Clues of God

Introduction

In his book “A Skeptic’s Guide To Faith” Philip Yancey writes about a trip he took that began with a stop in Sweden, where he spent some time with churchgoing Swedish Christians. At one point he suggested to the audience that even though most Swedes had turned away from church “their admirable society continued to live off the moral capital accumulated during centuries of Christian faith. Honesty, peacefulness, generosity, cleanliness, charity, compassion – the Vikings were not noted for such qualities before their conversion.”

Someone asked him what he thought would happen once that moral capital was used up. Yancey said that they didn’t have to look hard for the answer – it was two countries away in Russia. During the period of the Soviet Union an experiment was conducted on a huge scale to establish a fully materialist society – one without God, spirituality, or any sense of a deeper reality. Those in power saw religious faith as an obstacle to this, and they shut down 98% of the churches, killing 42,00 priests.

In the days of Stalin children in kindergarten would be told to close their eyes and pray to God for a bag of candy. And none would appear. Then they would be told to do the same but pray to Stalin, and the teachers would place bags of candy on their desks to teach the lesson that prayer never gets you anything, and what mattered was trusting their glorious leader for all their needs.

What was supposedly a society dedicated to justice and equality we now know was responsible for the deaths of as many as 60 million of its own people in the seventy-five years of that system, and the once-mighty Russia was reduced to the status of a developing country full of traumatized people.

The past two weeks I’ve been speaking about belief. We began with a call to look for deeper meaning and answers that should be a regular habit of Christians. Along the way I shared some testimonies from people whose search led them, sometimes very unexpectedly, to faith in Jesus.

Last week I focused on some of the big questions of life, like “where did I come from”, “why am I here”, and “what is a good way to live?” You get very different answers to those questions if you compare the Christian worldview that has guided our society to the materialist worldview that is replacing it.

I appreciated some people taking time to say they really got something out of last week’s message because I was afraid that it would feel like a bad philosophy 101 class of some kind. But I thought it was important to talk about Christianity, science, and materialism because I don’t think enough people realize that there is no such thing as non-belief or some kind of neutral, default worldview.

You are either here because of a creator, or you a miraculous accident of nature. You are either accountable to God for how you live, or you are not. There is life beyond this life, or there isn’t. And what you believe about these kinds of things changes the way people live and treat others, as well as the kind of society they try to build.

Today we’ll take another look at these two opposing viewpoints from a different perspective, and then I’ll describe a few reasons to believe, or what the author Tim Keller calls “clues of God” before reflecting on what this can mean for us.

Overlapping Worlds

A different way of thinking about what people believe in is to talk about whether or not there is more than one world.

Philip Yancey notes that, prior to a couple of hundred years ago, virtually every culture and religion believed that there was a visible world, the one we see and touch and walk around in, as well as an unseen world. Or we could say a physical world and spiritual world, if that makes more sense. It was quite commonly believed that the visible world was flawed or broken and in need of repair and restoration, and that the unseen world was powerful and significant, affecting events in the visible world.

It's not that everyone used to think this way, but it was the generally accepted view of reality until the ideas of the Enlightenment period and the scientific revolution changed things, especially in Western society, where it’s now very common to believe that the visible world is all that there is.

Jesus very clearly believed in the two worlds, for He taught things like “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit His soul?”

Before Pontius Pilate Jesus admitted that, as His accusers claimed, He was a king. But, He said, His Kingdom is not of this world.

Jesus taught us to pray “Thy Kingdom Come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The Bible uses those terms most often – heaven and earth – to describe the visible and unseen worlds. I have a video to show from The Bible Project that covers this topic really well and I think it can help you see how important this concept is from the beginning of the Bible right to the end.

Video: https://vimeo.com/145320390

I thought that was a helpful way to see the Christian story, which is something I want to keep coming back to like I did during Advent when I spent some time focused on the four parts of that story – Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. But many of the people around us, including family members, friends, and coworkers we care about would hear that and say “nice story, but I’m a little old for fairy tales. What proof to do you have?”

Clues for God

Today I’ll offer a few reasons to believe that there is more than this one world. It’s not proof – there is no such thing. There is no such thing as perfect evidence that can 100% prove or disprove God or a spiritual reality. But there are clues. Today I’ll offer a few clues from science and human experience.

I think it’s valuable to think about some of these things, because they might help you explain or share your faith with someone else. Or they might just help you not feel like you’re crazy in a culture that finds is increasingly strange for people to believe in what is unseen.

One of the classic clues starts with a question people have wrestled with forever: “why is there something rather than nothing?” When the theory of the Big Bang was introduced there was a lot of resistance to it among certain scientists, because there are some big implications to the universe having a clear beginning at one tiny point in one incredible moment of creation fifteen billion years ago. Doesn’t everything need a cause? But how could the universe cause itself? This is still hotly debated, but can serve as a clue that there is something beyond the visible world.

But it’s not just the universe’s creation that’s a clue, many scientists and philosophers today agree that one of the strongest clues for the possibility of God is how perfectly fine-tuned the universe is to life like ours. When the universe began all sorts of forces were at work determining how it would expand and form – like gravitation and weak and strong nuclear forces. The matter from the big bang could have flown apart so fast that no stars or planets could form, or it could have failed to expand at all.

To have become the universe as we know it the values of all of these laws of nature had to fall into a very narrow range. Those values, as far as we know, could have been anything. But they turned out to be precisely what was needed for the universe we see now. The probability of this happening by chance is negligible. Even the famous physicist Stephen Hawking, not a notably religious person, wrote “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way except as the act of a God who intended to create being like us.”

There isn’t a very strong argument against this conclusion at the moment. The main alternative is something you’ve seen in any recent superhero movie – the multiverse. Maybe there are trillions of universes, and we’re lucky enough to be in the one that worked out. But the multiverse hypothesis hasn’t gotten very far, there’s no direct evidence or convincing math for it, or a compelling idea of what purely natural phenomena is making all these universes and where itcame from.

One more science-based clue is the appearance of information within life. Science doesn’t have a handle on how life could form from non-life at this point, and the more we learn about how incredibly complex even a single cell is and how complex it has to be to survive and reproduce the harder it is getting to work that out. But we do know, thanks to one of the great discoveries of the last century, DNA, that life requires information to work. Calling DNA a genetic code isn’t a metaphor, it is literally a digital code found in every living cell that provides the information to control life’s functions.

Where did it come from? The clue here is that the only thing we have ever discovered that can create a code is a mind – a human programmer. So what mind programmed life? When we listen to the stars for signs of extra-terrestrial life through something like the SETI program that’s what we’re looking for – patterns, codes, information that isn’t random and is therefore a sign of an intelligent mind. So far we haven’t found anything like that coming from space, but we have found evidence of it inside ourselves.

Stepping outside of science, there is also the clue of beauty. We can be awed by nature, uplifted by music, transfixed by the right painting, or have our world turned upside down by a poem or story. In the presence of great beauty or love people often feel that there is real meaning in life, that love means something, that truth and justice are possible. Augustine suggested that these longings are significant – that it is a clue of God that we desire these deeper things.

Tim Keller writes “We have a longing for joy, love, and beauty that no amount or quality of food, sex, friendship, or success can satisfy. We want something that nothing in this world can fulfill. Isn’t that at least a clue that this “something” that we want exists?”

The Clue-Killer?

But that’s where one really important objection pops up that I’ll end this “clues” section with, and that has to do with evolution being offered as the explanation for pretty much everything. If we are not created beings but an accidental collection of atoms, then things like beauty and love are an illusion, just a response in our brains that we have because having that response helped our ancestors survive.

If we have religious feelings, some people argue that this it is only because they are traits that once helped certain people pass on that bit of our genetic code. Why do children so readily accept and believe in a God? Is it because such beliefs make people happier and more unselfish, so their families and tribes survived and they got better mates? If natural selection is responsible for the way we think about everything, then any religious thoughts or arguments are just by-products of our genetic past.

I hear this kind of thinking everywhere now – not just from scientists but from stand-up comics, life coaches, and ordinary people trying to figure out why humans are the way they are. Men can’t be faithful in relationships because of how it was when we lived in caves. Women prefer men who are like this for all these reasons. The reason you like these colours and those shapes is because of living in this or that environment once upon a time. And some of these notions might be correct, but there’s a lot of conjecture going on there. And, more than that, if natural selection is the answer to everything then we should wonder if we can be sure of anything at all.

The problem with explaining everything through our evolutionary past is that if we cannot trust our minds to tell us the truth about God, why should we trust them to tell us the truth about anything, including anything within the realm of science or evolution? Natural selection shouldn’t care about truth or accuracy or reality, it only cares about what helps pass on your genes. So if our brains evolved in an unguided process based only on what would help us survive, what reason is there to imagine that they can properly interpret reality or come to reliable conclusions about anything?

Either we can trust our minds or we can’t. If we can’t, then the scientific conclusions of an evolutionary biologist are as likely to be gibberish as anyone’s religious beliefs. If we can trust our minds there is no reason that people can’t come to sound conclusions about religious questions just as they can about science or philosophy or anything else.

Keller writes: “If we believe God exists, then our view of the universe gives us a basis for believing that cognitive faculties work, since God could make us able to form true beliefs and knowledge. If we believe in God, then the Big Bang is not mysterious, nor the fine-tuning of the universe, nor the regularities of nature. All the things that we see make perfect sense. Also, if God exists our intuitions about the meaningfulness of beauty and love are to be expected. If you don’t believe in God, not only are all these things profoundly inexplicable, but your view—that there is no God—would lead you not to expect them. Though you have little reason to believe your rational faculties work, you go on using them… You have no good reason to trust your senses that love and beauty matter, but you keep on doing it.”

None of that proves that God exists or that there is an unseen world connected to this one, but it poses a challenge to ask what makes more sense of the way the world has come to exist, the way everything works, and the way it feels to be human. I certainly think it opens the door to belief in something beyond the material. And there are some more clues that Erica will introduce next week as well, some that are more internal to the human experience.

Conclusion

In 1st Kings chapter 19 the prophet Elijah is ready to give up. He’s starving, exhausted, and on the run from a King and Queen who want him dead. After God encourages him to rest and eat and carry on Elijah resumed his journey and eventually stopped to hide in a cave. Elijah thinks it’s over, he’s the last person in Israel who still worships God instead of idols. But the Bible says:

And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.”

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

There are two things about this passage that strike me in the context of what I’ve been focusing on today. The first is that God can choose to speak in many different ways. Elijah had seen God’s power displayed in incredibly dramatic ways, including fire from heaven. But this time God’s presence comes to him quietly – a gentle whisper.

And the second is that God keeps calling Elijah out of that cave he tries to retreat into. Elijah doesn’t want to go back into his world of hardship and unbelief. But God keeps calling him back, because God has a plan. There are new leaders Elijah will help raise up and a faithful remnant that God will use to turn Israel back to Him. Elijah just needs to stop hiding and trust what God tells him to do next.

There’s a little metaphor for the Church in Canada and the western world in there, I think. Don’t hide from a world that’s not on your side. Listen carefully for God’s voice amidst the deafening noise. Keep going, trusting that God has a plan.

For those who love and follow Jesus, not only is it valuable to understand own beliefs and the alternatives so that that we can speak faith into this world, it’s also valuable for us to look inward and make sure we haven’t absorbed the materialist thinking of our culture. That can give us very low expectations of what God can do and how God can act. We can forget that even a tiny bit of heaven can transform something on Earth – us included.

There were a few paragraphs from Philip Yancey that really resonated with me, and it’s a better conclusion than I could come up with, so I’ll close by sharing them.

“In my own days of skepticism, I wanted a dramatic interruption from above. I wanted proof of an unseen reality, one that could somehow be verified. In my days of faith, such supernatural irruptions seem far less important, in part because I find the materialistic explanations of life inadequate to explain reality. I have learned to attend to fainter contacts between the seen and unseen worlds. I sense in romantic love something insufficiently explained by mere biochemical attraction. I sense in beauty and in nature marks of a genius creator for which the natural response is worship… I sense in desire, including sexual desire, marks of a holy yearning for connection. I sense in pain and suffering a terrible disruption that omnipotent love surely cannot abide forever. I sense in compassion, generosity, justice, and forgiveness a quality of grace that speaks to me of another world, especially when I visit places, like Russia, marred by their absence.

I sense in Jesus a person who lived those qualities so consistently that the world could not tolerate him and had to silence and dispose of him. In short, I believe not so much because the invisible world impinges on this one, but because the visible world hints, in ways that move me most, at a lack of completion.

Love, too, is why I believe. At the end of life, what else matters? “Love never fails,” Paul wrote. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” He could only be describing God’s love, for no human love meets that standard of perfection. What I have tasted of love on this earth convinces me that perfect love will not be satisfied with the sad tale of this planet, will not rest until evil is conquered and good reigns, will not allow its object to pass from existence.

Perfect love perseveres until it perfects. Jesus’ disciple John brought the two wolds together, a unity forged through love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son… For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” Love deems this world worth rescuing.”