“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
— Steve Jobs
I understand the challenges of belief in a deity, particularly a loving God. Many of us come from dysfunctional families where the idea of a solid father figure is a distant laugh. Therefore any mention of “God the Father” opens up scar tissue. Or we attended a church with a bunch of hypocritcal whackadoos that turned us off like too much wasabi on sushi.
When I think back to my disbelief before my October 22nd, 1999 conversion, I realize the biggest impediment was pride. I was resolute in my belief I could create my own definition of God, and he-she-it embodied everything I believed was cool and righteous, with an emphasis on cool. “My God likes the Rolling Stones, and wouldn’t be caught dead with a Coors Light. No way he created cats, my God digs dogs, after all what’s God spelled backwards?” Yuk-yuk-yuk. Yep, I was a moron.
Before I delve into my personal journey next week, let’s start with a foundational question of does God exist? In my experience, most folks who are not Jesus freaks land in an agnostic arena. They believe there’s something out there, but are not crazy about organized religion. A common post-modern phrase is “I’m spiritual, not religious.” Most of the time those folks sound like I did in 1999, with a couple of sentences of Zen-like talk about nature and the universe serving as God. But no religious text or prophets to speak of as ground zero for their foundation.
Atheists are a smaller percentage, and often fervent in their stance that God is for simpletons, but science is the answer to everything. We’ll start there, meaning, intelligent design vs. evolution. The former states there’s some manner of architect (God) who created all things material and invisible, whether flesh, blood, dirt, air, water, minerals, biology, morality, love, sex, and all things in between. The latter says there is no engineer, and with only time plus a series of random events, all things came into being. An evolution thesis says there can’t be any mention of agency or strategy, because that jettisons over to the intelligent design camp, meaning some sort of brain was involved. The only variables are oodles of time plus lots of random events, like explosions and fire and lasers and such. Spoiler alert, name an explosion you know of that created order and not chaos. In other words, how many car explosions have you seen where a Volvo got all blow’d up and reassembled as a Ferrari… by itself?
Even though everything I named was engineered by the most complex entity on the planet — humans — an evolutionist states those same humans of staggering intellect were created by something that has no capacity for intellect. Meaning, evolution has no brain, yet somehow formed things that do have brains. No amount of time, not hundreds of millions of years lengthening the runway, could form any level of intelligence. A “choice” would have to be made to begin the assembly; and choice, strategy, pivoting, turning, starting, stopping, all require sequences of purpose, which requires intelligent design. Can’t simply throw in another explosion or a “singularity” is what it’s called in math and physics, and magically see patterns appear. Also keep in mind, math and physics are never random.
When I was a new Christ follower, I had a myriad of questions specific to Him as God. However, one thing that utterly put to bed the idea of atheism, was an illustration of a broken watch, a riff on eighteenth century philosopher William Paley’s position on natural theology. The thesis is this. Let’s say I took a watch and busted it into a thousand pieces with a hammer, then placed all the pieces in a box, and created a machine that began shaking the box. Whether shaking slow or fast, rhythmically or not, would the watch reform itself after millions of years? Of course not. There’s no chance in hell. An evolutionist believes that with enough time, add in some explosions and cosmic events, then thrown in more time… That’s how our universe, and we peeps came into existence.
The next questions? Can we know Him? Does He love us? Why does He allow pain?
See ya next time. ML