Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Proof of God - Science and Faith

I heard you’re looking for this. I will not prove the existence of an Infinite Being in general; I find it quite useless to individually prove the attributes of an indivisible God. I will only prove the existence of the God that I know. But I can only tell you what I know; it takes God to know God.

First, a disclaimer: if you’re looking for a cold, hard, scientific proof then you’re not gonna find any. You have to realize that modern science possesses this assumption akin to uniformitarianism (which you probably encountered in geology), called naturalism. It’s basically this: everything happens naturally. Whether yesterday, today, or tomorrow – ‘everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation,’ as the apostle Peter would have said it (yes, the thought is so old that it was actually prophesied). Now I don’t completely disregard this point of view either; I think it is important to science, because science deals with natural phenomena. But I want to point out that the use of the word everything is presumptuous. You might say, “What’s wrong with that? No one has disproved it anyway.” Of course not, it’s a freaking postulate. The thing is, even if science can provide a completely coherent theory of everything (which is its ultimate goal), it is completely irrelevant to the existence of God. At its very core, science assumes that miracles don’t exist, and that God does not exist, or at least that the existence of either is irrelevant. Therefore science cannot prove that God exists, simply because it has assumed that He does not.

In close relation to this, God is not a natural phenomenon; He created nature and He’s not part of it. He is outside the scope of science. But you might say, “God is faithful. We should be able to observe that faithfulness.” Yes, but faithfulness does not mean predictability. Do you think that He who created the hosts of stars and millions of different creatures according to their kind is not creative enough to show His faithfulness in a thousand different ways, in a thousand different times, and a thousand different places? God is not nature; it declares His glory, but He is not there. And neither is He that random error you find in your data, so don’t bother looking for Him with statistics. God is not a natural phenomenon - God is a being with will, intellect, and emotions. Some people describe Him as a ‘person’; while not completely untrue, in view of the Trinity I find that statement severely lacking. It will, however, be good enough for our purposes.

With that in mind, how do you prove that a ‘person’ exists? For example, how do you prove that the writer of this essay exists? How do you prove that in fact, someone wrote this, and that this is not an excerpt from a string of randomly self-generated characters? Perhaps you could say that this string of spaces and letters has grammar, has a purpose, has logical flow, etc. etc. but that does not disprove the alternate explanation that this could be an excerpt from a string of randomly self-generated characters.

If you haven’t gotten the analogy, I’ll be explicit: the writer is God and the text is Nature. Now don’t overextend this analogy yet; I find many flaws in it too. But let us tweak the question a little in order to make it more relevant. We want to prove that the writer exists, let us first believe that He does not, and see if we arrive at a contradiction.

Case 1: It is easy to imagine that if the writer has no intention of showing himself, then it would be impossible to prove that he exists. Case 2: he wants to prove that he exists. How would he do that? Well, he could send us another letter saying “Hey, I’m real and this is what I’m like.” But we could easily brush that off as another excerpt from a string of characters. Then maybe he could find a mutual friend, go write a letter to him, or better yet call him and meet him in person, and get him to tell us that “Hey, I’m real and this is what I’m like.” But we could just as easily brush that off as a friend fooled by some impostor (remember, we assumed that the writer does not exist, and we want to see a contradiction). Then finally, as a last resort, the writer gives the ultimate proof and shows himself to you and says “Hey, I’m real and this is who I am.” But, we could still easily brush that man off as a fake. If we refuse to believe that then there is no more proof left.

Do you see it now? The problem with proving the existence of a ‘person’ is that you can’t.

And in this respect, Jesus Christ is the ultimate proof of God’s existence. Of course, for your question, “if God wanted to prove Himself, why doesn’t He just show some great miracle right here, right now?” The answer? He has. The Christ was asked the same question ages ago, and He plainly says, “None shall be given you except the sign [of the resurrection].” If we refuse to believe Him then there is no more proof left for us.

To believe is to see. Now you would say, “That’s stupid.” Yes, I completely agree. But that’s the way that God has chosen to reveal Himself.

“God chose the stupid things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things of this world to shame the strong.”
“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
“Anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists. Anyone who comes to Him must believe that he rewards those who earnestly seek Him.”

I can go on, but I believe that these would suffice.

Of course, this conclusion inevitably brings us to the historicity of the gospels. Many have written about it, and many still are doing so. I think it would be best tackled some other time.

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