There's a lot of popular scientists and philosophers - there's
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, others who have written really boldly, really
strongly
that science has essentially not only disproved God, but made God irrelevant.
They say there were centuries
of human history where maybe God and religion was
necessary to help explain the inexplicable things that we all face
in human life but now that we have science - now that science has basically
proven the way that things exist, we don't need
a idea of God anymore.
I always feel like it's a little funny - it reminds me of what happened in 1961
when the Russians sent the first cosmonaut into space
and it was a very exciting moment for the whole world -
first person, first human into space. And when he went into space,
the message that he sent back to earth was,
"God is not here." He was essentially saying,
"I have gone into space - I have gone to look for God, and
because I do not see him, therefore God does not exist."
And of course there's something really silly about that. I mean, the idea that
we could observe God
with human instrumentation, with the human eye is absurd and, and
and if, if there is a God,
if God is real then I guess what I think is that God would be
so big and so beyond us
that you couldn't just observe him
with like a telescope or in a lab.
God, God is not an object within the world. If anything,
the world is within God, and there's no perspective
within the world from which we can,
can view God.
When I was going through my own period of really severe doubt when I was studying philosophy
in college,
I read a book. It was called "A Severe Mercy"
by a man named Sheldon Vanauken, and it was this story about how
how he came to faith in Jesus.
And he was an atheist - he was a very committed atheist
and he began to learn about Jesus and he began to struggle with this idea that
Jesus could be God in the flesh.
And he told his parable - he calls it "The Parable of the Cliff,"
and he said, "I imagined myself standing
at this cliff and there was this huge gap in front of me, and it was a gap between
me and God,
and it was a gap that required me to have faith
to believe that Jesus was God in the flesh."
And he said, "I just did not feel that I had the faith to overcome that gap and get
to the other side."
And this is what he said: he said, "then I realized, I turned around
and there was a gap behind me as well.
There was a gap before me, but by God, there was a gap behind me," and he realized, "I
realized at that moment that it took just as much
faith to believe that Jesus was God as it took to believe that he was not,
and, and, and it's not as if it takes faith
that, you know, it's 'I'm a man of science, you're a man of faith' - No, we're all people of faith. We
all are basing our lives
on basic presuppositions that cannot be proved. Yes, God cannot be proved, but he
cannot be disproved either."
And so I think when it comes to Jesus Christ, I think what ultimately
kinda sent me over the gap was realizing, yeah, I needed
to believe that this person, this man was God in the flesh,
revealing the unobservable God to me. But I think what made me feel better about it at
least was knowing that
yes, it took faith to believe that but it took just as much faith to believe that
he wasn't.
And so when I got to the point of realizing that either way, I was gonna be living by
faith,
that made it a little bit easier for me to
to step over the gap in front of me.