Do We Really Need God? (Part 2)
The human experience is lived in a body, but it’s filled with non-physical values. That’s why it’s hard for me to fully understand the perspective of a person who believes all of reality can be reduced to physical explanations. Anything else seems more believable than that to me.
You can call it atheism, physicalism, or even materialism. It’s a way of seeing the world merely as a bubble of time, space, matter, and energy. If that’s all reality is, then science would indeed be the only way to know true facts. But nobody lives like that.
No one lives as though physical stuff is all that exists or as though science is really the only way to understand the human experience. Most of what we live for fits into other categories. We live for things like friendship, love, beauty, and justice. None of that fits into a scientific test tube or is well captured in a mathematical equation. The whole of our lives hinges on things unrelated to physical facts about the universe.
To tease out just one of these values, the idea of justice transcends all our scientific labels. Justice points to truths that transcend culture and preferences. In our day and age, it seems everyone has an opinion on things going on across the other side of the world. But where can we find a principle so strong someone in another hemisphere should be persuaded of its value?
Can we find it on atheism? Not really. How about in the eastern religions? Not if they insist all is one, meaning that both justice and injustice are really the same thing. Perhaps we get a hint of it in Greek philosophy. Socrates, in his final defense, gets really close to monotheism, belief in only one God, as he pleads his case.
What if belief in a singular God (monotheism or theism) really provides a compelling, superior even, description of our ideas of right and wrong and justice? How far can this kind of theism really get us? If theism is the best way to understand reality, how can we hope to make sense of theism? Is theism like a mysterious key, able to open doors and explain other things but not itself? A lot of people have felt that way.
The idea of God makes sense of a lot of things. But we can’t pretend that an argument for God in itself means we understand God. To understand God, we need God to communicate with us, to initiate some sort of relationship. He must stoop to our level and use words and concepts that make sense to humans like us. He would really have to spell things out.
That’s why I like to tell students, while theism best explains reality, Jesus offers us an explanation of God himself. Theism makes sense of reality. Jesus makes sense of theism. That’s really what Christmas is all about.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth . . . No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him know.” (John 1:14, 18, ESV)