We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Why Believe that There Is a God?
“Why should we believe in God in the first place?” This was a question that Greg’s father asked of Greg. While there are many ways to respond, Greg’s offered what is called “the anthropological argument.” Here is an excerpt from Letters from a Skeptic.
_____________________
My basic line of reasoning is this: We human beings are personal beings. This means, I believe, that we are constituted by a mind which is self-aware and is rational, a heart which is free and can love and which is, therefore, morally responsible, and a soul (or call it what you will) which longs for meaning and significance. Consciousness, rationality, love, morality, and meaning: These, I maintain, constitute the essence of what it is to be a person in the full sense of the term.
Now the dilemma we face is this: Either we exist in an environment (viz, the cosmos) which is compatible with these attributes, or we do not. Either our environment is congruous with these attributes—it renders them intelligible and answers them—or it does not. To illustrate, we hunger, and behold, there is food. We thirst, and behold, there is water. We have sex drives, behold, there is sex. Our environment, then, is congruous with our natural hunger, thirst, and sex drive. And given the kind of world we live in, we can understand why hunger, thirst, and have sex drives. Our cosmic environment “answers” our natural drives and thereby makes sense of them. Are you following me?
Well, the question is, does our cosmic environment answer to the basic features of our personhood outlined above? My contention is that unless our environment is ultimately itself personal, unless the ultimate context in which we live is self-aware, rational, loving, moral, and purposeful, then our cosmic environment does not at all answer to our personhood. In other words, unless there is a personal God who is ultimate reality within which we exist, then we humans can only be viewed as absurd, tortured freaks of nature; for everything that is essential to us is utterly out of place in this universe. This, on the one hand, renders human nature completely unexplainable. How could brute nature itself evolve something so out of sync with itself? And, on the other hand, it means that human existence, if we face up to our real situation, is extremely painful. We are a product of a cruel sick, cosmic joke. …
[W]e humans instinctively hunger for meaning and purpose. You can see it all around in the way people behave. We strive to infuse our lives with some sort of significance, some sort of meaning. But if our cosmos is ultimately indifferent and purposeless, all we are, all we do, all we believe in, all we strive for is ‘dust in the wind.’ After we exist, it matters not whether anyone has ever, or ever will again exist. Everything is ultimately meaningless.
So, unless the ultimate source of all existence is at least as personal as we are, my contention is that who we are is both unexplainable and extremely hard to swallow (63-64).
Category: Q&A
Tags: Apologetics, God, Letters from a Skeptic
Topics: Apologetics
Related Reading
Is God Personal?
Hamed Saber via Compfight How can we trust that God is personally involved in our lives? Are our seemingly “small” lives significant enough for God to get involved when you consider the vastness of all that goes on in the cosmos. These are common question raised by skeptics and seekers. In Letters from a Skeptic,…
A Foolish and Weak-Looking God
The New Testament assumes that the God of Israel and the God revealed in Jesus Christ are one and the same God. But there also can be no question that the portrait of God that was unveiled when the Messiah arrived on the scene was in some respects quite different from what the OT had…
Do you believe God is pure actuality?
The basis of the classical view of God as pure actuality (actus purus) is the Aristotelian notion that potentiality is always potential for change and that something changes only because is lacks something else. So, a perfect being who lacks nothing must be devoid of potentiality, which means it must be pure actuality. I think…
The Cruciform Beauty of Horrific Divine Portraits
“Only a person who is aware of the crucified Christ can properly understand Scripture.” Luther (Table Talks) In the last three posts I’ve been wrestling with how insights from Matthew Bate’s book, The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation might help us interpret violent portraits of God in the OT in a way that discloses how…
Gravity: You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone
I had read a number of reviews about the movie “Gravity,” so when Shelley and I decided to enjoy a mid-week date night at the movies, I entered the theater with some pretty high expectations. The movie more than exceeded all those expectations. “Gravity” is an off-the-charts intense thriller, made all the more exciting because…
The Cruciform Center Part 2: How John’s Gospel Reveals a Cruciform God
In the previous post, we looked at how the Synoptics illustrate the centrality of the cross. While the Gospel of John varies in its structure and language from the Synoptics, the cross remains at the center. This centrality is expressed in a number of different ways. 1. The role that Jesus’ death plays in glorifying…