We Believe in God, In Spite of the Fact that He Cannot Be Proved

11 May We Believe in God, In Spite of the Fact that He Cannot Be Proved

Blog Series

Moving from Checkers to Chess

Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective

This week we’re continuing our series: “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective.” Unless we have an eternal perspective, viewing life as God does, we are playing checkers in life while God is playing chess. And, if that’s the case, two things are certain: (1) we will consistently make the wrong moves, and (2) we lose in the end. I’d like to help avoid that.

We can’t play checkers according to chess rules. We can’t play basketball according to soccer rules. And, we can’t live an eternal life according to temporal rules.

When we became a Christian, we died to this life and were born again to another. We lost our citizenship in one country and we gained citizenship in another. We left the world of time and entered the world of eternity.

Everything is different.

We have to make the switch from a temporal to an eternal perspective.

It’s easy enough to understand. It’s very difficult to do. In setting the stage for doing so, we will review some of the information we looked at last week, and then begin to unpack the first step.

One of the fundamental challenges of life for a Christian is to gain an eternal perspective.

As we said last week in the introduction to the series, there are five components of an eternal perspective. To the degree that we know and embrace these five components, we are free to become all that God has for us. To the degree that we do not know and embrace these five components, we are limited, held back, diminished in our ability to become all that God has for us.

 So in this series, we will look at the five steps to unleashing the power of an eternal perspective:

1. Believe the unbelievable
2. Embrace the inconceivable
3. Choose the undesirable
4. Fight the invisible
5. Nurture the transformational

As we unpack these, we gain the knowledge we need to be set free (John 8:32), and we can be transformed by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:2). If you have not read last week’s blog post, I recommend your going back to read it to set the context for understanding this week’s blog post.

The first step in gaining an eternal perspective is to believe the unbelievable.

This week we’ll begin looking at the first step in gaining an eternal perspective, that of “believing the unbelievable.” It isn’t really unbelievable, it just seems unbelievable from a temporal perspective.

There are three parts to believing the unbelievable:

1. We must believe that God exists in spite of the fact that he cannot be proved.
2. We must believe that God is good in spite of the rampant evil in the world.
3. We must believe that God loves us in spite of the fact that he doesn’t make our life go better.

Believing in God in spite of the fact that he cannot be proved.

The ultimate philosophical question is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” To answer that question, we must use cause/effect reasoning. Cause-effect reasoning is necessary in order to function in the world. Without it, it is impossible to be in touch with reality. To that end, we look at the universe, which is a Great Effect. The question is, what is the Great Cause?

 The possible answers to that question are limited:

1. The universe is eternal.
2. Something came from nothing.
3. Someone created it.

Secular science doesn’t like any of those answers.

1. Secular science doesn’t believe the universe is eternal, for two reasons. First, because the stars are great balls of fire burning in the heavens, and they will eventually burn out. Second, because secular science believes there is compelling evidence to suggest the universe began approximately 15 billion years ago. So, for both reasons, they don’t believe the universe is eternal.

2. Secular science doesn’t believe that something came from nothing. If there is nothing, then something cannot come from it, though they have no explanation for the fact that there seems to have been “nothing” before the Big Bang. So, they just don’t talk about it.

3. Secular science doesn’t believe the universe was created.

 If the universe were created, there would be three options for how:

Naturalistic gods created it. Naturalistic gods are the gods of varied and isolated peoples around the world, including the proliferation of tribal and animistic gods around the world.

Eastern gods created it. These are the gods of various Eastern religions, such as the different varieties of Hinduism.

The God of Abraham created it. If the God of Abraham created the universe, we have to distinguish among the three religions that trace their origin back to the God of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

All the different naturalistic religions have a different explanation for how the universe began. They cannot all be true. Nor do any of them rise above the level of myth.

All the Eastern religions have a different explanation for how the universe began. They cannot all be true either. Nor do any of them rise above the level of myth.

The religions that trace themselves back to the God of Abraham all have the same explanation for how the universe began. God created it. However, there are other fundamental differences among those three religions, and they cannot all three be true. So we have to choose the correct one from among them.

How? It all boils down to the resurrection of Jesus. If the resurrection of Jesus is true, then Christianity is true. And, if you apply the universally accepted standards for historical accuracy to the resurrection that are applied to all other historic events, you end up believing in Jesus.

Yet, secular science does not like that option either, regardless of the evidence. So, secular scientists lock arms to keep God out of the equation, and propose ludicrously improbable options to explain the impossible, such as: there is an infinite number of parallel universes in which this one just happens to have come about by chance – an idea so absurd that it fits what George Orwell once said: “there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them.”

They want their Big Bang theory without having to say that something came from nothing. But, it’s even more than that.

Secular science requests that we give them five free miracles, after which they will explain everything else.

In a TED Talk, Terrance McKenna, an ethnobiologist, said, “Modern science is based on the principle: “give us one free miracle and will explain the rest.” The one free miracle is the appearance of both all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”

McKenna made a powerful point, but it is much worse than that. Modern science actually asks for five free miracles:

1. Something came from nothing.
2. Order came from chaos.
3. Life came from non-life.
4. Consciousness came from life.
5. Transcendence came from consciousness.

Without the Creator God of the Gospel, modern secular scientists have no credible answer to the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” They need a free miracle for that one… and four more besides.

Conclusion

Secular scientists choose to ignore the evidence for the existence of God, and then are left in need of five free miracles to explain the existence of the universe and conscious, transcendent life.

Christianity does not concede any free miracles to a secular worldview. Rather, we confidently champion the evidences for belief in God. A belief in the God of Abraham and in His Son, Jesus, answers these five questions clearly and compellingly.

In Romans 1:20, we read “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”

This tells us that God has given us enough light to come to Him, and those who reject that light are without excuse. God intended us to look up at the stars at night and say in our hearts, “There must be a God!” We can rest comfortably in the fact that God exists.

Next week we’ll explore another reason we can believe God exists in spite of the fact that He cannot be proved: without God, secular science cannot explain how order came from chaos. We’ll look behind their smoke screen and become even more secure in our first step toward an eternal perspective. I hope to see you then.

In case you’re new here, below are two resources I’ve created for additional help in your Christian discipleship journey:

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