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But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.  (Ph 3:13-14)

Father, Please do not let me by so distracted by earthly pleasures that I fail to pursue you.  And please do not let me use your grace as an excuse to cease pursuing you.  I want you.  And I want you even if that means difficulty. 

Claude would not study. He would watch TV. He would stay up late at night and drink. He would sleep in during the day and skip class. But he would not do any work. For Claude, college life centered on having fun, and he did what he could to have his share of fun. I don’t even know what his major was, but I know this. He didn’t learn much about it. Claude lasted one year before he had to drop out.

When it comes to knowing God, this world is full of Claudes. We will spend all day studying chemistry and engineering or working a full time job. We will watch movies, surf social media, or listen to Spotify. We will go to basketball games, plays or concerts. But we will not work at knowing God.

Knowing God is hard work, and many people know little of God because they do not want to put in the commitment. You understand the principle. The athlete who never trains, never improves. No pain, no gain, we say. So it is with God.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that our righteousness with God depends upon our work. Our righteousness is a matter of grace. Our effort does not earn us a place in heaven. Only our faith in the work of Christ can do that. But if we have real faith, we want to know God, and if we are to know God, we shall have to give Him our time and make Him a priority. It’s like a marriage. Imagine a husband and wife who lived separate lives and then complained that they didn’t really know one another. Kind of silly, isn’t it? You see, the business of marriage requires work. And commitment. And Scripture says that marriage is a picture of Christ and the church (Eph 5:32).

Listen. One of the biggest reasons why people do not know God is that they do not want to invest their life in knowing God. Our spiritual laziness limits what we can know. We do not want to work in the Scriptures, so we content ourselves with Scripture sound bites. We do not exert our souls in real prayer but content ourselves with the forms of prayer. We fall short of obedience because it can be strenuous.

If we are to learn of God we must commit to the Scriptures. The Bible is our primary source of information about God. If we ignore it, we will not know God. Many people who have never read the Bible think they know what it says. Or what it should say. And many who would call themselves Christians give the Bible just a cursory look. To learn from the Scriptures demands an open heart, diligence, discipline, persistence and a willingness to obey. As we work at understanding God’s truth, God rewards us; but if we take it easy in learning the Bible, God will take it easy in revealing Himself to us. Students of any book get out of it what they put into it. The Bible is no different. Many know little of God because they will not do the work of seeking Him in the Scriptures.

If we are to learn of God, we must pray with faith and urgency. Prayer is not a form letter. We must compose our communication fresh each time, even if we are praying for the same request for fifty years. Too many grind out form letters and think they are praying, but form letter praying does not teach us how to talk to God. Real prayer exerts great spiritual energy and is among the hardest work a soul can do. It requires the soul to focus and to do so sometimes amidst great spiritual opposition and distraction. Many never learn real prayer because form praying is so much easier. It gives all the packaging of prayer without the essence. We do not pray real prayers because often we are spiritually too lazy. We do not learn to listen to God because it takes work to be still. We do not learn to talk to God because we replace real talk with a list. We do not see the inner secrets and deep joys of God because we do not want to invest the energy to get close. Intimacy requires sacrifice.

If we are to learn of God, we must take obedience seriously. Obedience is not easy. When Jesus obeyed, He had nails driven through His hands and feet. God will ask you to do things you do not want to do. When He does, your response will take you in one of two directions on the path of knowing Him. You will go backward or forward. Many know little of God because they keep going backward when it is time to apply. They want to stay in the classroom and never go to the field. They want it easy, and because they want it easy, they limit what they can know.

God has given us abilities to know Him, but those abilities need to be used. If we choose not to pursue God, we will not know Him. If we choose to pursue Him half-heartedly, we will know Him half-heartedly. He who seeks finds. No one learns computer programming by watching football. What makes us think we will learn of God when we invest our time and efforts in other pursuits? Would you like to know God? Pursue Him. One of the great problems we have in knowing God is that we will not work at pursuing Him. We have these wonderful inherent capacities for discerning God but never use them for that end. It is like trying to pick up a radio station without turning on the radio. We are sometimes silly people.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.  (Mt 7:24)

Father, I ask that your Spirit would take your words and press them into my heart so that I live faith and do your will.  I ask that I would live out your heart in my life.

When I taught, I had to attend a certain number of professional development classes each year. I remember one such class in which a man with a Phd and a nice theory about education was instructing us on how to conduct discipline within our class. The problem was that he did not understand what it was like to teach a real class. He had great book knowledge but no practical experience. Have you ever met someone like that? They know the book, but they don’t know life.

Many people are that way when it comes to the Bible. They are correct but shallow. God does not desire that situation for your soul. He wants His truth to soak deep into the ground of your soul, and that soaking will never happen until you begin to live the Bible. It is not enough to know it. The truth of God must affect where your feet walk, what your hands do, where your money goes, how you use your time, and more. For God’s Word to do those things, it must penetrate our insides.

God is committed to depth in our souls. He requires us to put flesh to our knowledge. The flesh reinforces the learning. Sometimes it spawns it. The man who operates a machine understands the job better than the one who has merely read the manual. The woman who has worked as a nurse for years understands nursing better than the one who has merely read the textbooks. So it is with God. The disciple who has applied the Scripture understands God far better than the one who has merely read it. God is insistent about our taking His truths and living them. Often He addresses many of our questions through life. He wants us to know Himself and His promises through and through, and such knowledge comes more by living than by study.

God does not want us merely to know that He loves us. He wants us to turn to Him when we are down. Then we know His love more deeply. He does not want us merely to know that we ought to tell the truth. He wants us to be truthful when it hurts. Then we understand His command more deeply. He does not want us merely to understand the metaphor of dying to self. He wants us to give up to Him our greatest treasures, to be willing to deny ourselves a mate or the career we always wanted. Then we know the depths of what the metaphor is talking about. He does not want us merely to know He has sacrificed His life for us. He wants us in turn to sacrifice our lives for Him. Then we begin to see more clearly the depths and pains of His sacrifice. He wants us to learn about His forgiving nature by having us forgive. He disciplines us to teach us, removes our security to show us what trust is, gives us pain sometimes to turn us around, puts food on the table to show us His provision, grants us loved ones to train us to love, and sends us difficult people to show us how we look to Him. He desires not merely intellectual understanding but obedience, and obedience requires everyday life. No one knows God who has not applied the Bible to life. Life gives depth and dimension to our knowledge of God. God will not allow us to know Him in theory. We shall have to live Him in life. In doing so, we shall know Him more thoroughly. But this takes time. We cannot know all about God’s love by taking a one-semester course. In truth, someone as advanced in the Lord as Corrie Ten Boom was still learning the depths of God’s love up to the time she died.

To write the same things to you is no trouble to me and is safe for you. (Ph 3:1)

Lord, remind me of the simple truths of the Cross and Atonement, of the Resurrection and my redemption, of your Spirit in my soul, that I may never forget your glorious love, your justice and mercy, and the power of your might. Repeat these things in my soul that I may grow in your sovereign grace day by day.

When we walk with Christ, our knowledge of God grows. This growth is a process so that God gives us more advanced lessons as we obey the simple ones. But this doesn’t mean that we are done with the simple ones. God likes to constantly speak in our souls the simple truths because we need to hear them again and again. It’s like a marriage. A husband may tell his wife that he loves her, but she needs to hear it day after day. The information is not new. But a wife who hasn’t heard in ten years that her husband loves her will begin to forget what he told her so long ago. The repetition is important. It is necessary for refilling the tank, and refilling the tank is part of the process of a healthy marriage. It is also part of the process of walking with God. We need to hear over and over the simple truths of the Cross and the love of Christ, of the Resurrection and our victory over sin and death. The repetition is part of the process of learning about God. The more we hear the simple truths, the deeper they become embedded in us. And knowledge of God deals as much with depth as it does with breadth. No. More so.

For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God.  You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.  But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.  Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity …  (Hebrews 5:11-6:1)

Lord, grow me in Your grace, that I may know You more.  Let me never stop progressing in the kingdom of God.

I used to teach high school English. One time I gave my first vocabulary test for the year. Most of the students in my class had taken me previously, but a few were new and didn’t know anything about Mr. Demchsak. The students who had taken me before studied and were well prepared for the test, but one new student was shocked. “You mean I have to study the words?”

Steve, who had taken me before, said, “Sorry, Mr. D. I should have warned him about your test. But he’ll know from now on.”

I had a reputation for being a tough teacher, and I discovered that especially my freshmen were different people at the end of the year than they had been on the first day of class. Not all of course, but many of them had learned that they had to work and to take responsibility for what they did. They were beginning to grow into men and women. They now knew something about responsibility that they had not known before. And hopefully they learned some English as well.

The reality is that a man knows more than a 4th grader, and a 4^th grader knows more than a 1^st grader, and a 1^st grader knows more than a 2-year-old, and a 2-year-old knows more than a newborn. We learn as we grow.

It is this way with knowing God. Sometimes much of what we do not know of God we do not know because we are spiritual newborns … or 4^th graders. We could be sixty but a babe in Christ. Sometimes we want our spiritual understanding to match our earthly understanding, but that’s not how the kingdom of God works. Getting to know God is a process of the heart.

If a woman has a genuine heart and faith, she will know God, but her knowledge will not all come tomorrow. God does not dump the whole load on us at once. Many things that we wonder about today we may understand in ten years.

Knowledge of God builds upon itself. No one teaches calculus to a five year old. He would not be ready. In the same way, God reserves His advanced lessons for people who are spiritually ready for them. The process never ends. Sometimes our confusion about God is nothing more than a three year old being confused about physics.

If you want to learn about God, your heart must grow. But sometimes a heart never grows. Stagnant hearts bring stagnant knowledge of God, and a person can stagnate at any stage of maturity. A 70-year-old woman may know less of God than a six-year-old girl because the heart of the six-year-old may be spiritually more mature. Heart maturity and age are not necessarily related. Good hearts will progress. Bad ones won’t.

I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me.  (Ps 131:2)

Lord, still my soul, and let me focus on Christ. 

Mazda’s slogan captures well 21^st century western culture: zoom, zoom.   Mazda uses the slogan to market its cars, but the marketing works because it strikes at a value within western culture. We are a high tech, fast paced, information-bombarded people. We are here and there and hardly have time to breathe before we are back here again. We are a sensual people, perhaps more so than any other time in history. The pursuit of earthly pleasure is our specialty. We have at our fingertips more entertainment, information, convenience, and speed than any other period of history.  We have everything the world could want … except contentment.

We are too busy for God. We have so much, but we don’t seem to have time.  God says, “Be still and know that I am God.” David said that he stilled and quieted his soul. It was the custom of Jesus to be alone with God and pray. He spent 40 days in the desert with God, Moses 40 days on the mount, Daniel three weeks in prayer. All of this is foreign to us. We struggle to get twenty minutes in the morning. We are afraid to be still. Sometimes we cannot go more than a half hour without looking at our phone or turning on the news or the radio. Our culture has trained us to have stimulus, but constant stimulus diverts our attention from God. We are like a teenager who cannot hear her father because the music is so loud or because she is texting on her phone. We are like a husband who doesn’t know his wife because, well, he doesn’t have time for her. He has other things to do. One day God will say to us, “You had other things to do.”

We are proud of our technology, our knowledge, our pace, our ways. People often talk about how busy they are in a way that suggests that they are doing something important because they are busy. But sometimes all of our “important” busyness merely prevents us from the real importance of knowing God. We don’t know Him … partly because we are too busy. We have the equipment for knowing much more of God than we do but choose instead to listen to earth. We often cannot hear God through the babble of life. God will not shout; and if we refuse to turn down the noise, we will never hear Him. This is a great problem in our ability to know God.

So this I say, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart; and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. (Eph 4:17-19)

My sins blind my heart from seeing You, O God.  Cleanse me, for seeing You is why I was made.

You were made in the image of God so that you might enjoy Him. Why then do so many people not enjoy Him? Last week, we discussed two reasons: we are limited creatures, and we sin.

Human limitations are by design. Sin is not. Human limitations bring no blame. Sin does. Sin is disobedience to what God says. Sin can be as blatant as a woman berating her husband and as subtle as a man failing to speak up when God prompts him to.   If God says, “Do this,” sin does not do it, and if God says, “Do not do this,” sin does it. Sin is a defect in our ability to receive signals from God. We are broken. The more we sin, the greater the deficiency. Sin blinds us. Sin smothers our sense of the Holy. Sin changes how we think of God, for it makes God small and brushes aside His holiness and justice in order to ease our consciences. Sin warps and severely restricts our understanding and experience of love.

All people sin, but some people stand more firmly in their sin than others. Not all defects are equal. People who know God well will be the first to tell you their sins. The more you live in sin, the less you see it. Many who insist on their ways are incapable of understanding the A,B,Cs of God. The difference lies in the heart. Hard hearts cannot see what soft hearts can. God desires it that way. Remember Jesus’ words? “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure” (Lk 10:21). A heart like a child can see God better than a heart like a scholar. When we stand in sin, we make our hearts less childlike.

People who want to know God must see their sin and be hurt by it. Calvin put it this way: “We cannot seriously aspire to (God) before we begin to become displeased with ourselves” (Inst., p. 37). The reason is that we often cannot see God through our sin. Sin is spiritual cataracts. It is why so many see so little of God. If you really want to see God more clearly, then confess your sin and repent. If you believe yourself a decent person, I am afraid you will know little of God.

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.  For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.  For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins.  (I Pet 1:5-9)

Lord, like Moses, I can see only a sliver of your glory even when I am holy.  How much less can I see when I sin.

God is constantly communicating knowledge of Himself: “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps 19:1). The human race was built to process and respond to this communication. We are made in His image and for His glory. To a modern man, however, God’s communications sometimes seem vague. We were built for God, but somehow many of us do not see God. Why not, if He is what we were made for?

Think about radio for a minute. Right now radio waves inhabit your room, and people are communicating on those waves. But you don’t hear anything. You may be tempted to say that no communication is going on, but you would be wrong. Now if you consider God’s communications as coming over spiritual frequencies, you would have a picture of the communication between God and earth. His communication is always there all around us just as the radio waves are in your room right now. But to pick up the communication, we need a proper receiver in good working condition tuned to the right frequency.

The different capacities for knowledge mentioned in the previous blog partly make up our spiritual radio receiver. We understand what moral goodness is. We can think abstractly. We comprehend beauty. We have a spiritual sense. We have desires for purpose and for relationship. We are created in God’s image, and, thus, have the wiring to pick up many frequencies that God communicates on. If we fail to see God, there must be another reason.

Again, if you think of a radio, you will be on target. Why doesn’t a radio pick up specific radio waves? Of course, the first thing to check is whether we have turned the radio on. Obviously, if you don’t turn the radio on, you can’t expect to discover any communication. It would be a bit silly to say, “I don’t sense any communications from God,” when you aren’t trying. If you are too busy with earth to worry about God, then don’t expect to find Him.

But let’s say you have turned the radio on, and you still receive no sound. Or maybe you receive sound, but it’s garbled. You might check the receiver itself to see if it is in proper working condition. A broken receiver picks up nothing, and we must understand that you and I are broken. We may be created in the image of God, but that image has been marred. Sin has tainted the human race. Lust has warped our moral sense, pride has corrupted our reason, greed has stained our sense of beauty, self-centeredness has spoiled our spiritual antennae, and so on. This means that the apparatus God has equipped us with needs repair. We need to fix our sin problem. Or, to be more precise, we need God to fix our sin problem. Until Christ cleanses our hearts, our discernment of God will be blinded.  Even God’s two clearest examples of communication — the Scriptures and the Incarnation — require men and women with a certain kind of heart. Not everyone who reads the Bible thinks it is of God, and not everyone who encountered Jesus thought Him to be Messiah. In fact, sometimes people witnessed miracles and still did not respond. (Matt 11:20-4) In order to see, you need more than good eyes. You need a right heart.

But a radio in good working condition and turned on must still tune in to the right frequency. If I tune in to AM 710, but no one is broadcasting there, I will hear static. Consequently, we must learn the frequencies of the Spirit. This takes time and much work, for God’s people must learn to be with Him, to immerse themselves in Scripture and prayer, to know God’s ways and be obedient in what they know, and to tune out earthly static. All of this is part of finding the frequencies of God.

To hear from God, then, we must tune in to Him, let Him rebuild our hearts, and maintain a certain level of spiritual health.

But even then, we are still limited creatures. We can know only so much. We can pick up communications only within the range of our abilities. A radio not equipped for short wave will not detect it. No doubt, God could communicate to us much more about Himself if only we could handle it. In heaven, I suspect, we shall handle quite a bit more, but we are not there yet, so we must make do with the handful of modulations and frequencies we can tune in to. Every one of the abilities that make the human race unique has limits.

Consider reason, queen of our abilities. With reason we can understand only so much. No one can reason his way to God; and conversely, no one can reason his way from God. Both positions require something beyond reason. Jesus said, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:24). Reason can help with the truth part, but the spirit part is beyond reason. Do not misunderstand; I am not saying that theism is irrational. I personally think it more rational than its alternative. But I am saying that theism is suprarational. Reason, by itself, cannot comprehend even something as basic to human experience as love. Love lies beyond the domain of reason. This does not make it irrational. It simply means that if you want to understand love, you must tune in to a different frequency. Love requires something beyond logic. Spock never could quite get it.

All of our other capacities for knowledge are likewise limited. We are finite creatures trying to understand an infinite God. The apparatus God has equipped us with enables us to pick up information in only certain frequencies. When we are balanced and healthy in our approach to God, we understand Him in multiple ways, but we are still humans, not gods. Our humanness is one of the greatest liabilities we have in knowing God. People who tout the infinite capacity of the human race do not understand what they are saying. Holy people are still people, and they are limited.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.  (Gen 1;26)

When I look inside myself and when I see the human soul, I marvel at what You have made, O Lord.

A human is an amazing creature. We have written Hamlet, composed the Canon in D, painted the Sistine Chapel, sent men to the moon, invented iphones, worshiped at temples, set up complex governments, discovered calculus, and died for doctrines. We have a moral sense. We have a spiritual sense, an awareness of the holy. We desire real purpose and are not fulfilled with mere earth. We enjoy beauty. We are highly relational. We intuitively understand that a human being has special value. We can think abstractly.

The amount of information we can store and comprehend is mind-boggling, but consider the different types of information. Beauty is not rational, but we understand it. The spiritual is not physical, but we can grasp it. Love is not an idea you reason to, yet we know what it is. Why? Why are we able to process such a wide array of nonphysical and sometimes nonrational information?

The Christian answer is that God created us in His image. Each of these human capacities corresponds to some aspect of God, and He has created us with this incredible software package so that we can enjoy Him. Our ability to reason helps us understand a rational God. Our moral nature gives us a foundation for understanding His righteousness. Our sense of purpose and inability to find ultimate meaning on earth point us beyond earth. Our sense of the holy enables us to feel the transcendent otherness of God. Our relational nature and desire for love prepares us to know a relational God who loves us. Our appreciation of beauty prepares us for the Glorious One, who is lovelier than all the lilies of the valley.

God desires us to experience Him fully and not just in a rational dimension. When any of these areas of knowledge is deficient, our knowledge of God shall also be deficient, for these different aptitudes tell us different types of things about God. A logical intellectual who has squashed any sense of the spiritual will be incapable of understanding God. He may understand doctrine, but God is much bigger than doctrine. A romantic may sense aspects of God’s beauty, but she may also allow her experiences to make her think of God any way she pleases. God becomes whatever she feels. She thinks doctrine is dead. It doesn’t show her God. She has already felt Him. A man bent on indulging his desires may damage his sense of right and wrong so badly that he can no longer recognize righteousness. Many have lived a life of sin so long that they consider it normal. They are ill-prepared to comprehend the Righteous One.

We are to enjoy God, and we cannot fully enjoy God in only one way. We glory in His beauty. We bow before His holiness. We love Him. We approach Him as our Father. Yet we revere Him as a righteous King. We marvel at the intricate works of His hand, works that our minds have discovered. He is our purpose. He is our life. He is our joy.

We relate to God in all of these ways, but the only reason we can do so is grace. God has graciously equipped us with the software to handle a multifaceted God. Consequently, as we grow in Jesus, we develop our sense of beauty, our sense of morality, our reason, our love, and all the rest, for these give us a fuller, more heartfelt knowledge of God.

Let me give you some pictures. Think of a commanding officer with his staff. Each staff officer informs the commander on a different type of information within the unit. It would be a foolish commander indeed who listened only to his operations officer or who ignored his maintenance or intelligence officers because they were not important enough. Yet such is what many people do concerning God. Some proudly claim that they listen only to their reason. Others focus on their desires or their sense of right and wrong and ignore the information that their other senses give them.

Or let’s switch the picture.  Think of chess. Reason is our queen, morality a rook, our senses of purpose and of the Holy are knights and bishops, and so on. Each type of knowledge has a different ability and serves a different purpose. The chess player who leans too heavily on his queen is immature in the game; but the one who can use all the pieces (for they really ought to work together) and see the board holistically will be the tougher player to beat. No piece is a bad piece, though every piece can be moved in a bad way. Each piece contributes something different, yet some can do more than others. And every piece, including the queen, has limitations.

This is a human being, and I want you to think of a human being as a human being and not just a brain.  We are God’s creation, and as we submit our minds, our hearts, our relationships, our desires, to Christ and to Scripture, we see God more holistically, and His glory grows in our eyes.

This is but a little piece of the image of God.

We have finished addressing the questions put to us by internationals at AIF. Today’s blog resumes the discussion from February, but fortunately, the last several blogs have picked up the theme we left off with. To review: We were discussing what it means to be created in the image of God, and we have talked about things like our ability to detect moral right and wrong, our sense of a spiritual reality, and our desire for purpose. So to continue …

 We have a proverb in English:

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

The idea is that different people see beauty in different things. You’ve certainly experienced this. Your friend likes modern art, but you think it is a jumble. One man likes the look of a suit, while another prefers the look of blue jeans. Despite your experience with differing tastes, however, I want to push back a little against the proverb.

On one level, the proverb works, but on another level, it is problematic, for the more I think about beauty, the more I have to confess that it isn’t random. If beauty had no connection to anything outside a person, then we ought to expect much more disagreement about it than we do. Now we do find disagreement about many things, but we also find many phenomena that virtually everyone says are beautiful. I have heard people argue about the attractiveness of a painting or a building or a lady, but we must admit that not all paintings, buildings and ladies engender the same amount of disagreement. Some are more generally acknowledged to be lovely, some more generally acknowledged to be ugly, and some have the populace split. Almost everyone would have to confess that Banff, Alberta is far prettier than Gary, Indiana, including (likely) the mayor of Gary, Indiana. I have yet to hear someone say that the stars are ugly, and people all around the globe believe the Grand Canyon to be fabulous, and almost every human who has ever lived will tell you that a sunset is splendid. Why? If beauty is entirely in the eyes of the beholder, why are the beholders sometimes so overwhelmingly in agreement? It seems as if two things are true. First, not all things have the same intrinsic beauty. Second, we humans are wired to appreciate beauty, and, in some cases, the wiring brings consensus, as if beauty were more like an objective reality than anything else.

So. To summarize. Humans have the ability to sense beauty, and beauty seems to be real. I do not wish to argue whether it is our wiring or the sunset that defines beauty; for regardless of which one you give preeminence to, the other must still be present or we enjoy no beauty. It’s like any other sensor. A light sensor requires internal wiring and light in order to sense light. A movement sensor requires internal wiring and movement in order to sense movement. A camera requires an internal apparatus and a real object in order to take a picture. So it is with beauty. The human race has the software for processing beauty, and it seems as if beauty really does exist.

This ability we humans have is part of the package that comes with being made in the image of God. We have a moral sense. We have a spiritual sense. We have an aesthetic sense. All of these senses are designed to process different types of information. We are more than a body, more than a brain. There’s something else inside us.

This is a continuation of a discussion that addresses a question from one of our internationals.

Q: Proof that God exists?

A: Let’s pretend. Let’s say, you and your roommate wake up in the middle of the night throwing up in the toilet. Let’s also say that you both ate some under-cooked pork at a dinner party earlier that day. You conclude that you both have food poisoning. Is that a fair conclusion?

Now, let’s say a friend stops by in the morning, and you tell him your woes. But he disagrees with your assessment. He says you don’t both have food poisoning. He says that you have contracted a bacterial infection from not washing your hands properly and that your roommate is exhibiting an allergic reaction to the sage, which was in the pork. Let’s say that you don’t recall washing your hands before eating last night, and — it’s true — there was sage in the pork.

We now have competing theories for why you and your roommate are sick. Both theories are plausible and both accurately fit the known facts. Whose theory do you favor and why?

Most people will say that, given what we know, the food poisoning theory is the better theory. The reason is not that the other theory can’t work. It’s just that the food poisoning theory is simpler. It explains the same phenomena that your friend’s theory explains without as many contingencies. All other things being equal, we prefer simple explanations over complex ones. This idea is not a piece of evidence per se. Instead it is a principle for evaluating theories, and this principle has a name — Ockham’s Razor.

William of Ockham was a medieval priest and philosopher who often spoke of the necessity of economy in a theory. His principle is this: “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” In other words, when we have competing theories, we should select the one with fewer assumptions, unless we have reason to select a different one. Most people do this naturally. We call it common sense.

I am bringing up Ockham’s Razor in a discussion about the existence of God because atheists generally do. People like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have used Ockham’s Razor as a principle to favor atheism. Their argument goes something like this.

1. Science can explain life through purely material explanations.
2. Christians do not generally deny science (except perhaps for evolution). Instead they posit a God behind the science. For example, science offers explanations for how rain works or how galaxies formed. Christians, however, believe that God brings the rain and that God formed the galaxies, but in believing this, they frequently accept much of the science. In other words, the Christian theory suggests an extra step or an assumption that we don’t need to explain these phenomena.
3. Therefore, using Ockham’s Razor, we should prefer the atheist explanation of life.

If you read atheist arguments long enough, sooner or later you will hear some form of Ockham’s Razor.

So then. How can we address this line of thinking?

A.  First, we need to see Ockham’s Razor for what it is. It is not evidence but a principle for evaluating evidence. Consequently, it doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. It may be that you didn’t wash your hands, and your roommate is allergic to sage. Sometimes life is complex.

B.  Ockham’s Razor says that we should not posit entities without necessity. Ockham understood that simple isn’t always best. When you suggest an extra entity, you should have a reason for it.

C.  Christians would strongly disagree with #1 above, that science can explain life through purely material explanations. We do not believe that materialistic science can adequately provide a foundation for moral absolutes, purpose, human value, reason, the beginning of the universe, design, beauty, this inward sense of something beyond us, and more. We see atheistic explanations as utterly inadequate. Therefore, when we posit God to explain these things, we are not doing so without necessity. Atheism just doesn’t work.

D.  Life seems to be more than just biology. To reduce it to biology seems rather narrow-minded. When we include things like moral absolutes, purpose, etc. in our description of life, all of a sudden, God seems to best fit Ockham’s Razor.

Let’s think this through.

Let’s take moral absolutes. Moral absolutes either exist or they don’t. If they don’t, then slavery is not wrong, Stalin was not wrong, and the person who cheated you out of a thousand dollars was not wrong. There is no wrong. If moral absolutes do exist, then they need a moral foundation. Materialism cannot give us a moral foundation. Thus, to be consistent, an atheist has one of two choices: he can say moral absolutes do not exist, or he can say that moral absolutes do exist and that they just are. Why is it right to be kind? It helps the species survive. Why is it right to help the species survive? It just is. If you ask long enough, you get to “It just is.” Some things are right because — well — they just are. Fair enough.

Let’s take human value. What makes humans more valuable then parrots? Well, we are more intelligent or have a sense of beauty or whatever. And what makes intelligence more valuable than a lack of intelligence? Well, intelligence allows creatures to accomplish more sophisticated things. And why is it more valuable to accomplish more sophisticated things? At some point, you end up with “It just is.”

Let’s take the beginning of the universe. If there is no God, then where did the universe come from? Some may say that the universe just is. Others posit some other cause, maybe a multiverse. And where did that cause come from? At some point you end up with “It just is.”

Let’s take purpose. Life has a purpose beyond mere survival or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then the atheist should be consistent and stop criticizing people who say it does. If life has no purpose, then neither does their criticism. If life has no purpose, then the atheist and the Christian are equally floating in the sea of meaninglessness. If, however, life does have a purpose, where did it come from? At some point, you end up with “It just is.”

We could continue this game, but the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day, the Christian has one thing that just is. God explains all these phenomena by Himself. The materialist, however, must have multiple realities that just are. Unless, of course, he wishes to deny those realities altogether. Kindness is just right or kindness doesn’t exist. We have no purpose or our purpose is whatever they say, and at some point, it just is. Humans have value. They just do. At some point something caused the universe to exist, and it just is.

Now let me ask you a question. Which of these ideas — theism or atheism — best fits Ockham’s Razor?