How can we know whether there really is a God who loves us and gives meaning to our lives?
According to the Bible, discovering God isn’t like discovering whether a particular subatomic particle exists. Rather, it is like learning to know, and love, a person. Above all it is relational.
But to say that raises two immediate issues. First, if knowing God is personal and relational, then the truth about him/her/it will be `revealed’ to us in a manner appropriate to – designed for – us, and not for anyone else.
Second, if we want to give real consideration to biblical-Christian faith, we must take seriously what it really says. This includes recognizing that we don’t approach potential relationship with God from some ideal, objective starting-point. Rather, if biblical faith is true, then we start from a condition of deep alienation and distance from God. That could imply a major problem with our ever being able to learn the truth.
Let’s consider this second issue first. `You know I can’t make it by myself’, sang Bob Dylan on Slow Train Coming, the first album of his `Christian’ phase, `I’m a little too blind to see’. Our entire `modern’ tradition revolts against that idea; progress‑oriented western man has had enormous (and not unjustified) confidence in his investigative powers. We’ve been deeply committed to the faith that, in the end, we can observe and reason our way to the truth about anything whatsoever. As the last century drew to a close, however, we became less sure of ourselves. Postmodernism is rather less triumphalistic about the infallibility of our (western) reason (except when it comes to identity issues, but that’s another story). And according to Jesus, we do have a real problem.
`Why is my language not clear to you?’, Jesus asked the Jews, and answered his own question immediately: `Because you are unable to hear what I say.’1 Two chapters earlier he was even more blunt: nobody could know the truth about him, he declared, `unless the Father who sent me draws him’.2 Apostle Paul was equally `unmodern’: ordinarily, he declared, we human beings are ‘blinded’, so that we are simply unable to perceive the realities of the issues involved;3 by nature we ‘cannot understand them’.4 There’s a fundamental problem with our presuppositions, our paradigms, that goes deeper than the intellect. We `deliberately forget’ spiritual realities, says apostle Peter.5 This possibility is hard on our pride. Unfortunately, we cannot rule it out: if God says he cannot be known by our unaided research, it might just be true.
To repeat: for Christian faith, knowing God is personal. The biblical hypothesis presents us as needing direct, individual revelation from God if we are to know the truth, on a par with the `Word’ that set the entire creative process in motion. This comparison is apostle Paul’s: ‘God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.’6 What’s in view here is not an irrational or even (necessarily) mystical experience. Rather, Paul affirms that our hearts have a built-in prejudice, such that God’s enabling power is indispensable if we are to see clearly the real, objective facts. It is in `the face of Christ’ that we can hope to see the glory of God; but we need God’s light to grasp and evaluate aright what we are seeing.7 But that moves us from mere assessment of data to the challenge of relationship with a Person.
Two further points follow. First, the new testament itself guarantees that the truly honest seeker will not be disappointed. Jesus’ teaching presents a God who comes out like a shepherd looking for us as we are wandering in the dark: ‘Seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you’.8 Second, however, we know that establishing a meaningful relationship with any person depends on our approaching them in a respectful and appropriate way. So it will be in this case. We are not now indulging in an intellectual game, or conducting a casual experiment in a test‑tube. Rather, we are exploring, opening ourselves to, the possibility that we have a Maker (even an Owner); a Father who we need to speak to us, to show us reality.
Perhaps no such being exists. But if he does, we approach him as members of a rebelled race, and as individuals who have chosen repeatedly to drive his presence to the periphery of our consciousness, to live as though he were unimportant. So as we come to him asking for `grace’, for his revelation of ultimate reality, we must be willing to face up (if he speaks) to his rights over us. And that’s hard. While we may possibly warm to the thought of a heavenly Santa Claus or `figure of light` to protect us and welcome us after death, we’re often profoundly anxious that there should not be a God who we might need to obey; or still worse, who might assess what we’ve done with our (and his) environment, and to each other. Many of us have a built-in anxiety that such a God should not exist.
But we have to face the issue. In fact it is not necessary to believe that God exists before starting to treat him as God. Even the thoroughgoing agnostic can pray (if there is no God, it is only a minute lost): ‘God, I do not know if you exist. Nor do I know if I can find out on my own. But I realize that, if you do, I may be entirely dependent on you showing your truth to me. Therefore: if you show me your truth and your ways, I vow that I will give myself to you, and start to follow you wherever you lead.’9
Does this not jeopardise our exploration by assuming its conclusion at the very start? Not really (though even if it did, we would only be following the rules of scientific method ‑ presuppose the hypothesis and see if it matches up with what happens). Such a prayer says merely, `God, if you are there, if you are all that Jesus taught, then I will follow you.’ But it also offers us a step forward in self-knowledge. It’s striking how many of us feel profound reluctance to pray in these terms – and our reaction reveals our hearts;10 it helps us see whether our beliefs are controlled by deep-seated determination to preserve our independence. If that is so, there is not much point (yet) in looking at the evidence; we’re maintaining a position from which, even if God is real, we will most probably never know, at least in this life. Rather, the question will be just why we feel so anxious to preserve our exile from God’s presence.11
Such a prayer leads us beyond the safely cerebral. Logically, we would no more expect to meet the living God just through reading books than to meet a partner just through reading Mills and Boon. Sometime, something has to be done, the risk has to be taken. To pray such a prayer is to step outside what’s been called the ‘Cartesian madness of the West’, the absurdity of thought in a bloodless vacuum. It is to set our total being as the stake of our gamble with the unknown. It is the only appropriate way to attempt an approach to the Creator who may perhaps be there. If there is no God, we shall ultimately prove to have wasted a little of our time: no great loss. If there is a God, we shall have opened the door for heaven to break in on our experience.12
UNDERSTANDING FAITH
What then do we expect? We expect a journey: a journey into faith. And immediately that word presents a stumbling-block. `It’s nice for those who “have” faith; I wouldn’t even mind it myself; but you can’t “work it up”, can you?’ Or (since so many people misunderstand faith, thinking it is separate from reason rather than building and acting on it): `How can any intelligent person tolerate living just on the basis of faith?’
But life is not so simple. In postmodernity it has become increasingly challenging to believe that we `know the objective truth’ about anything; how could one dare believe that one knows? `The just live by faith’, says the new testament repeatedly, but there is a sense in which no one lives by anything else. It is absurd to say we refuse, or are unable, to live by faith. `Absolute` proof never existed for anything, even our own existence. Descartes tried to prove the latter with his famous `I think therefore I am’. But all that can be proven from `There are thoughts’ (not `I think’, which smuggles in the `I’ it is trying to prove), is precisely that and no more; `There are thoughts’, or, `Thinking is happening’. What, if anything, is doing the thinking – whether it has any lasting identity, whether it is an octopus dreaming it is human – is in no way `proven’. (Is our “reality” any more than `an illusion caused by lack of alcohol’? Probably; but the point cannot be proven!)
We live by reasonable faith. Every time I catch a bus home I make a whole series of acts of faith based on reason. Faith in my memory of the link between that bus’ destination and where I live; faith in the driver’s intention to go where his company promised; faith in my perception that he probably isn’t drunk; faith that the bus is properly maintained. I cannot prove these absolutely, but there is enough real evidence to justify my steps of faith based on reason. When I pause at the corner shop to buy `fresh’ fruit, it is an act of faith in the shopkeeper. When I greet my wife, I am building confidently on faith in her – and thus faith in my judgment, faith indeed in my memories on which that judgment is based – that she is not secretly sleeping with the neighbour and plotting to poison me. Normal life depends on our willingness to take a thousand steps of faith each day, in our memory, our perceptions, our reason, and the judgment and good intentions of others (to say nothing of our dress sense and our deodorant!) The world might be very different from the way we perceive it; we will have to live by faith in the evidence that it isn’t. Only a paranoid would refuse to eat breakfast because of the impossibility of proving beyond all doubt that no burglar has poisoned his egg; but the possibility cannot rationally be ruled out, and faith is indispensable for breakfast.
There is no way of living except by faith: faith, not set against reason, but defined as stepping forward in a trust based on reasonably solid grounds, even though they must always amount to less than absolute proof.13 And this, of course, is good scientific method:14 to take a theory and then test it by its internal consistency and by how far, longterm, it integrates and matches the data we receive. In one sense such an approach (to life or science) remains a gamble of faith. But some hypotheses about the world come to make far more sense than others; and these we live by. So Christian faith, writes Colin Brown, is a `hypothesis that… makes sense as we go along living it’.15 Jesus said something similar in John 7:17; and his challenge to his first disciples fits the need too of a postmodern culture: `Come and you will see.’16
WAYS OF SEEING
Suppose, then, that we are willing to embark on this journey of exploration. We want to give consideration to the Christian hypothesis; and we’ve chosen (it is an act of our inmost, fundamental will) to let God be God in our lives if he should exist. What then?
For many people in the two-thirds world these may seem stupid questions: anyone with a mind and heart knows there is a God. It is not easy to find atheists in, say, Iraq or Brazil or Nigeria. I remember a woman I deeply respected asking me – at a time when I very much doubted God’s reality – `But don’t you just know he is there?’ Such a condition is uncommon in the west. (Though not unknown: the great psychologist Jung told a BBC interviewer shortly before his death, `Suddenly I understood that God was, for me at least, one of the most certain and immediate experiences… I do not believe; I know. I know.’17) I was willing to concede that it might be a `normal’ condition for humanity, to which our western culture, its perceptions overwhelmed by the media-dream-worlds it has created, has blinded and deafened itself. But I had to say to my friend: No, I don’t `just know’.18 Many others of us are the same. What do we do? Where might we explore (or be given) the basis for living by faith?
As we’ve noted, to Christian belief the knowledge of God is something deeply personal. There are many different areas which God may select to make us, as individuals, aware of his reality: the `keys’ to our particular `lock’. For some it may be personal experience of God’s presence, in the miraculous or in answered prayer – either in our own lives, or in the life of someone we know well enough to trust.19 For others, it may be experience of the meaningfulness of Christ helping someone we know to endure and even grow despite immersion in horrendous suffering. For many it may be the Bible: our experience of being `spoken to’ as we read it or hear it preached, our sense of its profundity, relevance and coherence20 – our sense, as Peter said to Jesus, that these are `the words of eternal life’.21
For yet others, what we love most may begin to `turn the key’. The first `intuition of God’ may come through experiencing childbirth (`Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy/ I found living proof’, wrote Bruce Springsteen after the birth of his first child). Jewish novelist Saul Bellow, writing about Mozart, said that `At the heart of my confession, therefore, is the hunch that with beings such as Mozart we are forced to speculate about transcendence, and this makes us very uncomfortable.’ Respected culture critic George Steiner argues at length in Real Presences that the experience of great art only makes sense if it is underpinned by the reality of a God. Television naturalist David Bellamy wrote that his `road to Damascus was the wonder of the natural world.’22 To the Christian, such intuitions are actually the revelation of God, to be stewarded with care. `Take heed how you hear’, said Jesus; the intuition of grace may not return, and we are responsible for what we do with it.23
Or it may be other considerations. It is hard to `take God seriously’ when the media don’t; yet where does the majority opinion really lie? Don’t our North Atlantic fashions of materialistic thought seem myopic when set in a wider context of history or geography?24 The vast majority of the human race has always believed in a supernatural universe including a supreme God, so far as we can tell; and the majority certainly still does. `The main issue is agreed among all men of all nations’, said the Roman writer Cicero, `inasmuch as all have engraved in their minds an innate belief that the gods exist.’25 In the next generation, Seneca argued similarly that no race had departed so far from the laws and customs that it did not believe in some kind of gods.26 Calvin concurred, fourteen hundred years later: `There is, as the eminent pagan says, no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God.’ 27 And it is striking that the Christian church in particular continues to grow globally today; indeed she has grown faster across the continents in the last century than in any previous one.28 Of course we westerners tend to think of ourselves as `humanity come of age’, and assume that because we control the world’s media and educational systems our de-supernaturalised worldview must be the whole truth.29 But humility might urge us to note the near-universality of belief elsewhere, and to wonder if the majority of humankind isn’t sensing something we have grown deaf to. Shall I stake my life on the probability that they are right, or that they are wrong?
The universe we inhabit poses further questions. If there is no God, we must somehow conceive the cosmos as just `sitting there’, as it were, expanding and contracting perhaps, but in existence for no imaginable reason. Sartre’s comment about the oddity of there being something rather than nothing has some force. And that `something’ includes the physical laws; the universe we live in is in many ways a stable place – we might say a curiously reasonable place. The pattern of laws and constants that enables its existence in so rational and unchanging a manner might seem suggestive of a Law-maker.30 `The mind refuses to look at this universe being what it is without being designed’, said Darwin late in his life; Einstein remarked that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was that it was comprehensible, and that he was glimpsing the handiwork of an `illimitable superior spirit’ in what he perceived of the universe.
More recently, the debates over the `anthropic principle` have suggested that the ratios and constants of the fundamental forces in the universe – from the subatomic to the astronomical – are incredibly finely balanced. Indeed they seem balanced far too precisely to be the result of anything but intelligent design, since the margin of error was minimal (one part in a million in some cases) if a universe was to emerge that could contain intelligent life. `It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out’, summarizes theoretical physicist Paul Davies in God and the New Physics. `…The seemingly miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.’31 Leading cosmologist Sir Frederick Hoyle (not a Christian) concurred: `I do not believe that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed.’32 Do we not sense a Maker behind these astonishingly productive principles that have brought such complexities out of almost nothing in this strange, pulsating cosmos? Alongside this sense stand our intuitions of wonder: whether at the majesty of the galaxies; the glory and multitudinous living complexity of the natural world that has exploded out from the Big Bang; or the beauty of a sunset, a mountain-range, a stallion, a human baby. Are those intuitions sentimentality, or apprehensions of a real Designer at work? As we gaze thankfully at our world, from the sparrow to the panther to the human eye, it can be hard to avoid seeing it as the work of a personal Creator.
Or again: `Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily they are reflected on’, wrote Kant; `the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’33 The singer of Psalm 19 reflects on the same combination: the `heavens declare the glory of God’, he says, and the internal `law of the Lord’ presents an equally life-giving stimulus, `reviving the soul… giving light to the eyes’. Culturally and individually, we too sense profound intuitions of that `moral law’ – intuitions of the reality of good and evil, the truth of love and beauty, the reality and value of the individual, the trustworthiness of reason. Yet these vital intuitions have grown dangerously problematic as they lost their grounding in God. (There are five posts in the `Literature and Culture` section documenting this process.)
So were they idealistic sentimentalities, or apprehensions of genuine truth? Is there indeed no intrinsic value for the individual, no reality in love beyond lust and tactical alliance, and ultimately no ethics beyond our personal preferences? Or maybe there is a God? `Although man may say that he is no more than a machine, his whole life denies it’, writes Francis Schaeffer. In our profound experiences of love, beauty or justice we touch, not God indeed, but objective realities that only make sense in terms of God.34 The Triune God would be a `meaning-maker’ whose truth makes sense of our profoundest hopes and intuitions – that people do matter, that egoism and cruelty are wrong, that love is real. We’re trained into worldviews that negate these intuitions; yet still our hearts warn us that those atheistic worldviews are dehumanized, arid, inadequate. Maybe we should listen; maybe our hearts were trustworthy all along.
So: so many pointers that may well be enough to lead us towards the reality of God; depending on our openness, and on our personality. However, it seems to me there are two further, absolutely core issues that reveal God’s reality. So there are companion posts on this site about each of these two core issues: How do we explain Jesus? And, what about the historical evidence for his resurrection?
PS: I find it very odd that often I encounter atheists who say (forcefully) that there is no evidence for faith. It’s extraordinary, given that there are so many good and intellectually solid books out there presenting all kinds of evidence that Jesus is God. Picking just a few: Rebecca McLaughlin‘s brilliant Confronting Christianity (she has a great book for teenagers too, 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (And Answer) About Christianity); McDowell’s classic More Than a Carpenter, particularly on the historical evidence; or Moreland’s more philosophical Scaling the Secular City. Or for something lighter but still compelling and very funny, Andrew Wilson’s If God Then What is great. Surely it’s intellectually dishonest for people to say there’s no evidence for faith if – as often seems to be the case – they’ve never risked reading anything like these. Or indeed if we’re up for exploring a really extensive coverage of the evidence, William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith is brilliant though strongly philosophical in parts, or there’s the updated version of McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict, or Douglas Groothuis’ Christian Apologetics; though all three of these are encyclopaedic in the territory they cover, so inevitably their expected target audience who will invest that sort of time is Christians. And google these authors, some of them have very helpful websites. (Writing this PS doesn’t mean I would necessarily agree with absolutely everything said by any one of them; and that’s ok!)
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1 John 8:43; cf v47.
2 John 6:44.
3 2 Corinthians 4:4.
4 1 Corinthians 2:14.
5 2 Peter 3:5. Cf also Paul’s comment about our choosing not to `retain the knowledge of God’ (Romans 1:28). In Jesus’ story in Luke 16:31, Abraham tells the rich man in hell that his brothers’ state of mind was such that they would not be convinced even if someone was to rise from the dead.
6 2 Corinthians 4:6.
7 An additional point is made both by Jesus and the writer of Hebrews, that only a certain kind of being will ultimately be capable of ‘seeing God’, will have (as it were) the sensory ability necessary. This is implicit in the innocent statements `Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God‘ (Matthew 5:8) and ‘Without holiness no one will see the Lord‘ (Hebrews 12:14). There is no point in our complaining that if we saw God we would believe in him, if we are keeping ourselves incapable of such seeing. But who desires to be `pure in heart’ in our era?
8 Luke 15:3‑7; Matthew 7:7.
9 Rebecca Manley Pippert offers what may be an even more logical experiment: `Tell God (or the four walls if that is the one you think you are speaking to) that you want to find out if Jesus is truly God. And that if you could feel more certain you would follow him. Then begin to read the Gospels, every day. Each day as you read, something will probably hit you and make sense. Whatever that is, do it as soon as you can.’ And then see what happens. Again, this takes us out beyond the merely cerebral; so real relationship can begin. (Out of the Saltshaker, p.97.)
10 As does our reaction to the related idea that we may have reason for deep gratitude to God. Again, St Paul points to the refusal of thankfulness as a fundamental element in human alienation (Romans 1:21), in our determination to maintain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. Lundin suggests that `Ingratitude, and its attendant resentment, are distinguishing attributes of much of contemporary literary and cultural theory’ (The Culture of Interpretation , p.103). In this respect the simple prayer `Give us this day our daily bread’ has real significance as a deliberate expression of grateful dependence.
11 Moreland remarks tentatively, `Although I cannot prove it, I suspect that atheists fit a more tightly defined group than do theists, and it may be that other factors which help to define the class of atheists (for example, absent or passive fathers) may be key psychological causes for why people embrace atheism’ (Scaling the Secular City, p.229).
12 `Opened the door’ isn’t quite the whole story; many Christians would add that even our praying in this way is a response (conscious or unconscious) to God beginning to speak into our thinking. But that is another matter.
13 Moreland observes that in most of our knowledge-assertions we do not supply full criteria for our claims. If we had to do that, then it would involve `asserting that I know the criteria are true ones and before I could make that claim, I would need criteria for my first criteria, and so on to infinity. This would lead to a vicious infinite regress such that I could never know anything. But I do know some things (e.g., that I had breakfast this morning)’ (p.116, building on Roderick Chisholm, The Problem of the Criterion). Faith has to come in somewhere if we are to `know’ anything at all.
14 Science, too, involves an irreducible element of faith. Moreland observes a number of basic assumptions, including: `Science must assume that the mind is rational and that the universe is rational in such a way that the mind can know it. Science must assume some uniformity of nature to justify induction (i.e., science must assume that one can legitimately infer from the past to the future and from examined cases to unexamined ones of the same kind)…. Science also assumes that the laws of logic are true, that numbers exist… that language has meaning, and that some terms refer to things in the world… These and other presuppositions are necessary to ground science as a rational discipline which gives us approximate truth about the world. But these are philosophical assumptions or brute givens which cannot themselves be verified by science itself without begging the question’ (pp.198-99).
15 Colin Brown, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, p.266.
16 John 1:39.
17 Quoted in Roger Hurding, Roots and Shoots: a guide to counselling and psychotherapy, p.80.
18 This deep uncertainty was despite the fact that a curious experience some years previously had shown an awareness of God’s reality to be rooted extraordinarily deeply in my own psyche. For some reason we lose touch with such intuitions at times of doubt.
19 This is more likely to be meaningful if it is first- or second-hand. However, ch.9 of Forster and Marston’s earlier book Reason and Faith offers some striking descriptions of the miraculous in the life of the contemporary church. With regard to the specifically `medical’ dimension, Rex Gardner’s Healing Miracles is an in-depth study by a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists; see also Healing by anthropologist David Lewis.
20 Or its unique ability to foretell the future some centuries ahead – particularly the details of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. See, for example, the prophetic passages listed in ch.9 of Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict.
21 John 6:66-68.
22 Even atheistic sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, in the opening section of The Diversity of Life, writes of the wonders of the Amazon rainforest in these terms: `From such a place the pious naturalist would send long respectful letters to royal patrons about the wonders of the new world as testament to the glory of God. And I thought: there is still time to see this land in such a manner.’
23 A key aspect of C.S. Lewis’ most complex narrative, Till We Have Faces, concerns the central figure Orual’s rejection of the vision of the gods’ palace, and the way that, having rejected it, she can only `veil’ her consciousness in busyness (`I did, and I did, and I did’ ); until the gods rip the veil away, and she again faces their revelation `bareface’.
24 Even to say `North Atlantic’ may be to overstate the prevalence of materialism. Elward Ellis, an African-American leader working for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, wrote in In Touch that most African-Americans `have a sort of ontological awareness of God, so apologetics for us needn’t start with the existence of God. That God was always a given.’ The issue in their context, he added, is where the saving power of that God is being encountered in practical reality: `What did you confront that you could not contend with in your own resources? In what way did God bring you out?’
25 Quoted in Colin Brown, Christianity and Western Thought, p.57.
26 Brown, p.352. It is striking that the `apologetic’ content of the Qur’an seems directed entirely at making clear the truth of monotheism rather than polytheism. For Muhammad’s culture, atheism was evidently almost inconceivable.
27 Brown, p.153. Even communism distorted but could not exclude the intuition of the supernatural. Throughout Russian culture, communism turned into a religion: whether we think of Mayakovsky’s well-known slogan (parodying the new testament) `Lenin was, Lenin is, Lenin will be’; or the mausoleum in Red Square where Lenin’s embalmed body was kept as close as Marxism could manage to resurrection; or the trinitarian, icon-like pictures of Marx, Engels and Lenin that adorned room after room of soviet universities. Mao has `become a god’, a Chinese taximan told an International Herald Tribune reporter, `pointing to the Mao portrait that dangled like an amulet from his rear-view mirror… In some areas, a third or more of vehicles bear the portrait, and throughout China stories buzz of people surviving miraculously from terrible accidents because of their Mao photos… Mao may be the first atheist to have become a god.’
28 See, for example, the massive statistical base in David B. Barrett, ed., World Christian Encyclopaedia.
29 In fact our practically `de-supernaturalized worldview’ isn’t the `whole truth’ even about our own perceptions. Even in the North Atlantic region, most people still `believe’ in God in some way. Various surveys have reported figures of around 70% in Britain, 90% in the USA, 85% among Canadian youth, 69% in France. (Obviously such surveys don’t involve a high degree of definition of `God’, nor distinguish a purely abstract belief or intuition from a living and lived-out faith.) A particularly interesting study of students in Leeds University, England, showed 55% believing in God, even though the respondents themselves expected such a belief to be very much a minority view.
30 See the fascinating book There Is A God by the former standard-bearer of atheistic philosophical thinking, Antony Flew. Faith in such a Law-maker is one reason why modern science arose in a Protestant cultural context, as against, say, the culture of ancient China, which was highly inventive but grounded in a very different worldview. This may also be why so many of the early scientific pioneers were Christians. Cf R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science.
31 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics, p.189, concluding a chapter on the topic. Moreland summarizes the evidence succinctly in pp.52-53. The alternative seems to be a cosmos developing endlessly into multiple new universes (that is, everything that can happen does, along with every possible combination of physical laws, until the `lottery’ turns up a workable set) – an astonishingly prolific and unexplained generation of universes in a supposedly `empty’ cosmos that seems harder to believe in than a God. Daniel Dennett, in his militantly atheistic though very readable study Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, brings his chapter on this topic to a lame conclusion: `Why is there something rather than nothing? Opinions differ on whether the question makes any intelligible demand at all. If it does, the answer “Because God exists” is probably as good an answer as any, but look at its competition: “Why not?”‘(pp.180-81).
32 Quoted by Dennett, p.164. Hoyle is well known as a father of `steady-state’ theory. He has also argued (eg in Evolution from Space) that the evolutionary process is so problematic that it must have been supervised by higher intelligence – though he then opts for an extra-terrestrial intelligence rather than God. However, an intelligence capable of reworking the physical laws is not far short of divinity. If evolution is true, the idea that so much has come in such circumstances from so incredibly little might seem to demand God?
33 From the close of the Dialectic of Pure and Practical Reason.
34 Francis Schaeffer, The God Who is There (1968), p.110; cf pp.28-29.
