The Existence of God

Some people look at the stars and find God.  Some people find God in the first glimpse of the face of their newborn child.  Some people find God behind the bars of a prison cell, or at the end of their rope, or when they're scraping rock bottom looking for that last fix.  Some people find God at an alter call at a Sunday evening service where the drowsy light of the setting sun shines through.  Some people don't find God until they're drawing that last painful breath.  I found God in the periodic table of elements.  To each his own, I guess.

I grew up in a Christian home.  We went to church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once for Wednesday night prayer meeting.  We were there whenever the doors were open.  I also went to a private school for several years, also Christian.  I was knee deep in the religion.  It surrounded me on all sides.  Through-out my childhood I fluctuated between periods when I would become serious about being a "good Christian", and other periods when I couldn't care less and I just wanted to see what was happening with the TV shows I wasn't allowed to watch.  Regardless of these fluctuations, however, it never once even crossed my mind to question the truth of any of it.  God & the Devil, Heaven & Hell were as real and self-evident to me as my hand in front of my face.  I didn't even know that doubt was an option.

Then one day my brother, who's a few years older than me, came home from his college classes and mentioned that they had been learning about the notion that reality, as we know it, could be an illusion.  I remember his pointing to the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the hallway and saying, "How do you really know that the light is on?  How do you know that you're not imagining it?  How do we know that we're both seeing the same thing?  How do you know you're not dreaming right now and none of this is real?"  I didn't know it at the time, but I wouldn't be exaggerating now if I told you that this simple moment on a rainy afternoon completely changed my life and who I was as a person, forever.  A tiny little crack had opened up in my view of the world, and I could see an incredible light coming from the other side.

I became fascinated by philosophy after that.  I started reading everything from Aristotle to Nietzsche.  I didn't understand half of it, and the half I thought I understood then, I didn't really understand either.  But the wheels were turning.  I started to keep a notebook of my ideas, a kind of fledgling precursor of this blog.  It wasn't long before the most obvious question of all occurred to me, "How do I know God is real?"  Now, it wasn't that I had been living under a rock and had never heard of atheism.  It was just that up to that point, I had never realized how someone could arrive at that conclusion.  Atheists were evil people, denying God so that they could live a life of sin and excess...or so I'd always heard.  Now I was seeing how reason, rather than sin, could lead you there as well.

Naturally, this didn't go over big at home or at school.  I started to rebel and get into trouble.   I started to ask questions.  Looking back on it now, my questions concerning Christianity and the existence of God could be broken down into three basic sub-categories: 1.) How do we know the Bible is actually the word of God?  2.) If everything that happens is God's will, then how does human free will fit into the equation?  3.) Did God decide and create the ideal of what is good, or does goodness exist independently of God and God is simply the ultimate realization of the ideal?  In other words, how could God be the highest measure of the standard and the creator of the standard as well?

Regarding the first question, the best they could do was quote me a bunch of Bible verses.  I had sense enough even then to know that you can't prove the authenticity of a document by quoting from a document itself.  I could write something on a napkin, and add a footnote that it was the word of God.  So that argument proved nothing to me.  Regarding the other two questions, oh we went round and round in circles on those.  I can't hardly blame them though.  Despite what I said in the opening paragraph, I'm still struggling with those myself.  Anyway, eventually they grew pretty tired of me at the school.  They put me on something they called "spiritual probation", a new type of thin ice that they basically invented just for me, and then they made it pretty clear that they didn't want me coming back to their school next year.  I was trying to open the minds around me in the same way mine had been opened.  Clearly some people were hostile to this.

In the midst of all this, everyday life went on.  In Chemistry class we were learning about the periodic table of elements.  We learned that all the chemical reactions between the elements were due to the fact that all the different elements are trying to reach a stability and stasis by having eight electrons in their outer shell.  Perhaps it was because 8 seemed such an arbitrary number.  If it had been an even 10, I might not have even taken note of it.  But as it was, it made me wonder.  I wasn't exactly seeing God in all this then, that came later.  At the time, I was just wondering.  Here was a rule that governed every physical reaction through-out the universe, but why?  Why did these atoms have such a thing for the number 8?  Who decided this?  The rule caused the reactions, but what caused the rule?

No doubt someone with far more scientific training that I could ever dream of acquiring  would be able to explain exactly why 8 is the magic number, but that would be missing the point.  Such an explanation would only remove the issue back by one degree.  My questioning had led me to that old conundrum that anyone who's ever had a conversation with a four year old child is familiar with.  For every "why?" there's another "why?" waiting on deck right behind it.  You can explain to the Nth degree how everything in the universe works, from the tiniest microbe to the collision of galaxies, but you'll never reach an ultimate explanation of why it just conveniently happens to be that way.  You can take the whole cosmic clock apart piece by piece and show exactly how it keeps time, but you still wouldn't be able explain why we're fortunate enough that this clock even exists instead of just a pile of cogs and gears.  In other words, how do you account for the principle of clockworkness itself?  Why not chaos?  Again, you could go deep, really dig down into the metaphysical foundation of everything and explain why the universe is governed by a system of consistent scientific laws, but you'll find another "why?" waiting right behind that one.  

Take evolution, for instance.  Now, to Christian people "evolution" is a dirty word, but ironically, I see this "God-principle" more at work there than anywhere else.  Just like with the periodic table, someone could explain to me in intricate and minute detail exactly how natural selection works.  I know enough about it myself to see that there's no mysterious magic behind it.  It makes, simple, natural, logical sense.  But aren't we lucky that it does?  There's even a built-in slight degree of imperfection in the universe that allows it to work.  This raises an issue for another day, but for now I'm just pointing out that there's even a perfect degree of imperfection to make it all work out, that slight little hiccup in the clock that keeps it running.

Now, you're thinking that all these issues have been raised before by the theory of Intelligent Design.  I would say, yes...but not quite...or maybe, up to a point.  You see, I'm not looking at all this and seeing the hand of a designer.  I'm thinking God is the design.  Once upon a time, people thought the clock itself was God.  Then someone came along and said, "No, God made the clock."  I'm saying that perhaps God is the principle of clockwork itself.  It's not the gears and springs and scientific laws; it's the thing that allows the gears and springs to work as a clock.  It's the reason a flower is beautiful, that falls as a shadow behind any other reason you might give.  It's not how we came to be here to see the flower; it's why.  It's...well, quite honestly, it's beyond my power to explain.  In fact, it's the very nature of it to reside beyond explanation.  If you try to explain God, you find that it slips another degree away, forever just beyond your grasp.

There might be some fall-out and controversy over this, or it might be met with bland, unimpressed indifference.  I don't know.  I wish I could say I was up to that task of really putting this into words.  I've heard before that writers should never whine about their own inadequacies of expression in their writing.  They should either put up or shut up.  Well, I've done my best at putting up.  I wish I could say that all this helps me sleep at night, and that I'm no longer confused and plagued with doubts.  But I am, and probably always will be.  That light bulb in the hallway changed me in ways that can't be unchanged, even if I wanted to.   All I have to offer is a feeling that I have, a sense and a faith that the ship of space and time is being guided along on a steady course, holding the whole crazy universal carnival together.