Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World
Is There a God?
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, September 13, 2009

Psalm 19; Romans 1:20; Hebrews 11:3

One night as I stood at a Bible stand outside a student restaurant in downtown Bordeaux I got into a conversation with a student from Switzerland. With a wry smile he said, "I'll believe in God when he strikes me on the head with a bolt of lightning..." I told him I didn't think that was such a good idea. I'm not sure why he said this. Was he playing mind games? Or was there something else? Maybe he really wanted to hear what I had to say. It's the difference between the cynic who really doesn't want to believe that there is a God, and the skeptic who is really on a search for meaningful answers. We all know people like that, don't we? Maybe we are one of those people – skeptical, I mean, not cynical. I suspect it would be a rare day for a cynic to come to church on a Sunday morning. But you never know.

So today I'm beginning a series of sermons on the theme, "Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World". I think in having "conversations" about our faith, rather than arguments, we have to begin by asking why it is people are skeptical. As I think about the conversations I've been a part of, and what I read and overhear, and people I know, I believe there are at least seven reasons for skepticism about what Christians believe.

The first is that people are unsatisfied with simplistic answers to complex questions, especially where the answers seem to demonstrate a certain arrogance and disregard for other points of view.

Another is failed role models of Christian leadership where the talk is not walked. The hurt and disappointment that comes can also fuel skepticism about Christian faith itself.

Another of course is the daily encounters we all have with other world views including other religions, philosophies and political ideologies.

A fourth cause for skepticism is more personal. Maybe, based on my life experience, I just don't believe, or seriously doubt, that anything or anyone can really change. It's the sense of impossibility.

A fifth cause of skepticism about God is the exact opposite of the fourth, that I am persuaded based on my life experience that I am self-made. I have a profound sense of personal possibility based on my own ability, and good luck. Who needs God?

Another cause is the appeal to science to say that what's real is only what you can observe with your senses with the enhancement of instruments, and that you can repeat in controlled conditions.

Finally, and a very serious cause for skepticism, is the problem of suffering. How can there be a God in the midst of such great tragedy and loss?

At different times we all have had to come to terms with at least some, maybe all of these causes for skepticism. Let me say again that skepticism that leads to asking sincere questions is a good thing. Where would science be without sincere questions? That we have questions I think helps us to hear them as others ask. It helps us have a "conversation" that begins with, "Yeah, I know what you mean..."

I think we're finding that we are having these conversations more and more.

Pastor Tim Keller ministers in a large Presbyterian church in downtown Manhattan. In a recent book I highly recommend to you, entitled Reason for God, he says, "America is less Christian than it was 20 years ago and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to rejection of religion altogether." But at the same time he is seeing an increase in people consciously choosing a non-inherited faith, which can be "secular" or a highly committed Christian. The point he makes is important: that, "It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them." As it says in I Peter, we are to be ready to give an account of the hope that is within us.

Probably the first question we all face at one time or another is, "Is there a God?" But behind that question lurks another very basic question, "How can I know there is a God?" And behind that question is, "How can I know anything?" This is important for perhaps obvious reasons. If you can't really know anything, then everything becomes a matter of opinion, or feeling, or personal preference. To ask if there is a God is not to ask about someone's personal preference or opinion. We're really wondering, is there really a God? Is it possible to know that there is a God?

Professor Dallas Willard teaches philosophy at USC and has recently written a book I also recommend to you as we walk through some of the questions we have about what we believe, entitled Knowing Christ Today. He uses a very practical definition of "knowledge" that goes like this:

"We have knowledge of something when we are representing it (by thinking about it, speaking of it, treating it) as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience."

By this he is simply saying we know things based on adequate evidence or insight. Knowledge makes competence possible. So you expect your heart surgeon to know what she is doing, and not that she feels lucky the day you are up for a bypass operation. Knowledge makes for reliability, and therefore, for a certain authority and basis for what we can believe and trust.

Can we know that we are sitting here today? I'm not asking a trick question. The answer, for all practical purposes of how we live, is "yes". As much as anything is "knowable" in this life: that we are alive; that the world you and I live in is "real"; that we can see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. We can know that we are sitting here this morning.

So I ask again, "Is it possible to know that there is a God?"

From Old to New Testaments our Christian faith answers with a resounding, "Yes". And the reason, the evidence the writers of the Bible use, is all around you and me, including the fact that you and I and we all are even here. It is the Bible's most basic answer. Almost everywhere the Bible assumes God's existence, and the most eloquent testimony to God's existence is creation.

We just heard read this beautiful Psalm 19, "The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night declares KNOWLEDGE."

The apostle Paul wrote in his introduction to his letter to the Romans, "Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made..."

I said "almost" everywhere the Bible assumes the existence of God. There are a couple of exceptions. One is in found in Psalm 14 which begins, "Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God." That passage and another in Psalm 10 suggest that the reason someone would deny the evidence of God's existence is for ulterior motives - the desire to be free of God and live as if there is no God. Because if there is a God there might well be implications...

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. How can we know that there is a God? I want to follow Professor Willard's line of thinking to answer this question. I invite you to follow along using the Questions for Reflection at the end of this sermon.

First, there is NO reason in the nature of things why God could not exist or should not exist. There is nothing in the realm of nature that renders God impossible, improbable or implausible. No one has ever disproven God.

The biblical as well as classical sources from which we take our contemporary ways of thinking about God arise from the PHYSICAL UNIVERSE that we observe and experience. This is what our psalms and other passages say over and over. Based on what we observe, our physical universe had a BEGINNING. Using our best reasoning based on examination of the evidence by very powerful instruments, we can know there was a time when all we see was not there, but then, was there. We call that moment when it was there, probably inadequately, the "Big Bang". This means the physical universe is not eternal. This by the way is how the first book of our Bible also describes the universe: that there was a time when it was not there, and then a time when it was.

This leads to a fourth step. How did the universe get there? There are two possibilities. One is that the physical universe was not produced by anything, or it was produced by something that is NOT physical. Now, again, based on what we observe we know that something cannot come from nothing. Someone might try to say they believe this, but there is no basis for it. Everything we know to be real comes from within the context of other physical things. So if something caused the universe to be here, that something is not nothing, it's that it is not physical. We can use another word. We can say that this something is SPIRITUAL.

Nothing can happen without a CAUSE. This we also observe every single day. And this gets very complex very fast. Say my wife asks for a glass of orange juice. That request is a "cause" that sets in motion all sorts of things that also depend on conditions resulting from other causes. So I go to the cupboard and get a glass, which came out of the dishwasher where my wife had put it the day before, with some dish soap, and then flipped the switch that ran electricity to the motor. I go to the fridge and pull out a carton of orange juice that came from the store, that had been trucked there from a processing plant probably in Florida or California somewhere, that had gotten crates of oranges from groves of trees growing in the hot sun irrigated by water... and you get the idea. There are causes and conditions for causes, and it becomes nearly impossible to describe. Somewhere, all of this, and now I'm talking about ALL OF THIS, the universe, and life, and you and me, all had to have gotten started by something outside all these conditions. Based on what we can observe and reason, there had to have been a first move, a first cause.

It's like dominoes. Push on one and then a whole sequence of things happen as a result. But it all needs a first push. Imagine that a line of dominoes goes off to infinity in both directions. Infinity means no beginning, and no end. If the line is infinite off to the left that would mean falling dominoes would never reach here. These dominoes would never fall. It would also logically mean there is no first domino to fall. If that's the case then there are no falling dominoes. Nothing happens. But they do fall because there was a "push", a cause.

There is SOMETHING MORE that we can call "spiritual" that is the source of the physical world, who also has the capacity to INITIATE causes while not being caused to act. This means this Something More has "will", and "choice". (I can choose to tip over the first domino, or ask my wife for a glass of orange juice, or not.)

This also implies that the Something More must have the capacity think, to decide in order to choose. We can use the word, "intelligence".

And what has resulted is amazingly complex, beautiful, and perfect for life. The causes and conditions for life some have attempted to calculate. The odds that life would result from all the variables of physics is one chance in ten to the power of 229. Stephen Hawking agreed, "If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed before it even reached its present size." (D'Souza, p. 130) By the way, this is the reason the famous physicist and former atheist Anthony Flew finally concluded that there is a God. He wrote in an interview recently, "With every passing year the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup would magically generate the genetic code."

I'm put in mind of something the psalmist said, "When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?"

Really this is where we have to get, isn't it? Not the question does God exist? I mean this is a very important question. But a God that exists may not have much to do with you and me. That God could be out there, or back there, but what about here and now? Once we begin to see all the evidence the way our Scriptures see it, and we conclude that there really is a God, the next question becomes, "Does God care?" And this question is not about philosophy, is it? As important as good thinking is to do, there's also the question about you and me, and the people we love, and how we are to live today.

There came along Some One to help us answer that second question, "Does God care?" One day out overlooking a meadow he said, "Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?... Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these..."

What if what's real is that there is a God who cares? Who created time and space and place, and who therefore gets it down to the most intimate details about ALL OF THIS, including about you and me?

Would it not make sense that this God, this Something More, would not want us wondering and worrying about how this all works and how we fit? Would it not make sense that God would want to show us something more? That God would enter in, especially where skepticism begins to become cynicism, and we are this close to giving up hope?

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Questions for Reflection and recommended reading.