Complexities and the Lord

Sometimes Christians can benefit from taking the point of view of an atheist. Knowing where the other side is coming from is really important in our journey as Christians. Being the best missionary you can involves knowing where other people stand. The easiest way to be an atheist is to say: “Yeah, this world just doesn’t seem good enough to have God. Why would He create something that was bad?” This is a load of horse manure. This kind of atheist doesn’t have their own true testimony of the world, they’re just lazy. CS Lewis said in his book The Four Loves, ““To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.” As Christians, we must be vulnerable. We are giving our hearts away and preparing them to be broken. Christianity is based on Love, so if you’re not vulnerable, you’re probably not putting yourself out there. We need to be vulnerable to not only God, but our neighbors whom we are supposed to love. The problem with many atheists in the world today is that they’re not willing to be hurt. The truth is, we may be ridiculed for our beliefs. But it is important to remember that God’s peace, and God himself, passeth all understanding.

There are many different Christian explanations for why there is bad in the world. I will not go into the specifics, but they do exist. Personally, I don’t know why there is bad in the world, but we cannot disprove the existence or even goodness of God by saying there is bad in the world. First, our paradigm for good comes from God. There is really no Good or Evil without God. There is no forgiveness without Jesus. People credit Gandhi with saying an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but there is actually no record of him saying this. Jesus says that we shouldn’t follow eye for an eye, Even though it was said in the Book of Exodus, Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount was the first person to say that we don’t need to retaliate. The entire world changed with Jesus. Jesus told us to forgive 70 times 7. If the Son of God introduces the idea of forgiveness, then how can we say that God is bad? If the entire world’s paradigm for good revolves around the God of the Bible, how can we say that the same deity is bad?

There is a lot in the Bible that we simply cannot understand. Atheists will use evolution as a way to “disprove” God, but even Darwin always acknowledged the presence of God, even if he strayed from his original Anglican faith. All I know is that we cannot pretend to understand the works of God. No mortal can truly comprehend or know the answers to “why are we here, where do I come from, and where am I going?” These questions simply cannot be answered by the information of the world. Christians have the duty to not pretend they know the answer. Instead, Christians should have faith that the God we worship and put our faith in knows. Christians should not focus on the minutia as reasons to not believe. Take evolution for example: let’s assume that God doesn’t have a corporeal body (before Jesus). If this is true, then how can God create Adam in His image? I am not putting forth my theory as a correct one, but just to show that we must not underestimate God. What if God instead put a soul into a human, truly creating the first person? This would go along with Descartes’ theory that every living thing besides humans are automatons. God did, after all, create the animals first, and who knows if God’s days are based off of the sun and moon?

I imagine that one day, this will all be clear, but right now, it’s not. The important thing is that we don’t know everything. But we trust in someone who does. Part of our testimony as Christians is overcoming doubt. We overcome, not erase, doubt. We cannot know how the universe was created. But we can, through strong faith, be okay with the fact that we don’t know. Mark Twain said that a schoolboy says, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” We believe in things that we know are not the easy or obvious answer, but that is what makes us good Christians. That is what brings us closer to God.