One of the easiest ways to persuade our children that God is real is the evidence of his incredible, amazing, mind-blowing design in nature. Paul tells us in Romans 1 that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . .” I made sure my kids understood this as they were growing up, and still do even though they are no longer kids. The reason it is critical for parents to do this is that we must counter the assumptions of the dominant secular culture. The most obvious, yet pernicious, is naturalism: the material world is all there is, and God is not required to explain it. Oh yes he is! Yet because of the ubiquity of secular culture, naturalism seems, well, natural. Countering this assumption (i.e., it can’t be proved) is easy. A simple example show’s how.
My son got a new guitar last week, and the same day I happened to read a wonderful piece from 14 years ago called “Accidents Happen” from The American Spectator. When he was a young boy, the author’s mother asked him what the difference was between an elephant and a mailbox. He couldn’t quite get what he should say, so said he didn’t know. “In that case,” she concluded. “I had better not give you this letter to mail.” He continues:
In this vein, I approach the issue of random evolution vs. designed development as more than a judgment call one way or the other. It is not enough to say that design is a more likely scenario to explain a world full of well-designed things. It strikes me as urgent to insist that you not allow your mind to surrender the absolute clarity that all complex and magnificent things were made that way. Once you allow the intellect to consider that an elaborate organism with trillions of microscopic interactive components can be an accident, you are in a menagerie of bizarrerie; you have essentially “lost your mind” as a tool that operates and defines within recognizable parameters; you can no longer reasonably distinguish between an elephant and a mailbox.
Putting aside the systemic flaws in the process of random evolution, I would like to take a moment to examine all the things that evolution does not attempt to account for, the things it accepts as accident. This is the world as observed through that lost mind.
It’s amazing how many otherwise intelligent, even brilliant people have completely lost their minds! They look at the universe and the infinite array of astonishing things we find here and see . . . . accidents! Speaking of accidents, when my son’s new Gretsch arrived I calmly tried to convince him that this beautiful guitar was an accident, a mere collision of atoms and material processes, and over eons of time you have . . . . a guitar! I could tell he wasn’t buying it. You mean something as intricate and beautiful and sonorous as this guitar wasn’t a product of chance? Nope.
It’s simple to move from something as rudimentary as a guitar which can’t be a product of random processes, to, for example, the unfathomable, incomprehensible complexity of the human body also not being a product of random processes. The materialist claims this is a simplistic and false analogy, but are you going to trust the opinion of someone who has completely lost their mind? So we’re to believe that the human nervous system wasn’t designed? How about the circulatory system? Maybe the digestive system? They eyes? Ears? Nose? Maybe the heart or lungs? How about the zillions of chemical reactions that are happening in a body at every moment to make it all work? Not designed? Really? That’s what you want me to believe? You have lost your mind!
This little exercise, multiplied in innumerable ways all their lives growing up, is why atheism (materialism-naturalism) is impossible for my kids to believe. Only an all powerful, all knowing, all wise, all everywhere supreme being beyond our comprehension could be responsible for existence, and everything in it. That would be the Living God revealed to us in creation (“his eternal power and divine nature”), Scripture, and ultimately in Jesus Christ. My children, and I, know that God is more real than material reality because without him there would be no material reality. Including guitars.
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