I don’t know about you, but I find this whole spiritual, Christian, life after death, life is more than matter thing very hard to believe at times. Scripture tells us we live by faith, and not by sight, but I find it so much easier to live by sight and not by faith! This is of course really dumb, because there are all kinds of things I can’t see, or understand, or comprehend, but which I live by all the time. I can’t “see” gravity or wind or logic or love or quarks or smells or my thoughts or any number of other things, but that makes them no less real. In fact, the more we learn about the so called “natural” world, the more inconceivable and incomprehensible it becomes, but we still “believe” in it. It’s impossible to read a book like Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny, like I’m currently doing, and find atheism/materialism the least bit plausible. In fact, it is absurd! That everything came from nothing for no reason at all, and that by chance, is truly unbelievable! With all that said, spiritual reality is still hard for me to believe.
Thinking along these lines always brings me to one of the great classical arguments for God’s existence, the ontological argument. The longer I live, and the more I learn, the more persuasive this argument becomes. In fact, it becomes impossible for me to deny. The first person to make such an argument was Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century. Very simply put, he argued that we can believe in God because by definition God is a being than which no greater can be conceived. God must exist because we cannot conceive of any being greater than God. To alter this a bit, God is so inconceivable, incomprehensible, and unbelievable, that he must exist! God himself put it this way: “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.” Back in my seminary days long ago, I read a book by Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck called The Doctrine of God. I pulled it out while writing this, and lo and behold I see that the very first chapter of a book about the being of God is, “God’s Incomprehensibility.”
Think about it. If we could comprehend God, would he be God? Would he not only be about as big as our minds? This is why I could never understand skeptics who say something like, how or why could God do such and such. Well, I have no idea. He’s God, I’m not. If I could fully understand or comprehend the ways of God he would no longer be God, now would he. It’s the very mind-blowing, inconceivable, incomprehensible, unbelievable nature of God that compels me to believe in him!
I mentioned Michael Denton’s book above, which was written almost 20 years ago. He just released a new book called The Miracle of the Cell. He dealt with the nature of the cell in a chapter in his previous book, but our knowledge of cellular life has grown so much in the last 18 years, that he was obviously compelled to write an entire book on it. You tell me, is there any better or more plausible explanation for the existence of the insane complexity and functionality of the cell than an inconceivably, incomprehensibly, unbelievably believable Almighty God? Loud mouthed atheists may deny this, but their denials are becoming increasingly untenable, and arguably laughable. Take a look at the diagram of the cell I placed above this post. This marvel of living engineering must work a certain way for us to exist, and there are trillions of them in our bodies. All I can think of when I contemplate such awe inspiring complexity is that there must be a God!
This God has revealed himself without a doubt in creation, and in something even more remarkable than creation, the Bible, which points to his ultimate revelation, and the meaning of it all, Jesus Christ. As impossible as it all is to wrap our minds around, it all makes perfect sense. Which brings me to my favorite C.S. Lewis quote, and why I am a Christian: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” To beat a dead horse deader, it makes the inconceivable, conceivable, the incomprehensible comprehensible, and the unbelievable Believable!
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