A favorite tactic of skeptics to justify their rejection of God is to take some example of what God has ostensibly done or does, and assert that if there was a God he certainly wouldn’t have done it this way or that. The silliest direct example of this in my life happened before the Internet, in a letter writing exchange with a university professor I didn’t know. He claimed that if there was such a being as God that he would never make other beings who, how do I put this politely, need to defecate to rid the body of waste. That, to him, was a deal breaker: God cannot exist! I was incredulous. Seriously? You can’t come up with anything better?
Similar assertions by skeptics go in many directions, the biological is just one. Darwinist’s are fond of pointing to what they consider some defect in nature and confidently declare that if there was a God he wouldn’t have done it that way. Really? And you know that how? Many people, not just skeptics, do the same with morality, or right and wrong, good and evil. We all know the phrase, “the problem of evil,” by which people mean God has got some ‘splaining to do! If this God of yours, someone might say, is so good and powerful, how come the world is so screwed up? And since they are not really looking for answers, they will conclude that since evil and suffering exist, God can’t be good and powerful, and ergo can’t exist! Most people who go down this path don’t end up as atheists, but live as practical atheists, as if God doesn’t exist.
The problem with all such thinking is epistemological hubris. In other words, these people think they know what they simply cannot know. Which brings me to Anselm and his Ontological Argument. St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) was an Italian Benedictine monk, abbot, philosopher, and theologian of the Catholic Church, who held the office of archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. He is known most famously for his argument for God that focuses on his existence. Ontology is simply the study of being, and thus the argument is based on the kind of being God is. The basic premise goes like this:
We conceive of God as a being than which no greater can be conceived.
The full argument is somewhat esoteric, but not necessary for my point. We cannot conceive of a being greater than God, and thus God is the greatest of all beings and must exist. In any ultimate sense God is incomprehensible to us, for it is not possible for the finite to grasp the infinite, or that which has limits to grasp the limitless. Yet, if we are to believe the skeptics and grant credibility to their logic, we must accept the proposition that because we cannot understand (comprehend, conceive, etc.) what God has said or done, God must not exist. Stated the other way, we can only accept what we can understand. This is where kids come in, and how we can demonstrate to them how weak such arguments are, and that belief in God makes total sense. The point of such an exercise is to making belief in God more plausible to them, and atheism less plausible. And it really is very easy, despite the secular cultural messaging we are bombarded with every day.
As Christians living in such a culture we must actively engage ourselves, and our children if we have them, in the defense of the truth claims of our faith. With my children as they’ve grown up, I would often ask them a simple question when life gets challenging, or when the culture in one form or another throws them a challenge to their faith: If we could fully comprehend and understand everything God says and does, or how everything works in our lives and in the world, wouldn’t that make God only as big as our brain? Shouldn’t God, the “being than which no greater can be conceived,” be greater than we his creatures can conceive? It doesn’t take much to persuade our children, or ourselves, that the answer is, of course! This doesn’t mean our knowledge of God and what he does is irrational, illogical, or absurd, only that we should, often, come up against the limits of our knowledge and understanding with such a being as God. The skeptic’s gambit can make our kid’s faith stronger when they realize just how silly it is for us to expect that God’s creatures can completely get God! We can in fact revel with them in God’s words through the Prophet Isaiah (55):
8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
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