Faith in a world of good and evil

The Daily Interlake

You have to admit that God did a pretty good job - at least I do.

I mean, every day I wake up and I think to myself what a great world this is, and what a miracle it is to be alive. Even on my worst day, I have always been amazed by this place, this universe, and found that meditation on its complexities always led me inevitably to God, whatever you call him.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people wake up and find themselves in the midst of war, disease, starvation. They may be victims of abuse or poverty. Such people often find it impossible to share my joy. I understand that, and I certainly won't try to fault those people for their unbelief if they have it, but I don't understand why other people - those who have good lives, good health, good friendships - would strive to prove to themselves and others that God doesn't exist.

First of all, it is a fool's errand, and might be considered the atheistic equivalent of the ecclesiastical overreaching that claims to know the mind of God, but always proves itself wrong when it sets a date for the judgment day. You or I can't prove anything at all about God, anymore than we can prove or disprove the existence of a seventh dimension. As the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue."

But yet we do prate.

And if you have had a glimmering of the glory that is God, why then it makes sense that you would want to talk about it, doesn't it? If you had a glimpse of the interconnectness of all things, of the clockwork mechanism at the heart of existence, of the miracle that allows billions of lives to work out their destiny at the same time, each perfect and yet imperfect, each tainted and yet capable of grace, then you could not keep quiet, could you?

It's the kind of thing you would want to share, unless someone were threatening to kill you for your exuberance or for your certitude. So professions of faith will never go away. People who have had their lives changed by God, people like Saint Augustine or Saint Paul or C.S. Lewis or your next door neighbor who stopped drinking after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, such people will always want to "go tell it on the mountain, over the hills and everywhere."

They tell their stories (which in some ways are similar, but which in other ways are each unique - just as the DNA strand in every living being is unique) and those stories can inspire us to love God, to seek him, to praise him, but they also remind us that every experience of God is seen by us, as Paul said, "through a glass darkly." And because God is by definition infinitely multi-faceted, even the glass we are looking through is but one small glimpse of a whole that can never be comprehended.

Maybe that is why the rationalists, the so-called freethinkers, get frustrated with religion. If they can't reduce it to an axiom, or a mathematical formula, they don't necessarily see any reason to believe in it. Which is fine by me. I don't see any reason to force them to believe it.

Besides, let's face it, human religion is not always the best possible advertisement for God. Through the ages, there has been plenty of evil done by churches or churchmen, whether it is in the form of torture, oppression or sex abuse. So if someone is against religion as an institution, they can probably make a pretty good case.

But if someone is against God, against the prime cause, against the fundamental underpinning of the universe, then they may be on shakier ground - literally.

Surely, they realize that it is humanly impossible to disprove the existence of God. So why do they even try? What exactly is the payoff for such people in their efforts to debunk God? Don't they know that they cannot persuade anyone to turn against God unless they were never persuaded to be for him in the first place?

And in place of God, these freethinkers provide what? Reason?

Reason is a good thing if it is used well, but unfortunately, like God it can be hijacked for all sorts of unreasonable enterprises. Men have used reason to justify everything from murder to madness. In fact, reason is nothing more than another false idol, which if it is treated as the solution to the human condition will merely disappoint us. It is not the solution to the human condition; it is part of it. The same could be said of the concept of God, the idea of God, and perhaps it is this which the atheists correctly recognize as a danger.

Everyone knows that much hatred and harm has been waged in the name of an idea of God, but we should be smart enough to realize that ideas about God are not God himself. No, say the atheists, because there is no God. Just look around you, they insist - where is your God? In the eyes of the starving child? In the heart of the serial killer? In the stench of the concentration camp ovens? No, of course not. God is in us when we look at the starving child, the serial killer and the concentration camp ovens and feel compassion, remorse, anger and knowledge that what we are seeing is not right.

It is, after all, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil which supposedly forced mankind out of innocence and into our current predicament. That knowledge, therefore, of absolute good and absolute evil has to be our way back to God also. We need to use it as a road map to comprehend the mind of God intuitively, and when we can say with Jesus on the cross, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do," then we will be ready to make the leap from blaming God for our predicament to truly understanding it.

The mystery of pain and suffering certainly doesn't prove anything about God one way or the other. It raises lots of questions for philosophers, theologians and just plain folks, but the existence of pain doesn't prove or disprove anything about the existence of God.

For whatever reason, the world we live in is a world of opposites. Joy can't exist without sorrow, and peace can't exist without war. That's why St. Paul talks about the "peace that surpasseth understanding." That peace, the kind of ethereal peace that believers associate with heaven, can't really exist in this world, because our human "understanding" of peace is based on a contrast with war, tension or strife. Human peace, therefore, is transient, conditional and partial.

And human war doesn't prove anything about the existence or nature of God except that the world as created is a world of light and dark, spirit and flesh, man and woman, just as it was described in Genesis.

Our good friends the atheists believe that if there is evil in the world there can't be a God. But that goes about the problem the wrong way. What we can say for sure is that if there were no evil, there would be no "world," not the world we live in anyway. People who are naive enough to ask why bad things happen to good people just haven't been paying attention.

This time of year those of us who believe in God - and more particularly who believe in a God who IS paying attention - celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ or Jesus the Messiah or Jesus the Saviour or Jesus the King or just plain simply Jesus of Nazareth.

Much has been written about this Jesus, and much has been said in his name, both blashemy and blessing. But most of us who believe in Jesus as a representative of God on earth don't believe in him because of what someone else said about him. Rather, we believe because of what we ourselves have experienced of him, both in our understanding of his reported life on earth and often because of some personal moment of contact with his divine presence, one of those moments which make atheists call believers insane and which make believers shout hallelujah.

Tomorrow, as we celebrate the birth of Jesus approximately 2,000 years ago, it is worth remembering that he brought into the world a gift for compassion and left it with a gift of suffering. His life is an eternal metaphor for the opportunities all of us face to give in to despair, doubt and death. And if people want to find a reason to doubt God, then the death of a man such as Jesus on the cross would be the ultimate evidence. But it is also the ultimate evidence for hope, and for the ability to transcend human suffering.

Merry Christmas, and remember what a miracle it is to be alive.