A Reply to Atheism Part Six: Spaceships

It has been a few weeks since I attempted to write my final reply to atheism, and I think perhaps my biggest reason for delay has simply been that I have been searching for the right thing to say.

I asked my five year old son what I should call this, and he told me spaceships....so there you have it.  

People can come up with a million different answers to the questions that plague us all, and some are logical, and many are nonsensical. That still doesn't stop us from trying. As I mentioned early on, religion has always been about us connecting with God. I could not call myself a follower of Jesus if I believed all religions achieved this feat, but this does not dismiss the fact that something deep inside of every man is searching for the truth.

There are certainly different truths out there that apply to each person in each season they are living, and these are things that resonate in our bones. I cannot say that my truth is higher than your truth, for I am but a man, and certainly prone to my own assumptions and leaps like anyone else.

Am I convinced there is a God? Absolutely. If tomorrow I woke up and somehow had irrefutable proof that God didn't exist, would I still be convinced there is a God? Yes, and yes. It is also my assumption that you will continue to believe what you believe even long after it is proven to be false. Why would I say this? Well, I am convinced that all conclusions are but leaps of faith, and that the conclusion you have, as an atheist, agnostic, humanist, mystic, or whatever, must be based on a truth that resonates deeply in order for you to believe it.

I believe the evidence of God is in everything, and there are some who believe everything is evidence that there is no God. I also can say with all sincerity that I think anyone who doesn't acknowledge the probability of there being a God is extremely closed minded and blind to the truth, and I also acknowledge that they have every right to feel the same way about me and my beliefs. That's okay, there is room for both of us here to exist.

The truth is, my Christian beliefs tell me that only God can call anyone to be a follower of Him, and that the rest are actually blinded to the truth (which is why I have a huge problem with our modern concept of hell and eternal punishment), so I shouldn't be surprised when atheists deny the existence of God, even when I believe the evidence is right in front of them.

Listen, a Christian's greatest asset is his or her testimony. A testimony is regarded as the key reason one decided to be a follower of Jesus, and it rarely has anything to do with intellectualism or being proven through what is seen, the existence of God. It's a point in someones life when all presupposed ideas and closely held truths no longer seem relevant.

For me, it wasn't the fact that I grew up in a Christian household, had a lot of Christian friends, and listened to Christian music (which is something I rarely do anymore, just to clarify). My testimony is that there was a time in my early adult life that I started to wander from my faith, and question a lot of things. During that time I grew further and further a part from the life I had once lived and I found myself in a dark place, mentally, and spiritually.

My rock bottom was probably nothing compared to others, but for me I woke up one day feeling anxious, depressed, and completely cold inside. It's hard to explain, but in my memory I liken it to how thick the darkness feels in an unfamiliar windowless basement once the lights turn out. I remember searching myself for something significant or hopeful, and all I felt was dark and cold. I mentioned previously how people turn to God in hard or tragic times, and in this moment, within the confines of my room, I called on God.

For many people who have attended Church and eventually walked away, you no doubt consider how worship services are constructed (especially in the modern church) to give us warm fuzzies, and you might have even experienced this and now dismiss it as a figment of your imagination brought on by a clever structure of songs and emotions. However, there are times when I have experienced the undeniable presence of God that comes out of nowhere, and completely breaks through my defenses and is so overpowering that I have a hard time standing, let alone reasoning against it.

In that moment, when I called on God for the first time in quite a while, I felt this same overpowering presence, and it overtook me. I have no idea how long I wept, but in my memory, I see myself balled up on my bed, unable to move as something powerful and external washed over me. It wasn't a goosebump sensation brought on by an emotionally driven worship band, but rather an overpowering, almost tangible presence, and once that moment had passed, not only did my atmosphere feel lighter, but I felt cleansed, and restored.

This is why I say that even if you showed me irrefutable proof that God doesn't exist, I would still think He does, because such proof would not line up with what I know to be true. Perhaps my understanding of God, or my knowledge of scripture is askew, but my reality, based on my own story, and my own experiences, demands me to believe, and because of that belief, I see evidence that supports this in everything, from watching my kids, to standing at the edge of the sea, to star gazing, all of these things speak of the grandness and supremacy of God.

I don't think even for a second that my story will convince anyone else to be a believer, and that was never the point of writing these replies.

Lastly, I wanted to explain that part of my delay in writing this had to do with my desire to read and understand a book by Kurt Vonnegut called Cat's Cradle. Mr. Vonnegut referred to himself as a Jesus loving atheist, and perhaps there is hardly another author whom I identify with, in his philosophies and understanding of the world, than he. I'm not going to go into too much detail here about the book, but I did want to discuss it's theme.

Here is the line in the book that pretty much sums up the entire point Mr. Vonnegut is trying to make, and it reads:

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . No damn cat, no damn cradle.”

The point being made here is that all the institutions of man, whether they be religious, political, or scientific, are pretty ridiculous when you take them a part and actually look at them. In a sense it's the unveiling of the great and powerful Oz to be just a short old man with a few gadgets. Sure the mysteries of the Universe are astounding, and man can be pretty clever and entertaining at times, but what happens when they start digging into things? When suddenly it's not enough for you to exist and be happy, but when you decide to start hunting for the truth? Six words, “No damn cat, no damn cradle”.

So where then does this leave us? When everything we believe to be true is empty and false when viewed through the microscope? Don't get me wrong, I believe in absolute truth, but I also understand man's quest for absolute truth to be rather silly and assumptious, no matter how logical things seem to be. For me it is folly to believe that the complexity of life can evolve from molecules without even a hint of external guidance and planning, (and that's assuming Darwin's theory of evolution is true), and for atheists, it is folly to say otherwise.

Do I believe all truth's are equally true? Absolutely not. I also think that man's attempt to understand it and compartmentalize it, is entertaining and not to be taken too literally. So what then is the point? Well, as I explained earlier, my beliefs state that no one can actually be a follower of God or aware of absolute truth unless he is called to do so. There may be some of you reading this who are not called, but the point is there may also be some who are, and God has been working on your heart throughout this conversation. That you have been recalling all those times before when the path you chose seemed empty and hopeless, and how even then you felt the presence of something guiding you and getting you through it. 

Words are just words, but if you are in a place where suddenly these words ring true and you feel as if the pieces of a very complex and scattered puzzle are coming together, then don't resist or try to reason with it, for a deeper truth is resonating in your bones right now.  For whatever reason, the God of the universe is calling you out and offering to let you in on the secret.  It's terrifying and exciting, and it's a purpose worth living if you'll respond to this call.

For the rest of you, I'll just leave you with the words of Kurt Vonnegut found in the dedication of his book “Cat's Cradle”:

"Nothing in this book is true. 'Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy'."

If God calls you, then you'll know. Until then, good luck in your quest for truth, and never stop questioning, even in the things you believe to be true, for this makes us sharper, and more aware of how little we actually know.

My Reply to Atheism Part 5: What Science Actually Says About God's Existence

Over the course of this discussion there have been many times when I had to remind myself of how clueless I must sound to those believing they are of the “rational mind” variety. I have probably discussed religion more than I have any real evidence of there being a creator, and I have done so only because my own doubts (some of which are still there) spawned first from my understanding of God through the person and life of Jesus. Most people who are atheist or agnostic have already moved past these questions, and I had hoped to at least invite them back into the place where questioning is still relevant in the light of this present age.

Earlier this week, we got to witness two titans of opposing fields square off in a debate that seemed to capture the attention of millions across the world. It was a discussion about “Creationism” and if it has a place in the scientific theorem of origins. Bill Nye, a science guy, and Ken Ham, also a science guy and founder of the Creation Museum, had a respectable exchange of words on the topic of evolution, young earth science, and whether or not it was dangerous to believe things that so obviously denied that which science has proven as factual. As I mentioned earlier, I do not hold a particular stance on this issue, but I do maintain a certain level of criticism in dealing with both accounts. I see both sides of this debate to be struggling with ideologies that are based on great leaps of faith. Both have a lot to say in terms of evidence and how this breaks down, but Ken Ham is right in his assertion that we weren't there to witness when or how it happened, so everything we believe is in fact faith based.

I didn't bring this up to discuss evolutionary science and creationism, but rather to discuss the wave of criticism Bill Nye received for accepting Ken Ham's invitation to participate in this debate. People were outraged, thinking that the very act of entering into this debate means he is giving “creationism” credibility, and that he was doing a huge disservice to science by pretending that there was anything to debate at all. This mindset for me is terrifyingly dogmatic, as it sets up a precedence that says what we know is true and factual, and not up for debate, even when what they know is true and factual is only based on the presuppositions they hold, that is, things they presume to be true but can't actually prove.

Much in the same way I consider our knowledge of God to be deeply flawed, I also feel that our knowledge of the ancient world, as well as the cosmos is also, in all probability, deeply flawed. Scientists are constantly learning and updating their theories based on the latest “discoveries”, but most of the information we know is derived at by making great leaps of faith (even when they are disguised as practical predictions) about certain events that are concluded as most probable.

If the Christian equation is that the Bible claims God made the heavens and the earth in six days, and that according to the genealogy listed, places creation sometime around 6,000 years ago, then all discoveries must fit within this time frame for a Creationist, and if it doesn't, it must be reinterpreted, through the scope of physical events that could have caused such and such to happen. They point to catastrophic events such as a global flood as a viable explanation. I don't know if it explains enough, but when you read the research you can see why they think the way they do.

On the other side, you have a majority of scientists who believe that 14 billion years ago, or there about, there was this matter that exploded (big bang) that over the course of 10 billion years created the universe we now live in and are trying to understand. From there we have theory after theory of how everything was formed, how life evolved, and how Dinosaurs went extinct. What is not commonly understood however about this version of the creation story is how this matter got there and where it came from. In fact, I asked someone once about this, and they said that scientists mostly consider this unknowable, and choose to spend their efforts researching things we can know.

While all of this is considered the consensus, it too is based in faith. It's believing in something that cannot be proven, and basing all events after on such an assumption. Both theories have a structure that relies heavily on faith, and from that structure, the theories and mathematics take shape to paint vastly different pictures. It is up to you to decide which one is more rational, but to dismiss creationism as having nothing to do with science, or not including it in the conversation is absurdly closed minded given the leaps of faith we already take in the more popular story of creation.

Perhaps the one thing that has made many evolutionists uncomfortable in this present age is the growing support among scientists, especially those who deal in biochemistry, whose research has actually led them to conclude that basic Darwinian theorem doesn't actually add up, and that it is entirely unlikely that life just showed up on this planet on it's own. Some scientists have the theory that the first cells actually arrived here from outer-space, and that there is no way to tell exactly what it had evolved from as it is virtually unknowable in our present age, but could possibly be known some day.

Other scientists however have started to embrace the idea of Intelligent Design, and while many of them make no claims to religion, they insist it is much more likely that something external, outside of our reality, must have set things into motion and designed life to be the way it is.

Michael Behe, a biochemist and professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, once said in discussing what happened to him when he broke down the basic structure of a cell and noticed it's complexity, that “A man from primitive culture who sees an automobile might guess that it was powered by the wind or an antelope hidden under the car, but when he opens up the hood and sees the engine, he immediately realizes that it was designed”.

What biochemists and other scientists in related fields are coming to terms with, is the very notion that even with all these great theories and things widely regarded as factual, that the more we learn about that which we can actually learn, that is that which can be studied in a lab and not just through the schemes of presuppositions and careful mathematics, that these things just don't add up. What's worst is that they have been met at the crossroads of their discoveries by an increasingly vicious body of “believers”, that is people who regard any notion of creation or design as being rubbish while holding firmly to their own beliefs in the very theory being questioned, in a similar fashion as the Church once held on to it's position against science when these theories were first introduced.

Instead of constructive and helpful debate, these dogmatic scientists attack and devour all who oppose their long held faith in a theory masked as scientific fact. They compare evolution to things such as gravity, and grow mad at the notion of anyone doubting it's existence. As I have sat on the sidelines over the course of the past two decades trying to keep tabs on the debate and hearing both sides, I have determined that the only “rational” people in this debate are those who seem to be able to embrace both points of views without clinging to their own supposed ideas of what is true. Bill Nye spends a lot of time talking about how important it is for kids to grow up with a “correct” understanding of Science and how it works, but he fails to realize how important it is to be exposed to various views as this alone can teach our children to have critical minds willing to weigh evidence and not to buy into everything they are told to believe.

Now, with that said, I wanted to shift gears here and explain why I think the evidence of God is constantly in front of us if we only knew what to look for. To think that science could prove or disprove his existence is a stretch beyond any faith that I could muster, but according to the Apostle Paul, God's invisible attributes, or rather the evidence of His existence can be found in nature. So let's examine real briefly something incredibly fundamental, and that being atoms.

Atoms are commonly known as the building block of matter. Atoms are small...incredibly small. It is said that one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.

Atoms are made of smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom. I remember in biology class, this is where we typically stopped in discussing atoms, but atoms are actually made up of even smaller particles, and those particles...yup, even they are made up of smaller particles, further and further into the subatomic world.

Ever since the electron was discovered in 1897, we have come across an astonishing number of new particles, such as bosons, hardrons, baryons, neutrinos, mesons, leptons, pions, hyperons, and taus. Glutons were discovered, which hold particles together, and this has all led to an inconceivably small particle called muon. By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with the latest being the terribly elusive but important particle known as Higgs Boson.

The thing about particles is that they are constantly in motion, exploring all possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. Electrons for instance don't just travel around a nucleus, but rather they are known to disappear and reappear elsewhere without traveling the distance in between. Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go. This movement is known as quantum leaps...and you thought that was just a television show. A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in a single second.

The fun thing about particles is that they seem to always know what the other particles are doing without any clear sign of communication. We can't predict what they are going to do, or what path they are going to travel, but they seem to always show up exactly in the right place they need to be. In other words, in the sub-atomic world, things don't actually function the way scientists have assumed the rest of the universe functions, as in particular laws and motions that can be known. Things come and go, disappear and appear, spring and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other, all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.

Now here's the thing, all of this is going on while you sit there...or stand...or whatever, unaware of what goes on every fraction of every second of every day. The chair you sit on, well that's just made up of atoms (which is actually 99.9% empty space). The computer you use? Well that operates the way it does based on our knowledge of the quantum theory. It's all invisible, all unseen, and yet as a unit, creates something functional and physical that is, as best we can determine, real.

Tangible, material, physical objects, well they are made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular predictable reason. Your chair might seem solid, but that is a bit of an illusion. Your chair is just a relationship of energy.

Everything, from planets to tea spoons may appear to be solid, but are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.

Now consider you...yes you. You are made up of trillions of atoms. You lose fifty to one hundred fifty strands of hair each day (if you have hair that is), and shed ten billion flakes of skin. Every twenty-eight days you get completely new skin, and every nine years your entire body is renewed. Yet in the middle of all this shedding and dying and changing and renewing, somehow your body continues to remember “you”.

Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.

Millions of cells, drifting through the universe, assemble and configured and finely tuned at this second to be you, but inevitably moving on in the next seconds to be other things and other people. The atoms that make you you in this very second are not the same atoms that made you you a few minutes ago, and yet you stayed the same, nothing changed except, well you know...everything.

The basic elements of life are actually quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others. The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, stars, we're all made of the same stuff. You share over 60 percent of your genes with fruit flies, over 90 percent with mice, and 96 percent with large apes...and yet your DNA is uniquely yours. You are not carbon copies, you are a unique physical creature sustained by an immense amount of energy going on at the sub-atomic level.

Through all of this, these trillions of atoms, when put together responding to the coding and the unique structure of who you are, make you you. Somehow these things know, and are directed, and over the course of the seconds they stay with the whole, they don't change it but rather become part of who you are.

Those trillions of atoms that make you you, they form molecules, and those molecules form cells, and those cells form systems—nervous, immune, limbic, circulatory, digestive, muscular, respiratory, skeletal, and so on. Those systems eventually form a far larger, more complicated system which we know to be you. Trillions of atoms coming and going, billions of times a second, all of them knowing their place within the hierarchy that is you.

Do you understand how incredible this is? What orders these things to respond the way they do? How they they know where to go and what place they belong in the short moments between when they enter and when they leave the hierarchy? Can we assume that natural order just is, and that these things just exist, and that all order is simply controlled chaos?

What's more, even with this natural order, does this account for consciousness and awareness? For poetry, and language, and society? Does this account for our ability to have an invisible consciousness that responds to more than just instinctive behavior?  If you were taken a part, atom by atom, there would be nothing there that is uniquely you, and yet put together, not only do you exist visibly, but your consciousness is self-aware and function.  Where is your consciousness?  Is it in the wiring of your brain?  Can electric pulses firing off in your brain somehow create a self-aware creature that lives for more than just being alive?  That responds to more than just what is needed to survive? 

We can make the bold claim that things are the way they are and have always been the way they have always been, and even that atoms are simply responding to natural order, but in the end, the way our brains respond and perceive cannot be accounted for by some natural phenomenon.

I believe that this energy that flows through us, and that sustains life and creates consciousness and order cannot be accounted for when we are considering something as wonderful, and profound as natural order. This is why I consider it a greater leap of faith to declare that all of this has happened through accidents and wonderful coincidences. I find it completely illogical to say that this hierarchy is formed without any real intelligence navigating each moving piece, (all several trillion of them) to respond and behave in the way they need to in order to maintain the coding found in each of our unique strands of DNA.

I am convinced that scientists only accept the concept of a cosmic accident because there is no other possible explanation. I mean how lucky are we that glutons exist to hold all these particles together?

Once you remove God from the equation you are left with what you must consider rational, which leaves many to marvel at the incredible power of nature, while not seeing the obvious and more practical solution of something external programming this to happen. Logic would tell us when we come across a computer that it was made by intelligence that exists outside of that computers hierarchy. The computer responds to the way it was programmed to respond until let's say a capacitor goes bad, or jumper short circuits, and then what? The electricity stops and the computer stops functioning.  When this happens to a living being, we call this death.  Both things, a computer, and a human brain are complex machines that require electricity in order to function.  Yet we can look at the brain and somehow call it, with all it's incredibly complexity and wiring, the product of billions of years of accidental progress guided by a natural order that in all practicality, shouldn't exist. To say all of this happened by accident would be to deny the obvious.

It doesn't matter what your view is on religion, or theology, these things can be dismissed for many obvious flaws, but to dismiss the notion of design by intelligence? You, my good atheist, have a lot more faith than I ever could.  

A Reply to Atheism Part 4: Blood Shed and Problematic Scriptures

It might be a bit hard to understand why I have chosen to focus so much on problems people have with Christianity, verses the idea of God in general and why I believe the proof of God is evident and completely rational. I am saving this discussion for my final article, as I am merely walking us through the problems I faced in deciding what I believed. The questions I am answering here are the questions I asked ten years ago when I found myself surrounded by doubt, and since I understand God, through the person of Jesus and the gospel message, then I obviously started with my own understanding and went from there.

Atheists seem to have a hard time with the concept that a believer can take issue with the same problematic fundamentals of Christianity and still come out a believer in spite of this. I have had numerous conversations where I unwittingly defuse the conversation by nodding my head and exclaiming, “I know, right?” The truth is, all of the atheists I know (and I mean all) used to be Christians, and therefore their understanding of God is also filtered through the story and person of Jesus. A lot of what made them give up on the concept of God started with the same questions I had to get past as well. I have already discussed how I understand the concept of hell to be presented in the Bible verses how the Church handles this discussion today, and how attacks on the authenticity of historical Christianity are not open and shut cases, but rather stories that do still hold merit, and are only subject to what we prefer the “truth” to be based on our own assumptions about things that history continues to interpret differently.

When discussing the Christian Bible, obviously it doesn't do anybody any good to pick it a part piece by piece. I will acknowledge that the Bible is clearly not without error, and that the majority of the errors are due to the English language doing a poor job in containing all the meaning and emphasis of the Greek language, and scribes who made small errors here and there in preserving these books and letters for future generations. I still hold that the crux of the gospel message is still intact, given how the early Church responded to it and how their understanding of the sacred books is not all that different than it is today.

Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar, and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has written several books on this subject. He became an agnostic after becoming an evangelical Christian and struggling with the concept of evil and suffering (which we addressed in my second article on this subject). I have read some of Ehrman's work, namely his book “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed The Bible and Why”. In this book, Ehrman concludes that various early scribes altered the New Testament texts in order to deemphasize the role of women in the early church, to unify and harmonize the different portrayals of Jesus in the four gospels, and to oppose certain heresies. Ehrman contends that certain widely held Christian beliefs, such about the divinity of Jesus, are associated not with the original words of scripture but with these later alterations. While I found the glimpse he painted of the early Church and how the scriptures were copied and in some cases altered fascinating, I also disagreed with the conclusion that our present understanding of the divinity of Jesus is due to these changes. I look to early Church thinkers such as Justin Martyr, and I see a view of Jesus and the gospel message that is very much in line with what we understand today (though clearly what we understand today is a lot more polluted by theology and years of false assumptions).

It might be likely that the amateur scribes in the early Church did make errors, but the only proof that Ehrman really put on the table had to do with situations where the error was discovered and corrected. Perhaps the biggest problem I see in our current understanding of scripture has more to do with the fact that we live 2,000 years after it was written and some of the ideas, concepts, and dialogue was written specifically for those in Rome, or at least under the empires influence. In order to clearly understand scripture, you can't just read it for face value, but rather in the context to which it is being written.

Some things admittedly do not make any sense at all, especially when Paul is writing about cultural issues. Remember, Paul's letters were considered helpful and beneficial to the Church, which is why they were included in the canon of scripture the orthodox Church put together, but I do not think that Paul was correct in every thing he said, nor do I think he was referring to his own letters when describing scripture as being “God breathed”, or rather “inspired” by God. He may have had great insight into some things that were hidden to others, but his words have also caused more division and and confusion than any other document in the Bible, and since we know that God is not the author of confusion (Paul's words, not mine), than it is safe to say that Paul, being human, wrote things that may not apply to anyone other than the people he had intended as it's recipient. Some of his words, he claims were by revelation, but I do not think he claims the whole as such. In the same fashion, the sacred scrolls that made up the Old Testament, were written by people and not by God. God inspired them, and being the creator of all things, could no doubt decide what was saved and what was forgotten, but it's incredibly naive to believe that Bible is without error.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the Bible as it sits today however is in how few errors there are considering the fact that it contains 66 books, written over a period of about 1,500 years, and the message of death and redemption remains just as fluid and vital as it ever has.

What I have learned however is that many people who leave the Church do so out of a misunderstanding of scripture, not by error of their assumptions, but rather by those who they look to for answers, such as preachers and seasoned Christian friends. There comes a time when the questions can no longer be dismissed with a “just believe”, and they can no longer go on pretending that it makes sense through the filter of a rational mind. As I stated in an earlier article, I like to leave some things up to mystery, but if we can't rationalize with the most fundamental things about a certain philosophy or religion, then it cannot be fully believed for it no longer resonates as truth.

I am a firm believer in “experiencing” truth, and this means that if something doesn't sit well with me, it must be understood to the point where it does, or left behind to be replaced by a truth that does. This may seem like a “new age” principal to some of you, but I am not speaking of “feelings” here, but rather the taste I get when I know what I just heard, or saw, or experienced was true. It's like sitting through a sermon or a lecture struggling to listen while arguing in my head about a point being presented to me, only to be replaced by a revelatory experience when something is said that I deem to be profound in that it helps to draw into focus an understanding that I didn't before have.

Years ago when I was trying to figure out what exactly I believed, a good friend of mine suggested I read a book called “Conversations with God”, written by Neale Donald Walsch. The premise of the book was simple: A man was struggling with his faith, he felt the impression to sit down and write a question to God, and then miraculously his hand was guided to answer the question by the super natural. Again, if I believe in the concept that a creator exists and all of life came from His imagination, then the notion that God could direct a persons subconscious to write answers to very difficult questions, doesn't seem all that far fetched; so I read it.

Over the course of the several weeks I spent on this book, I saw certain scriptures interpreted differently, and at times I even had a moment where I put the book down and had to really contemplate several new notions about God and our own divinity. I was thoroughly confused and perplexed throughout the reading and found myself considering what the book had to say. In many ways the concepts and ideas were exciting, and I found myself wanting them to be true. The book, as it turns out has a very Eastern take on religion, one that shows up in Buddhism a great deal, and many New Age philosophies. In fact, some of the concepts even show up in ancient gnostic writings (early church writings deemed heretical) as well as Mormonism, and several Universalist Churches. I can't pretend that this reading didn't have an impact on me in how I viewed God and the role of man, but in the end, once I closed the book, I didn't have the taste of truth on my lips.

Listen, last night on my way home from work, I stopped at the store to buy some ice cream, and mistakenly picked up “lite ice cream”. Now for anyone who knows me, you know that I do not believe in artificial sweeteners, and I try to stay away from poisonous things such as High Fructose Corn Syrup and Sucrose. The experience is always the same: It tastes just like the actual regular ice cream except I know at the bottom somewhere in my taste buds and collective memory that it's a tad bit sweeter and there is something bitter in the sweetness. That is what I experienced after reading “Conversations with God”, and that is what I experience every time something seems to be true but just doesn't resonate the way truth resonates. It tastes a bit too sweet, with a touch of bitterness.

The problem we face in today's age is that we replaced experiencing truth with abstract thought, and have built structures around our hearts that keep us closed off to things that cannot be understood through deduction and reason. This goes back to what is commonly referred to as the “Golden Age of Reason”, where man, maybe for the first time, started to understand that things could be understood through observation and deduction, rather than some deity giving knowledge out like presents to those he deems worthy. In this age, the “Scientific Method” was discovered, and through it, we were personally delivered out of the dark ages and into an age with endless possibilities. Superstition started to become a thing of the past, and man reasoned that if given enough time, he can understand everything there is to understand.

In his book, “What We Talk About When We Talk About God”, Rob Bell (A great book worth checking out that goes a lot deeper into these things than I intend to go) points out that this Enlightenment Leap has “handed us a number of ways of understanding the world that have worked on us and influenced us for several hundred years now in positive ways. But these understandings also have limits, limits that we become acutely aware of when we talk about God”.

He mentions the first limit being how we filter knowledge, and how reason and logic has become more prominent, while the other ways of knowing have become less emphasized. He asks if everything we know has to be proven intellectually, then what about that which we know absolutely and positively to be true, but would be hard pressed to provide evidence if asked? He goes on to say that “most things in life we're most sure of, many of those events and experiences that are more real to us than anything else, lots of sensations we have no doubt actually happened (such as falling in love, being moved by a song, etc) these are things we cannot prove with any degree of scientific validity.”

The point he made, and the one I am trying to make here, is that the human experience is more than just logic, and that truth can be understood not just through a microscope, but also through our other sensations. Perhaps I have a leg up on some people because I am an artist and I experience this world through sensations that lead me to be inspired and to stir up my creativity. When I go a long time without refilling my tank on what inspires me, I not only become a worst artist, but I tend to become an awful human being. It is the way I am wired, that I only feel rested and tranquil when I have experienced things that resonate truth and life in my bones.

When I went through my “intellectual” phase of trying to reason and understand everything, I also went through my darkest phase, where I became less peaceful, more of a cynic, and borderline depressed. It wasn't that the notion of God not existing somehow made me hopeless, but rather that I wasn't experiencing life the way it was meant to be experienced. It's like eating a diet of nothing but bran flakes and wheat germ, eventually you lose the taste for food and eating no longer seems all that interesting or appealing.

What does this have to do with “Blood Shed, and Problematic Scriptures”? Well, when I read the Old Testament during my days of doubt and intellectual reason, I grew extremely angry at the stories of Israel being told by God to go and commit genocide. I detested the notion that God would have Abraham go through such a daunting test as to actually come inches away from sacrificing his very own son. Don't get me started about how unfair it was that God hardened Pharaohs heart to the point where He sent plague after plague on Egypt and eventually killed all first born males. Then there's what happened to Lots wife as they were leaving their home behind, when she looked behind to see the fire reigning down from heaven, and was turned into a pillar of salt. Yes, it was great that Israel finally made it to the promised land, but why did they have to kill so many in their way, including women and children? Then, once they arrived, they occupied cities they didn't build, harvested from fields they didn't plant, and benefited from the toil and labor of those who they drove out.

Then, let's talk about how unfair God was to His own people. If God didn't commission them to go out and fight a battle, they would lose, and lose badly. When they went through times of rebellion, God would allow them to suffer and be taken as hostage. At one point He decided to allow His entire people, you know, the chosen children of Israel, to be slaughtered and only keep a scattered remnant alive. Then of course you move on and see how God loved the world so much that He sent His only son to die a brutal death he didn't deserve, and how all of his disciples faced certain death for their role in keeping His legacy and story alive.

The Bible is not a clean, tidy little book. In fact there are many stories I won't read to my children because they are just too graphic. The beautiful depiction of Noah and the animals escaping on a giant boat might fit well within Sunday School, but the implication that God got fed up with the flawed people He created and that this flood meant certain doom for millions of people and countless animals. Then when you ask a religious person why all this happened and their best answer is because man is flawed and we live in a fallen world, it's enough to make you want to slam your head into a giant family Bible...repeatedly.

What about Adam and Eve, and how they lived in a garden and God put a tree there he told them not to eat from. Imagine your father making a delicious breakfast and filling the table with meats and fruits of all kinds, only to place a plate of chocolate chip cookies in the middle while instructing you to eat anything you want but not the chocolate chip cookies, for if you do, you will surely die. According to the story, Adam and Eve had never disobeyed God before, and we can only assume they had never been lied to before. This story implies that the temptation was there, and then God allowed His enemy to coerce these naive creatures into doing the one thing God told them not to.

Now, I have my own conclusions about all the things written above, and have studied a great deal in trying to understand these things, but for the sake of time, I wanted to explain what helped me get through it more than anything else. No, not booze, and there certainly wasn't a peace pipe involved. No, it was reading one very simple verse found in the book of Ezekiel, that records the words of God to the prophet Ezekiel where He says “For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone who dies, therefore repent and live”. Reading all of these stories with that one scripture in mind, suddenly things became a lot more clear. In fact, starting with this verse found in Ezekiel, there are many verses in the Bible that record God's words to His prophets that imply that God isn't out to torment His people or make them children of war, or to suffer, but rather that He wants them to be set a part so as to be a light in a world that is increasingly evil and hostile. He gave people opportunity after opportunity to make it right, explaining that if they would heed the words of the prophets and return to Him, then He would continue to protect them and give them favor, but if they refuse, hey bad things are going to happen because that's just how it is.

Ever notice how people tend to seek out God during hard times? Maybe they are just looking for answers, but I think going through the fire makes us willing to seek actual truth that resonates, verses how we live when times are great. The entire human story is one about death and redemption, ebb and flow, and while man's understanding might have progressed to contain knowledge that was never before even conceived, there is still a lot that we do not understand, or only understand through experience.

The cosmos itself is a great example of this, and while Scientists can explain a lot of what goes on in the cosmos, (though only about 4% of the Universe is even actually knowable), nothing can take away from what we experience when we travel beyond the city lights and experience the night sky through the unfiltered spectrum of standing in a dark field and seeing it through the eyes of experience. Some of my most profound spiritual experiences have happened under such skies, and in that moment, there is no doubt of God's existence, even though it is not something I can fully comprehend. It's something experienced that resonates deeply within my bones that this story is much bigger than man, and much too fantastic to fit within the tidy boxes of theology, philosophy, and anything our finite minds could ever fully understand.

In her book “Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint”, Nadia Bolz-Weber recounts how she was stuck in traffic one day as she became lost in thought while staring at the vivid blue sky through her windshield, and recalled thinking about the outrageous out-there-ness of space. “The beauty of our sky is really just a nice way for the earth to protect us from the terror of what's so vast and unknowable beyond. The boundlessness of the universe is disturbing when you think about it. It's too big and we're too small.” She writes, “Suddenly, in that moment, all I could think was: 'What the hell am I doing? Seminary? Seriously? With a universe this vast and unknowable, what are the odds that this story of Jesus is true? Come on, Nadia. It's a f***ing fairy tale.' And in the very next moment I thought this: 'Except that throughout my life, I've experienced it to be true.”

In the next paragraph, Nadia writes that even when her mind protests, she still cannot deny her experiences. I think this is true for countless others who would classify themselves as seekers. They aren't religious, and they aren't dogmatic, and they understand that they could be wrong, but there is something buried inside that cannot be denied and continues to navigate our lives even when we are trying so desperately to get away from it.

Rob Bell writes in his book mentioned earlier, that “faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites; they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners”.

Even when things seem to fall a part, and life itself brings more hurt than we deem necessary, it's vital that we not forget our own story and experiences. This is the one thing that led me out of my own dark ages, it wasn't a scientific theory, or a profound discovery that the Earth wasn't flat after all, it was remembering my own story, and what I have experienced not as a Christian, but just by being alive enough to experience things that no Science book could ever teach me.

It seems odd to me that so many people want proof of God's existence through the Scientific method, when God is the very life force behind everything we can scientifically observe. I'll explain what I mean in my next post, What Science Actually Says About the Existence of God.