2/13/24 - 1,665 words – 7.5 minutes reading time 

Is there a God? The fact that this is a question that has perplexed mankind almost since the origin of our species, speaks volumes to the importance of pondering it. A characteristic of humans is our desire to understand. When we encounter things we don’t understand we can go a couple of different ways. One is to decide that, even though we don’t understand it, someday we will. This approach lends itself well to an atheistic belief system since the atheist tends to believe there is nothing of a spiritual nature. When there is no earthly (physical/materialistic) explanation for a phenomenon it’s easy to kick the can down the road, assuming that as we grow in our understanding we will sooner or later bump into the answer.

This way of dealing with unanswerable questions has proven to be unsatisfactory because it seems that the more we come to know, the more unanswerable questions we turn up. And many of the questions we wrestle with today are the same questions that stymied us in the very beginning.

Another way of dealing with unanswerable questions is to attribute them to forces from outside our realm of understanding.  I imagine that is essentially how polytheism got its start.  As we witnessed occurrences whose cause lay outside our scope of experience we assumed there was some unseen force greater than ourselves who was causing it. That led to a god of thunder and a god of the planets, a sun god and a moon god, a god of plant growth, a god of death, a god of birth, on and on.

In polytheistic belief systems today, there can be thousands of gods who serve as the explanation for the myriad of unexplained things that go on in life. In my view, while the polytheist system acknowledges the existence of a spiritual realm, it doesn’t provide any insights as to how these gods function, or how they are organized regarding good and evil. It seems that each god is operating within its own realm and making arbitrary decisions. It all seems very random. The problem with that is, when we look to the world and universe around us for evidence supporting the feasibility of that type of belief system we see that our world and universe are incredibly well organized and very precise. Its hard to understand how the level of organization and precision came from the randomness of thousands of gods.

Monotheism, the belief in one God who is the Supreme Being and creator of everything is shared by most of the people in the world. A recent survey taken by the Ipsos organization, a global business that collects information from all over the world to provide current information on global trends, found that 61% of the world believes in a higher power. Of those surveyed in the study covering 26 countries, over 46% believe in the God of the scriptures (Christian, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jewish), while another 6% believed in the God of the Muslim teachings. 13% followed the belief systems characterized by polytheism (Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Taoist, Shinto, and folk), 7% surveyed claimed to be spiritual but not religious, 6% said they were agnostic (no religion but unsure about God) and 16% were atheist.

Belief in one God has the advantage of being the most widely accepted belief system in the world. Some would say it is hard to argue with success. But I don’t think it is a particularly good idea to make decisions of this magnitude based on popularity. Considering that seeking knowledge and understanding is only the third most common way of choosing a belief system, we can assume much of the acceptance on monotheism is a matter of either tradition or spiritual experiences, which are, according to some, the number 1 and 2 reasons people follow a particular belief system. While it may be easy to write off tradition as a weak basis for big decisions it may be important to think about the fact that most parents want what is best for their offspring. If following a particular religion or faith had been proven to be unhelpful to someone it may be safe to assume they would not subject their children to it.

The fact that a spiritual experience is the number 2 reason people choose a belief system is encouraging to me. It supports my belief in the spiritual realm and that God cares and is at work in the lives of people. I can say from experience that having a spiritual experience of this nature is a powerful event. It was the means by which I initially accepted that there is a God.

I am a proponent of knowledge. Even though intentional learning is the 3^rd most common reason for a person adopting a particular belief system I think it is essential, although perhaps more so after one has been influenced to accept the possibility of an all-powerful Creator, Supreme Being, God. If in fact, a person has selected a belief system based on tradition or a spiritual experience it stands to reason that the next step would be to start learning about that belief system.

There was a time I would have argued that decisions based on research are mostly intellectual in nature. I thought, unless your research leads you to some sort of epiphany, that understanding is more a tool that supports the choice of a belief system than a device that leads a non-believer to belief. However, there are a number of scientists and other researchers who have been led to Christianity through research discoveries.

Lee Stroebel, a renowned journalist, is one such individual. Lee was an avowed atheist when his wife converted to Christianity. For a person who was deeply committed to the idea that there was no God, there was some difficulty in accepting that his loved one and life partner was suddenly following a belief system that was not only different than his, but in direct opposition. Lee decided to use his journalistic prowess to prove, through exhaustive research, that God did not exist.

The research did not lead Lee in the direction he had expected or hoped for. The results of Lee’s deep drill into theism and Christianity were so compelling that rather than writing the definitive book on the fallacy of God, Lee converted to Christianity and has become one of the leading proponents of Christianity.

Rather than producing a strong argument for the atheist point of view, as was his original intent, Lee’s research provided the foundation for his bestselling book, The Case for Christ, which has become arguably, one of the most influential books on Christian apologetics today.  Lee has recently followed up with Is God Real? There is every reason to believe that his latest work will be as revelatory as The Case for Christ.

Director of the National Institute of Health for 12 years, under 3 presidents, leader of the National Human Genome Project, recipient of both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science, with these distinctions it is clear that Dr. Francis Collins is a mammoth figure in the realm of science and a very, very well-respected scientist. Dr. Collins is also a Christian.

Dr. Collins describes his younger self as a rather obnoxious atheist. After earning a graduate degree in quantum mechanics Dr. Collins decided that he wanted a career that was more closely involved in the human condition. He went back to school and became a medical doctor.

He was still a devout atheist, but he began to feel misgivings about his ideology when he encountered patients who were able to rely on their faith for comfort and strength in very difficult situations. Even when these faith filled patients were faced with hopeless outcomes they maintained a noticeably positive attitude. After talking to some of these patients about the source of their reassurance, although still convinced that faith was just superstition, Dr. Collins realized that he didn’t really know anything about the faith that he had so casually and stubbornly rejected. He determined to approach the issue of faith the same way he would approach a science problem, through research and investigation in a search for evidence. His first research project was to interview a Methodist minister in his neighborhood with the intent of dismantling the minister’s arguments completely.

This meeting led to Dr. Collins reading Mere Christianity, a book written by C.S. Lewis, an Oxford scholar who was also a committed atheist and came to Christianity through the intellectual process. Upon reading Lewis’ Mere Christianity, Dr. Collins realized that it was indeed, possible to arrive at faith because it was rational, because it was the most appropriate choice when presented with the data. Dr. Collins went on to become a faith filled Christian and wrote the best seller, The Language of God: A scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.

The Bible is explicit about Who God is. It provides a clear picture of His character. It chronicles His accomplishments, explains to us the many facets of His relationship with mankind. It gives us an understandable map of how to align our lives with His plan and what we can expect to gain from it.

So, is there a God? My experience and research has led me to believe that God definitely exists. Not as a myth but as a real and necessary part of my life. The majority of the world believes God exists. Some of the most brilliant thinkers of the past 2000 years believed and believe in God. Sir Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Sir Frances Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Louis Pasteur, all magnificent contributors to humanity, all brilliant men, all Christians. When I learn that men possessing this level of intellect believed that there is a God, when I experience the presence of God, when I see the work of God in this world, when I read of God in the Bible, I am convinced that there is a God.