Does God Exist?
Delivered February 13, 2011
On April 6, 1966, Time magazine had a black cover with red words that asked, “Is God Dead?” That was the philosophical question being asked back then. When I entered college in the fall of 1968, the Religion 101 class I took was a study of the Death of God theologians. My professor had just published a book on the subject. Today the question is being asked again. The April/May 2010 issue of Philosophy Now magazine had a replica of that famous Time magazine cover with the words (still red words against a black background) “Is God really Dead?)
There has been a spate of best-selling books in recent years by thinkers called the New Atheists. They are writers like Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The New Atheist books have titles like Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion,” and Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” and Victor J. Stenger’s “God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.”
That last title reminds me of a story about a college professor, an avowed atheist who shocked his students when he flatly stated in class that he was going to prove there was no God. Addressing the ceiling he shouted: "God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I'll give you 15 minutes!" The lecture room fell silent. Ten minutes went by. Again he taunted God, saying, "Here I am, God. I'm still waiting." His countdown got down to the last minute when a male student walked up to the professor, and pushed him from his lofty platform and took his seat again. The class fell silent...waiting. Eventually, the shaken professor looked at the young man, and asked: "What's the matter with you? Why did you do that?" The student responded, "God was busy. He sent me."
I think we can do a lot better in our interactions with atheists than push them around. I have been doing a lot of reading in such authors in the past year. I take them very seriously. The fact that these books can be on the NY Times bestsellers list means that many Americans are seriously asking the question “Does God exist?” and are often answering in the negative.
So this morning I want to ask the question: Does God exist? This is the first in a series of sermons I am starting today entitled “Questions of Faith” on the words of the Apostles’ Creed, the earliest extrabiblical statement of faith of Christianity. The creed starts off with the words “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Are those words true any longer, or do they describe an outdated superstition from a pre-scientific age? I have two points this morning. First I want to talk about the God that does NOT exist – in other words the false god. Then I want to talk about the true God.
I. First, the God who does NOT exist. The God that the New Atheism describes does not exist. As I read the writings of the New Atheists – as well as reread some old atheists like Bertrand Russell “Why I am Not a Christian” and Sigmund Freud “Future of An Illusion” – I found myself agreeing with them on many points. That was kind of troubling for a Christian preacher. But the truth is that the God that they reject is not the God I believe in. I don’t believe in the god they don’t believe in (if you can follow that reasoning.) The god they describe as God is not God; it is a false god. It is the product of human imagination.
The Biblical prophets often compared and contrasted the true God and the false gods – like in our Old Testament reading from Jeremiah today. That distinction needs to be made again today, but updated to include not just idols of wood and stone but also theological and philosophical idols. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, "God created man in his own image. And man, being a gentleman, returned the favor." The god that man has created in his own image is not God. Yet that is the god that is being attacked by the New Atheists. It is a primitive kind of deity, a philosophical straw man that can be easily discredited. It is not God!
Michael Dowd, a Congregational minister, preached a sermon recently entitled “Thank God for the New Atheists.” In it he says, “The New Atheists are God’s prophets, and believers need to listen up.” By that he meant that Old Testament prophets were always attacking false gods – just like Jeremiah. The atheists are doing the same thing. They are very effectively tearing down false gods. We ought to thank them. Of course the atheists say that after they have torn down all the false gods, there is no God left. I would say that what is left after all the idols have been exposed is the true God.
So who is this God that the atheists attack? It is a super man in the sky. A god made in the image of humans only bigger and stronger. This super male does not exist – at least not in the way that God is normally pictured. First of all, God is not up in the sky. Heaven is not “up there.” In pre-scientific times people believed in a three tier universe. Heaven was above. Hell or the underworld was below and earth was in between. God was thought to be up there in heaven, which was somewhere in the sky. You remember when the first Russian cosmonauts went into space. They came back gloating that they had been into the heavens and there was no God up there. We think that is silly, but that was the traditional thinking.
But now we know God is not in the sky. You can travel up as far as you can into space - through our solar system and our galaxy and to the edge of the universe and never reach heaven. Heaven is not up there. When we talk about God as our heavenly father we know we don’t really mean he is a male hiding in the sky behind a cloud or sitting in a planet. Heaven is not a place up there where you sit on clouds like in the comics. Heaven is a non-spatial spiritual dimension.
Likewise God is not an all-powerful male. We call God Father, but we know that he transcends the categories of male or female. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be the true God; he would be Zeus or Hermes. Even the author if Genesis knew that. It says “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Even Genesis 1 shows that the image of God transcends male and female. The same with Christ. Even though Jesus was clearly a human male, the apostle Paul said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” God is not a super male in the sky.
But it is still proper to call God our Heavenly Father – I will come back to that in a moment. When we use language like “Heavenly Father” we have to realize that we are speaking metaphorically and symbolically, and not anatomically and biologically. We are using human gender categories to describe a God who is not human and has no gender. There are people who are offended at the idea of God as Father and want to call God Mother. There is a whole mother goddess movement. That does not solve the problem. There are those who want to use impersonal language to solve the problem - God as a cosmic It – like cousin It in the old Addams family TV show. That is much worse. No language describes God adequately. All language falls short. But the traditional biblical language is the best, for reasons I will return to in a moment. But first let me make another point.
God is not a Lawbreaker. One persistent image of God is that he has set up the world to operate by certain natural laws. But if you pray well enough, then you can get God to break the rules for you. Miracles are understood as those instances when the Heavenly Father breaks the laws of nature in response to the prayers of his people. I don’t believe that. I believe in miracles and I believe in answered prayer. But I don’t think God breaks the laws of nature to answer prayers. That would be just as bad as God breaking moral laws to answer prayers. He would be an immoral God not worthy of worship if he did evil by breaking his own moral laws. He would be like the capricious immoral gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. The same is true of a god who would break natural laws. Miracles are not the breaking of natural law but the using of natural laws in ways we do not understand.
People a thousand years ago would think that airplanes and cell phones, and television were miracles. But we know they are not; we know they are perfectly within the natural laws of physics. People two hundred years ago would have thought that CT scans and antibiotic were miraculous. We know they are just science. When God heals people in ways that physicians do not understand, he is not breaking his own laws of how the human body heals. He is healing bodies in a way that we do not yet comprehend. God is not a lawbreaker – of moral or natural laws. That is why I can pray for healing with such confidence. The Great Physician knows our bodies; he can heal.
The God that the New Atheists describe and reject is not the God I know. I reject their primitive and obsolete concept of God. I don’t believe in the God they don’t believe in. But I do believe in the true God. Atheist Stephen F. Roberts is often quoted as saying to Christians, “I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” I contend that atheists take their reasoning one God too far. Because they can demonstrate that false gods do not exist, they assume that no God exists. That does not follow.
II. Now I want to move on to my second point, which is the true God. The question posed in my sermon title is: Does God exist? I want to change the wording now. Theologically speaking it is inaccurate to say that God exists. God does not exist the way that creatures and things exist; God is. When God described himself to Moses at the burning bush he said “I am who I am.” To says that God “exists” assumes that God is bound within time and space, that God is a being among other beings. That is the mistake that atheists make. They think God – if he exists - is a supernatural being. Any being like that would not be God.
God is not a being; God is not a supernatural creature. God is Being. God is the Source and Ground of all that exists. As the apostle Paul said to the philosophers in Athens “In Him we live and move and have our being.” In college I cut my theological teeth on Christian philosopher Paul Tillich who used phrases like Being Itself and the Ground of Being and Ultimate Concern to describe God. Even though I would use more personal language than Tillich, I appreciate his point. God is by definition that which is Ultimately Real. Defined that way, there is no way God cannot be. “I believe in God.”
God is Personal. “I believe in God, the Father almighty” I have no problem with calling God Father, because Jesus called God Father and taught his disciples to pray calling God Father. To call God Father means that God is Personal. God is not the impersonal Power behind the universe. God is not the Star Wars Force. God is not just a human personification of an impersonal power in the way that ancient pagan deities were personifications of the forces of nature. God is personal. We only know persons as male or female; we do not know genderless persons. God is not cousin It. So we have to choose some personal gender designation for God. Jesus choose to call God Father; in fact he called him “Abba, father” which is the intimate personal form of the word father. As followers of Jesus we follow his example in this.
Of course, ultimately Father is just an approximation of who God truly is. All descriptions of God are just mental handles we use to try to grasp the ungraspable. We need to always realize that is true of all language and words we use to describe God. 8 “ For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD. “ For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, And My thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa. 55:8-9)
But this is the best we’ve got to describe the truth that God is a personal God with whom we can have a personal relationship. God is a personal spiritual Reality, to whom we relate as our Heavenly Father. Maybe your personal history makes it hard for you to relate to God as a father. Maybe you had an abusive, absent or distant earthly father; that will affect the way you come to God. This is a very serious matter and needs to be worked through. But I believe the best way to work through our personal issues is not to reject the idea of God as father, but rather see God as the good father you never had. Reclaim the idea of father through a good relationship with your Heavenly father.
God is the Father Almighty. Almighty is simply an acceptance that God is omnipotent, to use theological language. Anything less than almighty makes God into a demigod. God by definition has to be almighty or he is not God. He is Lord of Heaven and earth, to use another equally culturally conditioned term.
“I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” That is the first line of the Apostles’ Creed. The true God is “creator of heaven and earth.” God is Creator. God is not a creature. Nor is God simply the sun total of everything that exists. He was before there was anything, and he brought everything into existence. How he created the universe in the beginning and how he continues to form galaxies even today is for science to explore. There is no contradiction between science and faith. Absolutely none. I was a geology major in college before I was a religion major. I see no conflict between the two disciplines. The truths that God communicates through his creation discovered by science cannot conflict with a proper understanding of Scripture. If there is a conflict then we are misreading something, but that is a whole sermon – or sermon series in itself.
Does God exist? I would say that God is. God is almighty. God is personal and best addressed with the personal name that Jesus taught us – Father. He is the Source and Ground of all that exists. God is creator of heaven and earth. In Him we live and move and have our being. And if God is, then this is the most important piece of information that we will ever have. For if God is, then it is of ultimate importance that we learn as much as we can about him and orient our lives in relation to Him. That is what the rest of this series will be about. But it begins with the foundational belief: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Amen.
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