It’s that delightfully spooky time of year, and, with November 3’s Election Day just around corner, it’s exponentially more so right now. Booo!!
(It’s going to be either JB or DJT. Oh, My Goodness.)
So, what does it mean to be spooky, to be a spook, to be surreal, to be unreal, to be not-material? Does such existence exist? Is everything obviously material, or is it unnecessary to even think of the immaterial or supernatural? Say, how do we know the material is “material”?
Or, in the alternative, is it necessary that the supernatural exist for the material to exist, and just what is the immaterial or supernatural? Can we know spirit as well as we know the “hard” nature of existence?
Do we have evidence of one or the other or of both? Again, how can we know? Philosophers have been arguing about this for thousands of years and are no closer to the answer. And yet, it still matters as much or more than ever.
Today, we feature a terrific video (4:48) created by the Impact 360 Institute above, entitled Will Science Disprove God? We present one of their videos on our website (see What’s Your Worldview?). It’s a short and excellent rendering on the well-known issue of the “God of the Gaps,” the atheist claim that theists use God to explain the world only where there’s a knowledge gap, where science doesn’t yet have an explanation.
In our recent posts we’ve emphasized that the Judeo-Christian worldview has had a revolutionary impact on the world, the secularization thesis is dead, and religion (defined here as “belief in the supernatural”) is on the rise worldwide. Of course, this is the exact opposite of what the West’s media and universities lead us to believe.
We won’t try to hide our position on this: We think that science since we entered high school in the 1960’s has created such an explosion of knowledge that the generation of questions has infinitely outpaced the production of answers. To think that science is answering more questions than it produces or will ever construct a unified theory is a laugher.
In other words, the Gaps have won, and humankind remains here on earth in our universe feeling far humbler and alone than ever, absent her feeling of an overwhelming presence of Great, Loving Consciousness or Mind. Call that mind or consciousness God, if you will: Whatever.
Without exaggeration, many of our best friends are naturalists. It’s very easy to understand why one might choose not to believe in God. God doesn’t seem to tap us on the shoulder every day in our material existence; furthermore, if He, She, or It exists and is all-powerful as a creator god, then we would have to object to the excessive degree of evil allowed to exist. That we cause most of it doesn’t often help much, especially those experiencing it.
Still, given our ongoing explosion of knowledge, today’s militant atheists seem more like men and women trying to take credit for what humanity merely observes or discovers, when we know only an Omni-Creator God could create and sustain the miracles around us every second of every day. We simply take all the miracles of existence for granted.
We can quibble with the Creator’s creation, but a feeling of awe and the presence of holiness is the more common – and probably prudent – point of view. The West is in the best of times now, and since these feelings have already made it through some of the worst of times, they are unlikely to change in the future.
Much of the time, many human beings have the feeling of the Sacred all around them. That’s what history’s long account reveals. It might be what we’re created for.
We have provided the outline of our worldview shown in the chart below in prior posts (here is one example). We will continue to expand on this over time.
The point is not to convince you of our worldview, but to get you thinking about your own. We would encourage you to design your own outline. Such an outline would offer answers to life’s most important questions and place you and your friends and loved ones into a story in which you are most comfortable. You should find that story most true, meaningful, purposeful, and good . . . or else you should consider alternatives. That’s how we arrived at ours.
We pulled a very small sample of books from our Praxis Circle Library that deal with the topic of the existence of God or the supernatural. Traditionalists place many of these books into the category of “apologetics,” a word that doesn’t do itself justice today. “To apologize” has negative connotations, leaving our secularist cancel culture looking ten feet tall and bullet proof.
Why do we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot with our terminology? In our opinion, when writing about the existence of God and the supernatural, given the evidence, we have the best and most fully documented view. It’s positive on balance and, in that regard, can speak for itself. A knowledge-based view of God is rapidly gaining momentum. We can see God’s evidence not only in science, but in our daily lives and in all of known history.
The next picture below singles out just a few books for fun. There is a God (2007) is written by one of the most famous former atheists who ever lived, Anthony Flew. Perhaps the most recent good short book on the subject is John Lennox’s, Can Science Explain Everything? (2019) Amir Aczel’s book (2014) to the left augments Lennox nicely.
We love the title of Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly Wrong (2012); it makes many of the points we made above. And finally, we know that human beings see best what they want to see and are already looking for. With that in mind, we pulled out a little case study involving the family of one of our Praxis Circle Contributors, Os Guinness: The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of Beer that Changed the World (2009) by Stephen Mansfield.
For it is written: Seek, and ye shall find. (Matthew 7:7-8)
Lastly, we would be remiss in moving to our closing without mentioning one last title: I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (2004) by Norman Geisler & Frank Turek. It takes the positive approach we mention above by shifting the burden of proof from the outset. In other words, it demonstrates how it’s often not the facts, but how the questions are framed or the words defined that make the critical difference.
In wrapping up, we’d like to note with reference to the last picture below that our resident Philosopher and expert on teleology, Henry the Home Ruler, fully endorses our book selection and, more important, is never one to miss a Hollywood photo op.
You should know he advised us not to light the candles to avoid offending those with whom we might disagree. Such would be discourteous and undignified, and, as ever, Henry was correct.
We all know we can’t prove God in a laboratory, and, if God exists, He must have designed it this way. There is beauty here. Henry’s main point: That makes us free to believe whatever nonsense we like.
