This is Part 1 of a four-part series on the self-evident nature of God. Be sure to check out Part 2 (If There Is No God, There Is No Free Will), Part 3 (If There Is No God, There Is No True Value), and Part 4 (If There Is No God, Then Something Came from Nothing).
The number of people that have completely disconnected from religion in recent years has surged so much that there is now a name for this group: the “nones.” When asked on the census to identify their religious affiliation, they choose “none.” The percentage of “nones” is currently at about 23 percent, up from 16 percent in 2007 and 7 percent in the 1990s.
Most “nones” are not hostile toward religion. But they say, “If there is a God, I’m not sure we can really know that much about him. So you relate to God in your way, and I’ll relate to him—or her, or it, or whatever—in mine.”
But why is the existence of God a question at all? For something as important as God, why should it require faith?
My kids don’t have to believe, by faith, that I, their daddy, exist. I don’t have to say, “Okay, children, I know sometimes you’ll doubt my existence. When you do, recite this: ‘J.D. is my daddy; I shall not want. He maketh me lie down in warm blankets; my sippy cup runneth over.’”
No! My kids doubt a lot of things, but to my knowledge, they’ve never doubted if I was real. Why should our relationship with God, which is so much more important, be any different?
The Apostle Paul gives us a hint:
For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse .… They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever.
(Romans 1:18-20, 25 CSB)
According to Paul, certain things about God are self-evident. We automatically recognize them and instinctively know them.
If we stop recognizing them, it’s because something has distorted our view. I’m not saying that atheists are intellectually dishonest. Most of them sincerely believe in atheism. But atheism isn’t a default position. Theism is. Atheism arises when people turn their backs on what are rather obvious indications that there is a God behind creation.
These aren’t “proofs” for God’s existence. But they are, to borrow Francis Shaeffer’s phrase, strong hints that God really is there—and that he is not silent.
The first of those four indications is this: If there is no God, then there is no you.*
If there is nothing more fundamentally real than biology, chemistry, and physics, then there is no “you” in there. You have a brain, yes, but no real mind within the brain. That innate conception of your “self” you feel? In a godless universe, that’s an illusion.
Christopher Hitchens, the well-known atheist, portrayed this well. Earlier this year I read a book about Hitchens’ final days. In 2010 he was diagnosed with a really aggressive cancer, and as it settled on him that he was going to die, he wrote a book chronicling his last thoughts called Mortality.
In it, he talked about how his doctors kept telling him, “Christopher, your body is fighting the cancer. Your body is trying. It doesn’t want to give up.” He finally said to his doctors, “I don’t have a body. I am a body.”
If the physical world is all there is, Hitchens is right. There is no “you.” There is no “me.” There is just my flesh and the high-tech circuitry that propels it.
Does that jive with you? That there’s no real you, that your consciousness—your sense of self—is just an illusion of the synapses of the brain?
Because if biology is all there is, that also means that death is the absolute end of it all! Another famous atheist, Bertrand Russell, said just before his death, “When I die, I will be consumed by darkness. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere. Life is only triviality for a moment and then nothing.” Russell meant for that to be beautiful. I wonder how many of us can accept that and not find life crushingly horrifying.
This idea alone may not prove that God exists, but it convinces many people that something doesn’t sit right with an atheistic approach.
Now, compare Hitchens’ account of his final days with that of Shawna, a young woman at the Summit with cystic fibrosis who recently passed away. I can’t remember ever being in the presence of another person who exuded such consistent serenity and joy. She told the doctors and nurses on her floor and anyone else who would listen that what she was going through was nothing compared to what God had prepared for her in eternity. People would come in her room and say they didn’t understand why she was being “cut down in the prime of her life,” and she would say, “Are you kidding me? I’m headed to the prime of my life!” Shawna knew that our lives, whether we live 20 years or 120, are only small drops of water compared to the expansive beauty of eternity’s ocean.
Does her hopefulness prove that God exists? No, it doesn’t. But it shows you that atheism runs contrary to a deep yearning inside of us that suggests we are more than biology.
C.S. Lewis famously explained it like this: “A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Why would that be the one desire for which there was no corollary?
What may be known about God is evident to us. He is there, and he is not silent.
*I am indebted to Andy Stanley’s helpful series, “Who Needs God,” for the concept of this series and the structure of the posts’ titles.
