When it comes to the question of the existence of God, one would think that if he does exists, then he would introduce himself to us. Christians assert that God has in fact introduced himself to us, and still is introducing himself. All we have to do is look around for his calling card.
In reality, there are many ways God speaks. Here are some of them, and they are all very profound.
God Speaks in Creation
It’s no accident that Genesis describes the creation of all that we see as an act of speech by an infinitely powerful and utterly brilliant personal God: The phrase, “And God said…and it was so,” occurs over and over again in the creation account. Out of this account came the late medieval conviction that God is rational and that his creation is therefore rational and intended to be understood by rational minds. The logical conclusion was that there had to be an underlying order to everything and it eventually formed the basis for the scientific revolution in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Consequently, the universe, we have since come to know, is information layered upon information layered upon information. Even our own bodies are simply the expression of exquisitely designed and expressed information in the form of DNA and RNA. Francis Collins, who headed up the human genome project, called human DNA “the language of God” when the project was completed.
The result of this amazing order and intelligence that we find in nature is that to this day a high percentage of scientists in the hard sciences are theists. “In 1916, researchers asked biologists, physicists, and mathematicians whether they believed in a God who actively communicates with humankind and to whom one may pray in expectation of receiving an answer. About 40 percent answered in the affirmative. In 1997, the same survey was repeated verbatim — and to the surprise of the researchers, the percentage remained very nearly the same.” (From, The Language of God, by Francis Collins)
God Speaks in Our Personhood
The Bible tells us that we have been created in the “image” of God. The Hebrew word for image can also be translated “shadow.” So we can say that we are the “shadow of God.” That is, we are not God, but we are like God in some ways. We are also not purely physical. Our physical being is simply the way this shadow is displayed.
Imagine a bird casting a shadow on a rock. The shadow is not the bird. The shadow is created in the form of the bird. It tells us something about the bird. But it does not tell us everything about the bird because it is not the bird itself. The shadow is also not the rock. It is cast upon the rock by the bird. The rock simply displays the shadow.
Now imagine that the shadow of the bird has self awareness and wants to know what it is. The only way it can tell what it is is by looking at the bird in the sky that is casting it. “Hey, I am like that bird up there,” it concludes. But suppose the shadow decides to look elsewhere for its identity. Suppose the shadow looks around itself, sees the rock it’s on, and decides that it, too, must be a rock. “Oh, wait a minute. I’m mistaken. I’m a rock.” Those are two very different conclusions, aren’t they? Both are plausible. In fact, lacking a knowledge of flight and the properties of light, the rock conclusion may be far more plausible to the shadow than the bird conclusion. The problem is that the rock conclusion doesn’t explain why the shadow is different from everything else around it.
That is the situation we are in as human beings. We have things in common with God himself: we love, we have free will, we perceive beauty, we know the difference between good and evil. Theologians call these traits communicable attributes; the qualities that God shares with us. These qualities don’t make us God. They make us like God. Conversely, God has many other qualities that he doesn’t share with us: God is eternal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, etc.
On the other hand, we are physical animals. I say it that way in order to emphasize our predicament. We are physical beings that have a spiritual cast to them. We are the shadow of God displayed in human bodies. The problem is that, if we are alienated in some way from God, then the only recourse we have to explain our uniqueness is to look to the physical world around us. But the ultimate result of doing this is that we dehumanize ourselves.
The Bible tells us that we humans are in fact alienated from God and yet, no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to explain ourselves in simply materialistic terms.
Well, this post is getting too long. So I’ll continue this discussion in my next one.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org
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