"Come now, let us reason together says the Lord:..." Isaiah 1:18
Don't you wonder why every story you read or movie you watch has this good verses evil tension play out within the storyline? Why is the greatest theme in much of literature and of so many songs the notion that love never dies? Where did numbers come from and why are they so useful? Where did your sense of fairness come from? Why do we long for the story to end happily ever after? Why do we sense that love will last forever?
In my curious pursuit of Narrative Apologetics, I've become more and more acquainted with and enchanted by the Ontological argument for the existence of God. I don't understand why it is that many believers and even biblical scholars don't find the argument compelling and convincing and down right beautiful.
Neither side in the God debate is going to give an airtight argument for the existence or nonexistence of God. Like a mystery novel detective, we have to be observant, ask good questions, and follow the clues, and some of those clues exist on the outside of us and some are hidden within. Once the evidence is gathered, analyzed, and presented, we all have to reach our own verdicts.
Well-known Design Arguments discerning the universe and nature such as the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments, are based on observation and experience. These arguments are based on everything in the universe having a cause, being in motion, or being contingent, in other words, needing a "causer."
On the flip side of the same coin, the Ontological Argument rests purely in reason and logic to make its case for God, which is why some dismiss it. However, one quote on a Christian website that I also found to be true in my own study of the Ontological Argument said of its wax and wane among theologians and intelligentsia:
"the Ontological Argument has not completely faded and disappeared. In part, that’s because, the more closely one tries to define its terms, the more the biblical God emerges." ( Maybe that has something to do with why it is dismissed at times. )
Both of these arguments are important in our hunt for God.
Works of scholarship abound on the Ontological Argument to challenge I suspect even those with the philosophical chops to think them through to their happily ever abstract ending. Embarrassingly, I found myself rereading Kierkegaard's paragraphs several times before I could understand what exactly he was getting at; however, I believe turning the evidence we find over and over like rich garden soil is where the real struggle lies.
At some point, we all have to be alone with our evidence.
We all have to wrangle with the findings along with our observations and experiences, scribbling dilemmas in our journals and working them out like an algebra equation. For me personally the problem of evil with all of its implications, assumptions, questions, and private heartache caused the most pain and gut-wrenching honesty, and tears. But nothing has moved me closer to the presence of God and a deeper knowledge of him and his love.
So finding out if God exists may require every brain cell we can muster and bend into deep contemplation: for it's the most important decision we will make in our lifetime. You might be saying, "I already believe in God, so I don't need to think about apologetics or worry about Kierkegaard's bright ideas. In fact, Rebecca, I think you're making the question entirely too difficult." Perhaps. But I would respectfully disagree. It's not just about believing he exists. If God exists, what kind of a God is he? There are clues everywhere. You don't need to even read any scholarly literature.
Many of us have a superficial grasp of our God and historic Christianity. I believe through apologetics we can gain, develop, and appreciate more appropriately and stunningly the richness and strengths of our faith.
And if you've been trying to find your true self, like Isaiah the Old Testament prophet, our only hope lies in finding God first. ( Isaiah 6 ) And I also know that once we establish a belief in God, many deep and dark inquiries extend the horizon. One blog at a time though. I know I shouldn't be quoting Scripture yet and giving my final analysis, but I can't seem to help myself.
What we believe about God effects every chapter of our story. If God created me, then I should have more than just a passing knowledge of him. I love how Gavin Ortlund details the search for God in his book "Why God Makes Sense in a World that Doesn't:" (1)
"It is, first, the most important and thrilling adventure of our lives. Nothing could be more urgent than whether he exists - and if so, what to do about it. For God is held to be the Supreme Good, who alone can fulfill the longings of the human soul. Therefore the stakes of finding him are literally infinite. The question of God is, secondly, the most fascinating puzzle you will ever think about. Whether or not he is real, certainly a more interesting idea has never been conceived. The concept God - the infinite Person, the ground of being, the precondition of reality - is the most staggering, enthralling idea ever to confront the human mind. The mere idea of God outweighs the physical universe in grandeur and importance. Finally the question of God is the most difficult and humbling question we will face."
And that's another ontological question isn't it? Why do we even imagine a concept of God in the first place? Think about that. Where does it come from? Evolutionary processes? Some make a case for this.
Interestingly in my research, I also found that when asked what they thought was the most compelling evidence for the existence of God and the hardest to counter in their debates, atheists, agnostics, and skeptics, alike, most all of them say that it is the Moral Argument, not the Design Argument that is hardest for them to combat.
So I submit my evidence that the Ontological Argument is here to stay.
Take music for instance. Charles Taylor, in his acclaimed (and thick!) work "A Secular Age," characterizes music in secular contexts as fundamentally mysterious because it conveys transcendence and yet is divorced from any transcendent referent. (1) Other secular people have written similar experiences of being profoundly moved by a piece of music and then feeling a loss because at the end there was no one to thank.
Why did the skeptic think someone transcendent should be thanked for the music he heard, someone above nature and outside of human being? Surprisingly, many atheists take the argument on music for the existence of God more serious than other arguments. Why is that? I believe because everyone knows that music is powerful with the ability to lift us up, containing a transcendence of its own beauty stretching beyond this world, something supernatural.
Sometime this weekend find a quiet place, pull up on your phone The Mozart G Minor Quintet or Hans Zimmer's "Chevaliers de Sangreal" or John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," or your own personal favorite, insert your earbuds, close your eyes, and just listen. Really listen.
Birds are a part of nature; we can observe birds. And they are so lovely and enjoyable to watch in their synchronized flight patterns, their busy, little work ethic, their diligence, and their fussiness displayed in constructing nursery nests for their eggs in the nooks of my barn. It's an activity I never grow tired of here at the farm.
But what about their music?
Researchers, including those who are both musicians and ornithologists, have discovered that the songs of birds are structured like that of human music in their change of tempo, pitch, and timbre, resembling human melodies.
Birds, however; seem to understand who to thank for their music simply by delighting in and displaying the songs they were created to perform. Everyday in these delicately detailed, fine-feathered friends I see and hear the ontological bridging its way to the observable in musical notes and even symphonies, transcending the skeptical.
At every turn our universe gives the impression of intelligence and beauty. Can't you see it?
And don't forget that we live in the universe too, creatures longing for meaning and hope and purpose. Creatures who write music and stories of love and hope, longing for a happy ending, where good, at last, defeats evil forever. Humans are observable. We are also meaningful beings with meaningful thoughts; it doesn't seem plausible to me that we would be created by accident or by an indifferent, untouchable, or boring deity. It doesn't fit our storyline. It doesn't fit with what I can observe nor with what I know is going on inside of me.
Could a random collection of molecules, emerging from nothing, heading nowhere, eating each other to survive, have turned from erratic blobs of monsters into affectionate, "civilized" beings now displaying love and creating art, because the blobs somehow realized developing a sense of morality and justice would be better survival techniques than the strong eating the weak?
To me, you'd have to stretch the daylights out of that secular narrative to make it work let alone fit our world and be consistently livable.
And anyway, how can you trust such a development of morality rooted in nothing but randomness? Or more importantly, why would you trust it? How could I trust my own thoughts for that matter, knowing they derived along a pathway that arbitrarily forked off from an already accidental main road and just kept going devoid of map and motive?
What if the morality path we ventured down per chance instructed us it would be useful to eat our spouses like a black widow spider? Moral nature in the case of evolutionary biology is an illusion tricking our brains rather than a clue pointing us to the good verses evil drama we encounter in all of our stories and "the infinite Person and the ground of being."
Follow the clues.
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| I visited this delightful book store recently in the quaint, little town of Monroe, GA |
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