It is popularly believed that Christians, when we go to church, hang our brains up at the door. Yet it is my experience that when I try and engage unbelievers in intelligent conversation about great issues of faith, it is so often they who shut down their thinking, who refuse to intelligently engage.
This is because they have already decided faith has nothing to offer by way of intelligent conversation. Of course, this is a poor caricature of faith as being by nature unreasonable, like superstition. You either have it, or you don’t, and who can explain it? It’s rather embarrassing, and who would admit to it?
An example I think of is that of creation. However you understand the Bible creation narrative, one thing is certain, the universe had a beginning. Science tells us that space, time, and matter came into being at the same moment. There was nothing, then there was...well, everything. That makes the universe contingent.
Think of oak trees. If you see an acorn, you would be forgiven for looking around to find the tree from which it fell. Having found the tree you would reasonably assume there must have been an acorn from which it grew. Each contingent on what went before. It’s the old chicken-and-egg conundrum.
In the same way, if space, time, and matter came into being at the same moment, it stands to reason the universe is contingent. Whatever the universe is contingent upon, cannot be confined to place, time, or physical existence. That would make whatever produced the universe part of creation, and nothing can pre-exist itself in order to create itself.
Richard Dawkins, of course, has decided that nothing can produce something, and the scientific community is busy trying to explain how that can be. What is ‘nothing?’ I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that nothing is the absence of something, just as darkness is the absence of light. In and of itself, it has no existence.
I can’t wait to see what science comes up with, but one thing is sure, Dawkins will not countenance the idea of God. His mind is closed for reasons I already explained, which seems odd for a scientist.
The Christian’s mind, of course, will go immediately to Genesis 1, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…’ and why not? My mind goes from there to the opening verses of John’s gospel:
‘In the beginning as the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him as life…’
So, we have a God who is ‘Spirit’ (John 4:24), confined neither to time, space, or physical existence. Jesus, the Word, was in the beginning with God, is God, and Jesus has life in himself, so he isn’t contingent. So, we have a being who is not contingent who created all that is contingent.
My main point here is not whether anyone accepts God and a supernatural world-view, what Newton called metaphysics. It is, rather, that we have a compelling argument for beginnings, even in light of science, and we should never be ashamed of that. Certainly, I am more confident about my faith in God than I would ever be in the idea that nothing is something that can produce everything.
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