I Believe in God
William Barclay
To the mind of the modern man there is one strange omission in the Bible. The Bible is the supreme religious book, and yet it never makes any attempt to prove the existence of God. In the Bible the fool says in his heart that there is not God (Psalm 53:1). But the fool there is not the intellectual fool or simpleton; he is the moral fool, the man who, as we would say, is playing the fool. He is not denying the existence of God on intellectual grounds; he is denying the existence of God because he wishes to deny the commandments of God, and he wishes to live life as he likes. His abolition of God is not the issue of mental despair, but the result of wishful thinking.
The Biblical writers did not feel the necessity of proving the existence of God. To them God’s existence was too vividly experienced, and God’s action was too obviously visible for any doubt to arise. It has been truly said that in the Bible God is not merely a character in life and history; he is properly the only character in life and in history. To a Biblical writer the existence of God was as self-evident as that of his wife or child. But the mind of the modern man works differently, just as indeed the mind of the Greek in the ancient world worked differently. ‘We feed on questions,’ said the old Athenians. “Curiosity,” as Plato said, “is the mother of knowledge.” Suppose we put our minds to the task of trying to prove the existence of God, how far will they take us? Ritschi said: ‘Without Christ I should be an Atheist.’ Is that a necessary conclusion? Can human thought and the contemplation of the world take us no distance towards God at all? It is certainly true that the Biblical view of life would not rule out such an inquiry. Paul speaks of the people who have turned their backs on God and who have chosen to live in shameless immorality, and of the wrath of God against them, and of how they can be legitimately condemned: ‘For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made’ (Rom I, 18-19). There was no doubt at all in God’s mind that it was possible to argue from the world of God, and to see God in the world. C.H. Dodd has pointed out that the way in which Jesus uses the natural processes of the world in his parables makes it quite clear that he too believed that there is a kinship between the world and God, making it possible to learn of God from the world and the processes of the world. Suppose then that we try to see how far our own minds can take us in the search for God, how far we can go in the direction of proving the existence of God. 1. There is an argument from cause and effect. Every effect must have its cause; the cause itself must have its cause; and the cause which caused the cause must have its cause. And so, if the chain of causation be followed back and back and back into infinity, it must somewhere come to a first cause, which is the cause of every other cause. Thus, we arrive at a God who is the First cause, or, as the Greek called him, ‘the unmoved mover of all things.’ 2. There is an argument from life. Man can do many things; he can change and rearrange and alter and develop and elaborate; but the one thing which man has never created is life. He cannot take a dead thing and make it alive; he cannot take a collection of elements and breathe the life into them. Life must therefore have entered into the world from outside, and so we arrive at a God who is the source and the fountain and the giver and the origin of all life. 3. There is what is perhaps the most famous of all arguments, the argument from design. This is an argument for the existence of God which men have used for thousands of years. A modern example of it is the parable of Paley. Suppose a man is walking across a moor and he happens to hit his foot against a watch. He picks it up; he has never seen a watch before; he examines it. He sees that the hands are moving around the dial in what is clearly and orderly way. He opens it up and finds inside a host of wheels and cogs and levers and springs and jewels. He discovers that by winding up the watch, you can see it going, and the whole complicated machinery is moving in what is obviously a pre-determined pattern. What then does he say? Does he say: ‘By chance all these wheels and levers and jewels and springs came together and formed themselves into this thing I have in my hand. By chance they set themselves going. By chance they move in an orderly way. By chance this watch became an instrument which counts the hours and minutes and seconds’? No. If he applies his mind to this problem at all, he says: ‘I have found a watch. Somewhere there must be a watchmaker.’ So then when we discover a world where there is an order more accurate than any watch, where tides ebb and flow according to schedule, where spring, summer, autumn, and winter come back in unvarying succession, where the planets never leave their courses, where the same cause always produces the same effect, we are bound to say: ‘I have found a world. Somewhere there must be a world maker.’ This argument from design can be illustrated by something much closer: by the structure of the human body. Xenophon in the Memorabilia tells how Socrates argued for divine pronoia, forethought, from the structure of the body: ‘Are there no other contrivances which look like the results of forethought? Thus, the eyeballs, being weak, are set behind the eyelids that open like doors when we want to see, and close when we sleep; on the lids grow lashes through which the very winds filter harmlessly; above the eyes is a coping of brows that lets no drop of sweat from the head hurt them. The ears catch all sounds, but are never choked with them. Again, the incisors of all creatures are adapted for cutting, the molars for receiving food from them and grinding it. And again, the mouth through which the food they want goes in is set near the eyes and nostrils; but since what goes out is unpleasant, the ducts through which it passes are turned away and removed as far as possible from the organs of sense. With such signs of forethought in these arrangements can you doubt whether they are the works of chance or design? 4. There is the argument from purpose. It does seem that the universe is purposely designed to produce certain things. The evolutionary process looks as if it was purposely designed to produce the particular forms of life which it did produce. The very fact that the same effect follows the same cause, the very fact that this is a reliable universe, is the prerequisites of purposeful activity. The Stoics, again to quote Cicero’s “De Natura Deorum,” put this in a special way. There is in the world, plain for all to see, so they claimed, a graduated scale of being. There is the vegetable kingdom, for whose preservation nature provides by nurture and growth. There is the animal kingdom, in which exist sensation, motive, and appetite, the impulse to choose what is helpful and avoid what is harmful. There is man who has reason to direct and control his appetites. To complete the scale there must be a fourth scale of beings, consistently good and wise, possessing perfect and absolute reason. This fourth grade must be above the level of human beings and therefore must consist of gods. There does seem to be in the universe an end and a purpose for each of its parts, which they may or may not achieve and attain; and purpose and plan and end necessarily imply mind. And thus once again we reach God. 5. There is also what might be called the moral argument. Where does man get his moral sense? Where does he get the values which are moral values? Long ago Epictetus pointed out that no man is born with a knowledge of music or geometry but every man is born with some kind of moral sense, even if he defies it and turns his back on it and perhaps ultimately loses it. There is a kind of innate consciousness of right and wrong. Certainly man cannot live without the natural instincts of self-preservation and of acquisitiveness, but what is it that prevents these instincts from taking control and from dictating the whole pattern of life? What is it, for instance, that makes a man override the instincts of self-preservation and die for a principle, or self-sacrifice for a loved one? What is it, for instance, that makes a man realize that in life there is an obligation to give, which controls the instincts to get? The conclusion is that these things must come from outside humanity. There must be that beyond man which breathes them into man. The moment we use the word ‘ought’ we arrive at God; the moral imperative implies God. J.S. Whale writes: ‘Man’s distinctive and imperious sense of “oughtness” has a sanctity which refuses to be bargained with or to be explained away in terms of any alien principle.’ And he goes on to quote a saying of John Oman: “Whoever says “ought,” really meaning “ought,” is in that act bearing witness to the supernatural and supra-temporal as the destined home of man.’ The very word ‘ought’ implies a standard given from beyond the human situation, and sanctions imposed by a power above the human situation. The moment we use the word ‘ought’ we are saying that it is not possible to explain man in exclusively physical terms, and that there is another area of life to which as man he necessarily belongs. The principles, the obligations, the laws, the duties, which are all assumed in the word ‘ought,’ have not emerged from the human situation but have been given from outside it. Thus, the moral argument leaves us facing God. This is the argument which is summed up in the famous saying of Emmanuel Kant that two things convince him of God, ‘the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me.’ 6. There is the argument from the universal belief in God, what the Romans called the consensus gentium, the common consent of all people. This again is an argument which has been used for thousands of years. Cicero in the “De Natura Deorum” uses this argument as one of the Stoic proofs of the existence of God. ‘The years obliterate the inventions of the imagination, but confirm the judgments of nature,’ and ‘the belief in God is only strengthened by the passage of the years, and grows more deeply rooted with each successive generation of mankind.’ Men of all nations have ‘engraved on their minds an innate belief that the gods exist.’ It has been said that there never has been discovered a tribe of men however primitive who did not pray. And long ago Seneca argued that, if there are no gods, prayer would become a kind of ‘universal madness,’ which is incredible. 7. We come last of all to the purely logical arguments for the existence of God. The most famous of all these arguments is Anselm’s ontological argument. It has been said that either this argument is quite final or else it is merely ‘ratiocinative trifling.’ It runs in three steps: a. By definition God is a being than which a greater cannot be conceived. b. But an idea which exists only in the mind cannot be as great as an idea which exists in fact as well. An idea which exists only in intellectu cannot be as great as an idea which exists also in re. c. Therefore, God must be thought of as necessarily existing. Given the truth of the second step in this argument, the argument is quite undeniable. To this argument Descartes added another. God is infinite and perfect. Man is finite and imperfect. Now a finite and an imperfect being cannot by himself conceive of that which is infinite and perfect. Therefore, the idea of an infinite and perfect being cannot have arisen from the mind of man and must have been put there by God himself. As Galloway puts it: ‘Man’s knowledge of God is due to God himself. God is the sufficient reason of the idea of Himself in man.” The logical proofs of the existence of God will appear quite differently to different minds. To some they will appear to clinch the matter and to leave no room for doubt; to others they will be quite unconvincing and devoid of reality; but it is Anselm’s ontological argument that is the most famous of all arguments for the existence of God. 8. Last of all, there is the argument from experience. That experience may be any one of three different kinds. There can be few people who have not at some time or other perhaps in the dark on a lonely mountainside, or in a wood or an open road, had the eerie sense of something other which can make the hair literally stand on the head. That is what is known as the sense of the numinous, the sense that in the universe there is a power other than human power. That kind of feeling is indeed the raw material of all religion. There are those who at different times in life have been quite sure that God spoke to them in guidance and in comfort and who on looking back are sure that they can trace the guiding hand of God. There are the few, the saints and the mystics, to whom the essence of God is the most real thing in the world, and who are in daily communion with God. In one sense, the argument from experience is the strongest argument of all. In another sense, it is an argument which may be personally undeniable but which cannot be used to convince anyone else because an experience is of necessity incommunicable. (Source: William Barclay, The Plain Man Looks at the Apostles Creed. London: Collins Clear – Type Press, 26-37, 1967) |
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