A World In Need of God

In the latest Superman movie, Louis Lane wins the Pulitzer Prize for her article entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Alas, Superman returns and sweeps her off her feet, literally, lifting her up to the stars where he speaks to her about the world he hears crying for a Superman.

Likewise books are hitting the best seller list explaining to the world why we don’t need God. Do we truly live in a world that does not need God? Do we have the bird’s eye view of all things to know that there is nothing that transcends nature? I think it evident that the world needs God. Does the need mean that He is or that we are merely desperate thinkers desiring the impossible? Are we merely looking for help from a loving God instead of picking ourselves up by our boot straps and making the best of life?

Some see a life lived in service to an invisible God as a crutch or wishful thinking best left to childhood. Would a visible God be more comforting? Would it be better that we could quantify and measure Him scientifically. Is that really the sort of God one would expect?

Others see a life lived for God as one lived in fear of retribution from a vindictive God. They think because of the doctrine of hell, that it’s all about self preservation to love God and no God that would require such devotion is worthy of it.

We had the world given to us literally in the beginning with full freedom to live in truth in the protective boundaries of His love. We were given a world where we lived with Him and walked with Him in real communion. Yet we thought we could do it better and take the reigns of our own life and we used our freedom to step outside of the boundaries of truth and it set humanity on a course away from God. Still God pursued us with His love and still He provided a FREE way of reconciliation and redemption through Jesus Christ paying our debt to justice Himself. God took off His robe of judgment and stepped down becoming one with sin and took the sentence upon Himself for all mankind. The door to Him is Jesus Christ. The choice is still ours: we can still freely live life opposed to Him or we can enter into true freedom and live life to its fullest in Him.

Just as Superman gains fullness of life and strength from the natural sun, man is made to gain life and strength and all that is good from the Son of God. We are invited into a relationship with God freely, not by works, not by ritual, not by magic words, but by a real tangible life giving relationship with our Creator. The world does need God. And He is available for the world in need. The question is will we acknowledge our need and stop trying to live life as if man were the measure of all things and start life with God being the center of our life?

Reason, Nature, and God

To continue on the theme of our cognitive ability to reason let us consider how it is impossible for nature to have produced reason. We use our reason in tandem with acquiring knowledge. Knowing something is distinct from what is known. Or as C.S. Lewis argues, “The knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” We can subdue natural emotions and physical responses by reason. A natural stimulus ought to cause a certain affect, but if we reason not to allow that affect the stimulus response can be subverted. While being a part of nature, we can still reason about nature and affect nature by reason, but nature cannot reason about itself. Nature is not rational. It has no intelligence. How can un-rational nature produce something rational like reason?

Either we accept that reason is not really reason at all and merely an instinctual non-rational response to stimulus of our environment of which we have no control or we realize that something outside of the natural world exist which is Rational and Reasonable who endowed us with the ability to reason. Hence, if you deny God’s existence, you also deny your ability to reason about the world in a rational way. You then lose your ability to rightly communicate knowledge for reason is not based on anything rational and is therefore irrational.

C. S. Lewis explains that, “It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt, for, if you don’t, all thought is discredited. It is therefore obvious that sooner or later you must admit a Reason which exists absolutely on its own.”

Indubitably, the atheist will assert their reason and proclaim that since we have already come to the conclusion that it is impossible to argue against our ability to reason that some how evolution has transcended all logic and created in us the ability to reason about nature for it is unreasonable to believe otherwise. To that I would say that this would be a great miracle being attributed to a process of chance without being or rationality to bring it about. I think this would bring the skeptic to the unsupportable faith they accuse Christians of maintaining.

Maybe God’s existence is not so unreasonable after all. It would seem that without the Christian worldview the world lacks a standard on which to know anything for certain.