True North Christian Fellowship

Recently, a member asked me how best to respond to an unbeliever who asked, "How do we KNOW that God really exists?" This is a really difficult question because unbelievers don't "know" as we "know." Unbelievers don't have the Holy Spirit dwelling within to confirm God's Truth and unbelievers don't give credence to the Bible.

The first point to grasp is that unbelievers are blinded by the false god of this world (II Corinthians 4:4) and, as the Bible tells us in I Corinthians 1:21, the world has failed to find God by its wisdom. If the world is both "blinded" and unable to find God by its usual means of "knowing," what hope do we have to answer such a question.

I believe our only hope in such a situation is to immediately pray to the Holy Spirit for wisdom in answering the question. Rather than trying to "prove" God, we need to appeal to common experience. After all, since the days of John Dewey (U.S. philosopher at the end of the 19th and early 20th century), our society has believed that knowledge is inseparable from experience. What experience do most humans have in common?

Karl Rahner, the Catholic theologian, says that we all have the desire to be better than ourselves. Humans are never satisfied with what we are; we always aspire to be something more. Rahner believes that God gives us this desire to be something better as a way of calling us or wooing us toward God. I like this because there is no other animal that has the drive to do better, to be more, and to find meaning. So, I suggest that our human drive and aspiration points to something more.

Perhaps, more vitally, humans have a desire to be completed by another. I realize this is not "universal" in the sense that not everyone gets married, but even those who are confirmed bachelors or single women usually have that best friend forever or confidante that completes them. Most humans are also drawn to family. While the world can point to mating rituals as expressing the physical aspect of people wanting to be together, it doesn't really express the desire to have "someone who understands us." Only a committed relationship expresses this desire to have "someone who understands us." The Bible tells us that God is love and that we love because God first loved us. This in itself should stand as a reasonable proof for God's existence except for that blindness and inability for human wisdom to grab hold of it.

Yet, I truly believe that between the human desire to be more than one is and the human desire to have "someone who understands me" we have evidence of God Who calls us toward God's person, God Who is wooing us toward relationship. What more should we need?

Once, one could point to creation as evidence for God's existence, but the ways of "knowing" in today's empirical world (where God apparently has to play by their rules) allows one to accept "chance" and "chaos" as foundational for the existence of the universe. At one time, one could point to individual miracles experienced by various persons as evidence of God's intervention in the natural order and, by extrapolation, God's existence, but that doesn't work in a world where people speak of accident and coincidence--even when confronted with the mighty acts of God.

As a result, we can pray and we can share from the foundation I suggested. It may not be enough to convince the unbeliever, but at least it plants a seed---and Jesus told us that little bitty seeds make amazing bushes and trees.

Those are great points you made Pastor Johnny. It speaks out that we can't really "save" people. Only thing we can do is simply plant seeds and hope that God will use them. Thank you for the interesting article :)