God Is Real. Here’s Proof.
I’m often asked by my irreligious friends how I, an otherwise intelligent and learned person, can also believe in the existence of God and also how I can possibly believe that Jesus Christ is both God’s Son and mankind’s salvation. I don’t take umbrage at the questions. After all, we’ve been taught – in school, in society and in the popular media – that the existence of God and the practice of logic and reason are mutually exclusive. This slow divorce of reason from the logic of God has been an element of neoliberal thought for well over 150 years. What was once an edgy, cool philosophical theorem primarily examined and debated on the most respected campuses made its way into the public consciousness by the beginning of the 20th century. By the 21st century, it was no longer cool or edgy – it had become accepted dogma, even among most of the religious, that logic and religion were non simpatico.
I was not immune to the modern doctrine. As I pursued my Baccalaureate degree in the sciences, it was only strengthened. Like most of us, I didn’t question the infallibility of idea that science and “mysticism” can not co-exist. And as I gravitated further towards the “rational” world, the religious world, the world of “mysticism,” became something not only to be ignored but shunned.
As Christians, we’re admonished to “take it on faith” that God exists and that despite our failings, he loves us enough to have sacrificed his own Son for our salvation. A powerful message, yes, but also pretty mystical as usually presented. This is largely because the majority of Christians fail to understand the actual meaning of faith. Yes, it is about belief (as explained by the apostle Paul, faith “is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” [Heb 11:1]) and when we begin talking about things we can’t see, that gets pretty mystical. But faith is not belief in the absence of evidence, nor is it belief in spite of contrary evidence. The New Testament is replete with stories of people who came to faith though knowledge and who used logic, reason and contemporaneous thinking to increase not only their faith but that of those around them. Perhaps the most famous of these is that of “Doubting Thomas,” who did not believe that the Christ had returned after his crucifixion.
I’ll leave out how my personal journey back to sanity and away from the secular commenced. Not because I don’t think it’s an interesting story, but simply for brevity’s sake. But 27 years ago when I began looking for the real meaning to life, rest assured I used every bit of the classic liberal education I received earlier to answer the question, “Is God real?” Not unlike Thomas, I wasn’t looking for absolute, irrefutable proof of His existence. Rather, I was searching for something that any reasonable person could look at as proving God lives.
The elegance of the answer is in its very simplicity. We can know God lives because every religious philosophy has, at it’s core, one tenet. In Christianity, we refer to it as the Golden Rule and it can be found in every religion, current and past, all over our planet. From the Brahmans to the Zoroastrians, EVERY religion espouses that the purest way to demonstrate their teachings is to love our fellow humans as we love ourselves.
Is this incontrovertible proof? Perhaps not. But consider this: over the thousands of years humans have walked the Earth, we’ve rarely found the capacity to agree on anything. We’ve fought, argued, warred over far less important topics. Yet, even in our ancient history, when scattered to the four corners with virtually no contact, our ancestors all came up with the same central religious philosophy? Perhaps someday, a statistician will run the numbers and give us the probability of that happening on its own. The odds, I imagine, will be astronomical. But with a spark of divine guidance, the odds suddenly become not astronomical but likely.
So, the proof God lives? It is as complex as quarrelsome nature and as simple as our belief that the highest goal is treating everyone with respect.
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