God is Life

Have you ever stood atop a mountain, and been stopped by a breath-taking view. Why does this happen? What draws us to gaze at a star-filled sky? What makes it inspiring? Oxford professor, Alister McGrath, suggests the reason we find our hearts drawn beyond ourselves in these situations, is that creation has been designed for this very purpose. “Maybe the spectacle of the night sky is meant to trigger off such patterns of reflection within us.” McGrath further points out that we seem to have been created to ask questions – to try to make sense of what we see around us and how we fit into the greater scheme of things. What if the sense of longing and yearning that is evoked by the night sky is meant to lead us on a voyage of discovery? What if nature is studded with clues to our true meaning and destiny, fingerprinted with the presence of God? Has God planned the heavens to lift our hearts and minds beyond ourselves? Are the mountains there to reflect his majesty, the oceans to model his grandeur?

It comes as a surprise to many that the Bible answers these questions quite plainly, “. . . what may be known about God is plain to them, for God has made it plain. For ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature can be clearly seen. They are perceived in the things God has made.” (Romans 1:19,20) The appropriate place to begin relating to God is as our Creator.

The Bible opens with a vivid portrayal of God as our Creator, the author and source of life. In fact, he is the Creator of everything. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)

John Dickson reflects on the idea of creation: “While some religious believers attempt to prove that God exists, many Christian philosophers are content simply to affirm that God’s existence explains the universe we live in better than God’s non-existence. How so? A universe that ‘banged’ into existence with sophisticated and elegant laws of physics already in place (as cosmologists remind us) is more likely to be the result of a great ‘Mind’ than a big accident.” Cosmologist Stephen Hawking: “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like a Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”

Why would Hawking make a statement like this? Possibly because there are logical difficulties in assuming that something with a random beginning could become inherently ordered. Random causes produce random results. As Edwin Conklin, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University said, “The probability of life being created by accident can be likened to the chance that a set of encyclopaedias would spontaneously form as the result of an explosion in a printing factory.”

Dickson continues, “Add to this the fact that this universe eventually produced beings like us, with minds that can grasp these laws and the accident theory seems even less satisfying. In short we have just the sort of universe you’d expect if there is a creator behind it and the kind of universe you could never expect if there isn’t. This does not prove God’s existence, but it goes some way towards explaining why, without proof, most people throughout history have believed in some sort of God.”