Last Friday we shared about the spiritual realm. On all things spiritual, we had a general empowering consensus. We believe that we are made up of spirit, soul and body. On this, we lack no biblical support. Read 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and you will discover that we are basically spiritual beings. 1 Corinthians 3:16 talks about us being the temple of God and God’s spirit dwells in us. And the defining scripture is 1 Corinthians 15 wherein we are told that we will one day be raised as spiritual being. There is therefore a wealth of scriptures on this point.
But to the rabid skeptic, using the bible for support is a non-starter. The bias is obvious. Christians using the scripture to support their case is like Hitler relying on Mein Kampf to support his case for anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy. For your info, Hitler wrote Mein Kamf. The voluminous book represents Hitler’s most perverted justification for the horrid war that he had started. So, the atheists and secularists rail at our scriptural justification of the spiritual realm. It is thus a lost cause to them to quote Ephesians 6:12 about principalities and power when the only power they see is scientific naturalism.
Simply, scientific naturalism is empirical proof or testable evidence of what you claim exists. If Christians tell them about faith, they want us to show it directly, or at least indirectly. They want tangible proof like proving electricity and subatomic particle. If Christians tell them about spirit and soul, they want us to demonstrate where such realm resides in our brain or heart. If Christians tell them about the real presence of God, they snort in utter disbelief. To them, God is definitely not provable and therefore, to speak of him as a real person is hallucinatory or at best, wishful thinking.
Can we convince the atheists that we are more than the sum of our parts? Can we persuade them to at least consider that our body, our brain, our heart are physical agent of our spirit? Let’s not kid ourselves. We cannot persuade them if persuading means presenting empirical, touchable, documented proof of all things spiritual. So, don’t waste time arguing with them - don’t insult your own intelligence.
Hebrew 11 already settled that debate long time ago. That passage states it beyond doubt that faith is beyond natural evidence. Faith is heart-felt; not scientific data. Faith is experiential; not empirical. Faith is personable; not verifiable. So, let us let dead dogs lie. Let’s move on to another type of “proof” I call personal relating. Last Friday, I shared a true account of a boy named Thomas. His story is related to us by a neurosurgeon from Harvard, Allan J Hamilton MD, who wrote the book “The scalpel and the soul”.
Thomas’ story is a tragic story. He met with an unspeakable accident when he was playing with friends. That accident changed him and his family forever. One day, he climbed up a high tension line to enjoy the city from atop. Unfortunately, he fell and his shirt got stuck in one of the high voltage towers. He then reached out to grab the power line. The moment he touched the power line, thousands of volts scorched his tiny body. Thomas shook convulsively and his clothes caught fire.
From there, he fell 100 feet down like a flaming meteorite. When the firefighters came, Thomas was burnt beyond recognition. Dr Allan described him as such, “Of Thomas, there remained little that was not burned. Only the usual small patches of intact skin remained in the axillae(armpit), groin, and the folds of certain joints. It seemed as if every bone had been broken. Nearly all the soft organs were damaged and bleeding. No one held much hope the boy could survive. Mercy dictated that dying might have been gentler.”
Thomas’ father couldn’t take the sight of his son’s body and suffered a heart attack. He died later. As for Thomas, the verdict couldn’t get any grimmer. He was practically a skinless little 10 year old. He desperately needed new skin to prevent infection in his bloodstream, which would lead to a terminal, sceptic coma. In a cruel twist of the plot, Thomas’ new skin was to be his late father’s. Dr Allan and his team then painstakingly slice off the skin of Thomas senior and quilted it onto Thomas junior. It was literally one skin for another. The skin harvesting and transplant were heart wrenching for Dr Allan to say the least.
At first, Thomas did not respond well to the operation. He was still in a critical condition. When all hope seemed to flicker, a nurse banged on Dr Allan’s office and stammered, “It’s Thomas…he’s…he’s trying to talk.” Dr Allan rushed to Thomas’ bedside and pulled a tube out of his mouth. Thomas’ first word was, “What happened to my father?” Dr Allan decided to lie. “Nothing has happened to your father, Thomas. He’s just fine.”
Thomas then replied that he saw his father. His father was just standing at the end of his bed. He even greeted his father and attempted to wave at him. It was one of those unexplained, unscientific moments that freaked out the hospital staff. When Thomas was told that his father had died three days ago, the boy said softly, “That must be his ghost then that’s waving back at me.”
The above is what I meant by “personal relating”. Looked at critically and rationally, there is no way to prove the account. Non-believers would dismiss it as anecdotal and sketchy. True, there is no way to prove that Thomas’ father appeared in a non-dimensional form to him that day. Just like there is no way to prove that Jesus resurrected as claimed in the Bible. Although most historians accept Jesus as a historical character, they reject his deity claim and his resurrection. Unless we can wind back time, none of us would be the wiser.
But to those skeptics out there, one must bear this in mind: the absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence. Just because there is no evidence verifiable by the skeptic to prove the existence of God doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our faith in it. There is just too much in this world that it is not knowable and it is just too much for anyone to say that what is not knowable does not exist.
At this point, I anticipate the atheist’s next question: Why not then suspend all belief until sufficient evidence for God is presented? This is what I call the agnostic’s default position. The atheist is basically saying: Be an agnostic and wait for God to show himself. My answer? God has already shown himself. “Proof” of His existence is everywhere.
Pastor Timothy Keller, who wrote the book, The Reason for God, called these proof “clues of God”. The clues are in how the universe came about, how the natural forces of gravity, electromagnetism and nuclear forces collaborated in a complex cosmic dance to birth earth, and how we “evolved” to be us. These are questions pointing to something more complicated than what science at the present moment can offer. Sir James Jeans once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” And we all know an idea comes from a thinker. The thinker, I propose, is God.
Using CS Lewis’ analogy, we can think about God as a playwright and we the characters in His play. It is therefore not possible for us as His characters to know all about the playwright. God can choose to reveal Himself by personal revelation but we cannot pop out of the pages of the script to study God in the same way epidemiologist study germs. In our physical bodies, our understanding is limited. We therefore have to accept this not from a position of ignorance but from a position of humility.
Another way to put it is to see God as the sun. Borrowing from CS Lewis’ words, he wrote “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
Pastor Tim explained it this way, “Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it. Here then we have a way forward. We should not try to look into the sun as it were demanding irrefutable proofs of God. Instead we should look at what the sun shows us.”
Therefore we can learn more about God from his word, from looking at his creation, especially studying how unique, special and different we are from all other creation. This is where I depart from the default position of agnosticism. Like the sun, God has shown me his reality not from a collection of conclusive proof but from an assortment of conclusive clues. And Thomas’ honest, unvarnished account of his sighting of his father is just one of those clues.
Let me end with this: God makes sense of it all. God makes sense of the birth of the universe. God makes sense of our coming about. God makes sense of why we feel, think and act the way we do. God makes sense of why we aspire, why we seek truth, why we yearn for meaning, and why we love. Apart from God, nothing explains it quite that well.
On this point, CS Lewis deserves another quote, “You can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.”
So, putting it singlishly, God is like kaya, He makes gardenia taste so good!
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