In the past several installations of this column we have addressed the holy Scriptures, what they are and what they mean for the faith of Jesus. Although there is no shortage of questions we could still ask regarding the Bible, let us now turn to reason on another question, one that is just as important as our prior questions: Is it illogical to believe in God, specifically the God of the Bible?
No. It is not illogical. If fact, it is only logical to believe in God. That being said, there are far too many features of this issue to fully address here. Thus, I will only reason for the logical existence of God from one of the classic arguments — the moral argument.
There are many strong arguments for the logical existence of God. The modal ontological and teleological arguments being two of the best, as they argue for the existence of God from the “necessity” of God and the finetuning of the universe, respectively. But they are complicated and not very personal. Actually, we could go our entire day and not have a single situation that would prompt us to philosophize on the necessity of God from the makeup of reality.
Throughout your day today, however, you will be presented with an extraordinary number of situations in which you will need to make a moral decision. Have you ever stopped to ponder were the objectivity of your morality comes from? It is something we all feel and know instinctively. It is personal.
We know the difference between right and wrong, and desire to be right and to be good. And while we may not always agree what the right thing to do in any given situation, we all know the right thing to do is the right thing to do.
And, when we do wrong (and know it), we even try to cloak what we have done in the wrong under the disguise of being right or for good reasons.
Truly, mankind is bound to this fact of our morality. And because so, many have called it “the natural law.” Only the centrality of a creator God can account for such a natural and objective law of morality in mankind’s heart. Therefore, is not illogical to believe in God. The existence of God is, truly, the only answer there could be.
But, like I said above, the moral argument is more than just the strictness of law, it is personal to us. It knows us on a personal level and beckons of another person we ought to know personally, the one that is the source of not only our desire to do right but all things that are right. This is God.
And He acted in the greatest form of love that we can possibly imagine, to lay down one’s life for a friend’s life (John 15:13). The Bible tells us that this is what Jesus Christ did on the cross for our redemption. God acted personally in love towards us, and this love was nailed to a cross. The love of God is the centrality of our morality. “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)
C.S. Lewis, the Christian apologist and lecturer of literature at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, known popularly for his series of children’s novels The Chronicles of Narnia, considered the simplicity and personality of this divine love in a poem entitled “Love’s as Warm as Tears.”
In this poem, Lewis describes love first “as warm as tears,” second “as fierce as fire,” third, “as fresh as spring,” and lastly “as hard as nails.”
Love is like nails — firm, unwavering, and true. Love, like nails, holds all morality together (Mark 12:31); as love, Himself, was held in nails on the cross. God loves you. He bore nails of love for you.
