Who is God?

The way you answer that question impacts the way you are living your life. It impacts not only the individual, but your relationships, and eventually society as a whole. It’s not hard to prove this point. If you believe there is no God, you will live a certain way, as if God, His ways, and His existence doesn’t matter. And if you believe God and His will is vitally important and relevant to life, you will live another way. Either way, you can see that how we think about God is relevant to our entire society and life. How much more relevant would it be that God actually exist or not exist? That He actually has a perfect moral standard, and that Jesus really is the Son of God, the only one who can fill that standard on our behalf?

But how can we know the mind of God? It is popular today to think that no matter what we “decide for ourselves” to believe about God, we can’t know it for certain, so we must just “do our best” according to our own standards of good. Then God will just forgive our moral failure to meet His standards. But on whose authority is this opinion based? Is it in fact true? Or is it true that God is Yahweh as described in the Bible who “will by no means clear the guilty?” (Ex 34:7)

On what authority would you base your beliefs about God? Your opinions? Feelings? Experiences? Sort through the confusion and consider how you know who anyone is. Unless they reveal to you what is on their mind, you can’t know it. So are there, for example, reliable documents which God has had transmitted to us to do just that, revealing these very things? Yes. Test the Bible and see.

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. For since the message declared by angels proved to be reliable, and every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution, how shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord [Jesus], and it was attested to us by those who heard… (Hebrews 2:1-3 ESV)

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Evidence Speaks (Part Two). Or Seeing What We Wanna See.

How do we know if we are fooling ourselves? People see what they want to see, right? In order to check your views for self-deception or lack thereof, you might have to go through the process of looking at the evidence that led you to believe the position you’ve taken (in other words examine the reasons you have for your belief. A reminder of clues, so to speak). But perhaps also as important would be to evaluate the doubts themselves and the beliefs behind those doubts as well. Maybe your doubts are a creeping form of self-deception. What kinds of tests might we then give our beliefs?

A belief should probably not be entirely a result of wish fulfillment. But wishful thinking alone should not count as a trump card against a belief as even good news occasionally works against what we’d desire. Believing something because it is what you want to believe may be a bad reason to believe something is true, but it has no bearing on the matter of whether it is truth or falsehood whatsoever. Also, if someone produces evidence to the contrary of your belief, a truth seeking person would have to deal with that evidence. Is it valid evidence? Does it fit with your belief or does it significantly challenge it? Are you finding it easy to just ignore inconsistencies or cram in beliefs that don’t fit naturally together? Are you holding on to it only because of feelings or cultural tradition or because it works to explain reality? Is it just a system, or does it reflect truth at its core? Are we dismissing evidences one by one without looking at the big picture that each has been pointing to? Are you working to fit to reality or fitting reality to you?

This is one way of looking at the problem (examining reasons or evidential support), but it lacks one thing that philosopher Alvin Plantinga has called a “properly basic belief.” For example, we don’t always need evidence to know or believe something rationally. Not many of us need evidence to know properly that our parents are really our parents. Dr. William Lane Craig says it this way, “There’s a big difference between knowing Christianity to be true and showing it to be true.” He goes on to say the believer and seeker alike can know Christianity is true because of experiences with the “self-authenticating witness of God’s Spirit” (Reasonable Faith p34, 1st ed). So the ultimate proof of God’s existence is God himself interacting in our lives. The rest is showing it to be true through arguments that reveal God’s existence is highly probable. Ultimately, the relationship is the deciding factor, and though this may sound arbitrary and cult-like, it makes sense when discussing any other kind of relationship. The way we know the person is because we know the relationship is real. Because God is real and he is really interacting with at least some of us, then we can know he is real. Even while some or many of us are not “hearing” from God (hypothetically speaking) we should be able to listen to those through whom he speaks. The ultimate proof for something’s existence is actually their existence, witnessed in some way by our senses (not merely our physical five senses but also our mental and spiritual ones). This interaction of the Holy Spirit with us is one very direct way of witnessing God’s existence. Dr. Craig relates his point of the “self-authenticating” evidence of the Spirit to an innocent man on trial who is found guilty. Though the verdict and evidence were wrong, reason convicted him, but this doesn’t change that the man knows he’s innocent by his own reasoning. He doesn’t need external evidence to prove his own innocence. His correctly perceived experiences confirm it. So what happens if we aren’t correctly perceiving our experiences? How do I know if I’m filled with the Spirit or just hopped up on caffeine? To be continued. . .

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