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Aren’t Christians just frightened of death?

It’s a little odd, isn’t it, when you listen to someone who has the temerity to tell you the reasons you believe what you do. I mean… how would they know? They are not you. So let me confess that I find it a little galling when atheist opinion leaders try and tell me the reason I am a Christian – and then portray that reason as something pathetic and rationally vacuous.

Bertrand Russell, arguably the leading exponent of atheism in the early 20thcentury, played this game. In his lecture, “Why I am not a Christian,” given to the National Secular Society in 1927, Russell said that people believe in God fundamentally because of their fear of death. This is a familiar stick Christians are beaten with, and it is, of course, a fallacy; a fiction designed to make atheists feel both superior and comfortable in their narrative.

How on earth would Russell and the legions of atheistic opinion leaders know why Christians believe? It is as cheeky as inviting a baker’s apprentice to give an opinion on nuclear physics. The reality is: an atheist is experientially ignorant of the transforming reality of God in a person’s life. Almost always, they are also crassly ignorant concerning the historical evidence for Jesus Christ, and what Christianity has to say about the big issues of life, such as suffering.

So, just in case there are a few “Bertrand Russells” reading this, may I share the reasons why I am a Christian?

It is not primarily because of fear. It was because I encountered the love story of a God who pursues me with relentless grace. It is the story of a God who died on a cross to pay the price for all the dumb things I’ve done that would disqualify me from his presence.

Secondly: I was prompted to look at the possibility of God because our universe exists with a level of “fine tuning” (to a degree of many, many trillionths) that has allowed intelligent life to develop. To not ponder the possibility of God is to believe that everything came from nothing, as a result of nothing – which, I submit, is irrational.

There is an ache in the human soul that is divinely given. This ache is not fear. It is the discomfort that comes from feeling you don’t yet fit where you were meant to fit. It is an ache for meaning, morality and hope that is as restless as a compass needle until it finds true north.

I pray that you find that “north.”

Finally; let me admit to being guilty of one aspect of fear – to the type of fear often referred to in the Bible. It is a fear that more accurately can be defined as reverence, respect and awe. Personally, I think such reverence is entirely appropriate when faced with the reality of a holy God who dreamed you into being… and who invites you to be part of his eternal adventure.

Mutton birds, God and Christmas

Because of the generosity of some very special people, Mary and I were able to spend ten days on Lord Howe Island. Lord Howe Island is a majestic place and a gentle place. It is kind to writers.

Whilst I was there, I came across the Mutton Bird. Now, here’s the mystery. The adult Mutton Birds lay their eggs and raise the chicks until they can look after themselves. The adults then fly off to Japan. The chicks fly off some time later when they are stronger. And without any parent to follow, they too fly to Japan.

You’ve got to be amazed, haven’t you? How do they do it? Is the information in the DNA?

When I was at university studying biology, it was thought that some information might be contained within the cytoplasm of a living cell. Goodness knows what theories exist today. But one thing is for certain; there are a lot of mysteries in our remarkable world.

But we don’t invent God to explain mystery. That is to constrain God into a being we invent to fill in the gaps of our knowledge… a gap which contracts when we learn more about science. So, no. Rather, we know about God because he chose to reveal himself to us.

The biggest mystery that has exercised the mind of humanity is whether the cosmos is the result of a monstrous fluke working on eternally existing particles; or whether the cosmos shows signs of design. In other words: does God exist, or not?

It was a mystery… and it remained a mystery until God came to town.

When Jesus came to Earth that first Christmas, we saw God in human form… and God was no longer a mystery. God was “with us”, which is what the word “Emmanuel” literally means. He came to share our life of pain, and to pay the price for our sins that would otherwise separate us from God. And in doing so, he gave us a hope that lay beyond pain and beyond death.

“Cancel culture” has, sadly, become endemic in our society. It is one of the nasty results of us letting our Christian culture fall to the ground. So here’s my challenge to you: Don’t cancel Christ this Christmas. If you do, what’s left to celebrate? A happy holiday? Are you really content to disempower Christmas so much, that all it means is a pause from routine work and an excuse to overindulge?

That, I submit, sounds pathetic when held against the love story of the Galilean.

So, I invite you to rejoice in God’s love and lordship this Christmas. Why? Because God has no desire to cancel you.

Black holes, God and you

Come with me “to the dark side,” to the world of black holes.

Cosmologists tell us that black holes will eventually gobble up all material matter in the universe. This means that the only things that will be left in the universe will be black holes. The question is: do black holes then become the eternal prison for all the information of the universe? 

As it turns out, it would seem that the information in black holes is not lost. Stephen Hawking has shown that black holes are not completely black. They glow slightly with radiation (which has been labelled, ‘Hawking radiation’). This means that black holes slowly lose mass, erode and die over a period of trillions of years. Hawking suggests that the information that has been swallowed by the black hole is radiated back out into the universe, or even to another universe. So, as the English cosmologist, Brian Cox, says: “it would seem that black holes are not tombs, but gateways.”[i]

It is significant that the language of scientists is now sounding remarkably theological. Here are two more quotes from Brian Cox.

Black holes tell us that our intuitive understanding of space and time are wrong, and that a deeper reality exists…

Space and time are not fundamentally a property of nature. They emerge from a deeper reality in which neither exists.[ii]

These words cast a shadow over the thinking of ‘materialist reductionists’ who reduce humanity to ‘materials’ and say there is nothing more that makes humans significant. It seems that scientists are now whispering theological truth to us!

Another intriguing thing to emerge from the study of black holes is that evidence it gives for the interconnectedness of reality. (This was something also hinted at by ‘quantum entanglement’.) Scientists are suggesting that information contained within a half eroded black hole becomes the ‘same place’ as distant information emitted eons earlier through Hawking radiation.[iii]If this confuses you, you are in good company. The exact mechanism of this is currently baffling scientists and is still being worked out.

So, where does this leave us?

If we have dispensed with space-time as the fundamental reality and have replaced it with ‘information,’ that is highly significant. Information is not random chaos. It is something that is ordered. This suggests that at the heart of reality is order… and that begins to sound a lot like ‘Mind’.

So, here’s the question: Does this deeper reality have a divine origin? Is this deeper reality God?

Brian Cox would say, quite rightly, that deeper reality may be natural, not supernatural. Certainly, no one can rightly posit God just because they have reduced reality to information. To do that is to fall into the discredited thinking of inventing a ‘God of the gaps.’ But what we can say is that the discovery of a deeper reality beyond space-time is totally consistent with theistic belief.

Wahoo!

[i]     Brian Cox, The Universe with Brian Cox(film), Series 1, Episode 4, “Heart of Darkness: Black Holes,” 2021 (see: 41 – 50 minutes). https://view.abc.net.au/video/ZW3171A004500

[ii]     Ibid.

[iii]     Ibid.

Evidence of God

God is not “on trend” at the moment. He’s been banished from biology by Darwin, and pronounced dead by the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. If this were not enough, he’s been discredited by the disunity and abuses that have occurred within fallible church institutions tasked with representing him.

Despite this, there remains a troublesome concept, which – although largely dispensed with by modern philosophers – is still appealed to by those working in the hard sciences… and that is the notion of truth.

Scientists rely on scientific truth, and the cosmos being both ordered and rational to do their work. It’s worth remembering that the universe is under no obligation to be rationally understandable, but remarkably, it is. So, do we shrug with indifference or is this significant?

There are four forces that build the universe. Two of them are the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force. If the ratio of the relative strengths of these two forces had differed by one ten-thousand trillion-trillion-trillionth… there would be no life on planet Earth. (That staggering statistic is just one of a number that suggests that out universe has been very finely tuned so as to allow life.)  Again: should we shrug with indifference, or do we ask if this is significant?

As physicists look at the cosmos, they are discovering that it is constructed in way that suggests there was an intent that it be understood. The universe is built along mathematical lines – and not just any sort of mathematics. When mathematicians see that an equation for a foundational law of physics that is ugly, they know it is wrong. The mathematics of the cosmos, it seems, is both beautiful… and of a very high order.

The English physicist Paul Dirac (the man who discovered the positron) said: “God is a mathematician of a very high order, and he used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.”[i] In saying this, he was echoing a conviction of Galileo who said:

Philosophy is written in the grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics.[ii]

So, again, may I ask: Do we shrug with indifference on learning this, or is this significant?

Let me now take you a little way down the crazy rabbit hole that is quantum physics – the physics of particles that are smaller than an atom. In this microscopic world, the normal laws of physics don’t apply. In quantum physics: a subatomic particle collapses from a “cloud of probability” into a solid particle only when it is observed. If this doesn’t sound absurd to you, it should! We are saying that a sub-atomic particle doesn’t actually exist as a tiny bit of matter. It exists only as a cloud of potential. And this cloud of potential only collapses into a tiny bit of matter when an intelligent mind watches it.

This characteristic seems to point to the existence of consciousness. One of the scientist making this claim is the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Eugene Wigner. He says: “Study of the external world leads to the conclusion that contents of consciousness are the ultimate reality.”[iii]John von Neumann (also a Nobel prize-winning physicist) shares this view. He says: “All real things are contents of consciousness.”[iv]

It appears that empirical truth being uncovered by quantum physics is pointing to God. Do we shrug with indifference, or do we take note?

If all these empirical truths don’t result in you taking the existence of God seriously, then I submit that you are just falling back into wilful atheism – and there is not much that anyone can do about that.

So what can we say to conclude? Perhaps this: Whilst trendy philosophers in the humanities departments of our universities have given up on the notion of truth, those engaged in the hard sciences have not… and what they are discovering suggests that science gives very real reasons to believe in God.

[i]     Paul Dirac, (May 1963). “The Evolution of the Physicist’s Picture of Nature, Scientific American. Retrieved 4 April 2013.

[ii]     Galileo GalileiIl Saggiatore, quote translated by R.H. Popkin in (The Philosophy of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 65.

[iii]     Eugene Wigner “Remarks on the Mind-Body Question,” pp. 171-174 in Symmetries and Reflections, Bloomington: IN, Indiana University Press, 1967), 171.

[iv]     John von Neumann, in Keith Ward, Is Religion Irrational?(Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2011), 21.

Is Christianity true?

The reason people don’t accept God’s love and lordship are many and varied. Not all of them are rational.

The real issue concerning Christianity is this: “Is it true?” Nothing else really matters. If God really has revealed himself through Jesus Christ, then God is worthy of our full commitment. If God has not; then Christianity is not worthy of anything.

So, let me say again: The real issue is – “Is it true?”

If people are so wedded to their need to live autonomously from God that they refuse to investigate whether Jesus is true, then there is little anyone can do. That is simply wilful atheism… and it is not rational.

But for those who dare to seek; their quest is to find an answer to the question: Is it true? From this, it follows that discarding Christianity because of abuses committed by the church in history – is irrelevant to the question.

Discarding Christianity because the church once treated you poorly is similarly irrelevant to the central question. Meeting religious people whom you judge to be hypocritical is also irrelevant.

A desire to fit in with society’s atheistic opinion leaders, who tell you that God is not ‘on trend’ – is avoiding the more pertinent question: Is it true?

Whether or not you believe you can live a moral life without being a Christian is also irrelevant to the question.

To be perfectly honest, I am not greatly interested in whether or not you say, “being a Christian is boring and inconvenient to your lifestyle”; the issues is whether or not it is true.

If the love-story of the Christian gospel is historically and rationally true, then it is worthy of your full commitment. But if you wilfully choose to hide from the truth in a cave of ignorance – justifying your position with lazily held clichés… then that, I submit, is culpable behaviour.

Over and against that sort of behaviour stands the historical Jesus… and a universe of unimaginable wonder – if you choose to look up.

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