Editor's Note: This post is by Jeff Cook, pastor and author of Seven: The Deadly Sins and the Beatitudes. For more information about Jeff, visit his blog at www.everythingnew.org. Enjoy.
Bertrand Russell has a famous essay titled, Why I am not a Christian. Russell lived in a country made up predominantly of Christians. He sold himself as one of the intellectual elite of his day, and being an atheist, he provoked much questioning from his culture. In his essay, he gives no positive reasons for his own convictions, he simply lays out why the traditional arguments for God's existence fail, why Jesus teaching (though good in some spots) are not the best, and why on the whole theistic worldviews are archaic and lead people to commit moral horrors.
I am very different from Russell. I'm not one of the intellectual elite. And neither our country nor the university at which I teach desires the title Christian. But I write and study Jesus a great deal, and unlike many in my field—many in higher academics—I have decided to be a Christian.
I know the arguments against Christian truth claims as well as anyone at my university. I know the arguments for all sorts of positions fairly well, and I fall on one side, and what I am consistently struck by is how little intellect comes into anyone's decision to accept or reject their worldview, their paradigm, their philosophy ... their religion.
I certainly think there are good reasons to believe in God.
I am personally convinced by the cumulative force of the traditional arguments for a supernatural creator. The design argument, the cosmological argument, the argument from motion are fairly compelling to me. Add to them the fact that it is immensely difficult to justify reason, meaning, or objective value judgments without the supernatural and I think you have solid intellectual ground for some kind of belief in God.
This however, does nothing to lead one to become a Christian.
There are many forms of supernaturalism that are worthy of consideration, whether they be pantheistic systems in which I and everything else are a piece of the divine. Or deistic systems, which have a distant God, birthing our universe, who doesn't love, or desire, or really even care. Some of my friends and students hold to a neo-pagan understanding of the world. Some hold to an orthodox Jewish understanding. And I think those faiths are worthy of pursuit and have beautiful qualities.
I also understand and respect why someone would be an agnostic or committed atheist. In fact, in their own ways, these commitments can be as beautiful as any religious commitment when they move to create meaning and value from nothing. Certainly there can be courage, wisdom, and grace found in the atheistic vantage point.
Yet I affirm the Christian view of God, and I do this because when I look for the supernatural—when I seek to experience what is most central about being human—I consistently encounter Jesus.
I did my master's work on the divine hiddenness problem, and I still think it's the best reason to reject the Christian God, for if God is so interested in human being becoming his children, then giving evidence that each person would find compelling is something we should expect from God.
I don't think God has done that. And in some ways that bothers me. I have thought deeply on this problem for seven or more years, and I don't think there are very good reasons that say, "Well of course, this is why God hides." I believe in God, believe he desires to make each person into a child, and I think it is a deep mystery why he hides.
Mystery however is not always bad. In fact it is often in the mysterious that life is most raw and integrated. It is mysterious how the mind and soul interact with the physical brain. It is mysterious why human beings have a unique value over and above other living things. It is mysterious why love is more than chemical events in our skulls. It is mysterious why we exist and what purpose our lives have.
Mystery is where life takes place and it matters very little what philosophy you follow. The mysteries are there.
Wittengestien said that after all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Why? Because life is not about facts. Its about something bigger.
Blaise Pascal said the heart has its reason, which reason knows nothing of. For Pascal, knowledge was not simply about the intellect. Knowledge of reality was a holistic experience of his heart, and his body, as well as his mind. Reality was not something to be observed from a distance. It was something to be plunged into.
I often find the atheistic picture compelling. I am compelled by my empirical experiences to believe a tale about our world that says—it is just matter, and it is just motion, and anything beyond that is blind conjecture. I am compelled by the simplicity of materialism. It makes sense of why our world is so violent, so sex obsessed, so ego-centric. It makes sense of why the wicked thrive and the innocent suffer, and there is often no rhyme or reason to any of it. It makes sense of the history of man: our wars, our development, our confusions. And it makes sense of why God hides.
God hides because he really isn't there, [so says atheism].
And yet the naturalistic story, in my mind, does nothing to address mystery. It does nothing to address the problems where life is found. It simply sets them aside, or hacks them to pieces so severely that all the things I once valued—meaning, personality, love—are left in a bloody pile, reduced to chemical reactions and DNA.
Conversely, when I read about the life and particularly the death and resurrection of Jesus, for me, these are not simply Bible stories. They become the fulcrum around which all the most basic and pressing mysteries revolve and become glorious.
The problem of God's hiddenness is a real problem for me, until I make that step and say, I see God in the man hanging on that cross.
The problem of why human beings have value is real for me, until I embrace the reality that God has died for our sake.
The problem of the mind connecting with the physical brain is a real problem for me, but when I assume that the logos—God's reason at the core of reality—took on flesh and bone in the man Jesus, the mystery becomes glorious.
The problem of love being more than a chemical reaction is real for me, but when I believe God entered the created order—born in poverty, dying in disgrace, and considering it all worth it—love is no long one of the details experienced by a unique species, in this corner of the cosmos. Love becomes the central movement of the entire created order—because it is the movement of its Creator.
The existential problems of my existence and the purpose of life are real. The physical universe gives me no answers. After examining nature we ought to say alongside Jean Paul Sartre that we have been handed a life that is anxious, forlorn, and filled with despair (or as Pascal put it: wretched, alienated, and waiting for death). Yet when I look at God dying to rescue and restore a world gone wrong, the mystery of human purpose is again transformed.
The cross does not answer life's mysteries. That is far too easy. For me, Jesus on the cross gives shape to the mystery so that they are no longer terrifying. Now the mysteries are worth plunging into. They are worthy of sustained and thankful reflection. They are the place that life happens.
Technorati tags: atheism, author essay, Jeff Cook, Seven, divine hiddenness, Bertrand Russell, Christian, Christianity, Zondervan
Editor's Note: Look for devotions from Ann Spangler's books every week for the next few weeks. Todays devotion is from Praying the Names of God. 
