Apologetics 4 - Naming the Mystery

The title of this post is somewhat misleading but it speaks to the difficulty of making a positive case for the existence of God. I don’t mean to simply categorize all of the mystery inherent within human experience and then apply the name ‘God’ to it but an apologetic interest in the question doesn’t really allow for the option of appealing to the Bible to make the case.

Those who have followed my train of thought thus far will not be surprised to discover that ‘proof’ (understood in the language of rationally guaranteed certainty) is not something that is available to us on this question so the issue becomes how to describe how faith in God illuminates or explains reality more plausibly than the alternatives.

The book I am using for this course is C. Stephen Evans’ Why Believe? and in it he points to three fundamental mysteries that point toward the reality of God. These mysteries are the mystery of existence, the mystery of moral order and the mystery of human personhood. None of these are original approaches to the question but they are, in my opinion, persistent reminders that there is more to be explained than cause-effect relationships, that there are genuine ’signals of transcendence” that point beyond reductionist explanations of reality.

The mystery of existence can be summarized concisely as the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is easy for us to imagine that things it could have been otherwise, that the brute fact of existence itself is something that cries out for explanation. This mystery is felt even more acutely as science has revealed how astronomically improbable a universe like ours is and what the odds against there being creatures like ourselves actually are.

The mystery of moral order has been a cornerstone doctrine Christian apologists, from C.S. Lewis’ ‘Law of Human Nature’ to N.T. Wright’s ‘echo of justice’. Again, the mystery is quite simple: why is that we feel a sense of ‘ought’ when it comes to our (or more tellingly others’) behaviour.

In contrast to the ‘laws of nature’ which are descriptive of how things really behave, the Law of Human Nature points to how we should behave and this fact, for many, points beyond itself to a transcendent source. There are, of course, persistent efforts being made to explain this moral impulse in other ways but these seem to be attempts to avoid the uncomfortable conclusions that biological determinism seems to point toward.

The mystery of human personhood is in many ways deeper and more profound than either of the previous two. Most of intuitively recoil at a suggestion like Francis Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis that “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

This mystery is sometimes talked about in the language of ‘consciousness’ but it encompasses all of the things that Crick appears to be explaining away above. It would also cover the unique ability that we have to transcend ourselves, to be self-aware and to freely choose between a course of options with an imagined future in mind. How do we explain these realities that are so obvious to most of us that we rarely stop to ponder them?

Lewis comments in Mere Christianity that the better ’stuff’ a thing is made of the greater its capacity for good and the greater its capacity for evil. The human race has provided ample evidence to back up this claim. We alone are capable of awe-inspiring heroism, artistic wonder and acts of selflessness. We alone are capable of barbaric cruelty and soul-crushing inhumanity and violence.

To summarize these three mysteries, consider the following three questions: Where are we? How are we? Who are we? The answers to these questions, from the perspective of faith in the Christian God, is that we find ourselves in a world God made, with a built-in knowledge of goodness and evil as a result of being created in image of God.

We are obviously nowhere near associating the God who accounts for these mysteries with the God revealed in Jesus Christ but this is a bit of a look at how some of the basic questions that all of us confront can be approached from the perspective of Christian belief.