The Doe of the Dawn: A Christian World View. . .No. 2

ONLY A CREATOR GOD MAKES SENSE OF THINGS

A child looks into the heavens through a powerful telescope and is moved with delight over the magnificence of the star-spangled sky. Endowed with childlike faith, he is not threatened by the imponderables. He has an answer, if he needs one, for the God his mother tells him of is behind it all. God hung the stars, he explains, so he moves along in a world that makes sense, even when it is inexplicable. In his simple way he accepts the universe as a gift to be enjoyed, and he doesn’t have to be bothered with too many answers.

An agnostic scientist looks through the same telescope at the same universe and is challenged to take control. He must explain what he sees, even if his answers are hypothetical. But he must not only explain what he sees, but manipulate it as well. He thinks only in naturalistic or scientific terms, never in transcendental or supernatural terms. The only “faith” he considers is whatever faith he may have in his methods. Unlike the child, he is not awed, only challenged. There is no God, no creator, in the drama, and so it makes no sense. But this he can never admit, for then he loses control. He must make sense of it, if not in one way then in another, and so he turns to what he calls science.

Scientific man, as contrasted to the man of faith (a scientist can of course be a man of faith), presumes sovereignty over nature, and so he becomes a creator of sorts, projecting upon the world the image he has of the world. Like the playwright that plots the story the way he wants it to go, the scientific man creates a world that he can explain. He has a manageable world in that it reflects the kind of world he sees it to be. But no such world exists, for there are yawning gaps between the world that he experiences and the world that lies beyond his experience. He seeks security for his future by manipulating the world, through such techniques as nuclear physics and bioengineering, only to be threatened with destruction by his own creations.

He presumes that the world was made for man rather than that man was made for the world. Man tries to force the universe to conform to his behavior, whether in the recesses of outer space or the vast domain of human genes, rather than conforming his behavior to that of the universe. Instead of allowing the heavens to declare the glory of a creator God, man uses the heavens to declare his own presumed glory.

This is the essence of secularistic humanism, which views man and the world strictly in naturalistic terms. It says that life is to be lived as if there is no God. Insofar as solving problems is concerned the idea of God is irrelevant. A secular humanist may not bother to deny the existence of God; he simply finds no place for God in his view of things. It is a kind of “beyond God” philosophy. It isn’t that God gets in the way. He is simply ignored as being beside the point. Consequently life holds no ultimate meaning. Life and death may be explained in terms of modern science and even dealt with in humanitarian ways, but they remain void of any real meaning. If man has no creator, he has no hope. This is why secularism, which is to live as if there is no God, begins and ends in futility. If our future lies only in our own power, through science and technology, we have no basis for hope. And life without hope means despair.

This was the philosophy the apostle Paul encountered in Athens with the Stoics and Epicureans. They were the secular humanists of their age, and while there were ennobling qualities to their thought, they saw man and the universe as transitory. The Epicureans insisted that whatever happens is but the whim of nature and that death ends everything. Pleasure should therefore be man’s chief end. Like the humanists of today, they believed that if there are any gods they are completely irrelevant to our kind of world. The Stoics were fatalists, basing their philosophy on the premise that life is determined by forces beyond man’s control. Man’s only response is to yield to those forces and not allow himself to become emotionally involved. While they spoke of God, he was but the spirit in the blind forces that have no discernible meaning. Everything ends in a grand conflagration, only to begin the mad process again.

This was the secularism of the most cultured nation on earth in Paul’s day, with the Epicureans naming pleasure, especially intellectual pleasure as the point of life, and the Stoics stressing apathy, an indifference even toward the tenderest of life’s experiences. Pleasure and apathy continue to be the main ingredients of secularism, a way of life that ignores any notion of God.

It is noteworthy that to such ones Paul spoke movingly of a creator God, “the God who made the world and everything in it.” The Greeks could tolerate the idea of God, even the notion that “In him we live and move and have our being,” as their philosophers had taught, of which the apostle reminds them, but not of a creator God who is “Lord of heaven and earth,” as Paul described him. It is only a creator God that can lay claim to Lordship over the universe and over every created thing.

Humanism has always been subtle in its disbelief. It often employs religious language, allowing for a “God” who is some sort of spiritual essence that may be equated with nature, and so we have pantheism, which makes everything “God,” including man. Or it may be called naturalism, which makes deity of Nature. It may even find place for a creator God so long as the deity removes himself from active duty and has no more to do with his creation once he has put it in motion, and so we have deism. It is all humanistic in that there is really nothing greater than man and nature insofar as the issues of life are concerned. If man is to be saved he must save. himself. Things like bioengineering, which may eventually attempt to control one’s existence from conception to the grave, are man’s only hope for meaning in this world. Not only behavior but character itself may one day be predetermined by genetic manipulation!

The idea of a God who created the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, and who is consequently Lord over nature and history and thus relevant to the very air man breathes is offensive to our secularistic age. As believers we look to a God who is both transcendent and immanent. While he created nature he is beyond it and distinct from it, thus transcendent. And yet he is in nature and in the world, being the arbiter of history and the guardian of all creation, and thus immanent.

All forms of atheism deny either the transcendence of God, as in pantheism, or the immanence of God, as in deism, or both, as in radical agnosticism. The true theist affirms both the God of creation and the God of history, the God who hears prayers and continues to work in our lives.

This is the God that Paul declared to the Athenians, who saw him as a mere babbler or a preacher of foreign divinities. The God who created the universe, Paul reasoned, cannot be housed in shrines built by man, for he gives to man life and breath. He not only created man but presides over the nations of men, “having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation.” Whatever God is like, the apostle insists, he cannot be represented by the artifacts of man, whether in gold, silver, or stone. Even more important, this God has revealed himself, commanding all men to repent, “because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man who he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

The belief that God created all things out of nothing gradually emerged in Biblical thought. While the very first verse of the Bible says that God created the heavens and the earth, there is reason to suppose that this refers to an ordering of the universe out of chaos or out of already existing matter. Even the Greeks could accept this in that they believed in the eternity of matter and that matter is constantly changing. They even believed there was a Logos at work in the “constant state of flux,” which explained the order of things.

While God is referred to as “maker of heaven and earth” as early as Gen. 14:19, it is centuries later before the prophets emphasize the doctrine of a creator God as part of their portrayal of a redemptive God. Until then the Hebrews were content to think of their God as one who was mindful of them as a people and who acted in history in their behalf. It was when the people were finally separated from their homeland and in exile among foreigners that a prophet arose who gave new meaning to belief in a creator God.

The one commonly referred to as “Second” Isaiah (chapters 40-55) taught his people who were crushed by the events of history that it is the creator God who is the God of history. It is a redemptive doctrine, one needed as much in our troubled world as in the days of ancient Israel. “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth,” the prophet told them. He went on to assure them that if they would “wait for the Lord” that the creator God would bear them on eagles’ wings back to their homeland (40:28-31). The prophet was persuaded that “men may see and know,” that they can make sense of things, when they realize that the God of Israel is the creator of all things (41:20).

Psa. 89:11 also gives us a basic principle for the living of these days: “The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine; the world and all that is in it, thou has founded them.” The principle of a creator God answers so many of our problems. Whatever doctrine we may have of evolution, what really matters is that the living, creator God is behind it all. This is the great truth that is to pervade every classroom. Whether it is the anatomist looking at the human body, the astronomer looking at the stars, the botanist looking at the plants, or the geneticist looking into the vast universe of the gene, this grand truth must serve as arbiter: Thou has founded them.

To deny the creator God places man in an impossible, hopeless position. He must conclude that order evolved out of chaos with no reason. His own mind, indeed all of life, just somehow happened to be. And he must accept the absurdity that intelligence came from non-intelligence. And his mission and destiny are in a universe of blind forces? His mission is meaningless and his destiny hopeless.

But if the creator God is his heavenly Father and has revealed his will for the living of these days, then he is heir to one of the greatest truths ever penned: If God is for us, who can be against us?

God made me and he is for me! It must be the heart of our world view. --- the Editor

Belief in and dependence on God is absolutely essential. It will be an integral part of our public life as long as I am Governor. - Ronald Reagan