God

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

Is there a God? How can we know? What evidence is there that God exists? Does it really matter one way or another? If there is a God, what is God like? These are the questions we'll consider in this chapter.

A Growing Rejection of "God"

In the last thirty years, an increasing number of people reject the idea that there is a God. This growth in atheism has brought with it a number of vocal and at times hostile "evangelists" who seek to demonstrate that belief in God is absurd, anti-intellectual, even dangerous, and that the world needs to be rid of it.

Steven Weinberg, a theoretical physicist and atheist, once noted that "the world needs to wake up from the long nightmare of religion. Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization." A host of others have taken up the challenge; people such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett are among the best known and most vocal advocates of this position.

To be honest, I understand their convictions. When certain Christians insist on reading the creation accounts in Genesis as science, and adding up the genealogies in the Bible asserting that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago, it is an affront to nearly every discipline of modern science. When Islamic extremists cry "God is great" as they detonate suicide bombs, it is easy to conclude that the problem is belief in God. When religious people study their scriptures and find commands that lead them to deny equality to women or to demonize gay and lesbian people, it is easy for the atheist to equate belief in God with injustice and ignorance. And these few examples don't begin to exhaust the reasons why people such as Weinberg have felt they were doing the world a favor by turning people away from God.

Is God, or belief in God, to be equated with anti-intellectualism, violence, and bigotry? Or would these very human impulses exist regardless of belief in God? After all, the officially atheist regimes under Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot burned books, imprisoned and slaughtered millions, and fostered their own forms of bigotry. God or no God, human beings will find reasons to oppress and kill one another. They will resist progress in ideas, justify their own prejudices, and act upon those prejudices.

Just as Christians or theists might hold their convictions with a bit of humility, recognizing that the facts leading them to their convictions might have other explanations, I believe atheists would do well to maintain a similar humility to the question of God. Einstein articulated this well when he stated that on the question of God, he maintained "the attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."

The God Christians Believe In

The Apostles' Creed begins, "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth." Christians believe there is a God, a Supreme Being, an Ultimate Reality that created the universe.

Many would be willing to use the term "God" when referring to the creative and powerful forces that gave rise to, and hold together, the universe as we know it — forces such as the mysterious "dark energy" of astrophysics. When Einstein referred to God, it seems to me that he was willing to use the word in such a way — not a personal being, but an impersonal power or force, or perhaps a mystery of science yet unsolved. Yet Christians perceive God not simply as a force of nature, but as an entity, a Being, that is both intelligent and powerful.

Max Planck, the brilliant theoretical physicist and father of quantum theory, captured part of this idea in a 1944 speech in which he said, "All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter." Planck, a Nobel Laureate, did not see his work in the field of quantum mechanics as incompatible with his Christian faith. Sustaining and holding the universe together was an almighty force that was both "conscious" and "intelligent."

George Lemaître, a Catholic priest and cosmological physicist, was perhaps best known as the father of the Big Bang theory. He championed the idea that the universe had a beginning, a day on which it was born. His theory of cosmic expansion pointed backward to "a day when there was no yesterday." Lemaître did not see this idea as proof of God's existence, but he did seem to recognize that his theory, now widely accepted, made it intellectually possible to reconcile faith and science.

There are many scientists who believe that science and faith are incompatible, but many others throughout history have believed, and continue to believe, that the two are not mutually exclusive. During the "scientific revolution" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, some of the leading luminaries were Christian believers — people such as Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, and Galileo, who, despite the church's blunder in criticizing his conclusions, continued to maintain his faith in God.

My point is that, despite frequent statements by some scientists that science and Christian faith are incompatible, there are numerous other scientists who have played significant roles in the advancement of knowledge and whobelieved in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.

Christians believe that God is the creative force, the power, the source from which everything that exists derives its existence and upon which all that exists is contingent.

We see this idea in the name by which God reveals himself to Moses in Exodus 3:13-14. There God speaks to Moses in the midst of the wilderness of Sinai. A voice speaks from a burning bush. God calls Moses to lead the children of Israel, slaves in Egypt, to freedom and the Promised Land. Moses, who lives in a polytheistic world, says to the voice, "[The Israelites] are going to ask me, 'What's this God's name?' What am I supposed to say to them?" In other words, Moses is asking, "Of all the many deities people worship, which one are you?" In response,

God said to Moses, "I Am Who I Am. So say to the Israelites, 'I Am has sent me to you.'"

This phrase, I Am Who I Am, is in Hebrew a wordplay on the proper name Yahweh (or Jehovah), usually rendered in English Bibles as LORD. What kind of name is I Am? I believe that God is revealing himself to Moses, and through Moses to Israel, as being itself, the source of all that is, from which everything that is has come to be and continues to be.

Here's where theology and physics might meet. Physicists speak of fundamental forces (strong, weak, gravity, and electromagnetic) that are responsible for...