How Do You Know God is Real?
Dear Wake Up Family:
We are perplexed today by the tremendous state of change in the United States. It is clear that our culture and values are being assailed. The overt effort to promote and embrace perversion is, at its core, an attack on our nation. The result is that the founding Christian principles that once made our country cohesive and secure as a nation are no longer upheld, undermining its moral conscience. Today, up is down, white is black, good is bad, and wrong is right. The delusion of it all convinces me that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s statement was prescient, Man has truly forgotten God.
But what led to it, and when did it start? It didn’t happen overnight. It couldn’t have. People would have vehemently resisted had the change not been gradual. It’s my personal belief that the seeds of religious skepticism and moral subjectivism were sown long ago with the slow-growing idea that God doesn’t exist. The Devil is the master of gradualism; and one of his greatest avenues of doubt has been that the Genesis account of creation is a tall tale.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published a book titled “On the Origin of Species” detailing his theory of evolution. Wikipedia says that “by the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. Darwin’s scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.” The word fact means a thing is certain or proven.
When I read that entry, my first thought was, how does a philosophical theory become acceptable on a scientific basis? The idea that something could accidentally derive from nothing is not sound; there is nothing scientific about that. In fact, its whole premise is utterly unscientific. Science insists that controlled methods be used to verify and prove its propositions. It also demands other scientists arrive at the same conclusions and results under identical conditions. Evolution doesn’t pass this test. Then why is it embraced? When science begins to deal in theories rather than demonstrable proof, something is being covered up or denied. Recent events shine the light of truth on that statement.
Albert Einstein once said, “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.” Yet here we are. Historically, no one witnessed what took place billions of years ago, so how could the big-bang theory be scientific? Evolution is simply speculation of how life’s origin might have happened. I have no problem with philosophy. If evolutionists want to investigate and speculate on how things could have taken place, I don’t object to that. But when speculation is presented as fact, I vigorously object.
Besides, if life did evolve slowly from the simple to the complex, there should certainly be far more intermediate forms than the fixed species we see. So how can Darwin’s theory be credible when everything continues to reproduce only after its kind, exactly as God decreed in the Book of Genesis?
The Bible says, “Then God said, ‘Let the earth produce every sort of animal, each producing offspring of the same kind—livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and wild animals.’ And that is what happened. God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.’ So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.’ ” (Genesis 1:24–28)
One of my nieces once asked me how I knew God was real. I took her outside, had her look up at the night sky, and asked her to conceive of the complexity and orderliness of something so vast happening by accident. As another example, I asked her if she believed leaving some paint, a few brushes, and a canvas in a room could spontaneously produce a priceless masterpiece if left unattended long enough. I then asked her if she thought the raw materials that make an automobile could, over time, miraculously come together as a car without an intelligent and skilled designer. Her answer was of course, No.
Now, I’m not an engineer, but I know that each of the examples above is produced with great skill and expertise. Evolutionists, on the other hand, would have you believe that not only did the raw materials come together as a car by happenstance, but then the car eventually transformed itself into an airplane! Such a narrative is preposterous—and we all know that. Only an intelligent designer could create such intricate and marvelous objects. In fact, many of the world’s greatest feats of engineering have been performed by brainless insects and spiders. Where did they get the know-how? I once read an article detailing how engineers still study beavers to learn how to construct better dams. How could a beaver inherently know what mankind has to study for years to grasp?
It all boils down to believing our eyes and combining it with faith. If we know what we see has to have a designer, we can believe the Bible’s account and our faith will accept God as the Creator. If we reject that idea, we will eventually doubt that God exists at all and choose the manmade theory that life’s origin began by accident. Incidentally, Wikipedia also notes that “in 1851 Darwin was devastated when his daughter died. By then, his faith in Christianity had dwindled, and he had stopped going to church.” Perhaps Satan used this tragedy to plant a seed of doubt.
As moral accountability diminishes in the world, more and more proof is demanded that God exists. Once upon a time, most of mankind was too ashamed to even raise such a question; there was no doubt man was accountable to God. But today, even theologians are unsure if God is real, although evidence abounds around us proving that He exists; and the most obvious evidences are in plain sight. When we consider nature, who could have planned such an extravagant arrangement if not the mind of an intelligent and infinite God?
The Bible asks, “Who gives intuition to the heart and instinct to the mind?” (Job 38:36)
The Psalmist states with gratitude, “Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.” (Psalms 139:14)
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hebrews all state the same notion, that it was man’s maker who imbued him with a mind capable of thought and affection and worship.
“And now the Lord speaks— the one who formed me in my mother’s womb to be his servant, who commissioned me to bring Israel back to him. The Lord has honored me, and my God has given me strength.” (Isaiah 49:5)
“I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
“This is what the Lord says—the Lord who made the earth, who formed and established it, whose name is the Lord” (Jeremiah 33:2)
“By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.” (Hebrews 11:3)
Who can explain the mysteries of our glorious world aside from the creation story found in the book of Genesis? The only logical answer is that God did. He is the maker of all things, and it seems illogical that skeptics could look at these marvelous examples of intelligent design and not believe in a Creator. That God is real seems pretty simple and clear to me, and I want to meet Him one day!
Rex