Conclusion

I have posed the question, “Is belief in God reasonable?”, and I believe that I have provided a reasonable answer in the affirmative.

I have shown that there must have been a First Cause, but that a physical only, or metaphysical only, or even a combined physical and metaphysical First Cause could not have produced the universe in which we live. The First Cause, the Creator, must have been spiritual.

Not everyone will agree with my argument. Not everyone will see it.

Someone will object that I am simply advocating ‘the god of the gaps’. However, if the creator is God, then there are no gaps. The gaps only appear when we try to look for answers that exclude the agency of the Intelligent Designer.

Someone composed a little rhyme, which goes like this:

Two men looked through prison bars:
One saw darkness, one saw stars.

An alternative version reads:

Two men looked through prison bars:
One saw mud, and one saw stars.

The obvious message of this adage is that what you see depends on what you’re looking at. Both men were presented with exactly the same view, but what they saw was different.

Two men can stand side by side and look up at the night sky, one seeing the wonder of nature, and the other the wonder of the hand of God.

Why is this so?

There are many possible answers to that question. It may be to do with the way we were brought up; it may be to do with our experiences of life; it may be to do with our natural temperament; it may be to do with how God is at work in our societies or our families or our individual lives.

In my own case, I can say that from my early teenage years I was convinced that there was more to life than what I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears, but I had no idea what that ‘more’ might have been, except that it was ‘the truth’.

For someone reading this, that statement sounds like nonsense; for someone else, it resonates within.

I am convinced that this is true:

And this:

I have been following Jesus Christ since 1977, and throughout that time I have become more and more certain that the truth lies here, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. When I look around me at this broken, troubled, beautiful, ugly, wonderful, terrible, grieving, rejoicing world in which we live, I find the answers to the goading, upsetting, traumatising questions that it poses to us in no other religion or philosophy.

That good and evil are realities and not just principles is manifestly evident to us all, and only one book that I know of furnishes us with an adequate explanation of these realities. That book is the Bible.

Where do you stand in all of this? What do you believe? What do you see when you look up at the sky or down at the ground or across the street or across the sea? Is there an answer in your heart to the question ‘why’?

I’ll leave you with a little rhyme of my own, which poses the question quite succinctly, I think:

What do you see when snowflakes dance
Or stars bright in the night sky shine?
The art of God, or heartless chance?
Just physics, or divine design?