Something Is Out There! How Come?

I want to thank Fishcleaner for his/her thoughtful comments on my last posting. I fully agree that it is not sufficient for us Bible-believing followers of Jesus to merely talk to ourselves in congratulatory tones, affirming that we have kept the faith, but to have no reasonable explanation for why that’s important or possible. So, in the next several entries, I’m going to try to lay out a reasonable basis for the hope I have in the God that the Bible talks about, in the Jesus of the New Testament, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish God’s purposes in a way that will mean maximum benefit and blessing for all who give themselves to Him. Let’s begin!

Suppose you wake up some morning in a philosophical mood, and take a step out your front door. The first thing that you would ask yourself in this reflective moment is this: “Is there anything out there?” I mean, is there stuff out there that really exists, that’s not imaginary or just an illusion. In simple terms, if I walk out in my yard and take steps toward that tree next to my driveway, will I actually bang into it and get a bloody nose, or will I just pass through it as though it were a mist?

The answer to your question has to be “yes, there really is something out there. I can see it, I can feel it, and I have to deal with its presence when I back my car out of the driveway, or I’ll have a big problem and a bad day.” Once that first question is answered, it demands the second question: “How did what is there get there?” Did it just mysteriously appear, or was there some sort of agent that produced that reality? Now remember, when you ask that question, you have to deal with everything that is actually there – the whole line-up of things that exist, including nature, people, beauty, evil, poverty – how did what is there get there?

People who really believe in materialistic evolution insist that everything that’s out there came out of nothing. I mean, nothing nothing. You can’t start with something like primordial ooze, because then you still have the question, how did that get there? People can try to explain with all kinds of complex sentences how something came out of nothing, but the simple fact is that it cannot be explained. You can’t get something from nothing. There has to be something eternal and infinite behind the something that is temporal and finite.

The question gets more complicated when you realize that part of what is out there is you. A person, one among many. You have this thing called a “personality,” the unique dimensions of you that make you who you are. You are a personal entity, with feelings, emotions, thought patterns, physical realities, relational and physical needs – so how did you, the personal you, get here? (I’m not asking a biological question!) Since you and I are personal beings, which is a higher order of being than if we were not personal, it must mean that whatever entity was behind the whole thing is personal as well, because you can’t get something personal from something that is not personal. For example, if you come home from school or work one day, and find a letter on your table that communicates something to you, you assume it is from someone, not from something. It’s a personal note or gift, and cannot possibly have come from a non-personal entity. Even if the letter was computer generated, somewhere, somehow there was a person behind it!

So, it’s more reasonable to assume that the eternal and infinite entity that started the whole process is also personal, because only that assumption can explain what is actually out there. Remember your old high school science experiments that taught you that water cannot rise higher than the level of its source. In the same way, personal beings could not possibly have arisen out of an impersonal source. To believe that would take more faith, more suspension of disbelief, than to believe that something personal, in other words, Someone was behind the beginning of it all. The most reasonable explanation for what is really out there is that there is a personal, infinite Someone who thought it all up and caused it to exist. That has to be the starting point.

We’ll go farther next time.
GW