Why I Believe in God (2)

The Bankruptcy of the Alternatives

Donald MacLeod

As I mentioned in my last posting, Saint Paul’s statement that every human being is by nature aware of God’s eternal power and godhead is an entirely apt description of my own experience.   Many others, however, will emphatically deny that it is an apt description of theirs.  There is no seed of religion, they say, in their hearts, or any sense of accountability to a deity; and in any case, ‘We don’t need him: the idea of a creator is superfluous.  There are perfectly valid alternatives.’

But when I began to reflect on these alternatives, they seemed to me utterly bankrupt.

One very basic definition of God is that he or it is whoever or whatever accounts for the existence of the universe, and on this the Christian faith is clear.  The universe was created by God, the Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth.  This, too, I have believed since childhood; and not only had he made it, but he had filled it with millions of life-forms.  Later on, inevitably, I encountered alternative explanations for the existence of the world, and for a while they shook me.  But what struck me was, first, how limited the alternatives were; and, secondly, how unconvincing.  They are represented by many -isms, but in the last analysis there is but one basic question, What was there before there was a world?  And to that question there are only three possible answers.

First, before there was a world there was Nothing.  Before there was Anything there was Nothing.  The nothing-ness of this Nothing must be taken with absolute seriousness.  There was no matter, no mass, no energy, no light, no gravity, no electro-magnetic field, no protein, no amino acid: nothing but nothing, and surely the ancients spoke truth when they said, ‘Out of nothing, nothing comes’ (Ex nihilo nihil fit).  There was no one to make anything, and nothing to make it with: nothing, in terms of the Big Bang Theory, to bang; and no one to press the button.  A mind seeking understanding cannot rest here.           

The second possibility is that before there was a universe, and even before there was light, there was some form of self-existent matter, untouched and un-programmed by mind, and somehow containing in itself everything that was needed to produce the world as we know it today, although only after endless accidents and countless billions of years.