Since today is Christmas Day, I’d like to share a blog that I wrote several years ago that is meaningful to me. May you have a most blessed Christmas!
One of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last ten years is There is a God by philosopher, Anthony Flew. He writes of his journey from atheism to theism. He died three years after the book was written, and I am not sure if he ever became a Christian, although in the book, he speaks of Christianity as being quite compelling.
While he was an atheist, he liked to share a parable that explained why he was an atheist. The parable goes like this:
Two men stumble upon a beautiful garden in the midst of a dense forest. The two men logically assume that there must be a gardener. They wait for a long time, yet no gardener ever appears. The first man concludes that no gardener exists even though the flowers are set out in neat, well-kept rows; this garden, he contends, is simply the consequence of an unknown natural process, an aberration in the natural scheme and contrary to the principal of entropy. The second man urges patience, arguing that there must be a gardener; how else could the garden remain in such tidy order?
The gardener must be invisible, the second man surmises. Deciding to test this new premise, they surround the garden with an electric field that will set off an alarm and reveal the presence of this invisible gardener. They wait for quite some time, yet again, no gardener appears. They now reach the conclusion that, even though an orderly garden exists, there is no gardener to be known because one has not appeared.
Mr. Flew applies this illustration to our world and states that, just as there is no gardener in the story, there must be no God for us to know; He has failed to make an appearance.
When my son, Dixon, was around eleven years old, he asked me why I believe in God. I told him that there is a great deal of evidence that points to the existence of a divine being. However, I told him that the main reason I believe in God is Jesus. God sent Jesus into the world as divine revelation. The only way we could know who God is and what He is like is for Him to reveal Himself to us.
We are told by Paul,
“For in Him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:9)
The writer of Hebrews tells us that Jesus
“is the radiance of God’s glory, the exact representation of His nature.” (Hebrews 1:3)
We celebrate at Christmas the incarnation, because it is the foundation of our faith. And on that first Christmas morning, the Eternal stepped into time, and we beheld His glory.
To learn more about the evidence for God that exists, I invite you to read my book Reflections on the Existence of God. The book lays out, in short essays, much of the evidence for the existence of God that is available. We should seek to take the evidence offered and use it to make reasonable conclusions. What you will find is, as the evidence accumulates, it enables us to come to confident conclusions about God. Who He is. And, that He truly is.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In