Wilson was fine with a little spirituality. He knew something was out there that he couldn’t directly see. He respected spiritual people and felt a little spiritual himself. He didn’t have any particular practices around his spirituality, but he regarded himself as open to spiritual things. The point where it all stopped for Wilson, though, was with God. He just couldn’t get his head around spiritual things as if they involved an entity or entities like divine beings. He was fine with forces and presences and other unseen influences on things. Wilson just couldn’t accept the idea that those things took shape in some way in a supreme being he could call God. But then Wilson met a young woman in whom he had a romantic interest. Seeing how intimately and continuously she related to God, Wilson for the first time thought that maybe there was more to God than just imagining things.
Intimacy
As the above illustration suggests, one reason to believe in God is the intimacy he can bring. It’s hard not to believe in someone who overcomes and engulfs you, or who embraces, uplifts, and inspires you, whether doing so continuously, regularly, occasionally, rarely, or even just once. When the impact is that immediate, consuming, heartening, and transforming, what is one to do but to believe in what one just experienced? Some might say that experiencing the intimacy of God is simply a physiological or mental state, induced by circumstance, drug, or delusion. But those who have such encounters do not receive and experience them as delirium or some other form of excited state. Indeed, they relate the opposite, that they were perfectly calm and in possession of their faculties when they first encountered the presence of the supreme divine entity. You will believe in God when you meet him.
Conditions
Don’t think that believing in God takes some kind of moral purity or mental ecstasy. As the scriptures say, even demons believe in God and shudder. If the worst can believe in God, then we can, too. The encounters that the ancient scriptures and individuals today describe, realizing the presence, reality, and immediacy of God, do not depend on the observer’s holiness. You may draw nearer to God through confession, sanctification, and purity of heart. By all means, do so. But God also shows himself to desperate sinners. And good thing, because that’s most or all of us. God may reveal himself at our lowest and worst point. That God appears to the desperate and despairing tells us that God has no use for the proud or the proud have no use for God. The two may be the same thing. Humble yourself sufficiently, acknowledging the condition in which you are, and you just may encounter and believe in God.
Belief
The question why believe in God can have an instrumental sound to it, as if one should make a list of advantages and disadvantages to the belief, and then choose the longer and better list. You may certainly proceed that way if you wish. But that’s not the entire nature of sound belief. In that case, the moment the advantages turned in the other direction, you’d abandon the belief. Taking the side that prevails at the moment isn’t belief. Nor is it conviction, logic, proof, or truth. Following the prevailing wind isn’t even rationality or integrity. It’s instead whimsy or convenience. The belief that God invites and urges, or demands if you’re in the mood for obeying, is to accept that he exists whether doing so is to your advantage at the moment or not. Fortunately, believing in God is, in the big picture and long term, very much to your advantage. But accepting the advantage isn’t belief.
Reality
Belief instead aligns itself with what the believer recognizes to be real and authentic, as things in fact exist. Atheists may regard the belief in God as a manufactured thing inconsistent with the real. But that’s not how those who know God at all feel. They, like the apostle Paul, may not have believed until the evidence showed up, when the facts compelled their belief. The word fact has a Latin root suggesting an act done or event having already occurred, one that is capable of demonstration and thus undeniable other than by an exercise of deception or irrationality. Undeniability is the belief held by those who give their lives for God. They know that he first gave his life for us. Belief in God thus isn’t a calculation or weighing of consequences, nor a logical argument. Calculations, consequences, and arguments may point you in the right direction. But belief in God often arises when he shows up, revealing his presence in the subtle and surprising way that the supreme being would.
Demonstration
Don’t misunderstand, either, how the supreme being, the creator of everything from beyond material and time, would make his presence known. It wouldn’t be with a billboard, even one projected in the skies. He wouldn’t stand behind a United Nations podium or appear at Super Bowl halftime to declare his eminence. He would not borrow any other human contrivance. The supreme being instead set himself and his unmatchable account in the middle of human history, culture, and development. He set himself in distinct lineage, exquisite sacrifice, and extraordinary humility. And he gave his appearance such a wildly transforming and tantalizing result as to instantly determine the course and end of human history. Then, after doing so, he kept quietly appearing to everyone who authentically asked, as the whisper that would be all anyone would need to know his reality beyond anything else that appears real. God made the incomprehensibly perfect entry and exit, while leaving his full presence among us, not as a blaring siren or screaming banshee, but as the most tender telltale utterance, leaving one no desire to ever turn back.
Wager
You may, if you wish, treat the question of believing in God as a wager, as French polymath Blaise Pascal postulated after a profound night of fire conversion experience of God’s presence. That wager is to accept that one does better overall believing in God, for the rationality, accountability, sanity, and morality belief produces, than not to believe in God, even assuming one is in error as to God’s existence. In more-prosaic terms, if you bet on God and are right, you get eternal life, while if you bet on God and are wrong, you were going to die anyway. That’s not, though, how scripture presents belief in God. Scripture instead documents God’s words and actions while revealing his plan. Contrary to Pascal’s wager, the apostle Paul wrote that faith is useless if the resurrection account is untrue. Make Pascal’s wager, if you wish. Belief in God is undoubtedly good for you. But belief in God is not a conveniently deceptive tool. God is neither a tool nor a wager.
Advantages
If you have not yet perceived your own demonstration of God’s existence, to believe in him on that first-hand basis, consider the advantages that accrue to one who embraces the wager. If the wager proves true, then embracing the sacrificed and resurrected God assures one of eternal life. If instead you find only temporal rather than eternal advantages, advantages also accrue in this life. Belief in God first brings an essential degree of humility. Human nature is to walk around as if we were the supreme beings. That attitude can be toxic to relationships and poisonous to life. Better to put a greater being, indeed the true supreme being, in charge over your life. In that way you address your natural inclination to favor yourself and begin to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Belief in God relieves you of your god complex. Belief in God also holds you to a reasonable, rational, and civil standard. Belief in God is the moral fabric of a just and civil society. Belief in God also undergirds your marital and family relationships, making the family the bedrock for a free and ordered society. Belief in God also keeps you sane, sensible, tolerable, and rational, lending you the character that makes you not just reliable but even admirable, someone whom others can model for their own life. Belief in God may also keep you healthy, healing, hoping, persevering, and engaged.
Demonstration
These and other advantages to belief in God demonstrate that the belief accords with reality. The soundness, generalizability, functionality, and effectiveness of a belief tends to verify that the belief is trustworthy and true. Indeed, truth’s definition invokes verifiability. Biologists theorize that the structure and behavior of an organism so fits its environment that you can describe the environment by examining the organism. Under that theory, belief in God serves us so well not just spiritually but also psychologically, physiologically, relationally, and socially, adapting us to society and society to the world so fittingly, that the adaptation verifies God’s existence as real. If belief in God made us uncivil, unhealthy, and unfit to lead, follow, form a stable family, propagate, produce, and survive, then we would be foolish to believe. That belief in God is the bedrock of human thriving demonstrates that God is real. Even those who deny God’s existence act as if he’s real because doing so is the only way that they can get on in the world.
Witnesses
If the advantages to believing in God were not enough, you might do just as well to believe in God because of his many witnesses. Witnesses mean more than you may think. We tend to believe that we mostly rely on our own senses and investigation to determine what is true. That belief is exaggerated. If it were so, you would do better believing that the earth is flat and still, with a sun that circles around it every twenty-four hours, because that belief would reflect the nature of your experience. You might not believe in bacteria, having never seen them, nor in your own DNA as the encoder and transmitter of your genetic material, not having seen it, either, and instead relying entirely on its report. If anything, you have learned not to trust your senses and observations because of the number of invisible things, like radio waves and infrared light, you accept as perfectly reliable, existent, and true. You also might not believe in Pearl Harbor and World War II because all you have for history is witnesses and their reports. You wouldn’t trust government statistics nor your neighbor’s report of what he ate for breakfast. We rely on the observation and report of others for so much of what we believe. And so why not adhere to the same witness standard for belief in God? You have solid grounds to believe the witness of the scriptures. They are the most-reliable ancient accounts by historical measure, more so than political and military histories of the same age that all accept as fact. You also have solid grounds to believe the witness of so many others who knew God down through the ages, including for many of us the witness of family members and friends.
Providence
Another way that some of us come to believe in God is through his providence. Astrophysicists and cosmologists are aware of the anthropic principle, that the universe perfectly fits itself to human life. Indeed, the laws, forces, movements, and materials of the universe, galaxy, solar system, and earth are so exquisitely tuned to support human life that they are improbable beyond reckoning. The slightest tweak of any number of already-spectacular conditions would throw us entirely off the map. These preposterously improbable and yet somehow stable conditions must therefore be the design and arrangement of the creative being from outside of them who wished to behold and sustain us. We have no reason to believe that human life, with its encyclopedia of embedded genetic information, could in any way have arisen from material conditions. Yet you need not accept the anthropic principle to experience the providence of God. Just watch for the perfect confluence of inexplicable and entirely improbable events in your own life, and you’ll have the evidence you need to believe in a loving God.
Reflection
Have you encountered the intimacy of God? If not, have you been looking for it? He might appear if you look, just as he might not if you don’t. Are you incorrectly presuming that you must first fulfill exacting conditions to encounter God? If you have no demonstration yourself of God’s existence and presence, what does the record of human history suggest? Does God have a sufficient number and quality of witnesses, including many who have given their lives for their account, to satisfy you? Does God have fewer and less reliable witnesses than histories or scientific discoveries in which you readily believe? Would you be better off believing in God? How so or how not? What would be the effect of your belief in God on the quality of your character, commitments, and actions? If believing in God would make you better in who you are and what you do, does that suggest to you that God may be real? Isn’t the fitness of our actions to our environment to some degree a measure of the truth of what we believe about our environment?
Key Points
Believing in God involves accepting and embracing his intimacy.
God does not demand exactions but instead comes in his own time.
One doesn’t believe in God as a whim but on knowing his existence.
Belief in God aligns with reality, not simply imagination or tradition.
Belief in God comes with profound historical and personal revelation.
One may but need not treat belief in God as a wager.
Belief in God can come with many rewarding advantages.
One may also believe in God based on ancient and present witnesses.
God’s cosmological and personal providence also justifies belief.