In the beginning God ...

Unlike a number of books on theology and apologetics, the Judeo-Christian Scripture unhesitatingly begins with God. It does not begin with adapting an apologetic approach to carefully demonstrate the reality of God’s existence to an unbelieving audience, as if it just cannot proceed to speak about Him without first going through such a delicate undertaking. It simply states its opening line without apology with the words “In the beginning God …” (Gen. 1:1).

However, the biblical account of God’s unveiling of Himself in ancient days has for long time been deliberately ignored and rejected by unbelievers. Indeed, it has never escaped the criticism and ridicule of those who claim they have already abandoned the religious superstitions of the uneducated past. Instead, the children of the Renaissance and the so-called Age of the Enlightenment now celebrate, both in the academy and popular culture of the 21st century hi-tech world, the pride and dignity of the autonomous self. Great are humanity’s achievements without God, and so they boast, despite many postmodern thinkers’ skepticism to the contrary in light of the obvious failure of the Enlightenment-inspired scientific progress and technological advancements to improve humanity and to make the world a better place.

To the secular mind that is still largely shaped by the old Enlightenment’s philosophical upbringing, the God of the Judeo-Christian theism is more of an abstraction than a concrete reality. Whoever or whatever it is, this abstract entity commonly called as God is at best perceived to be an impersonal First Cause, the philosophers’ Unmoved Mover that stands at a great distance from the painful realities of human existence, having nothing to do whatsoever with humanity’s mundane affairs. At worst, He is simply dismissed as the weakling’s wish-fulfillment, a mere illusion that exists only in the mind of deluded believers. This illusion of God somehow helps these believers to make them overcome the many challenges of this life’s journey, but nothing more.

Sadly, a great number of Christian theologians and ministers themselves surrendered the biblical view of God when they uncritically accepted the Darwinian hypothesis during the rise of theological liberalism in the mainline churches of the past two centuries or so. Since then, the concept of a personal God who intimately relates with His people has been systematically ejected from the public square and the academy. In fact, the mere mention of His name in major universities and other secular institutions today will sooner or later invite negative remarks, if not provoke outright ridicule or outrage.

The intellectual elites of this highly secularized 21st century world may have been thinking that they are standing on neutral grounds when they dismiss religiously laden ideas such as the existence of God as necessarily superstitious. However, such an Enlightenment-oriented positivistic notion of scientific knowledge has already been proved to be not necessarily neutral after all.

For we if are to push a particular system of thought, whether religious or secular, back to its starting point, it would eventually turn out that it has its own version of ultimate principle, or what may be called as its own self-existent First Cause or Unmoved Mover. Such a starting point, be it a personal Creator God of the Judeo-Christian theism or the so-called “Big Bang” of philosophical naturalism, requires more of an act of faith than a function of reason on the part of its adherents.

“In this sense, we could say that every alternative to Christianity is a religion." says Christian worldview scholar Nancy Pearcey. "It may not involve ritual or worship services, yet it identifies some principle or force in creation as the self-existent cause of everything else. Even nonbelievers hold to some ultimate ground of existence, which functions as an idol or false god.”

“The need for religion appears to be hard-wired in the human mind,” atheist philosopher John Gray concurs. “Certainly the behavior of secular humanists supports this hypothesis. Atheists are usually just as emotionally engaged as believers. Quite commonly, they are more intellectually rigid.”

From a theological point of view, any way of thinking that does not begin with God may be fairly called as backward thinking. It is backward because it begins with something else other than God Himself and attempts to reason back to Him. In most cases, however, it finds itself helplessly ill-equipped to reason back to God. At the end of the day, it leads to nowhere else except to perplexity, leaving the so-called “riddle of the universe” largely unresolved. What it then makes of life is deny it of its meaning due to its lack of a transcendental point of reference that is big enough to explain what life is all about.  It is all because it did not begin at the right starting point, that is with Him who alone has no beginning.

As the evangelical theologian and biblical scholar Arthur W. Pink puts it, “Begin with the world as it is today and try to reason back to God, and what is the result? If you are honest of heart and logical of mind – that God has little or nothing at all to do with the world. But begin with God and reason forward to the world as it is today and much light is cast on the problem.”

This brings to mind the words of the British thinker G. K. Chesterton: “God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it, you cannot look at anything else.”

References:

John Gray, “Exposing the Myth of Secularism,” Australian Financial Review, Jan. 3, 2003.

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 41-42.

A. W. Pink, “The Godhood of God,” IIIM Magazine Online, Volume 5, Number 1, January 1-17, 2003.