Part 5: The Audacity of Identity

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

The fact that I exist is scandalous.

We don’t know what to make of this fact. I think we live our entire earthly lives never quite coming to grips with it. On a daily basis, we set aside our shock over the fact that we exist in order to pretend to be like the other people we see who appear to be getting on with their lives.

But it’s not just that I exist—I have the ability to make my own decisions. I am someone. My own life, will, perspective, and choices are different from those of every other person. It is not just that “I think, therefore I am.” I think in a particular way, so therefore I am a particular person. This is the fact that is scandalous, and this, indeed, is what makes me distinct from God. At the same time that I am someone, I am also not someone else. I am finite. The statement “I am” therefore is truly complete only for God. I need a predicate. That is, “I am Pete,” or “I am a person.” God does not need a predicate, but I do.

Another way of saying this is that God is “identityless,” at least insofar as the nature of identity is defining and confining. The fuller name for God that the Bible also gives is “I AM THAT I AM.” This name and statement describes the way that the totality of God is accounted for entirely through the fact of God’s existence. His eternal nature means that no justification is needed or even applicable beyond this fact—a fact that we have recognized to be observable from all that is.

Note also that “I AM” is present tense. When Jesus accounted for his own identity this way, he forced the gospel account to violate the rules of grammar—“Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). This points to another aspect of the nature of God. Part of being eternal is being unchanging, and part of being unchanging is being ever-present.

By contrast, I am not like that. I am finite. I am moving through the world and changing as I go. I am making mistakes. I am getting older, and in some ways seeing my possibilities decline. It is true that “I am”—but it is also true that “I was” different than I am, and “I will be” different still. And one day, I won’t be any longer.

God is real, and I am a part of his creation. I don’t know why I exist, but he does. I have at least this much relationship to him. So what does a person do, any person, once he discovers God? This is the next fundamental question. We search out the impact, the meaning, and the direct personal consequences of our coming to realize that we live, move, and have our being within I AM.

Part 4: Welcome to the Nulliverse

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

So what does that tribesman see? We are back to the illiterate tribesman of Part 1 (see link above), who has no need of the Bible to find God. Somehow, wherever he is and whatever faculties he is equipped with, he has enough information to infer that God is real. What is this information?

Again, we are all “without excuse”—meaning the information pointing to God must be so plain that every human being, without exception, could be counted on to face it and experience it, no matter how limited her life, health, senses, or circumstances might be. The evidence for God must be inescapable within our lives.

What are the inescapable realities that every human can experience? We might be able to list several, but the full list includes at least these two:

1. Existence exists. There is something instead of nothing, and we are part of that something.

2. Things change. Everything we experience in the world has a beginning and an end.

These two facts about earthly human life are so basic that we have forgotten there was ever a time that we learned them. They were certainly among the very first truths we learned, long before we even had spoken words with which to define our thoughts. Neither of these truths would necessarily have to be true, given that it is not difficult to at least abstractly conceive of a universe (perhaps “nulliverse” would be a better word for it) in which neither of these facts is true.

Yet these two facts are indeed observable characteristics of our world—pointing to a series of conclusions not only about the nature of our world, but also about the nature of God.

* * *

Existence exists. Everything in the world had a beginning. From these two observations, one of the conclusions is that there must have been a time when the very first thing, or the very first set of things, came into existence.

If this never happened, then there would be non-existence instead of existence, and this is not what we have. Existence must have begun with the first thing in the world that existed. And this in turn points to God, because for something to come into existence, there must be something outside the material world to cause this existence to begin.

After all, it couldn’t have been something inside the material world that caused this first thing, because then this cause would have been the “first thing” instead.

You might still be inclined to say that “chance” caused existence to begin—as in, some wrinkle in the fabric of nothingness that is theoretically possible but so vastly unlikely that the odds against it are something like one in ten quintillion raised to its own power. That is why existence feels so special and unique.

However, what then caused or created this “wrinkle”? Or what created “chance” itself? What created the march of time proceeding in such a way that it allowed enough duration for this vastly unlikely event to occur? All of these things must have their beginnings, too—or else they would be eternal.

You might say instead that creation occurred because of energy leaking in from some other world, some other dimension of reality. But how did the other dimension begin? This hypothesis does nothing except expand the borders of the material world to let them include other dimensions. In fact, for this very reason, we know that the Creator does have to be eternal. If not, then he is simply an extradimensional entity, and we would have to ask what it was that caused the Creator to begin.

Here then is where reason begins to show us the nature of the Creator. Not only is he eternal, but there are other things that we can know about him as well.

* * *

For example, we know that the Creator must be entirely self-contained. He is able to exist independently, without relying on anything else. If this was not true, then something else would have had to exist eternally alongside the Creator, and what would have created this other thing?

We also know by observation that the Creator has the ability to create. Since existence exists, he apparently exercised this ability. Furthermore, the Creator is alive and conscious, and has the ability to choose to create. If this was not so, if the Creator was somehow nonliving or unthinking, then only random chance could be responsible for directing where its creative energies went—and we would be stuck again with asking where this random chance came from.

So it turns out that we can recognize quite a bit about the nature of God from some of the most basic facts about the world. The facts that (1) our world exists, and (2) everything in it has a beginning, together point to all of these conclusions:

A. The world began with the very first thing or set of things.

B. Something outside the world created this first thing.

C. That Creator is eternal.

D. That Creator is independent.

E. The Creator is powerful enough to create the world.

F. The Creator has a will and makes choices.

All of this can be seen and known by the tribesman—not from the words of any person or scripture, but from the implications that are written upon reality.

And there is even more. There is still more that the tribesman can know, thanks to an additional truth that is also apparent in every human life. Points 1 and 2 were among the first truths we learned as self-aware beings, but before these came a “point 0” that was the very first thing that each newborn human being experiences. It was a shock to experience it for the first time, and I am convinced that it continues to be a shock for us in the first subconscious millisecond of each new day when we awaken to it again. The simplest statement of this most fundamental experience is also a name we have already cited, a name the Creator gives for himself. That is: I am.

Next: The Audacity of Identity

Part 3: The End of All Continuums

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

What does “better” mean?

The better of two competing entities, objects, or proposals is the one that comes closer to some particular ideal. “Better” implies a “best”—even if the best is something we have never seen and cannot name. To illustrate using an everyday object, a washing machine that meets our capacity requirements is better than one that does not, but one that meets our capacity requirements and features styling we find attractive is better still. All of the movement from good to better to better still implies a “perfect” washing machine toward which this continuum is oriented, even if that ideal can only be approached but not attained.

Living is better than not living along just such a continuum, because one’s sense of what is highest includes the dynamism that comes with life. Truth is also better than falsehood, because the highest-quality thing would be unencumbered by lies. Each reasoning human being has ideals of what is good and right that extrapolate toward “highestness” in this way—that is, toward a model for what is perfect or best. We don’t think about this ideal directly, and we cannot imagine it because we ourselves are imperfect. However, the ideal, or at least our sense of its direction, serves as the yardstick by which we make our determinations.

This is true even of seemingly subjective points such as our favorite color. We might all have different favorite colors and we might each change our favorite colors according to our moods, but each of us nevertheless agrees that certain colors touch us in ways that are better than certain other colors. Measurements such as these could not be made unless there was some standard for comparing life vs. unlife, truth vs. falsehood, or my reaction to one color vs. my reaction to another. There is a model, in our thoughts or in our spirits, that we use in order to judge—in order to favor certain things and avoid or discourage other things.

One might argue that this standard for determination is actually something mundane. We human beings simply seek our own happiness, or our own physical comfort. This is true as far as it goes. However, even if all of human life and human choices were this simple, still these conditions would point toward ideals. There is some “perfect” happiness. There is some “perfect” comfort. It would be impossible to make relative measurements of “better” along these continua as well, unless there was a “best” to use as yardstick. And these “bests” surely exist. We use them, after all. So given that the ideals exist, where do they exist?

The answer is that the ideal, any ideal—an ideal of perfect justice, beauty, truth, or even happiness—must exist outside of the material world. It cannot be found in the material world, because nothing perfect can be found here. Everything we find in the material world could still be better than it is. That is, everything here falls somehow short of an ideal that, as we have already seen, is also real.

So (to build on the arguments in Part 2): Assume that somehow you do think thoughts. Assume, furthermore, that this act of thinking actually is just random, and you are entirely comfortable with the notion that selfhood is an illusion—that in fact we have no autonomy and our thought life is just the result of cascading collisions. If so, these cascading collisions seem to be making evaluations with reference to a standard that does not exist in the material world.

The problem with this should be clear. The material world is all that there is—or so goes the argument. The argument further asserts that all that we see and all that we experience are fully self-created, the result of meaningless random events. So how could random collisions give rise to something immaterial? Specifically, how could colliding particles create referential standards of value that do not exist in the realm of colliding particles?

Plenty of people try to assert that there is no ultimate perfect being. But they undermine their argument through the very premise of arguing. Is the notion of the absence of God a “better” intellectual construct? Atheists would say yes! But if so, then what does “better” mean—and what does that meaning imply? All of us are leaning in the direction of something that is ultimate and perfect during every single instant through which we are aware and making choices in the world.

Next: Welcome to the Nulliverse

Part 2: A Finger In My I

Click here for the first part of this series: How Do We Know God is Real?

Even though our condition might truly be as “ego-bound” as Part 1 described it (see link above), we still manage to speak of God. We all do this.

Simply consider how common it is to hear the phrase shruggingly spoken, “God only knows,” for example. As in, God only knows how long this warm weather’s going to last. What is this phrase, if not a shorthand for expressing our shared perception that the uncertain is somehow certain after all, and that everything unknown is still ordered and guided by some kind of greater will? The frequency with which people use and accept this and similar phrases suggests that the meaning of the phrase is held to be at least plausible, if not self-evidently true.

But the words we speak casually are symptomatic of something deeper. More significant than what our outward verbal expressions reveal is the way that all of us rely upon God for the very foundation of our thinking. The most basic premises that underlie the ways we think about ourselves and think about the world are based on the expectation that God exists.

An old saying goes: “It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist.” The truth of this is found in the fact that the atheist—the one who believes that the world and his own self came into existence and keeps on existing without God—must then by extension believe that certain assumptions are wrong that his own mind seemingly cannot help but to embrace.

* * *

For example, we have ideas. A person gets a concept, picture, or connection within her mind that wasn’t there before. This is an idea. Few of us doubt that we have experienced this phenomenon. Similarly, we have thoughts. We make decisions through reasoned analysis. Sometimes, we even make decisions based upon ideas that have come to mind. We mentally choose—each one of us does this. We compare competing alternatives by using our reasoning and our imagination to forecast which choice will lead to the outcome we like best. We make up our minds and then we change our minds. We all do these things, and we all are aware that others do these things, too.

So where does all of this thinking come from?

It’s not an idle question. If there is no conscious will that created the universe, then everything in the universe happens without anything willing it. By default, everything happens because of unwilled or “random” events. Subatomic particles collide with other particles at random, or waves intersect other waves, and the result sometimes is that the collisions and intersections produce events that can lead to other events.

A waterfall, for example, could be seen as the product of random events in this way. The waterfall might seem like something distinct and singular, but in fact it is just the result of various sorts of collisions. Random interactions over time produced the planets, produced the landscape of a particular continent, produced the rainfall, produced the rocks as well as the earthquake that left a sharp cliff, and then produced the course of the river that sends the water cascading over this cliff. The waterfall is the result of an uncountably vast number of random events in this way, and to believe that there is no supreme being creating the universe is to believe that everything in the universe—including you and all your thinking—was produced exactly the same way.

That is, random electronic firings in your parents’ brains mixed with whatever experiences they had randomly encountered up to that point in order to generate the belief that they should have you. The random events surrounding you have then produced your life and your experiences so far. In fact, random collisions of electrons in your own brain even produced the most recent thought you had, perhaps the thought to continue reading to the end of this sentence. Precisely like the waterfall, your own self—or the thing you think of as a “self”—is just an undirected end product that is cascading along on collisions.

But no, you might say, there is something more than that. There is a will in the universe, and it is my own will. Though the waterfall is not conscious, I am. I do have a self. I make decisions. Randomness does result in what is—but one of the things that randomness has produced is human consciousness. Human beings have this consciousness, and each human being exercises a will.

The basis of this argument is that the waterfall is different from the human being. More specifically, the waterfall is different from “consciousness.” That waterfall, as complex as it is, cannot take credit for having decided to do anything that it does. It is the product of external events and external events still drive everything about it. But the “consciousness,” by this argument, can take credit for what it does. It arose from randomness, yes—but randomness no longer drives it, because a self is in control.

How, then, did the randomness take this leap into selfhood?

To assume that consciousness arose out of random events is to assume that somewhere, sometime, there occurred the very first conscious thought. What were the circumstances that led to this thought? Presumably there had been nothing in the world up to that point except random collisions and their results. If so, then this random cascade created the first thought.

But wait! If this thought was only the latest result of the latest random collision, then it could not be considered a “conscious” thought at all. A “self” must have thought the thought in order for it to be a conscious thought. So where, again, did this “self” come from?

You might finally say, “I have no problem with the contradiction. I fully acknowledge that the universe we perceive is not all there is. Our ‘selves’ are greater than the material world. I am a spiritual person—I certainly have a sense of this. However, that does not mean I believe in a single great ruling ‘God’ per se.”

This is the belief in the transcendent self. It is a compelling belief, given the way our time-bound linear lives seem too small to contain the totality of all that we feel ourselves to be. This provision of ample space for a more abundant view of the other self therefore feels like it answers the puzzle of consciousness—but the answer is incomplete.

This “ample space”—where is it? The transcendent self has a different existence from the way we understand existence, yet still is must exist (for lack of a better word) “somewhere.” That is, it exists in some “place” (again, lacking a better word), in that it emerges from and remains connected to some different sort of realm that also transcends the material world.

If so—if the above description at least partially and crudely expresses the nature of the transcendent self—then what is the origin of this transcendent realm?

Specifically, did a conscious will create the transcendent realm? If not, if the transcendent self is instead just the result of an ongoing series of unwilled “random” transcendent events, then one cannot take credit for having a conscious transcendent self either.

In short, no matter where you put the “I,” the “I” does not exist. This is true whether the universe is random or whether heaven and earth are random together. Either way, the randomness means that you speak falsely whenever you say that “I” decided something, because there is no “I” that is able to decide. All of your thoughts and ideas instead just come from collisions. Every opinion you hold comes from the same thing—ultimately the opinion is just the product of electrons among your neurons happening to go one way instead of another. Even this very feeling of being a self, this feeling you carry with you all the time, is also a result of electronic collisions. You are not a self—not really. You just feel that way. You feel like you decide things, but in fact you have no autonomy. Instead you are just flowing downstream on the course of random interactions that have never been consciously influenced by you or anyone else.

* * *

This idea is more than just disquieting, more than just dispiriting. Part of the horror of this idea is that it implies that a living human being is no better than a corpse. Neither one is conscious, after all—and both are equally subject to random events.

We seem viscerally opposed to this idea.

And in fact, the reason we object relates to a second basic assumption that our minds seemingly cannot help but to embrace. We have already seen that we believe we think thoughts. In addition, we also believe that some things are better than other things.

A human being is inherently “better” than a corpse, for example. A living organism is inherently “better” than a thing that does not live. Some monster might disagree with those statements, but that monster would still share the premise that there are things that are “better.” And like the idea that I am an autonomous self, this idea also is incompatible with a universe that has no creator.

Next: The End of All Continuums

How Do We Know God Is Real? Part 1

You don’t need a bible in order to know God. The Bible itself says this.

“What may be known of God is manifest,” reads chapter 1 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. In other words, the evidence is already plain. “God’s invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Thus, not only can we infer that God exists, we can also learn about his nature from what we perceive around us. Creation testifies about its Creator.

In fact, creation itself provides enough information about God, somehow, that human beings who disregard God anyway are, in Paul’s word, “without excuse.”

So: Those of us who have bibles do not necessarily have an advantage.

Those of us who know the word “Jesus” do not necessarily have an advantage either— because presumably an illiterate tribesman in the most distant wilderness somewhere might speak an obscure syllable for the being he is seeking and coming to know, but cannot explain. God knows when his name is called.

These verses from Romans 1 (specifically vv. 19-20) represent a remarkably confident passage of scripture. Confident, that is, in the universality of our awareness that we live in the presence of God. The implication of Romans 1 is that even this remote tribesman has access to at least enough insight about the God we all share to be able to piece together a sufficient framework for how to experience this being and how to conform to him. I do not know precisely how this insight comes, and doubtless it can be different for every individual. It might involve dreams in some cases. In other cases it might involve the words of missionaries reaching the most remote tribesman third- or fourth-hand. In still other cases, the tribesman might intellectually build this insight out of the clues that are manifest in the material world.

Whatever the case, the being he comes to recognize is living, constant, and true in a way that is distinct from the trinkets of worship that are scattered around him. A missionary might find this person and teach him the story of the cross, but the tribesman is receptive to this message only because of the way it ratifies, intensifies, and “fleshes out” the picture of the one he has already come to appreciate. He speaks a syllable, perhaps, and this is his own private name for the “I AM” of the Bible and the One-through-whom-all-things-were-made who was born on earth as Jesus Christ.

* * *

Don’t get me wrong, though. The Bible is, to say the least, extraordinary. The Bible is, among other things, food.

I have seen the truth of this. The Bible characterizes itself as nourishment, and I have come to recognize the ways that I go hungry when I try to live without its instruction. Yet the Bible derives its authority from God, and the Bible is all but meaningless if God is not real. Therefore, to address the question of whether God exists, we should begin by setting the Bible aside.

Indeed, one might wonder why we in the modern, developed, wealthy, “industrialized” portion of the world have been given this particular blessing—bibles—in such abundance. The book is available in libraries, stores, churches, and almost every hotel room. Plus it is easily accessible in every English version through all of our Internet connections. We are tempted to think of ourselves as special because we have this special document in such an array, but could it be that we are just especially in need of it? Given the hyperbusy, fretting, intellectual minds that our culture produces, perhaps we need to have God’s insight—God’s food—arranged for us in these sequential verses on which we can focus our thoughts. In the Western world, perhaps that is the only avenue left by which to reach the gut where we are starving. Perhaps our culture leaves us so sealed with an ego-bound shell, and therefore so oblivious to God around us, that God has to parachute literature into our midst just to get through. I mentioned that I do not know exactly how the illiterate tribesman pieces together the way of God, but it could just as well be that the tribesman doesn’t understand how I am not able to see it.

Next: A Finger in My I

I Think I’m Getting the Hang of Walking on Water

I think I’m getting the hang of walking on water.

Jesus walking on water was a different sort of miracle. It was different from all the other miracles he did. With every other miracle, Jesus simply showcased something prominently that the Father was already doing with less recognition. Jesus turned water into wine, for example—but the Father turns water into wine as well. The Father simply uses such mechanisms as rainfall, grapes, and fermentation. In the same way, Jesus turned scarcity into plenty (Mark 6:41-44), just as the Father routinely turns a few seeds into an abundant harvest of crops. Jesus even said (see John 5:19) that he does only what his Father shows him to do.

But then there is the apparent miracle of walking on water, which arguably is not presented in the Gospels as a miracle at all. Jesus seems to do it casually, striding across the water when no boat is present (Matthew 14:24). The naturalness with which he does this seems to imply that this sort of capability is part of the character of the surrendered life. We haven’t heard of another believer since Jesus’ time who has replicated precisely this act—but perhaps there is more going on here that just water. I Thessalonians 5:19 says we are not to “quench” the Spirit. The Spirit, in other words, gets extinguished as if through drowning. In doing the best we can at what our Savior shows us to do, we follow his model of walking on water by gliding lightly across any of the things of this world that would submerge us.

In the case of one episode involving Peter, that “water” was literally water. Peter is the one other person in the Bible to pace across a lake. He did this one time, at the direct urging of Jesus, for only for a few steps before sinking. Becoming free enough that we relax gravity’s hold on us is thus possible—but apparently it requires such faith that few human beings do it and even fewer do it for long.

Yet other forces besides gravity also pull us down, and more than just water threatens to wash over us.

In our modern busy lives, for example, there is just so much to do.

Indeed, the pace, possibilities, and convenience of the modern world seem to make it easier than ever to succumb to a life of spiritually drowning. Most of us end up angry much of the time, and we don’t know why.

I have been angry. Only slowly have I begun to see why. I find that I have insisted on tidy appearances because I am ashamed of what others might say about the mess. I pursue distant goals because I fear having only meager success by which to let other people measure my worth in the end. I even do nonsensical and unnecessary things that others tell me to do, simply because I fear their pointing a finger of criticism at me if I don’t do them. In each of these cases, I am not worshiping God or submitting to God, but instead submitting in worship to other human beings. No breath of life can come of this, so no wonder I am angry. More accurately, I am panicked—thrashing at anyone close to me in my desperate groping for air.

The way of Christ is not like this. We still submit to other people. We serve them and regard them as treasures—this is the most vital thing we do in the world. But we do not worship them. We do not fear them, and we submit to them not out of insecurity or shame, but out of love.

I am still tidy, though. Nothing about that is inconsistent with a life in Christ. I still aspire—and I also still do many things simply because other people ask me to do them. The life of surrender is not free from pleasing other people, and not even free from chores.

Before I do any of these things, however, I breathe. The way of Christ is to pray continually (I Thessalonians 5:17). This includes praying for God to work through us and with us, recognizing that he provides the time, energy, and opportunity for all that he would have us do.

It is therefore pointless to get frustrated. It’s pointless to get frazzled. The gift I have right now is the present. “I AM,” the name of God, consists of only the present tense. God is here now, and God comes first—followed closely by the people God has put into my present life.

I breathe before taking the next steps in a full day. I remind myself that the expansiveness of the air of God is the medium through which I wish to move and live, rather than yet again making myself heavy by taking the things of this world too seriously. One of the simpler messages I derive from that picture of Jesus walking on the water is this—that all of us, by his power and grace, can discover the ability to decide not to sink.

The King James Punctuation

Dallas Willard wrote in The Divine Conspiracy that, “when trials are permitted, it only means that [God] has something better in mind for us than freedom from trials.” Earthly trials are the specific implements God uses to reshape us in his image, and to set us free from prisons we hadn’t even seen confining us.

I noticed, in that spirit, that the King James rendition of I Thessalonians 5:18 adds a semicolon. This might not seem like much. However, it is a striking mark of punctuation, given the way it transforms the meaning of the whole passage.

Here is how the New International Version treats I Thess. 5:16-18. It puts semicolons instead after verses 16 and 17:

“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.”

Now here it is in the KJV:

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”

The significance of the semicolon in the NIV is that it separates away the last part, and frames this last part together. It says that because all circumstances flow from God’s will, we are to give thanks within those circumstances as part of our recognition that God is in control. The thanks, in the NIV, is the one fundamental response.

By contrast, the King James Version uses the semicolon to separate off the phrase, “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Thanks to the KJV’s ordering of the punctuation, this version says that there is more for us to do in recognition of God’s will than just to give thanks. The thankfulness is part of a threefold response.

I had been more accustomed to the NIV rendition. Yet seeing the difference in the KJV treatment has me rethinking the way I understand this set of verses.

Neither punctuation could claim to be authoritative. The original text presumably had no marks to indicate which of the readings is right. However, if we believe that God wishes a relationship with us and speaks to us by means of the ways he crafts our lives, then the King James punctuation stands as more compelling.

It says that we have a greater role to play. Experiencing the will of God at work in ways that challenge us, we have more to offer—and more to bring to bear—than just thanks. We can also derive value from those trials and resist being submerged in our reactions to them through a set of interrelated responses. Namely, we are to...

1. “Be” joyful—being ruled by joy, which comes from the Spirit, and not being ruled by bitterness or fear;

2. Pray continually—asking in particular for the wisdom (see James 1:5) by which we can receive the instruction that God would have us learn from this challenge; and

3. Give thanks—not for the difficult circumstances but for God himself, the one who loves and safeguards us eternally, and the one who chose us in particular to be transformed by these trials.