By Douglas Groothuis
Q. 4. What is God?
A. God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
Q. 6. How many persons are there in the Godhead?
A. There are three persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.
Westminster Shorter Catechism, 1646-1647
Christians have a particular conception of their God. But they believe their God is the one true God, a God who has revealed himself and so can be known for who he is. Take one ringing affirmation from the Apostle Paul in a letter to a young pastor: “Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen” (1 Timothy 1:17). The Bible is adamant that we get God right, that our beliefs about God line up with God himself. Jesus’ rebuke to the Pharisees of his day is sharp and stinging. After they posed a supposed problem for Jesus’ doctrine of the afterlife, Jesus said: “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29).
If we don’t get God right, we cannot get anything right—at least anything that matters most. Belief in God is not simply another belief in our collection of beliefs, such as:
1. America is, in many ways, an exemplary nation.
2. I am a male.
3. Willie Mays was the greatest baseball player of all time.
4. Alaska is the 49th state of the United States.
5. My wife is kind and gentle.
6. God exists.
I take all these beliefs to be true. Beliefs (2) and (4) are obvious and I can give good arguments for the rest, but these five beliefs are not in the same category as beliefs about God. This is simply because the idea of God (6) effects every other idea we have and influences our actions decisively. For example, the hijackers who flew two airplanes into the twin towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, were compelled by their belief in Allah as the one true God and by beliefs about the evils of America. But without their beliefs about the will of Allah and their eternal reward for jihad, they would not have perpetrated their horrendous murder-suicide. Jesus’ beliefs about himself and his mission took him to his suffering and death on the cross. To secure and keep that conviction, he had to resist and refute false views of himself as a political insurrectionist or as anything less than the Messiah. He was King, but not the kind people had anticipated.
Mortimer Adler (1902-2001) was one of the most influential public philosophers of the twentieth century and a prolific author. Later in his life, he converted to Christianity. He helped compile, edit, and popularize Great Books of the Western World (1952), a series of fifty-two of the most influential books of Western history. In his synopsis of the “great ideas of civilization,” he wrote: “More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.” In more detail, he notes that
the idea of a Supreme Being is itself supreme among The Great Ideas. In the Syntopicon, where we were working on the 102 Great Ideas of Western Thought we found this out as we went through all of the 102 ideas; we found that the idea of God was the idea to which there were more references than to any of the others in Western literature—in poetry, philosophy, theology, and science—and references by more diverse authors, more different kinds of authors than occurred in the case of any other idea.[1]
One’s belief in God, and the kind of God one believes in, has intellectual and practical ramifications. As Richard Weaver wrote, “ideas have consequences”—particularly the most significant ideas, about God, humanity, the good life, and the afterlife.[2] And one’s beliefs about God will necessarily bear on what one thinks about humanity, the good life, and the afterlife. Consider what one famous atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), wrote about the idea of the Christian God.
Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: Nothing necessarily remains in one’s hands.[3]
The German philosopher illustrates this dramatically in his parable of “the madman,” who declares that “God is dead,” and then poetically recites the consequences of a godless world and man without God.[4] Godless, we are straying “through an infinite nothing,” with no way to find our bearings in a cold and dark world. “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”[5] Of course, the atheist finds no comfort in God; nor can he find comfort or meaning in a world with neither a compass nor an anchor.[6]
How one ends up if the God of the Bible is rejected, however, depends on what alternative view is adopted. Certain beliefs flow from atheism, as briefly noted; but one may deny God and embrace another religion or agnosticism. Yet in every case, what one takes God or the ultimate reality to be will have tremendous consequences for one’s belief system and way of life. In Dominion, Tom Holland, a historian (not the actor), argued that the great ideas that shaped Western culture, such as universal human rights and the dignity of the individual, flow from a Judeo-Christian worldview and depend on them.[7] Aayan Hirsi Ali, a public intellectual who was formerly a Muslim before becoming an atheist, converted to Christianity partially for this reason.[8]
Can God be Known?
Before taking up some denials of God in light of our beliefs, which we’ll do in part two of this series, we’ll discuss a fundamental question (even if too briefly). Can God be known to exist? And if so, what is the nature of God? The case for the biblical God and the Christian worldview is rich and varied, and I have made the case in depth for many years.[9] Here are some highlights. I will be telling more than I am showing, but all the points can be shown to be true if you consult the references.
The Christian tradition has always emphasized and insisted that God can be known; it is “a knowledge tradition” and not a matter of blind faith without or against reason. By knowledge, I mean beliefs that are true, and which are sufficiently supported by facts. Hence, besides enshrining the Bible as their primary sacred text, Christians have written creeds and confessions, as discussed earlier.
The existence of God is evident from the existence of the world and form of the cosmos, especially that perplexing part called human beings. The Bible itself tells us that nature and human nature reveal God (Psalm 19:1-4; Romans 1:18-21). The universe cannot be explained adequately apart from a personal and infinite Creator and Designer. The alternatives are few and feeble. Consider objective science and human value.
The consensus in physics claims that the universe began to exist from nothing a finite time ago. This is no flash in the pan cosmology, but has been established through multiple and converging lines of evidence over more than a hundred years. This began with Einstein’s general theory of relativity (1915), which, when corrected, implied that the cosmos was expanding. Findings known as “the red shift” revealed that galaxies were moving away from each other, thus confirming the expansion of the universe. Other evidence confirmed this. If the universe is expanding, there had to be a beginning of the expansion, since it cannot go back for infinity. This is called the singularity, in which all space, time, matter, and energy originated. The best account of the origin, development, and credibility of this theory is given in Stephen C. Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis. After carefully detailing the evidence and counter-evidence for what is called the big bang theory, he (perhaps too) modestly affirms: “as best we can tell, the universe did have a beginning.”[10]
If the universe had a beginning,[11] it must have had a cause, since nothing begins to exist without a preceding cause. Otherwise, something would come from nothing, which is impossible. The universe-maker must be immaterial, vastly powerful, timeless, spaceless, and personal. There is no need to posit more than one Maker if one will explain the whole. In other words, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1; see also John 1:1-3). Science cannot confirm every detail of the Genesis account, but Genesis—and the rest of the Bible—is consistent with the best science, and physics confirms a divine creation out of nothing.
Further, the large-scale conditions of the created universe are finely tuned on a razor’s edge for life. Put simply, various variables (laws, constants, and proportions) needed to sustain life as we know it—to create what astronomers call a “habitable zone”—are tremendously unlikely to occur by chance. Rather, a Mind was required to select just all the right factors needed to sustain physical life. The odds that chance can take the credit are so remote that atheistic scientists invented the notion of the multiverse “to give chance a new lease on life” (Jay Richards). This theory claims that our universe is just one of innumerable universes. If you roll the dice enough (millions or billions of times), you can get just about anything. We are the lucky universe that could sustain life (since God has been removed as Designer). The only problem is that there is no independent evidence that there are other universes. The idea was concocted in a purely ad hoc fashion in order to avoid the obvious rational inference that our improbable universe was designed by God with us in mind.[12]
The realization that we live in a world created and designed by a vastly powerful and intelligent Being should lead us to wonder and praise. As singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn wrote in “Lord of the Star fields.”
Lord of the starfields
Ancient of Days
Universe Maker
Here's a song in your praise
Wings of the storm cloud
Beginning and end
You make my heart leap
Like a banner in the wind
O love that fires the sun
Keep me burning
Lord of the starfields
Sower of life,
Heaven and earth are
Full of your light
Voice of the nova
Smile of the dew
All of our yearning
Only comes home to you
O love that fires the sun
keep me burning
Humans Reveal God
Science speaks of God, but so do human beings. We stand out as personal and meaning-seeking beings. But Christianity best explains our heights and our depths, and provides a path of meaning and truth through it all.
What kind of being would write the lyrics just quoted or would write any profound poem? Neither angels nor animals. Who are these strong and weak, smart and stupid, kind and cruel, knowing and ignorant, dense and lucid creatures who comb the earth for meaning, who love and hate life, who fear death, and who wonder if their pained yearnings will endure beyond their last heartbeat? We are unique among the living. We are living and breathing question marks in search of an answer.
According to the Bible, in the vast scheme of things, human beings are a good idea, despite our badness. They were created by God himself; they bear God’s own image; they were created to know and love God; to develop nature into culture; to further bless the world with offspring; and to love each other commensurate with the image they and others bear (Genesis 1:26-28; Psalm 8).
Men and women break the mold of both god and beast. Our godlike aspirations come to naught, but no beast bears our aspirations to brilliance, to elegance, and to mastery. We look in the mirror and smile. We look in the mirror and cringe. Or we may stop looking in the mirror.
It is only in knowing God that we can know ourselves. God has left us a record of his truth in the Bible, which is at once historical, theological, and philosophical. The Christian story of humanity is one of greatness, misery, and redemption. The image-bearers of God, in a primeval past charged with perennial effects, turned from God and turned to themselves and thus became alienated and estranged from God (Genesis 3). We fit into this world—it was designed with us in Mind—but we often feel the misfit, the outcast, the stranger: our minds restless, our hearts heavy. Yet God is not far from any one of us; we may reach out and find him as Lord and Savior through Jesus Christ (Acts 17:26-27). This great universal story fits our personal stories. It can be felt as well as thought. We are great and we are miserable, and we cannot repair ourselves. God alone, through the sacrificial offering of Jesus Christ, can take away the objective guilt of our sins, forgive us, and make us new creatures. No other religion or worldview accounts for our greatness and our misery, or offers such well-founded hope for redemption from God himself in Christ.[13]
The Great Yes of Jesus Christ
Having discussed the importance of the idea of God and two reasons to believe that the God of the Bible is the one we can know to be real, before issuing our denials in part two, we’ll first consider the great Yes about God. God is evident in nature and God is active in history, as the Bible teaches. His involvement culminates in the Incarnation. The Apostle Paul wrote this to the church in Corinth near the beginning of his letter:
But as surely as God is faithful, our message to you is not “Yes” and “No.” For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us—by me and Silas and Timothy—was not “Yes” and “No,” but in him it has always been “Yes.” For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-20).
The nature of God is a grand, vast, and compelling topic, one far beyond the confines of this article. However, I chose Paul’s statement since it focuses on Christ as the greatest affirmation of reality. Paul’s message was not mixed or confused; it was not “Yes” and “No.” Rather it was “Yes” in Christ, who is the meaning and fulfillment of God’s promises. There are numerous prophecies concerning Christ in the Old Testament, starting in Genesis 3:16, but somehow all God’s promises are “Yes” in Christ. He is the Amen, the affirmation, for the Christian for the praise and glory of God. Paul sounds this theme also in his letter to the Colossians.
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him (Colossians 1:15-19).
One way of knowing what beliefs to deny is to ask a simple, but profound, question? How does this belief relate to the reality of Jesus Christ? Or, more simply, what would Jesus think of this belief? It is the Bible that supplies our answers to these questions, since Jesus endorsed the Old Testament (John 10:33) and commissioned his apostles and their associates to write the New Testament (John 14:26).[14]
Notes
[1] Mortimer Jerome Adler, How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), 497, Kindle edition.
[2] Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
[3] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 515-16.
[4] Nietzsche, “The Madman,” in The Portable Nietzsche.
[5] Nietzsche, “The Madman,” in The Portable Nietzsche.
[6] For more on Nietzsche’s atheism, see Douglas Groothuis, “God Is Dead,” Philosophy in Seven Sentences (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity-Academic, 2016). On what we can learn from Nietzsche, see Bernard Ramm, “Frederick Nietzsche,” The Devil, Seven Wormwoods, and God (Waco, TX: Word Publishing, 1977).
[7] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2021).
[8] Aayan Hirsi Ali, “Why I Am Now a Christian,” UnHerd, November 11, 2023, https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian.
[9] Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity-Academic, 2022). For a summary, see Douglas Groothuis, “Apologetics in a Nutshell,” Christian Research Journal, September 13, 2021, https://www.equip.org/articles/christian-apologetics-in-a-nutshell/. See also Douglas Groothuis and Andrew Shepardson, The Knowledge of God in the World and in the Word: An Introduction to Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2022).
[10] Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2021), 201, Kindle edition.
[11] There is another philosophical argument that the universe had a beginning that does not rely on Big Bang cosmology. Some Christians balk at the theory’s conclusion that the universe is about fourteen billion years old, taking this to be incompatible with biblical teaching. I do not hold that view, but if one does, there is another argument at hand. This claims that it is impossible to cross an infinite number of moments to reach the present time (traversing an actual infinite); that is, the universe cannot be infinitely old. But if God did not create the universe a finite time ago, then the universe would be infinitely old, which is impossible. Therefore, the universe was created a finite time ago. Thus,
1. If there was no creation, then the universe is infinitely old.
2. The universe is not infinitely old.
3. Therefore, the universe was created by God.
This is a modus tollens argument. See Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, 210-213.
[12] See Groothuis, “The Fine-Tuning Argument,” Christian Apologetics.
[13] See Douglas Groothuis, “Deposed Royalty: The Anthropological Argument,” Christian Apologetics.
[14] For the argument that Jesus endorsed the Bible, see Groothuis, Christian Apologetics, 507-509.
— Douglas Groothuis is University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (InterVarsity-Academic, 2024) and Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (InterVarsity-Academic, 2022).
