This week the blog is sponsored by Zondervan Reflective. This is an excerpt from Thaddeus Williams’ latest book on living out a radically God-centered systematic theology entitled Revering God: How to Marvel at Your Maker (Zondervan Reflective, 2024), featuring stories of Christian thinkers like Michael Horton, Fred Sanders, Joni Eareckson-Tada, John Perkins, Vishal Mangalwadi, and others on how God’s attributes have impacted their personal lives.
There are many so-called “evidential” arguments for God’s existence. The universe’s beginning points to its Beginner. Design in the universe points to its Designer. Moral laws point to the Moral Law-giver, and so on. Such arguments compute well with how certain minds are wired, particularly the more philosophic brainiac types. But there is another style of case for Christianity, one that I believe touches those without patches on their blazer elbows, pipes in their teeth, or five-syllable words on their tongues. There are arguments, if they can even be called that, which address themselves to all of us, every human and every dimension of our humanness. They address us not as cerebrums on sticks but as the artists, lovers, dreamers, hypocrites, heroes, loners, romantics, dullards, worshipers, adventurers, failures, jokesters, and weirdos that we are.
Every day you are bombarded with more arguments for God’s existence than your five senses can possibly intake or appreciate.
Thaddeus Williams
They are something less like arguments and more like invitations, signposts, pointers, clues, keys that open doors to wider vistas of human experience, lighthouse beacons that guide us out of churning black ocean chaos to safer shores. They are what a pastor hailed as “America’s most important and original philosophical theologian” understood so well. Describing the searching soul, Jonathan Edwards says,
[I]t sees that till now it has been pursuing shadows, but that it now has found the substance; that before it had been seeking happiness in the stream, but that now it has found the ocean…. The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. Fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of earthly friends, are but shadows; but God is the substance. These are but scattered beams, but God is the sun. These are but streams. But God is the ocean.
Dusk, magnolia flowers, ground-rule doubles, dandelion fluff, thunder, baptisms, laughter-induced side cramps, the sudden volume spike of rain from a pitter patter to a torrent, the conversation with a homeless man, the wrestling match with a toddler, the cool pillowcase, the Lord’s table, and on we could go. Try to wipe God from the horizon and, in the final analysis, this stream of wonders runs dry. They are reduced to nothing but “illusions fobbed on us by our genes,” in the words of atheist Michael Ruse.
I have some books on my shelf that list five arguments for God. Others document a dozen. Peter Kreeft lists twenty. One youtuber boasts 150 arguments for God in a four-hour video. What is the true number? Something more like how many drops are in the Pacific, or how many subatomic particles exist. Every day you are bombarded with more arguments for God’s existence than your five senses can possibly intake or appreciate. Lord, give us eyes to see, noses to smell, buds to taste, fingertips to touch, ears to hear, and souls to sense the moment by moment grand case for You. Help us follow shadows to the Substance, streams to the sea, sunbeams to the Sun. Amen.
