Everyone Believes In God

BRAD STINE

I have a thought experiment for you. If God didn’t exist, why do humans behave as though He does? If nature is all there is, then humans are just a batch of arbitrary molecules meandering meaninglessly through life. So there shouldn’t be anything about nature that should invoke awe. If you are simply an accident of nature with no purpose or design, why don’t you act that way? When atheists look at the Rocky Mountains, they are literally seeing a gigantic mud pie. That is what a mountain is, a heap of dirt and minerals and rocks, capped with a blanket of frozen water. So why doesn’t observing it leave us indifferent? Why do we imbue it with a sense of majesty that takes our breath away?

How about a sunset? Or, as scientifically defined, the diffusion of light filtered through the pollution of dirt particles floating in the atmosphere. Not unlike a prism that separates light into colors, yet no one has been brought to tears by the effects of a prism. But a sunset can cause that! When colors appear through the setting of the sun, we should be numb to them. Instead, we’ve written poems and sung songs about this breathtaking canopy of the transcendent.

And beauty, I might add, is something no one taught us to see. Animals don’t view anything in nature that way, only humans. It naturally brings us to our knees. The stars that illuminate the night sky make us realize how small we are compared to the unimaginable size of the universe, yet this doesn’t cause us to despair; it enthralls us.

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ike many atheists, we could say that we are insignificant in the universe. Yet although the universe’s size is almost impossible to comprehend, there is still one missing truth about it that we rarely consider. No matter how magnificent the universe is, it still has never once stopped… to contemplate… me. If we are the only beings in the universe that can measure its size, marvel at its complexity, and speculate about its origins, we must be way bigger than it is, since it isn’t aware that it exists. The self-reflection of existence, which only humans possess, makes us miraculous compared to all other living plants, animals, and bodies in orbit.

Or how about morality on the earth? We see the human cost of a natural disaster or a terminal illness in a child, and our souls cry out, “this is wrong!” Yet if we are only evolutionary by-products, then this is neither right nor wrong; nature is just weeding out the weak children to leave more food for the strong. Survival might sound good on paper, but the concept leaves us empty when we want justice. Justice, which only humans inherently realize is the one way to bring balance to humanity.

So it seems that, without even trying, humans are designed to worship something much bigger than ourselves! That can only mean God.