My wife has noticed, often in exasperation, that with me, things are either black or white. It’s true—I like to join until there is only one split. You are either alive or dead. You are either standing on top of the cliff or you have fallen over it. You are either innocent or guilty.
So it’s natural that I split the question of cosmology into two alternatives. Either God created the world, or it is the product of magic. Either societies submit to Jesus, or they become chaotic. Either everyone in society is subject to the same laws, or the powerful do as they please with the weak. We will consider those issues in order.
Either there is a conscious being—a god, a creator—outside the universe available to our five senses, or there isn’t. If there isn’t, then it follows that we and all other tangible objects are the result of mindless processes. Furthermore, the question of why anything exists at all is meaningless: If there is nothing outside the universe, it could not have come into existence for any purpose, so it has no inherent meaning. But we’ll get to that later.
The question of the origin of the universe can be answered only one of two ways. Either everything has always existed, or there was a beginning.
If it has always existed, existence is either static or changing. Since we see motion, which is change, we can discount stasis. So we’re left with an ever-existing universe that changes. Are those changes directional or cyclical? While the climate cycle and the life cycles of everything from insects to empires point to cyclicality, statements like “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme” and “We never cross the same river twice; not only does the river change, but we become different people in the meantime” cast a shadow on strict cyclicality.
One might also point to the observation that the universe seems to be expanding at increasing speed. If the universe’s history were a series of big bangs, expansions, and contractions to a black hole, we would expect that it would be expanding but the speed of expansion was slowing down. (That is, unless we are still in a phase analogous to that in which a bullet accelerates to its maximum speed, in which case we would need to find a source of the energy driving that acceleration.)
This leaves us with a history that spirals, sort of like a slinky that goes left and right on the floor and up and down over the furniture at a speed that is currently increasing. Maybe the increase in speed will diminish and eventually become negative, the speed itself will decrease to nothing, and the universe will eventually contract again and the process will repeat. But this is a maybe that cannot be proven and seems counterintuitive. So let’s look at the possibility that there was a beginning.
Where would the beginning of that slinky be? And how did it come into existence? That brings us back to the question of the creator. If there was no creator, then everything came out of nothing for no reason. From nothing came everything, including the time by which the history of everything is measured. Not only is this magic, it’s even better than magic: a rabbit has sprung from the empty hat without the agency or desire of a magician. Let us call it capital-M Magic.
Scoffing naturalists score a touchdown when they point out that creationism of any stripe is a convenient solution to the problem of existence. But I’d like to argue that they ultimately lose the game because they can provide a viable alternative neither to that problem nor to any of the problems that follow from it. Not only is the god answer convenient, it’s the only answer that doesn’t evaporate as we look at it closely.
Let’s look at the implications of naturalism’s closed system. Not only do we have the physical universe coming out of nothing for no reason, we have order coming out of randomness for no reason. For what reason should some subatomic particles bond to form hydrogen and some uranium? For what reason should some amalgamations orbit around other amalgamations that themselves become part of discreet structures with complex internal and external relationships?
It depends on what is meant by “reason,” I suppose. The easiest type of reason for scoffers to dispose of is that of consciousness. If there is no conscious being outside the natural system, then it came about for no reason. It is the result of no conscious intention. It simply exists: whatever is, is. Touchdown again.
Then there are reasons that are the bailiwick of physicists. For example, one can posit that in a random explosion some particles end up being closer to each other, thus forming heavier elements, and others being farther apart, thus forming lighter elements. Fine, but for what reason would all combinations of, say, eighteen protons and electrons (and whatever else is in there) be a gas (argon), while all combinations of fewer particles, thirteen, be a metal (aluminum)? For what reason aren’t some combinations of eighteen a metal and some of thirteen a gas? From what I can see, the answers to each question raise questions that require answers that assume that the universe is more, not less, complex than we know.
I don’t read molecular physics, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the horse that says the processes are more complex than anyone has figured out rather than that they occur willy-nilly. Complexity coming from randomness for no reason we can state definitively: Magic.
How does lifeless material produce living beings? Great minds have tried for centuries to reproduce the process—and they can produce, as we are finding to our horror, destructive organisms—but they cannot produce totally from dead matter anything that fulfills the traditional definition of life by being able to both metabolize and reproduce. If the process were random, reverse engineering it should be easy, but everything we learn about living beings points to them being incomprehensibly complex both internally and in relationship to their environments. Similar to—or perhaps a corollary of—complexity from randomness, life from death is either a gift of some god, or it’s Magic.
Sometime after the first living beings appeared by Magic, so the story goes, some of them stopped gaining nutrition from lifeless matter and started consuming other living beings. Now, when I was a kid, we acknowledged cows and pigs and deer as conscious beings, so we thought of hunting and butchering as killing. But plants, we thought, had no consciousness, so we had no trouble with eating apples or cabbage or mushrooms. But science, never settled, has cast a shadow on that view: it seems that plants from mushrooms to trees (including cabbage?) actually communicate with each other, at least within species, so they are not the unconscious organisms I thought they were in my youth. How much the cells of the meat of an apple suffer when I eat them (or when the apple simply rots on the ground) I don’t know, but whatever consciousness the first organism to eat another organism had was probably matched by the organism it ate. So sentient beings began consuming other beings that were in some sense sentient.
As time went on, organisms became more complex, and so did the organisms they ate. As species diversified, the diets of most became specialized. This specialization was purely practical: X “knew” through Magic-endowed cognitive processes (experience? instinct?) that Y had been endowed (by Magic) with something that, if X consumed Y, would benefit X and enable it to metabolize and reproduce.
Metabolism and reproduction: more Magic.
Now we get into the uniquely human question of morality. Note that the question whether X should (in the moral sense) eat Y was not, shall we say, on the table before the appearance of homo Sapiens. When a tyrannosaur attacked a hadrosaur, the outcome was equally moral whether the hadrosaur escaped or the tyrannosaur ate it. The same cannot be said about a virgin’s relationship with a rapist or a merchant’s relationship with a shoplifter. Even the terms used in the previous sentence speak to the importance we place on morality—it is an important part of what makes us human.
But where did this sense of morality, the idea of should, come from? What evolutionary benefit came with the idea that we should not kill those who stand between us and what we need or desire? One can argue that it is simply an extension of pragmatics—human life is better in society than in isolation, and respect for others’ lives and property makes society possible. But that doesn’t explain people forgiving and even adopting their enemies (as in the biblical examples of Saul’s adoption of Agag and Evil-Merodach’s adoption of Jehoiachin).
At best, it simply kicks the can down the road: Where did the idea of society come from in the first place? Even once sexual reproduction (more Magic, whether it’s a bug or a feature) became part of the picture, society wasn’t inevitable. Koalas mate like welfare mothers—slam, bam, thank you ma’am, and Dad disappears.
Society and compassion coming from individual self-preservation at any cost: more Magic.
Either that or the system has been constructed by something outside it. I find the latter explanation more plausible. (Only the Abrahamic religions attribute the material world to a supernatural creator, I will follow their assumption that there is only one god, most often named simply God, and I will also follow their exclusive use of masculine singular pronouns.)
The most important question after whether God exists is whether he is perfectly good. Though few would find absolutely nothing good about the material world, fewer still would consider it perfectly good. Reasonable people see suffering and death and infer that the God who created the universe is less than perfectly good. To avoid harm, so the thinking goes, we have to find ways to get and stay on his good side, such as incantations or child sacrifice or burnt animals or fasts or self-flagellation or boring convocations or the giving of alms. And maybe, just maybe, he’s like people in that we can go against his will and get away with it if we don’t get caught or we patch things up in time. But even if he has made his requirements known so clearly that we can be sure we have met them, we will always have the nagging fear of being betrayed in the end. And, of course, if we know we has not lived up to the requirements, we live in fear of being condemned by justice or whim.
One way of avoiding this fear is to make up a god who accepts us the way we are, period. Whether such a god would treat sadistic torturers and murderers differently from their victims is not addressed definitively by any of the Abrahamic religions’ sacred scriptures, so one man’s view is just as good as another’s.
But what if God really is perfectly good and hates anything that goes against his desires? What if he has revealed all we need to know about him somewhere and any of our ideas about him or desires or words or actions that do not comport with what he has revealed are not just errors but offenses against him? What if our default setting is to be at war against him?
To fall short of the requirements of a perfectly good God is to deserve what that God considers just recompense. He sets the terms—we don’t. The Christian God says we all have fallen short of his requirements and so deserve eternal punishment. The only way to escape that punishment is to enter into a covenant with him mediated by the blood sacrifice of his Son Jesus, which is done by believing that Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth and that God raised him from the dead.
Simple assent to those facts, however, carries with it life-changing implications. The war does not cease when we realize we need to change sides. The pardon for sins is free, but it will eventually, at least potentially, cost us everything we valued when we were God’s enemies. Jesus, God’s Son, gave up everything of his for us, and so he has the right to ask us to give up everything we consider ours for him—guilty pleasures, innocent pleasures, comfort, reputation, even life—everything.
People become like the gods they worship, and those in covenant with God through Jesus show evidence of that covenant by being like God and treating as holy what God calls holy, beginning with a devotion to truth. There is only one God, and he is not only primarily good but also invisible. His ways are better than our ways, and so we cannot claim his endorsement of anything he has not specifically endorsed. We are to set time aside to focus on our relationship with him and to honor those people who have graciously given us the benefits we enjoy. We are to consider all human life holy, including the property that makes life possible, the trust that makes society possible, and the reputations that make trust possible. As individuals take on these characteristics, the societies they form will also take them on. Such societies will be characterized by respect for—and reverent treatment of—life, property, trust, and reputation.
Societies composed of people who worship imperfect gods whom they must placate and can manipulate, on the other hand, are essentially wildernesses in which hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs play their hunger games. Truth and others’ lives, property, trust, and reputations are worth preserving only if they serve the needs of the individual or collective. And the bar of the god’s approval and disapproval is always just a bit lower than the individual or collective can jump.
This, then, is our choice: Christ or chaos. Either we take Christ as king as revealed in Scripture, upholding the holiness of all life, property, reputation, and trust and prescribing, again through Scripture, the responses for violations, or we have the chaos of life, property, trust, and reputation up for grabs by the rich and powerful—that is, tyranny.
Not sure the connection holds? OK, you tell me: Is Christ honored in any sense more in your society today than twenty years ago? Are life and property safer? Can you think of a society in which the answer to one of those questions would be yes but the other no?
What does a Christian society look like? The first answer, of course, is that is would be imperfect; it would be, after all the product of imperfect people. So perhaps the proper question is what Christians should aim for their societies to look like.
Let me suggest that the answer is found in Romans 13—no, not the first seven verses, but the next three:
Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another, for the one who loves someone else has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet,” and if there is any other commandment, are summed up in this statement: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does not commit evil against a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.
The fulfillment of the law, the fullness of Christian love, consists of reverence for life, property, reputation (“You shall not bear false witness” being subsumed under “any other commandment”), and trust. Note that property is part of that: “You shall not steal.” Stealing is taking what belongs to another by direct action, deceit, or extortion. Extortion is giving a person a choice between obedience or worse suffering: “Do as I say or I’ll kill you.”
Taxation is extortion by another name, and those who would extract taxes are by definition acting as though they are above God’s law. They are without exception those with power over their defenseless neighbors. Any Christian who advocates for a tax-funded body “to keep order” is thus sowing the seeds of that society’s destruction by making the most powerful people in the society exempt from God’s law. The combination of human nature—which, as noted earlier, is at war with God—and the perverse incentives inherent in exemption from God’s law is practically an engraved invitation to tyranny and chaos.
So the choice is clear. People live under either the beneficent reign of Christ or under the tyranny of chaos. And the choice matters only in a universe made by a perfectly good God.
Evangelicals might have further questions: What about Romans 13:1–7? Is that not God’s word? What about “Render unto Caesar” and “Honor the king”?
I have addressed these questions at length. I discuss Romans 13 here, “Render unto Caesar” “here, and “honor the king” here.
