Three Questions that Changed My Life
The world raises interesting questions that demand answers, here are three I wrestle with
Years ago, long before it occurred to me that I might one day have a life in ministry, a co-worker said the most remarkable thing about God. “Jay, I just don’t care about those things.” He cared about all sorts of things. He was a rabid sports fan, he worked hard at his job and seemed to enjoy time with his family. He wasn’t a committed materialistic naturalist or an existentialist. He occasionally attended church with his family, but, like most people, he lived his life without any attempt to form a coherent view of the world.
I struggle to understand this view. Just like him, I enjoy my family, sports, and the satisfaction attained through hard work. Unlike him, I experience those aspects of my life through the lens of deeper meaning and purpose. We work because we must contribute, earn, and participate. We fall in love. We have children. Our lives unfold like the scenes in a play, but deeper questions materialize. Where did the stage come from? Is there a playwright or a director and, if so, what are their intentions? I asked him, “You don’t care at all if the universe is an accident or a creation? You don’t care if there is a God who made you for a point and purpose or if you are a cosmic accident?”
To my surprise he shrugged his shoulders and said, “No. It just doesn’t matter to me.”
New Beliefs Ought to Produce New Convictions
For as long as I can remember, questions surrounding the ultimate explanations of reality consumed me. Early in my life, the vastness of the ancient universe, unfathomably old, led me to believe all human life was meaningless and our life spans impossibly transient in the greater scheme of things. A life of 70 years was no different than a life of 20 or 30 years, all absurdly short in the face of billions of years of life. We fill our limited years with meaningless tasks. This idea plagued me, infected my decision making. All the things my peers did, what I ought to have been doing, things like going to high school, caring about my future, preparing for college, I just couldn’t convince myself to do them. Nothing mattered. It seemed vastly more interesting to live outside of that system and die early. The truth mattered to me, and once I determined I was a cosmic accident, atoms bumping into atoms, I lived consistently with that view and argued for it. I cared about the truth.
My transformation from atheist to Christian was not a movement from apathy to passion. It wasn’t even a movement from immoral to moral. It was a process of clarification. The ultimate explanations I once believed became insufficient to me, and I sought new ones. Those new explanations produced new behaviors consistent with those views. When I believed the world had no purpose and people had no intrinsic dignity, it would have been dishonest to participate in a lie of illusory deeper meaning. New beliefs, life has purpose and meaning, produced new convictions, all of our lives matter.
Despair and Hope
Despair. The first chink in the armor was despair. I despaired of life without any clear understanding as to why. It is easy to despise humanity, our treatment of one another, our obsession with fame, wealth, and power. Despising the human condition or even the animal condition comes easy. The natural world is terrible and beautiful, vast oceans, unforgiving wilderness, monstrous rolling cloud formations carrying deadly storms. Mountains cutting through the world daring men to climb them, cross them, and then shaking many of those accept off jagged cliffs, carrying them away in landslides, burying them in avalanches. Rivers gently meander then suddenly roar with rapids and falls. The heat of the summer, the chill of the winter, the suffocating high altitudes, the earth is at once a lush Eden in the cosmos and an impassable gauntlet of life-threatening challenges. Its formidability creates breathtaking beauty.
Living within that beauty, a diversity of life competes for survival. In the novel Watership Down, Frith, the rabbit word for God, tells the first rabbit, El- Ahrairah, the world is filled with predators. El-Ahrairah is the prince with 1,000 enemies who will pursue him and his children all their days. Humanity has far more than 1,000 enemies in the natural world. As children we hear tales of bears, the big bad wolf, a witch in a house of candy in wood, fierce tigers, clever serpents, deadly spiders, sharks, piranha, alligators, etc. We are the children with 1,000 enemies from birth, raised to see danger everywhere in our world, but invisible dangers lurk in the form of bacteria in dirty water, viruses on dirty surfaces, even the air that we breathe. As Alfred Tennyson wrote in his In Memoriam, an elegy for a friend who died very young, nature is red in tooth and claw.
Amid the turmoil, we find man. Man at war with man. War through conventional means, war through industry, war through finance, war by every manner possible. Those who don’t wage war either profit from it or are its victims. It is easy to admire the uncontrollable vastness of the natural order and despise the role man plays within it. Despising the human conditions is to hate or dismiss it all as meaningless and without value. But despair is something different. As authors from Dostoevsky to Kierkegaard to Camus noted, despair is interdependent with hope. To despair life is to lose all hope that it will ever be what it ought to be. A state of despair is a state of existence without hope.
Human relationships seemed broken to me, and that bothered me. I hated how people treated each other, including both how I treated others and how I was treated. It bothered me that I was bothered. To be bothered implied in some way or another people ought to treat each other better, there is a way that we ought to behave. I wanted to believe we could be better, though my view of the world lacked any standard of elevated behavior. The insensitivity to human dignity fostered a sense of despair, a loss of hope for what could be. The reality of my despair shook my confidence that nothing mattered, because if nothing mattered, then why did all that was wrong hurt so much?
Either the pain of despair was grounded in an illusion, a fantasy of meaning, purpose, and value, or a deeper truth undergirded reality defining how we ought to treat one another. One thing I could not escape, it is more obvious to me that there are wrong things we can do to one another than it is human beings are accidental byproducts of an indifferent universe.
Dennett’s Admission
In Jim Holt’s book, Why Does the World Exist?, he confronts the most basic and problematic question confronting humanity, “Why does something exist rather than nothing?” The question, as expressed, is relatively new in human history because the idea of nothing existing is difficult to wrap the mind around. Holt’s question is formed around the idea that the simplest state of affairs is the most likely to exist, and nothing existing is simpler than our universe existing (or any other universe for that matter). Our universe is filled with complicated systems held together by nuclear forces, gravitational forces, balances in quantities of matter, and more, any of which existing in a different state would cause our universe to be non-life permitting.
I once sat in the audience as the late Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of cognitive science and member of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheists, made the following claim. Whatever the truth of existence is, it is wildly improbable. His point was to undermine the probability arguments mentioned above as evidence of design, but it comes with an admission. The existence of the universe demands an explanation, and all available answers are incredible. Of course they are, the universe is incredible, awe inspiring, beyond comprehension.
In July of 2022, NASA published a deep space image from the James Webb telescope. The image (link here) shows a field observed over a 12.5 hour period. The observed field is the size of a portion of the night sky equivalent to a grain of sand held extended the length of your arm. A grain of sand in the night sky covers 10,000 galaxies of an estimated 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe which it is believed is expanding faster than the speed of light. I won’t pretend to understand what that means. Information like that once made me feel impossibly small and unimportant, but today it makes God larger, more incomprehensible. It raises unresolvable questions we must do our best to answer with some level of epistemic humility.
Some of the brightest minds in the world suggest solutions to the problem of ordered existence like the multiverse theory, in which the sheer number of realities makes every improbability eventual. Others point to the massive number of galaxies combined with the ready availability of the chemical building blocks which make up organic matter to draw the conclusion life will find Goldilocks zones where the conditions are just right for complex organisms to flourish and evolve.
As for the initial conditions of the universe and the cosmological constants which make all existence possible? Some shrug their shoulders and say the concept of nothing existing is incoherent and more information may yet demonstrate that those constants and variables aren’t as improbable as once believed. Finally, others say a finite universe comprised of contingent entities requires an ultimate and transcendent cause. A cause which decided to punctuate non-existence with existence must have made a decision to do so and is, therefore, personal. The source of existence is a timeless (without creation), transcendent, personal creator.
Whatever the truth is, it is amazing.
Jesus is There
During a Q&A after a presentation at a church about the equal dignity of all human life, a skeptical young man stood up and asked, “There are so many different religions and beliefs, why do I have to believe your religion or I go to hell?”
I responded, “Christianity is not my religion. It started 2,000 years ago on the other side of the planet. There were Christians in Africa, Asia, and Europe far before our country existed. At its center is a proposition I came to believe is true. Claims about a man who existed in history, his nature, his relationship to God, and how his life related to my own. If Jesus is who the New Testament authors claimed he was, then everyone is afforded the opportunity to avoid judgement through his grace and mercy. That mercy was secured in a single act of perfect sacrifice, his burial, and then his resurrection, defeating the wages of sin once and for all.
I didn’t come up with that story. I learned about it, heard about it. Jesus was neither the first nor the last man to make extraordinary claims. In this case, much like Socrates and Siddhartha Gautama, we know all the claims about Jesus from his followers. Unlike Siddhartha Gautama, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith, Jesus never enjoyed any prestige or privilege because of those claims. He didn’t amass power, wealth, or wives. He traveled around a very restricted area, taught difficult lessons, performed a few miracles, was killed, and then was reportedly seen alive according to the testimony of multiple eyewitness accounts. I, like billions of other people throughout the last 2,000 years, heard that story, weighed the evidence, and determined to the best of my ability to do so that the story was true. I am a believer, but it isn’t MY belief. It is a recorded historical event of such magnitude that worldwide calendars (Julian and Gregorian) set this event as the center point of our modern measurement of years. Deciding what you think about Christianity is not agreeing or disagreeing with me. It is not believing or disbelieving my views. It is coming to terms with the most famous story ever shared about man who claimed to provide a way for us to overcome our fallen condition and be restored to a love relationship with our Creator, a relationship we were intended to be in all along.”
Jesus is there, standing astride history. His name is objectively one of the most important names ever uttered. Great and glorious works of service and charity have been done in his name. Terrible acts of violence and oppression have been perpetrated by those abusing his name, wearing it as moral cover while violating the spirit of his message. According to historian Tom Holland, the followers of Jesus tamed the world, transformed ethics, upended old ideas of just governance, and redefined our duties to the helpless and needy. We live in a world transformed forever by the Jesus story, and the shadow he casts over human history demands reflection.
When I was younger, I dismissed belief in Jesus as God incarnate as on par with belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I am embarrassed by that position now. Whatever one concludes about Jesus, there is zero comparison between his story and legends and fantasies of that kind. Legends take time to grow, and they morph constantly. The legend of Santa Claus, though loosely grounded in a real man, a fourth century Christian bishop, took more than 1,000 years to move from Nicholas leaving money to a family in dire need to the Father Christmas figure of today. Every retelling adds a layer, every storyteller delights in expanding the myth, creating a new wrinkle to the story. It is a fiction to which every generation contributes. Like vampires, bigfoot, and comic book heroes, legends evolve wildly beyond the scope of their first iteration.
The story of Jesus isn’t loosely based on a historical figure. The historical records we commonly refer to as the gospels and the epistles of the New Testament have maintained a consistent story about Jesus from the beginning. To quote William Lane Craig[1] from his debate with skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman on the historicity of the resurrection and proximity of those claims to the actual event:
“For example, he says Paul was 25 years later, not as early as I have claimed. But surely Dr. Ehrman knows that Paul in I Corinthians 15:3-5 is quoting an ancient Christian tradition which he himself received and which goes back to within five years after the crucifixion. In fact James D. G. Dunn dates it back to within 18 months of Jesus’ death[2]. So we’re relying on those pre-Pauline traditions here, not the date of Paul’s actual letter.”
Jesus’s followers fought textual corruption, setting a canon of trustworthy books to guard against the accretion of legendary tales to the original story by gnostic and Coptic authors. Generations of Christian scholars have stood vigil over the texts, endeavoring to provide every culture with the core content of the original story intact. There is no creative license permitted. Each word, phrasing, and translation is fought out both in writing and in public conferences by serious scholars.
The story says what it says and happened when it happened. It does no good to protest Jesus living so long ago and so far away. Given the reach of the story of Christ and the Christian influence over the world, it appears the timing worked well for the dissemination of the story of Jesus throughout the ages. As comedian Lous C.K. said, all religions are basically the same except Christianity. They won. Give them their proper credit. His joke has bite. Jesus is there, unavoidably there for all men and women to see.
Conclusion
I repeat, life raises fascinating questions. They are unavoidable. What does it mean when we say something is morally wrong? How can things like natural rights exist? How can anything exist? And what the heck happened in Israel 2,000 years ago? There are more, and digging into those questions has been the some of the most rewarding work of my life. I understand people who see the same things and reach different conclusions. What I will never understand are people like my former colleague, who won’t look up from the business of their day long enough to reflect on how much more there is out there than our vocation and children’s little league teams. Familial and professional experiences are deeply important, but, to shamelessly pilfer from Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the average common worldview.
[1] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-there-historical-evidence-for-the-resurrection-of-jesus-the-craig-ehrman
[2] James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), p. 855.