Day 2 — Is There a God?

“For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.”

— Romans 1:19–20 (BSB)

Some questions are bigger than others. “Is there a God?” might be the biggest of all, because the answer changes the meaning of everything else.

Paul says that God’s “eternal power and divine nature” have been “clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship.” In other words, the world itself is a signpost. You don’t need a laboratory or a philosophy degree to read it. A girl herding goats in the Ethiopian highlands and a student in a lecture hall in Seoul are looking at the same evidence.

So where does that evidence point? Think about three signposts.

First, there is something rather than nothing. Everything you’ve ever seen that began to exist had a cause: your phone, your house, you. Most scientists today agree that the universe itself had a beginning. So what caused that? Whatever it was had to be outside time, space and matter, and powerful enough to bring them all into being. That sounds a great deal like what the Bible calls God.

Second, the universe makes sense. It runs on laws so steady that we can write them down as mathematics, launch a spacecraft at a planet that is moving through space, and arrive years later exactly on target. Why should the universe be orderly at all? And why should our minds be able to understand it? If everything came from mindless chance, that’s a very strange coincidence. If it came from a Mind, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

Third, there’s something inside you. You know that some things are truly wrong, not just unpopular: bullying someone weaker, betraying a friend, cruelty for fun. Where does that sense of ought come from? And you carry a longing that nothing in this world quite fills. The thing you wanted so badly turns out, once you have it, to be not quite enough. That ache makes sense if you were made for Someone.

None of these signposts forces you to believe. They aren’t like a maths proof that leaves you no choice. Blaise Pascal, the brilliant French mathematician who built one of the first calculating machines, put it like this: there is enough light for those who want to see, and enough darkness for those who don’t. God isn’t trying to win an argument. He wants to be known and loved, and love can’t be forced.

And here is the most surprising part. The God behind the universe isn’t a distant force. When Paul spoke to the philosophers of Athens, he told them that God made people so “that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.”

Not far. Not from them, and not from you.

Think about it: Which of the three signposts seems strongest to you? Which seems weakest, and why?

Try this: Spend five minutes outside today, or at a window, with your phone in another room. Look closely at one living thing. Ask yourself honestly where you think it came from.

Go deeper: Pensées by Blaise Pascal — in his famous “wager”, Pascal argues that nobody can stay neutral about God, and that there are only two kinds of reasonable people: those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they don’t know Him yet. Start with chapter 3, “Of the Necessity of the Wager”.

Creator God, thank You for a world full of signposts pointing back to You. Open my eyes to see what You have made plain. When I’m not sure, help me keep seeking instead of giving up. Thank You that You are not far from me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.