A Sunrise and Belief in God
Recently I was on my morning walk and I saw a beautiful sunrise, a veritable palette of magnificent colors. Red, peach, yellow. The red was especially intense between two hills, where in their trough was the ocean. This is a place in my city where one can best view this daily event.
I was in awe of the natural beauty before me, more spectacular than any manmade painting. Then an idea dawned on me (excuse the pun!): This is just one of the many ways God reveals himself to us. He could have created any kind of world, but just look how much he went above and beyond in creating absolute beauty and wonderment.
I thought of the idea presented by some that goes something like this: If God is real, why doesn't he make it extremely obvious. Various examples of how he could achieve this have been brought forth.
- He could create a massive structure in space, perhaps the size of the moon or even larger that conveys some kind of message such as "I am God, worship me".
- God could appear, perhaps taking on human proportions, again as a giant entity, in a way that he would be visible to all of humanity on the planet, again expressing something about himself and asking us to follow him.
There are surely countless other ways people have proposed for God to reveal himself. We can overlook the idea that we are demanding God "perform" in this way to serve us and satisfy our curiosity for the moment while we consider this argument.
I could respond to this line of reasoning in a way that many others have by stating that if God were to make his presence too obvious then our refusal to accept it would be impossible and thus we would not be freely choosing to love and trust him. However, I feel like this line of reasoning has been thoroughly explained by many people ancient and modern. I would like to take a slightly different approach.
For one thing, as I already mentioned with the sunrise, it seems to anybody who's paying attention that God is making his presence known in many ways all over the place. I've already discussed all of the natural beauty that surrounds us. We look at this as God's handiwork. Also look at all of the things that he has created right before our very eyes. Another angle to look at is the fact that God came to Earth in the form of a man. Yet despite fulfilling prophecy and performing miracles, he was rejected by many. I don't really know how God could make his presence any more obvious than he already has.
There's also an element of fallacy in the line of reasoning that if God were to make himself more obvious then people would automatically believe. Just imagine for example if God appeared as a giant being in the sky. If this were to happen now, in our current day and age, we would say that is very unusual and unbelievable but perhaps we would say this because it is not our current situation. If, however, since the dawn of humanity there were a giant being in the sky, many people would perhaps attribute his existence to the same things to which they attribute our own. They would say things like perhaps he evolved or he is just another, albeit a rather impressive, being in our universe. We have to understand that the Christian idea of God is not just one being among many. For example, our being is contingent whereas God's being is not contingent but necessary. All things that are in the universe ultimately stem from God and his creation. So he is fundamentally different than we are. But if a giant being was simply appearing in the sky, there's no reason to think that people would not simply think of him as another species just like we are.
Ultimately I think we all have that spark given to us by God to come to love and trust in Him and it's a choice whether we accept that spark. A quote attributed to St. Augustine sums it up: "To those who have faith, no explanation is necessary; to those without faith, no explanation is possible".
