Do We Still Need God?

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and Monday is not hitting you like a storm. As I write this I have numerous thoughts on my mind of were the church sits now compared to the ministry of Jesus and the early church. I wrote my last blog on social justice and although I want to dive more into that I will save that so as not to ramble in one area for too long. Tonight, as the thoughts run in and out of my mind I cannot help but to think back on the conversation the ultimately led me to start this blog.

This conversation was with 4 friends of mine who I would label as post-Christian Atheist as they all have their own deconversion story of how they grew to distance them from the faith they were raised with. One of the first pieces of this conversation was discussing what Christians could be doing better to reach out to non-believers and if more Christians carried out these behaviors would it draw you back to church. In their responses I received a few interesting reasons as to why the change in attitude and behavior would not be enough to get them back into church. One particular response said that they would need empirical evidence that God was real in order to come back to Christianity and they also posed this thought:

The church and the world have been at odds for centuries. The more we know, the less we need god. We find answers to things we thought were god. We know why earthquakes happen, we have seen the Big Bang. Religious people, years ago, needed god much more than we do today because it was the answer for the unknown. It is now struggling to hold on to what’s left. Just my thoughts.

I have spent a lot of time considering this comment and trying to fit it into my spiritual journey. I will be honest, I see and understand the thought process. Years ago, God was the only explanation for many of the things that were occurring in nature and science. As time has passed we can use science to explain many of these items. It seems that the more we can things we can explain the less we tend to give God credit for. We, society and even Christians, tend to reserve God as an explanation for only the things we cannot easily explain. Once we have the scientific explanation then we just remove God from that issue.

As I have went down this path of self-reflection I continued to have one question pop up in my mind:

“Does the presence of these scientific facts remove the need for God as an explanation or do they disprove Him as a creator?”

God created the world in 6 days and then everything went into motion. The fact that the motion is still ongoing and changing inside our world and that science is able to provide explanations for why things happen does not disprove God although you may be able to use them to say you do not need God as an explanation. I am also left with the question, “Did God ever intent to be the sole evidence of the things of this world?” I am no scholar but I think God wants to be seen as the creator and designer of this world and to be recognized for the beauty it beholds. Just because science can show you how something works it does not show you how or why it began.

After talking with a new parent once, I said man what a blessing babies are and their response to me was, God did not do this; me and my wife did. I was taken back by this comment because this was a person who was raised in church with me and it hit me when they said this. They knew the science behind child birth and simply felt that this was just something they had done with their wife. I spent time examining these comments the same as the ones above and in this instance I look at it this way. Just because science can explain where babies come from and how that all works it does not in any way prove that God does not exist or does not have a hand in it. It simply gives us humans an avenue to try to explain life without God. Just because medicine will heal a disease does not mean that God is not in the process.

In the end, I know that science and history have given us factual evidence and explanations for things that were once considered to only be possible through God. I also believe that as time continues more and more of life’s mysteries will have earthly scientific explanations. I fully believe that no matter how much we can explain through science it does not and will not disprove God as the creator of the world. Many times, science and Christianity are pitted against one another but I thing they can work hand in hand more often than not if we allow them to. So to answer the question that is the title of this blog, Do we still need God? Yes, we may not need Him to be the evidence we once did but we still need Him as the creator of the world and the Father who sent His Son to save us from the disease of sin.