Leaving agnostics and atheists to go their separate ways, people of faith are bound to find the analysis in the previous post dissatisfying. We believe that God is real and engaged with reality as we know it. Different religions describe the nature of God and of God's relationship to the world in different ways, but the consensus is that in one form or another we can know God. While Buddhism, for example, is often thought of as a non-theistic religion, some Buddhist thinkers acknowledge that the Dharma can be thought of as "God," just so long as God is not conceived of as being a person.We Christians base our affirmation of the reality of God primarily on experiences with the divine. The central experience is with Jesus, which is both historical and contemporary. Some 2,000 years ago, the founders of our faith had a mind-blowing, life-changing experience with Jesus that we are still trying to wrap our heads around. Later generations have shared in that experience in their own lives. Building on the Bible, we affirm that at the very core of it all, we experience God as love. Christians in different ages, cultures, traditions, sects, and denominations have understood the love of God in different ways, given different interpretations and emphases to that love, but we share across the boundaries of our many Christianities the common sense that God is love, and we experience that love in Christ.
This brings us to a third way of talking about God. We can speak of God in the abstract as "ultimate being." We can affirm the living Lord as "love". And we understand God as creator of all of reality. The Old Testament affirms from the get-go that God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth. In the evolution of their faith, the Hebrew people learned that their God was not a tribal god whose throne was in the temple in Jerusalem. God's throne, instead, stood at the peak of the created universe, heaven, and the whole of the world was God's footstool. In the tiny universe of the ancient world, this was as universal a view of God as was possible. It took our understanding of God to a new level. It transformed God's "kingship" and "kingdom" into something Beyond any human conception of God—even concepts such as "Lord" of the Universe.
God as the creator who encompasses all of reality takes us back to the neutral, abstract idea that God is ultimate reality but with one crucial difference. We do not know what the relationship of ultimate reality is to mundane reality. When we claim that God created the universe, we also necessarily claim that we can know certain things about God through the study of the universe, God's creation. The universe reflects and therefore reveals something of the nature of God. The abstract notion of God as ultimate reality becomes more concrete and comprehensible in some degree to us whose senses and perceptions are tied to the physical world.
The universe itself reveals God. It is one of the "two books" of revelation, the Bible and Nature. The discovery of the Book of Nature, which goes back to the early decades of the invention of science, was an important moment in the evolution of Christian theological thinking. Rooted in the biblical view of God as creator, it continues to provide a key interface between faith and science. It reminds us that many early scientists were looking for God in their scientific pursuits and that we should continue their journey today. Stay tuned.
