Put Your Ideas to the Test - #4 – The Question Part II

          In the last entry on this topic (Entry #3), I discussed the question “What would God have to do to prove Himself to you?”  Sometimes questions tell us as much as the answers do, and I find this question useful as a starting point for a very interesting line of thought.  But it is too vague and, frankly, too wimpy to be used to help in designing the spiritual experiment that we have been discussing.  We need a better question.  To make this better question, we need to:  1) carefully define God and the characteristics of God, and 2) use those characteristics to our advantage in designing the experiment.

          We are limited to certain types of gods in our testing.  For example, a capricious God with no standards who would just as soon lie as tell the truth – such a God is always going to be outside of our ability to experiment.  In fact, we need a God who is willing to reveal Himself to human beings.  We also need a God who is willing and able to make Himself known in the physical realm, since that is the only realm in which we can observe the results of our experiment.  In fact, you may start thinking “by the time we’re done, the definition of God will be so narrow that there is nothing left”, and that is a valid concern.  Our experiment, and the meaning of its results, is going to have to be rather narrow.  But that is true of most well-defined experiments.

          There are also some "Gods" where an experiment is not even necessary because our past experience or current situation already tell us that such a God does not exist.  For example, a God who doesn’t allow hardship or tragedy in our lives – clearly such a God doesn’t exist.  We have those things in our lives already, so we can answer the question without any further evidence:  such a God doesn’t exist.  However, we have to be careful not to leave out the “such a”.  For example, a common argument is “there is evil in the world, therefore:  God doesn’t exist.”  That’s the problem with not carefully defining the question.  If the question is “Does a God exist who doesn’t allow evil in my life (using my definition of evil)?” then the answer is clearly “such a God doesn’t exist.”  But it is incorrect to then extend the statement by dropping the “such a” and saying “God doesn’t exist.”  Usually, though, there is some implied definition of God in such statements.  The problem is that if we don’t make those statements highly specific, the meaning of such statements becomes very hazy.

          As I mentioned in an earlier entry on this topic, we’re going to focus on a specific “God”, and that God is Jesus.  Further, at least as a starting point, I said we would focus on Jesus as described in the Bible.  I do not want to get into topics such as the accuracy and “inerrancy” of the Bible here.  Instead, we will just use a practical definition for my phrase “as described in the Bible”:  any description of Jesus, sayings of Jesus, actions of Jesus, as described in the Bible, can be taken at face value as reliable.  We’ll use this as the basis for helping to define the characteristics of Jesus, and therefore of God, for our experiment.  Actually, we will just need to pull out a few key characteristics and a few key sayings.  Our experimental question will be based on the assumption that those key things are true. 

          The first key characteristic is the same characteristic that I labeled as the #1 Crazy Thing That Christians Believe (here):  Jesus is alive today and still active in people’s lives.  This is absolutely critical to our experimental design.  If our experiment ends with a negative outcome, then it could be that Jesus is not still alive, or that he is not still active in people’s lives, or that he never existed in the first place.  I think these would be the kind of negative conclusions that we would expect from such an experiment.  I bring them up because it is critical to keep these kinds of issues in mind as we more carefully define the question.  Every carefully-defined aspect of the question also results in a more carefully-defined outcome.  As I said earlier, don’t forget the “such a” in describing the final answer.

          The second key characteristic is also in my Top Five Crazy Things list (here):  Jesus is God.  Now, that could mean a lot of things, so for our purposes I want to specifically highlight two things that “being God” means:  1) ultimate free will, and 2) omnipotence (all-powerful).  The combination of these two features means that God (Jesus) can decide what He wants to do and He can carry it out and no one or no thing can stop Him. 

          I will have to add a third characteristic that helps clarify God’s/Jesus’ actions.  Specifically:  Jesus can decide not to exercise his “free will” if he chooses.  Really, I’m just clarifying that free will can be positive (I will do…) or negative (I will not do…).  The reason this is important is that we already talked about how some people have locked God out by their own views of the world (see here).  I said that God could not show Himself to those people because they had arranged their belief system such that nothing God might do would lead to their believing in Him.  From a theological perspective, this appears to go against a God who is all-powerful.  Thus, we say that “such a God” doesn’t exist:  a God who always carries out His plans and never “checks Himself.”  Actually, nature is just such a “god” – nature never “checks herself”.  The law of gravity always acts, even if that means someone falls to their death.  Nature has no mercy, no forgiveness.  But Jesus, as God, is clearly described as having mercy, forgiveness, etc. in the Bible.  Therefore, we do not seek “such a God” as nature in our experiment.

          I will summarize these features in the future, but one more piece of our puzzle in characterizing God for the purposes of experimentation is this:  He (Jesus) made two statements of relevance to our experiment, as I mentioned earlier.  These are:

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  [Matt 7:7-8]

And also

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”  [Rev 3:20]

          We’re going to have to spend some time understanding these statements, or at least defining our understanding of them for the purposes of the experiment.  That will add another detail into our results (i.e. our interpretation could be wrong), but we’ll just have to live with that.  But, I’d like to stop here and begin to start phrasing a more specific question for our experiments.  We can now start with something like: 

          “What would Jesus have to do to prove to you that He is still alive, still God, still active in people’s lives, and can be found by everyone who seeks Him?”

          Do you see how a more specifically worded question might allow us to conduct our experiment?  At least this gets us closer, I think.  Does such a God exist?

          Well, we still have a ways to go before we are ready to do an experiment.  There are some pretty difficult issues still to address.  But I hope you at least find this journey reasonably intriguing!