Day 6 – the task before us
No fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave… all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genious, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system… the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. –agnostic BERTRAND RUSSELL
The atheist, therefore, cannot conceive of life after death, nor can he hope for all things unjust to be made right. Only the believer embraces these possibilities. Such faith is worthless, however, if the atheist is right and the believer wrong about the existence of God. If the atheist is right, then life after death and ultimate justice are mirages. Only if the atheist is wrong—if God, indeed, does exist—can you or I consider living beyond death and seeing justice prevail.
God's existence, then, is the first hurdle we must leap in our religious quest. Only then can we determine if we have reason to hope at all. Only then, when we truly believe He does exist, can we begin to look at His character. Only after perceiving His character can we begin to see whether or not our hopes are in vain.
The task before us can be simply stated: we must first examine the existence of God to see if eternal hope is possible and, if so confirmed, must then examine His nature to see if this hope is reasonable.1
Daily Quotation
Bertrand Russell, A Free Man's Worship (Portland, Me.: Thomas Mosher, 1927), 6-7.
1When referring to God, I have chosen throughout this book to use the traditional masculine pronoun. I am aware of the debate about such use in certain theological and political circles and am not trying to be insensitive to those with differing views. If the truth were known, I believe that God transcends the bounds of gender just as much as the bounds of race. Why I have elected to use “He,” “His,” and “Him” exclusively is rather practical. If theology isn’t already confusing enough to the non-theologian, equally distributed references to God as masculine and feminine would have made this book much more difficult to follow. It would have defeated the purpose of the whole project: to relay God’s existence to the masses in the most understandable terms possible. Another option—to refer to God as “It”—would have projected an image far too impersonal, almost demeaning. And to use no pronouns whatsoever would have made these pages unbearable reading.
Two other points are worth mentioning. Since most people are already accustomed to masculine references to God, their use here may help keep the reader focused on the main issue (is there a God?) rather than on a secondary one—whether God is male, female, or neuter. Lastly, and not the least important, Jesus freely used the male pronoun for God. I suspect he did so for similar practical reasons: to maximize the message and minimize the minutia. If such an approach was good enough for him, so be it for me.
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