God in a box?

Image via Wikipedia

The word ‘God’ means different things to different people.  But can we put God in a box, and quantify Him? (if He is a Him!)  Some maintain that we can can, leaving the box empty and putting the label ‘God’ on the box, implying that God does not exist.  Others would argue that God is outside of our time-space ‘capsule’, and that He is bigger than the box, and can never be confined to a box.

John Blanchard argues in his book Does God Believe in Atheists? that the word God has become meaningless in and of itself.  He writes that when the word God is used it must be defined by the user.  In explaining what he means he writes that in a worldwide poll taken in 1991, 80% of people professed to believe in some kind of god.  He continues, “In a Western European survey, 75% of those polled said they believed in God, but when just one qualification was added – as to whether they believed in a ‘personal God’ – the figure dropped dramatically to just 32%.”  Blanchard quotes David Trueblood, who says that, “Nothing is easier than to use the word ‘God’ and mean almost nothing by it. It is easy to be right if we are sufficiently vague … in what we say”

Renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking believes that there is no God.  He has been quoted as saying that, “What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature.  However, this is not what most people would think of that God.”  When asked about death, Hawkings replied, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail.  There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Image by Horia Varlan via Flickr

God’s existence cannot be proven scientifically (by taking God out of a box and subjecting Him to various laboratory tests).  But neither can God’s existence be rejected by scientists on an empirical basis.  How then can Christians believe in a transcendent Creator who is outside of, and beyond, the Universe?  Their worldview is not governed primarily by science textbooks, although many of them do practice and love science.  In the hierarchy of books, one book stands above all other books.  The reason for its preeminence has to do with its ultimate Author.  Evangelical Christians believe that God’s attributes are discovered by means of God’s revelation which is recorded in the Book, not man’s empirical research that is recorded in books.

What divine attributes does God’s self-revelation, the Bible, yield when it is studied?  Just one chapter of the 1189 in the Bible, Psalm 139, describes God as being omniscient, incomprehensible, omnipresent, self-existent and holy.  Based on these attributes of God, Christians would argue that any God that could be measured, tested and observed under a microscope (or in a cage) would be no God at all.  How many people would agree to believing in a God with all of these attributes if this question were put to them in a large scale survey.

Evangelical Christians believe that a God that man can put in a ‘box’ is not worthy of praise.  Does this mean that Christians need to have blind faith, since they cannot know their incomprehensible God completely?  No!  Christians believe that God has revealed enough of Himself in His Word and in Jesus Christ for reasonable people to put their faith in Him.