The idea of God makes sense of a lot of things. But we can’t pretend that an argument for God in itself means we understand God. To understand God, we need God to communicate with us, to initiate some sort of relationship. He must stoop to our level and use words and concepts that make sense to humans like us. He would really have to spell things out. That’s why I like to tell students, while theism best explains reality, Jesus offers us an explanation of God himself. 

The human experience is lived in a body, but it’s filled with non-physical values. That’s why it’s hard for me to fully understand the perspective of a person who believes all of reality can be reduced to physical explanations. Anything else seems more believable than that to me.

You can call it atheism, physicalism, or even materialism. It’s a way of seeing the world merely as a bubble of time, space, matter, and energy. If that’s all reality is, then science would indeed be the only way to know true facts. But nobody lives like that.

No one lives as though physical stuff is all that exists or as though science is really the only way to understand the human experience. Most of what we live for fits into other categories. We live for things like friendship, love, beauty, and justice. None of that fits into a scientific test tube or is well captured in a mathematical equation. The whole of our lives hinges on things unrelated to physical facts about the universe.

To tease out just one of these values, the idea of justice transcends all our scientific labels. Justice points to truths that transcend culture and preferences.

Read More