Norfords' Ramblings

Saturday December 6, 2008

But as for me, it is good to be near God, Ps. 73:28.

We spent some time today watching Ben Stein’s film Expelled. It details systemic discrimination in the American academic community against the idea of Intelligent Design. One of Ben’s interviews is with Richard Dawkins, the British author of The God Delusion. He, in common with most in the American academic establishment, believes that religion is fantasy or superstition that is helpful to people like me who find comfort in a belief in God. He holds that the “overwhelming proof” of evolution proves the Old Testament God is a myth as any intelligent person must come to acknowledge.

Dawkins denial of God is a belief system, equal to belief in God. After all, the absence of proof of God is not proof of his absence. But the belief or non-belief in God has far reaching effects on our understanding of the world, the sacredness of human life and eventually on the meaning of life itself. Yet we all have a sense of destiny, more than crass animal life and death. Most chilling is the idea that once God is dispensed with, man is his own master and he can control who lives and dies. Whether it’s abortion or euthanasia or the extermination camps of Hitler’s regime, it all starts the same way—survival of the fittest.

If I look inside myself, I sometimes feel that I don’t deserve to live. It is only the knowledge that there is a God of forgiveness beyond me that makes life not only worthwhile, but a joy to live. The awareness that God cares whether I live or die makes me determined to fight sickness with whatever tools are available, for life is worth living and has meaning beyond itself because God exists. That’s why I find “it is good to be near God” in health or sickness every day.