GOD - AND THE GREAT GOD CHANCE - Part I

(Please read: Genesis 1: 1-5; John 1: 1-5; Hebrews 11: 1-3)

It all happened on a beautiful sunny September afternoon. Little Jimmy, precocious for his age, returned home from his first full day at his elementary school.

He put his backpack aside and settled down at the kitchen table for the cookies and milk his adoring mother had set out for him. After his first bite of his favorite chocolate chip cookie and a sip of milk, it came – the question, that is.

With a quizzical look on his face he asked innocently, “Mommy, where did I come from?” Mommy rolled her eyes and said to herself, here it comes, the birds and the bees question. Why isn’t my husband here when I need him?

Nonetheless, being a mother of the times, she knew the importance of the teaching moment and the learning opportunity. So she took a long sip of her coffee and explained as directly and succinctly as she could the slightly embarrassing facts of sex and human reproduction.

She paused for a breath, another long sip of coffee and a reaction from precocious elementary school student Jimmy. And he said, “O, know all that. But at school the teacher asked each of us where we came from. David said he was from Cleveland. Where am I from?”

But in a more profound way, Jimmy was asking the question human beings have been asking since the beginnings of self-consciousness. Where did we come from? Where did the world and the universe come from? In philosophy and theology those are what we call the origin questions. From whence and when have all things come, especially the millions of life forms and most especially ourselves.

The companion question is, of course, where are we going? What is the end of the world and universe and humanity, if indeed there is an end? Attending funeral after funeral, we do indeed know of our own demise as well as that of plant and animal life. But at a deeper level, where is everything going? What is our destiny?

For centuries human beings have been asking the all important origin and destiny questions – where did we come from and where are we going? And then come the all-important central questions between questions or origin and destiny – what does it all mean, what is the purpose of life, how then shall we live?

In the remote centuries of our past, answers to these questions were given by philosophers, priests, shamans, astrologers, storytellers, sacred institutions, families, tribes and nations. And in varieties of sacred stories, answers to questions of origin, destiny and meaning were given.

If we were to ask ourselves those questions, how would we answer? I am reasonably sure that most of us deal with those question all the time ,either consciously or unconsciously. Where did we come from, where are we going and what does it mean in between?

In our “Dialogue with Atheism” the atheists we are consulting are saying we have been looking in the wrong places for answers to these questions. Especially if we look to religion. Christopher Hitchens, in his book titled God Is Not Great, and subtitled, How Religion Poisons Everything, believes religion poisons and distorts answers to these questions. Sam Harris in his two books, The End of Faith and Letter To A Christian Nation, believes religion is pernicious in its response to these historic questions. And Richard Dawkins, Oxford university biologist, in his book titled, The God Delusion, claims religion has been ignorant and arrogant in its handling of these questions.

So what have been the authorities to answer “where did we come from, where are we going and what is the meaning of it all?” But now our focus is especially on the first question. For our response to it determines to a considerable degree how we will respond to the other two questions.

(To be continued)