by Harry Dale Huffman

Created on: May 11, 2008   Last Updated: January 06, 2011

First, God is relevant in today's world because most of the people in the world believe in God, and they act on that belief in ways large and small, daily. (Of course, as the news makes clear, many are wildly wrong-headed in their actions.)

Second, God is relevant in today's world because men and women have believed in God from the beginning of recorded history, and all that mankind is, has developed specifically with reference to that belief, both for and against. God is thus inescapable to a full accounting of human experience; that is why it is said that "if God didn't exist Man would have had to invent Him." That includes science, which developed (and is sustained) through faith in unchanging and ultimately simple natural laws governing everything in the world and the universe, and in man's ability to comprehend those laws. Such faith is no different than faith in God.

Third, science itself is incompetent if it denies or dismisses God - as a meaning and intelligence inescapably beyond description and analysis - for to do so is to pretend that science already knows all the laws governing the universe, that it stands itself in the position of "God" and nothing is beyond it. Only a fool thinks he knows everything, or argues as if he did. Man does not really, fully know his own mind; at bottom, no man or woman knows where our thoughts come from, or how they come. God is relevant because we, even the scientists, don't know much of anything in this seemingly infinite universe.

The root meaning of the word "man" is "mind", which knows it requires a source and strives to reach it. Every answer we seek stands for that ultimate answer (that's why every unsolved problem is so hard), every enlarging and ennobling striving but a rehearsal of the ultimate striving for God, for meaning.

In mathematics, we find that the real number line is "everywhere dense" no matter how closely we look; similarly, our conscious experience of the world is "everywhere meaningful", everywhere connected and coherent and closely working, at every level of conception and consideration. Thus God is, quite practically speaking, universal Meaning, or Meaningfulness, itself, which is beyond the mere machinery of physical processes. Mind proves God. The universal striving of Man for answers, in a universe that is found by experience to be coherent, governed by unchanging natural laws, proves God.

The natural philosopher Rene Descartes, one of the early founders of modern scientific thought, famously wrote as his first article of undoubtable truth: "I think, therefore I am." The natural philosophy of man, I believe, is most effectively summarized as: "I think, therefore God exists." Every problem we solve, every true answer realized, gives us the intimate experience of meaning. I think, after 60 years of personal experiences, it is both a mental and physical sensation, a shivering recognition of the truth.

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