I’ve been thinking about how to respond to one of the comments posted on my “Talking to Kids About God” post earlier this week. I wrote about how we are teaching our children about God, hopefully in word and in action. The commenter wrote, “A wiser course would be to let children become adults without being indoctrinated. Let them decide for themselves when they are old enough to think for themselves. Or are you perhaps afraid your religion won’t be obviously right to them if they aren’t raised believing in your invisible watcher?”
The commenter and I disagree on a number of points, and I’m not going to take them all up right now. But it made me think back to a series of posts I wrote a year ago about the nature of God, beginning with the question of God’s existence. I will quote the first one in full, and then refer to the others:
I’m not planning to mount a defense of the existence of God. Honestly, if there is a God, it is up to God whether we know about Him. For all our arguments, at the end of the day, God’s existence and character need to be revealed to us, not discovered by us.
I go to seminary up the road at Princeton, which means I take a lot of classes that talk about God, and in seminary classes, my teachers talk about something called the “ontological divide.”
Ontological. It’s a big word, but I like it, because it defines a big concept. “Ontological” comes from “ontology,” which means “the nature of being.” In other words, the question, “What makes us human?” is an ontological question. “What makes God God?” is an ontological question. And most people (though not all) would agree that there is a divide, ontologically, between human beings and God. God is God and I am not. What it means is that God is different, in His being, than we are. And if there is a God, then that God is not just ontologically different than us, but ontologically more than us–more powerful, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, more everything.
It’s because of this divide that we don’t get to decide whether or not God exists. God exists, or He doesn’t. And if He does, it is up to Him to let us know. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, so on that level, it doesn’t matter, really, whether we believe in God. If there is a God, then there is a God, no matter what we think. What does matter is whether God believes in us. So this weekend, my job is to explain how it is that God has let us know that He exists and how God has let us know that he believes in us.
If you’re interested in reading more, here’s the rest of the series:
Read Previous Post