[SPEAKER_00]: Awesome, hey, good evening, everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good to see you all here.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Tim.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am the senior minister here at one.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you can see, just from that video, we are going to be launching Alpha on the seventh of October.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll mention that again at the end of the talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're interested in that, please register.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as Tara said, what we are starting tonight and what we're going to look out over the next few weeks with the exception of Father's Day,
[SPEAKER_00]: is that we're going to examine together whether it's still plausible in twenty twenty five with all that we know about the world compared with say previous generations but we we know about science with all the problems that world is facing including you know ongoing sectarian religious violence religious conflict is it still plausible to believe in God
[SPEAKER_00]: And in particular, to trust the claims of the Christian faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we're going to be exploring.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I be a reasonable?
[SPEAKER_00]: intelligent person and still believe in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that possible?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we're doing this for a couple of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first reason is that it's your fault that we're doing this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have lost count of the number of people who've come up to me over the last few weeks and months saying, really, we should really be doing like a series exploring what it means to believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it still possible to believe?
[SPEAKER_00]: Kind of on a apologetic series.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that also came throughout church.
[SPEAKER_00]: Survey that we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to look at this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you can see on the screen, we're going to do this through a bunch of different lenses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So tonight we're looking at the first one, how can you believe what you can't prove.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then over the next few weeks, we're going to look at questions of morality, purpose, meaning justice, human rights, happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to explore all of those together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is a good thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a really good thing to do as believers.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a verse in the Bible in one Peter three fifteen that says, always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping it clear conscience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're a believer and you get asked questions like, why do you believe in God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you a Christian?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you need to have, according to one Peter, you need to have answers to those questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't mean you need to know everything about theology, but you need to have a think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to think through the questions, and that's not always easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what we're going to do together.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to think through some of the really important key questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And secondly, we have people coming to this church.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were here this morning, probably some here tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've come along, you're not a believer, you're not a Christian, but you're exploring, you're asking questions, maybe someone, maybe one of your friends has dragged you along tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're asking these kinds of questions, and so I want to explore those with you, and I promise you that we're going to do this as Peter tells us to
[SPEAKER_00]: with respect and with gentleness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to completely own my bias here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I'm going to try and convince you that Christianity is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: That, you know, it is the best way for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, I'm going to try and do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm not going to rant at you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to try and create kind of cheap, sharp, gotcha moments.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to do this as openly and as honestly as we can as we explore these big questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's so much that we need to cover each week, so I am just not going to be able to answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure I'm not going to be able to touch on all the questions you might have.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I want to encourage you, if something comes up that you think I haven't dealt with adequately, maybe you think I've just made a straw man argument or something like that or missed something important, or you just want to ask a question, then please do get in touch.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can use the QR code that we showed earlier, which we'll try and put up again before the end of the evening.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can scan that and get in touch and I will try and answer those questions that you might have through this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if I know what they are, I can try and address them.
[SPEAKER_00]: One final point.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are interested in pursuing this further, I want to encourage you to check out a podcast by Tim Keller, which is of the same name as the serious question in Christianity, or you can check out this book that he's written called Making Sense of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be drawing on both of those sources a fair bit throughout the series, so credit where it's due.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to reference everything so just know that if I say something that sounds really intelligent or clever, I'm almost definitely stolen that from Tim Keller.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't we pray real quick and then we'll jump in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, thank you that we can be here together tonight in your presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pray that as we dig into this question, wherever we might be, in terms of belief or not belief, I pray that this would be helpful to all of us in Jesus' name.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're going to tackle the first question.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is foundational to all the others.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have to grapple with this one before we look at the other questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we even really ask whether what it means to believe in God or disbelieve in God or even which God I should be believing in, the question that we have to think about is how can I believe in something that I can't prove?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, how can I believe in something that I can't prove?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we can actually take this, by the way, I'm sorry, tonight's probably going to be the most brain-breaking.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be fairly not abstract, but I'm going to deal with some big issues, some big topics.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if you think after tonight, oh, that was all way too much, I just, you know, I just drank from a fire hose.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, the other weeks won't be quite like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: It'd be much more down to earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: This one is a bit more theoretical, a bit more philosophical, but I don't think we can talk about the other things until we think through this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how can I believe in something that I can't prove?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to take that further and ask, how can you believe in anything at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can you believe in anything at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: And how then to faith and reason into relate?
[SPEAKER_00]: And isn't just faith blind faith if you can't prove what it is that you're putting your faith in?
[SPEAKER_00]: And any case hasn't modern science essentially proven that there's no God or at the very least that there's highly unlikely that there's a God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if there is a God,
[SPEAKER_00]: then where's the proof that he exists?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so if there's a God, where's the proof that he exists?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the famous twenty century British philosopher and atheist, Bertrand Russell, one said, when somebody asked him, Dr. Russell, what will happen if you die, when you die and you find out that you're wrong and you are standing before God's judgment seat, what are you going to say to God?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Bertrand Russell said, quick as a shot, I'm gonna say, not enough evidence, God, don't blame me, there was not enough evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, some of you might know him, he wrote the God delusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was actually raised in Anglican, but gave it up in his late teens because he couldn't reconcile the biblical account of creation with the fossil record.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll touch on that a bit toward the end tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Later on, when he was much older, he ran an ad campaign in Britain putting this slogan on the sides of buses everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's probably no God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, stop worrying and just enjoy your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've spoken to lots of people over the years who have lost their faith or who have de-converted and one of the things that you hear all the time is that, once the person put aside emotion, put aside emotion feeling and just confronted the fact that there was very little to no empirical scientific evidence for the existence of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Along with admitting also that non-religious people are not horrible, but actually a very good, they're great people and sometimes even better than religious people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, eventually they just kind of found that their faith was no longer plausible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this often happens when you've got someone who's grown up in a Christian family, maybe going to a Christian school, they leave home, they go to university, suddenly they're confronted with a whole bunch of new ideas that they've never had to grapple with before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it just feels like faith in God is no longer plausible in the face of this barrage of new information.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, and his landmark book, A Secular Age, calls this a subtraction story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now a subtraction story
[SPEAKER_00]: usually goes something like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a believer, but once I subtracted out God or the supernatural of the transcendent, once I got rid of faith and emotion and just started looking at the world through the lens of reason and evidence, then I was finally able to see clearly, I was able to see life as it really is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Richard Dawkins tells exactly that kind of story in the God delusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: So did the historian Tom Holland.
[SPEAKER_00]: For those of you who've read him, he found growing up that he couldn't reconcile his love of dinosaurs with his love of Jesus and the dinosaurs one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although he has had a bit of a change of heart lately.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, another one is Ion Hersey Ali, who wrote How and Why I became an Infidel, a little essay that I read recently.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, after escaping the prospect of being a child bride in Somalia, she fled to Holland, where she went to university, and she describes the blinkers of faith
[SPEAKER_00]: falling off as she encountered the freedom of Western thought and culture, and eventually religion just became impossible in the face of reason, in the face of everything that she was encountering that she'd never seen before.
[SPEAKER_00]: And especially, she writes, quite honestly, after she had her first glass of wine and wasn't struck dead by lightning in divine retribution.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they got even worse when she fell in love with a boy and wanted to have sex with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's a whole nother story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although, so she had a change of heart as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the encounter with a whole different way of seeing the world, faith became implausible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when she would say, and others have said, and lots of people have spoken to, that as soon as they just subtracted out God, subtracted out the supernatural, everything became clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tim Keller actually quotes the writer, C.A.
[SPEAKER_00]: Joyce, who had been a Christian, but lost his faith, and he wrote this, the question entered my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is a God for whom there is no real evidence?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, non-existent became the obvious answer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that point, the blind as a dogma and the yoke of dread were finally taken off.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first time, the universe now shone in a new light, the comforting glove reality was no longer distorted.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was free.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, note what he says that the secular outlook in this story is put forward as the neutral position, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was, listen to what he says.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was free of dogma.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blind is finally fell off.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was able to, you know, see what I had not been able to see before once I subtracted out the supernatural and all that was left over was science and reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: So once superstition has gone,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the deconverted person is able to see what had been there all along, but they were blown to.
[SPEAKER_00]: That reason alone can establish what is true and what is real, and that we don't need religion to establish values like justice, equality, and freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: The website, a guide to a good life without God, argues that without the influence of religion, we will finally be able to achieve
[SPEAKER_00]: I quote, a tolerant open society where there is mutual respect and equality for all people and everyone will be able to realize their potential.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as John Lennon saying, imagine, how's that going for us?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, what Charles Taylor says is that these ideas are not actually neutral or value-free at all, but are in fact a new kind of religious belief
[SPEAKER_00]: and their beliefs actually that cannot be empirically proven either.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's dig into that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to move from religion to secularism or atheism, according to Charles Taylor, is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new kind of faith, which is simply drawing the lines of what's true or false, what's right or wrong, what's good or evil, in different places to where religion had drawn those lines.
[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially, the assumption is that secular people are secular or that atheist people are atheists because they have reason, because they have rationality, they have evidence, but religious people believe simply because of blind faith or because of some kind of deep emotional need to believe or just simply that they don't want to have to face the real issues of life, so they hide behind the veil of religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, there's lots of ways to frame this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for some, it might actually be less about science and more about the problem of evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, how can there be a good God who has created this world when there's so much suffering?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a huge question that we'll look at.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe for some, it's religious hypocrisy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, they've got, maybe they grew up in church and they just saw that the church is full of hypocrites who don't live what they preach and practice what they preach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're like, this must not be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: This can't be real.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the thing is the Christian faith wrestles with all of these things too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like we don't know that they're there and they're not issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wrestle with them and we're going to wrestle with some of those together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Underneath all that and this is what I want to wrestle with you tonight is the idea that the burden of proof, like the burden of proof, rests with the theists with those who believe in the existence of God and not with the atheists.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the assumption is that the reasonable position, the neutral position, the default position, is unbelief rather than belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm sure you encounter this, and if you're a believer, I'm sure you encounter this in your own lives, probably on a day-to-day basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: When people find out you're a Christian, they're like, wow, that's really weird.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you really believe in God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the assumption is that believing in God is something strange.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an aberration.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not what everyone else is doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's actually true in the sense that's the world we know live in, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not always being the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charles Taylor points out that this shift historically is pretty recent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, even a hundred and fifty years ago, most people believed in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it was almost impossible not to believe in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, but now, you know, now, for the majority of secular people that you probably live and work with and interact with, it almost seems impossible to believe in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So how has that changed so rapidly?
[SPEAKER_00]: I dealt with that in the Jesus and Culture series that I did last year.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want to dig into that question, I'm not going to look at that tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is a really rapid change, but it didn't just come out of nowhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, there's a whole kinds of reasons why we are, where we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the assumption is that you can either have faith,
[SPEAKER_00]: or you have reason, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: What I'm going to try and show you tonight is why that doesn't really work for a number of reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I'm going to see if there's a better way forward.
[SPEAKER_00]: First thing I want to say,
[SPEAKER_00]: Is anyone else feeling a little bit warm in here?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is it just me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a little toasty.
[SPEAKER_00]: Could we maybe just turn off a couple of those heaters?
[SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise everyone's gonna fall asleep.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I need you all to stay with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stay with me tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turn the person next to you and say, I'm gonna stay with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first thing I want to suggest you tonight, whether you're a believer or not, is that we all live by faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: So whether you know it or not, whether you believe in God or not,
[SPEAKER_00]: We all live by faith rather than by reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because at the most basic level of what it means to be human, we live by trusting in something that we cannot prove.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of us, every single one of us, operate on the basis of something that we cannot prove, rather than kind of just living our lives by pure reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do I mean by that?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the oldest problems in philosophy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very ancient problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one has been able to solve it yet, and it's this.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do I know that anything actually exists at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, how do I know that anything exists at all?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is the external world real or is it just an illusion or a dream in my mind in our minds and how would we know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Our reason depends on the belief that our cognitive faculties, our senses, like our eyes and our ears, our touch, our minds and our memories,
[SPEAKER_00]: are actually not tricking us.
[SPEAKER_00]: A problem is there's no non-circular way to find out or to establish that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Thomas Nagel, who was until his recent retirement, the professor of philosophy and law at New York University, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So no dummy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he writes in his book on philosophy, what does it all mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: But he says, your claim about the external world has to be based on the evidence of your senses, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We all know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is if you try to prove the reliability of your senses by appealing to your senses, then you're arguing in a circle and you can't get anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: They may or may not be an external world and if there is, it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way for you to step outside your own mind and check to see if your mind is telling you the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so we all live by taking two really big leaps of faith, all of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, that there really is an external world that exists independently of our minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And number two, that our minds are reliable enough and they're telling us the truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way to prove this, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no scientific test that you can do for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of us can step outside our minds and kind of analyze the information that we're receiving it objectively.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if we were able to do that, then we would be, well, God.
[SPEAKER_00]: The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously showed that on this basis, it's, I love this, it's actually impossible to prove, sorry, to disprove the claim that the earth is only one hundred years old and that it just popped into existence with all the marks of being old.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you know that we're not all hallucinating?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that we're not all just plugged into the matrix and the real world's actually run by robots and what we think is real is just highly sophisticated AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that sounds way more plausible today than it did when that movie was made back in nineteen ninety nine.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, I think you can see the problem here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the problem?
[SPEAKER_00]: No one can actually live like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one can live.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's practically impossible to believe that all the things around you, the world around you, might not actually exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though you can't prove otherwise.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Nagle goes on to say that our acceptance of the external world is instinctive and powerful.
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot just get rid of it by philosophical arguments.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only do we go on acting as if other people and things exist, we believe that they do, even if we have no grounds for this belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what Nagle is admitting, and remember, he's the
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, to recently, the Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, is admitting that all philosophy, and I'd add all science and all knowledge, and everything that we might call empirical proof, is predicated on faith, on an act of belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if we can't prove it,
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something instinctive and powerful in us that refuses to accept the opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we go on believing anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the alternative that we all just live our lives in despair?
[SPEAKER_00]: We all become nihilists and change our name to Jean Paul Sartre and start smoking cigars.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: The option is despair or faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is something that all of us have to face.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why I'm starting here is to show you that whether we believe in God or not, we're actually all coming at this question from the same position of common, we're all uncommon ground here.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're all in this together.
[SPEAKER_00]: To live as to believe, to live is to have faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we can go further than this though, because this also challenges the view that science
[SPEAKER_00]: is the only qualified judge therefore of what is real and what is true, and that we should not believe anything unless we can empirically prove it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the kind of general assumption that we shouldn't believe anything unless we can empirically prove it, but that's actually an unprovable idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only things we can prove are worthy of being called truth,
[SPEAKER_00]: And that everything else is just simply human feeling or emotion, which is the basis of the secular view that, since religion cannot prove its claims that they, is a God, or even like a transcendent realm beyond the material, then we should reject it as a matter of principle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem is that approach cannot meet its own standard, because where's the empirical proof for the idea that we shouldn't believe something unless we can prove it empirically?
[SPEAKER_00]: You follow?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where's the proof that that statement is true?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't prove that statement, and so it is itself a statement of faith, a statement of belief.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also impossible to maintain.
[SPEAKER_00]: The American philosopher of science sees Stephen Evans wrote that science by its very nature is not fit to investigate whether there is more to reality than the natural world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, of course, you can prove by science that substance x will boil at temperature y at elevation z, or z, sorry, I'm going to Australia.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it cannot provide a basis for what we believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like science can't prove something like, you know, you boil this substance at a certain elevation that will take, you know, at this temperature.
[SPEAKER_00]: But science can't tell you what to believe about justice or human rights or whether all people are equal and dignity and worth or that we should reject slavery or that we should care for the poor and the destitute or even what we should think about good and evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: like empiricism, materialism can't provide you a basis for any of those ideas, those are religious ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we use the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject their belief in God, then no one would be able to justify anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'd all just be in a death loop.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in that case, the only things that would be ethical to believe in would be things that can be proven in a laboratory,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, or things that can be verified by the scientific method, and we tried that in the twentieth century, and as you probably know, it was a terrifying prospect.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like hundreds of millions of people are dead because we approached the world that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a good way to go if you think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing I want to say is that it's not a question of intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so faith or non-faith is not a question of reason, but it's also not a question of intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what I mean by that is many bright and very rational people have looked at the evidence for God and come to very different conclusions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So some have looked at the evidence and the arguments and converted to Christianity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Others have looked the same evidence and the same arguments and said, no, I still don't think there's enough evidence for God and remained atheist.
[SPEAKER_00]: or agnostic.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the biologist Richard Dawkins, for example, is one of those, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, authors like George Eliot, Selman Rushdie, philosophers like Sam Harris, Daniel Denner, Camille Pagilla, the feminist writer, and many others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of those authors actually have argued publicly that if a rational person only looked at the evidence that science has provided, excuse me, the believer would see that faith is implausible.
[SPEAKER_00]: that it's wishful thinking it best, maybe an emotional crutch to help them cope with the pain of life, or it's diluted at worst, something on a level of like believing in sky fairies or the flanks for getting monster.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know what that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some have even said it might even be dangerous, like Christopher Hitchens did in his book, God is not great, how religion poisons everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like in his view, believing in religion, believing in God is poisonous, it's dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you look at some of the people who have examined the evidence, many brilliant and intelligent people and have decided that believing in God actually does make the best sense of the evidence available, then the argument that it's just delusion or a lack of intelligence or a suspension of reason doesn't really work, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you can't have two very intelligent people, both looking at the same evidence and coming to different conclusions and then say, well, it must be that one of them is not intelligent.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them's just stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: So people like Blaze Pascal, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, others like C.S.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis, you know, my kind of my own boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: J.R.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tolkien, T.S.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eliot, or contemporaries like the Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, John Lennox, or in fact one of the world's greatest scientists living
[SPEAKER_00]: Francis Collins, who was in charge of the Human Genome Project, that first mapped human DNA, and was the head of the National Institute for Health in the United States.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't look at a list like that and say, well, the believers must be stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're ignoring the evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not intelligent enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, not long ago, I listened to a brilliant debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, which was respectful, but at times a bit combative.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the end, Dawkins actually said, in the interview, you can look at this on YouTube if you want, that he had a lot of sympathy for Collins' views, that he kind of wished he could see the world the way that Collins did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially the argument that the universe appears impossibly fine-tuned for life.
[SPEAKER_00]: and that as a matter of pure mathematical probability, it simply couldn't have happened by accident, even Dawkins admitted that.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you just look at the evidence for the fine-tuning for life, it just couldn't have happened by accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how many billions and billions and billions of years you tack onto the equation.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the chance of the fine-shining for life happening by accident is so infinitely small that it was compared in an article I read recently to imagine you were in a competition where you had to select one particular atom out of all the known atoms in the known universe and you had only one chance to get it right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how infinitely small the chances are that everything just happened in a way that made life possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a mind-boggling number, something like one in ten to the power of eighty for those of you who know mathematics.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dawkins even said that if there was an argument as I said that it could almost get him to believe in God, it would be that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when he was pressed on this,
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was asked, if there could actually be a proof that really would convince him of the existence of God, he said that in the end, probably not, he couldn't actually think of one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because even if God appeared to him out of the sky or a booming voice spoke to him out of heaven,
[SPEAKER_00]: Or he witnessed a miracle, like someone coming back from the dad or a leg regrowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't put aside the idea that he might be hallucinating, or that his mind wasn't playing tricks in him, so we're back to where we started earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or that science will eventually come up with a naturalistic or evolutionary explanation for what he'd experienced.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what he was saying is that in the end, it comes down to a question of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if he's presented with irrefutable evidence, he's not sure he could actually believe that he just doesn't have faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's take this a step further.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if you accept all of that, it still doesn't prove that there is a God or even if there is, like which one you should believe in out of all of the plethora of gods that we have on option.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, I do think there are some excellent arguments or proofs for God's existence.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I do want to own that none of them are watertight, none of them are a slam dunk.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's always wiggle rooms, always room for doubt.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll explain why that is, at least as I understand it, why the proofs don't really work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my third point is why the proofs don't really work.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, I think we have to accept.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even if we can trust our reason, we can trust our minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do think we can.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not suggesting we could do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an idea that we should all just give up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not downplaying the importance of reason or rationality or logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even so, when it comes to the way that we actually live in the world, like the way that you live in the world,
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't live just by reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't just live by logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, someone said to me after the morning service when I said this, it's like, if you can imagine that if there was someone who just lived by reason or just lived by logic, that sounds like a psychopath.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me know, that's probably fair.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't just live by reason or by logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: We all of us have like background beliefs at work in our lives that motivate us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And many of those, if not most of those, we're not even really aware of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we all live to some degree by intuition, by desire, we're moved by things that we love, or we hate, or that we prefer or dislike things that maybe we've inherited from our parents, all of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's way more to we human beings than simply what's just happening in our brains.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we are much more complex than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not just reasoning machines.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're creatures of the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we all know this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we approach the world from the heart, not just from the head or from a combination of both.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the seventeenth century mathematician plays Pascal once said, the heart has its reasons that reason knows not.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of us live this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, as a Christian, what I'd want to say is that I think God has set things up like this on purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the God has created the world to be like this on purpose because He wants us to exercise faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that will explore in the coming weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what is faith?
[SPEAKER_00]: Faith is both the heart and the mind in operation together as we approach the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, coming back to Blaze Pascal and his famous Ouija, if anyone here ever heard of Pascal's Ouija,
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, not like nobody, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, well we're in for some fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Pascal was a really smart guy, smarter than just about all of us in this room, maybe put together as Graham Tomlin puts writes in his book, Pascal, the man who made the modern world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He writes that Pascal was a groundbreaking scientist
[SPEAKER_00]: mathematician, geometer, physicist, philosopher, polymer system, theologian, as well as a man of deep spiritual consciousness, he virtually invented probability theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prove the existence of the vacuum, laid the foundations of integral calculus, perform what has been called the first.
[SPEAKER_00]: modern, proper scientific experiment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's basically established the scientific method, established the principle that made possible the creation of the hydraulic press.
[SPEAKER_00]: Demonstrated that air has weight, designed and built the first function in mechanical calculating machine, a precursor of the modern computer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pascal was no idiot.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was probably one of the most intelligent people that have ever lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, he also liked to place the odd bet.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he liked to go out, play cards with his mates from university.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one night, he's out with his friends, and they're debating whether God exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And since they're in the placing some bets, Pascal puts before them a wager, and it's this on the screen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, bet on God, discard exists, then you've won infinitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't bet on God and God exists, then you've lost infinitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no God and you bet on God, me and I don't have a small loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't bet on God and no God exists, maybe that's a small win.
[SPEAKER_00]: His point was, obviously, the quadrant in the top left is the most logical thing to put your wager on.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the balance of probabilities, the most logical thing to do according to Pascal is to believe in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the point of the wager was not to say therefore that you should just, you know, even if you don't believe in God, that you should just believe in God, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: bed on God anyway, as if that will full God in the end, like you're standing before God's judgment thrown at the very end of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you say, well, I didn't really believe in you God, but I pretended that I did, like that's going to full God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course not.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the point of the wager.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point of the wager is to show you that actually, even though that is the most logical position to take, reason, logic, probability is never going to be enough to get you there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You still have to have faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end, what you have to decide is what you believe the world or reality actually consists of.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this might sound very esoteric, but let me tell you, the reason I want to mention this is because this is actually what divides atheists and theists, believers and non-believers at the foundational level.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not whether we actually believe in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually what we believe about the nature of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where we've got to start.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so actually, what you believe about reality will determine whether or not you have a predisposition to being a believer or a non-believer.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do I mean by that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me explain.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, Dr. Nathan Hawkins argues that pretty much all humans have one of two main ways that we think about reality, that we think about the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately he writes that we need a conception of reality that is satisfying and coherent that accounts for our actual lived experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're not just talking about what's reasonable, but it actually makes sense of love and of pain and of friendship and of loss and of marriage and of children, of career and work and just nature itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you need to have a conception of reality that accounts for the way that you actually experience the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question we have to ask ourselves then is whether our conception of the world is more like what he says, is it more like a person, or is it more like a machine?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is our understanding of the world more like a person, as in its personal, or is it more like a machine and that it's just mechanistic?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think that the bedrock or the deep nature of things in the world is kind of personal in nature, then you're likely to be a theist.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think that the deep nature of things is ultimately mechanical, then you're likely to be an atheist.
[SPEAKER_00]: So an atheist will generally think of reality as some sort of like brute fact machine that created itself and simply exists by itself and operates on its own terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a theist to believe in God,
[SPEAKER_00]: regardless of which God for a moment would say, no, reality is not a machine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reality is personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world is personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was made by a person that we were made to correspond to, that we are like, and to worship someone who this person exists outside of nature, but can also be experienced within it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, okay, think about love for a minute, okay, just think about love for a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a mechanistic worldview, love is just the operation of chemicals,
[SPEAKER_00]: on our brain, some evolutionary advantage to help us pass on our DNA, you know, ensure the survival of the species.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not real, or we might say it doesn't actually mean anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our experience of love is meaningless, except in terms of brute biological processes.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even if you believe that, I would suggest that you don't actually believe that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I mean is that you don't live that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't live that way.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't treat your friends or your spouse or your children like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we instinctively feel, don't we that love means more than just simply a chemical reaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it has to mean something more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, we could dismiss it as a trick of the machine or a trick of our biology.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, I hope this is clear to you now, that is not a statement of empirical fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a statement of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because no one has scientifically proven what love is, or what's going on when we fall in love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay, there are chemical things happening, but also much more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead, what we might say, if we view reality as something personal, we might say that the world actually draws us toward a viewer experience of love in the world, actually draws us toward the view that reality is ultimately personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: because it was created by a person and the experience of love suggests that that person wants us to receive love from them and give love to them and receive love from others and give love to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the meaning of love is grounded in the fact that it was created by someone for our benefit, for our joy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, some atheist philosophers and scientists I've read are honest about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them are not, but some of them are one of those Daniel Dennett has kind of reluctantly admitted.
[SPEAKER_00]: That since he thinks the world is some kind of machine,
[SPEAKER_00]: That means that human consciousness to begin with, like your sense of self is actually just an illusion, like your sense of who you are as a person, it's just an illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the effect of chemicals, the interaction of your DNA.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that also, if you take that towards logical conclusion, that also means there's no such thing as free will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if your consciousness is an illusion,
[SPEAKER_00]: Then free will is really just, even though you might think that you're choosing this thing or that thing or doing this or that thing by your own free choice, actually all you are as a slave to your DNA.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're just doing whatever it is that your DNA is telling you to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have any free will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is already encoded in your genes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So who you marry, what you prefer, whether you like custard or not, whether you, you know, what I hate custard, by the way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And jelly, never feed me custard and jelly.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will die.
[SPEAKER_00]: But...
[SPEAKER_00]: We think we're making choices, but all we're really doing is just doing what our DNA tells us to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is what Dawkins said.
[SPEAKER_00]: The universe we observe has precisely the properties that we should expect.
[SPEAKER_00]: If there is it bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless in difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: As an unhappy poet, a husband put it for nature, heartless, whittless nature, or neither can or no.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Dawkins says that DNA neither cares nor knows.
[SPEAKER_00]: DNA just is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we dance to its music.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no free will.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing as consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love is just an illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If something in you goes, that can't be the way it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: that there must be something more personal in nature going on than you're probably not an atheist.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're probably leaning toward belief in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's troubling is that might be for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing is, right, if the machine is all there is, if everything can be explained by evolutionary biology, then Dawkins is right and all of that is an illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think at the very deep level we reject this and the reason we reject this is because we can't live like that's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we are just chemical processes, then why do we live as though that's not true?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that tell us?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that tells us something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Consider human rights, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: Consider human rights for a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: How can you hold a belief that all people are equal and everyone deserves equal rights if you also believe in evolutionary biology?
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're just a decaying piece of matter in a decaying universe, and nothing more significant than that, how does it follow that we should live a life of love toward others?
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why shouldn't we just live as selfishly as we want to live?
[SPEAKER_00]: How to believe, like individual freedom, human rights and equality arise from or align with the idea that as human beings, we came to be what we are through survival of the fetus through, you know, nature, red and tooth and claw, as the Russian philosopher Alexander sold the ov, put it, man descended from apes by a process of the strong eating the weak, therefore let us love one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, it doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so while I'm saying that both belief and unbelief are both acts of faith, what I'm not saying tonight, what I'm not saying is that they're equal.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that reason isn't important, and I'm not saying that there's no evidence for God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I think there's plenty of evidence for God.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, and I'm coming to land this plane now, one of the most common objections to belief is the problem of the hiddenness of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, if you ever thought about this, if God is real, then why is he so absent?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, why can't we see him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why can't we experience him in a more obvious way?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does he seem so hidden?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, for those of you who are at Pete Carolyn Seminar, you'll recognize this.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you already have a close view of reality, and I stole this from my mate, Pete, like the roof on Marvel Stadium,
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing transcendent, the roof is closed.
[SPEAKER_00]: All there is is the stadium.
[SPEAKER_00]: All there is is this universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then attempts to prove this existence of God in that framework will be pretty fruitless.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to get anywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if there is a transcendent reality, like if the roof is open, then God is, by definition, outside the stadium.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Here he is.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what proofs will be sufficient
[SPEAKER_00]: if you're only looking for what's inside the stadium in the first place.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like if the roof is closed, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, there's Jesus there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Put yell out if you find Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So someone will say, well, I'm not going to believe in the abominable snowman unless you give me some evidence for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why should I believe in God unless you give me some evidence for God?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I'd say to you is that you're making a category mistake.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a category mistake because no religion believes that God, like in this picture, is an object inside the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, but there is another way to understand this, all the religions of the world will say that the material world cannot exist by itself, cannot exist on its own, matter couldn't just happen, matter can't just create itself, there must be something, some supernatural power outside the universe that generated matter and that upholds matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, secular people say, no, no, matter generated itself, it caused itself and it can support itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, who's right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I'd ask is how are you going to prove which of those views is right?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can you test for that?
[SPEAKER_00]: What proof can you provide?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, first we've got to actually define what proof is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you look it up on Wikipedia, you'll find that there's at least four different versions of what the word rationality means for different working definitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the irony is that each one of those definitions thinks that the other definition is irrational.
[SPEAKER_00]: So proof in mathematics is one thing, of course, you can prove a mathematical equation.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what are we talking about when we talk about proof in law, or proof in philosophy, or proof in science, which I have a friend who's one of the head scientists at Ciro.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he'll tell me, we've talked about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not a Christian, but we've talked about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he is honest, that science is only so good as the information we have on hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're always learning you information, which is always changing what we think.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so science is not really a slam dunk proof, either.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if something appears empirically proven, there's often times something somewhere out there in nature that's waiting to be discovered, which changes the theory.
[SPEAKER_00]: One author I quote around here a bit, let's call him Clive Staples.
[SPEAKER_00]: says that our objections to the lack of proof for God, I love this analogy, a bit like Hamlet arguing, that there must not be an author of the play that he's in, because he's never seen Shakespeare with his own eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And as Christians we'd say, yes, okay, yes, of course, on the one hand, God is absent.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is by definition absent because he's not part of this created world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He exists outside of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not a product of creation, but he's the maker of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he is by definition not inside the known universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't see him because he doesn't exist physically in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yet we'd also say that he's not completely absent, we can actually experience and see his presence in the creation everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's won the one hand, he's absent, on the other hand, his presence is inescapable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's everywhere if you care to look.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just like Hamlet, the signs of Shakespeare are on every single page.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just Hamlet's not looking for the right evidence.
[SPEAKER_00]: God is absent, we can't see him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We all know that, but on the other hand, he's present everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's written on every leaf.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in every strand of DNA.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in every experience of love, and he's in every human face.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so you might ask, well why hasn't he written himself into the story in a more obvious way?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd argue that actually he has done that, and he's done that in Christ Jesus, and the coming of Christ into this world is one of, and that's one of the main reasons for his coming, so that we would know what God is like, that we would see what God is like, and that we would know how to access God, how to find him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is what Paul says in one Corinthians,
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter one.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: For in him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth visible and invisible, all things have been created through him and for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is in fact what the biblical account of creation in Genesis One is also designed to tell us, to show us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here I've put a few verses from it up on the screen here.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people deconvert from Christian faith or find it implausible because they think that Genesis One is intended to be read as some kind of scientific document that tells us how God made the world that it happened in seven, twenty, four hour days.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't actually think that that's what Genesis is trying to do at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think we need to worry about reconciling the fossil record with the idea of a creator who made the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Genesis is trying to do is to show us, and if you just look at these verses in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, then God said, let us make humans in our likeness, in our image, then God created mankind, in his own image, in the image of God he created, the male and female he created them.
[SPEAKER_00]: and God blessed them, and then God saw all that He had made, and that it was very good.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's it telling us?
[SPEAKER_00]: Genesis is trying to show us, just even in these few verses, that the universe is not just a purposeless machine, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't live in a mechanistic universe, but the world around us is the good work of a good God, who can be known, who is personal, who wants us to know Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: and whose presence is revealed in everything that he's made, but especially in human beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Human beings, God's image bearers and likeness, which is why we have an innate sense that we should treat each other with respect and with love.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the basis of human rights, it's the basis of equality.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, in this account, in verse twenty-seven, the only creation account in all the religious texts that you can find that gives men and women the same equal status before God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is a fundamental equality of the heart of Genesis one that's trying to be communicated to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what it's saying is that God bless the world, that this world is good, that He wants us to find happiness here and enjoy it and celebrate what He's made and worship Him in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in terms of our experience of God's likeness in one another, I'd say that in terms of the scriptures, there's one human being in particular who has been sent to us to show us ultimately what God really looks like, and that is, of course, the Son of God Jesus Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what I'll argue in the next few weeks, if you're prepared to stick around,
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea, this idea really is what gives the world meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's what gives human beings meaning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's the only real basis in the end for what makes life beautiful and happy and meaningful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually gives a basis to things like human rights and equality, the possibility of justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes sense of love and teaches us where we find our deepest happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd argue that without God and particularly without Christ, most, if not all of those things would be impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're not a Christian, but the final thing I want to say to you tonight is we finish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe the band can come one up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to encourage you as we finish to recognize as I've tried to argue tonight that you do live by faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: whether you realize it or not, no matter what you believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'd ask you perhaps to open yourself to the possibility that you might have ruled some things out on the basis of reason that might have actually been an unreasonable thing to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: So more on that next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you can't come back to hear these talks, I think as Tara said, we'll make them available online.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we also have our offer course coming up in October, which will be a nonjudgmental, non-preachy space for you to engage with others and ask all these questions and wrestle with these things together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, why don't you stand and let me pray as we were prepared to sing our last song.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me finish with a prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lloyd, we thank you for this chance to be together tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thank you that we have a space here to wrestle with these deep things, with these challenging things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pray even for those of us who believe that as we look at these things that it will take us deeper and give us more confidence in what we believe in Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for those who don't believe or hear and exploring, asking questions, and we all have questions, but I do pray, Lord, that you will help them just to take some steps forward towards you, that you show that you love them infinitely.
[SPEAKER_00]: You love everyone that you have made.
[SPEAKER_00]: that we can open ourselves to these things without feeling like we're betraying reason or logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, we're stepping into what we truly made to experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pray this in Jesus' name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.