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Christian Network

Those who demand rational, scientific proof of the existence of God have made an idol of what their eyes can see and their mind can understand. We live in an age of Post-Modernity which has seen many individuals once more become open to the reality of the "numinous", but there are still millions of Westerners who adhere to a religion that denies all things supernatural. These are the non-believers who base their atheism on the assumption that only what we can verify through science can actually exist. A primary example of such an individual was the late Carl Sagan. Not long before his death the scientist wrote a book called The Demon-Haunted World in which he mourned the fact that a large portion of the Earth’s population still believed in the existence of a spiritual realm beyond our ability to see and understand. To him there was the physical "Cosmos" and nothing more.

Today Christians tend to think of idolatry as being the worship of physical things and/or activities. Very few persons are going up to the high-places and worshipping Baal these days so we have redefined the word to mean an inordinate obsession with money, power, pleasure and the like. It is true that any one of these is a potential idol in our present culture. What some do not realize is that our own faculties, or perhaps more accurately a reliance on our own faculties, can become idolatrous as well.

Who has not, at one time of another, run into someone who says he would gladly believe in God if we could simply produce some rational proof of His existence? Where is He, they ask us? Why is deity in hiding, so to speak? Such people will accept the existence of atoms and the like, which are also invisible, because they know that our science has created an electron microscope that allows them to be seen. If the Hubble Space Telescope snapped a picture of God tomorrow they might believe but if human instrumentalities cannot detect Him than how could he exist?

What they are unknowingly portraying here is just one more facet of arrogance of our fallen species. We have made our ability to see and understand become the measure of all things and, in doing so, have made gods of ourselves. Many rationalists might deny the implication of hubris in this statement of their philosophy but that is because they have bought into the idea that they are just humbly seeking truth. This is self-deception.

Those who deny the existence of God based on the Enlightenment’s principle legacy, Scientific Rationalism, have made a personal decision, to exalt an intellectual ability to see and understand all that is needful for humankind. This decision may be conscious or unconscious, but the outcome is the same: a human-centered religion that ultimately destroys its object.

When we disregard the reality that our survival depends on transcending our flawed and finite minds and seeking, through faith, after the invisible God we put ourselves on the road to that destruction. Such is the final outcome of every form of idolatry and this perhaps lesser-recognized contemporary form is no exception.