Is there a God? It’s the biggest question we can ever ask ourselves and the one question we need to get right. I was raised as a Catholic and did my Holy Communion and Confirmation because it's what my parents believed. I did those things based on tradition and obedience to my parents, but on Sunday morning mass I really wanted to be playing baseball. Everyone, including the gang-bangers I knew, wanted to “pay their respects to God” but none of it changed the way we lived our lives. I didn’t know God and the first time I really talked to God was after losing a teenage friend when I was 13 and I was angry with God. It made me stop going to church. Why God? Why do you let bad things happen to good people? Why did my friend have to die for no apparent reason – he was a good person, more respectful, more deserving to live than me. I couldn’t make sense out of the unexpected loss. In the next few years I wrestled with God, angry at every chain of event that would not work out in my favor, and I would get upset and blame God for being unfair every time I came in 2nd place, or lost a spelling bee or a baseball game, and I would shout out to the sky and say “God if you’re there, just strike the telephone pole with lightning and I’ll believe”, or “appear to me just once and I’ll believe”, stuff like that. But I did more than just challenge God, I began to challenge myself, to think for myself, to examine the world and try to make sense of it for myself, and the one thing I had to know above all else was whether there was a God or not. I knew the implications that came from answering that question would affect every aspect of my life and dictate the way I viewed the world around me.

Is there more to this world and this life or am I simply a mass of matter and energy, nothing more than an evolved species of animal to return to the dust from which I was formed? From dust to dust, is that all there is? I had to know. And at the age of 16, my answer came when I experienced the presence and person of a living Christ. Once I had the living Christ, the words I considered stories in the Bible became alive with new meaning and the message of the scripture became power to my life and a blueprint to living life. But as real and personal as that experience was for me, I still had questions, and I realized with time that there would always be more that I didn’t know than what I knew, even if I lived to be a 1,000 years old. The world around me and the truth that I could see with my eyes and touch with my hands gave me many things to think about, but would never be enough to answer all my questions. Ultimately, the answer had to come from within. I examined the things I was taught at Venice High school and asked simple questions like “why didn’t the rest of the monkeys evolve into man?” or “Where are the missing links?” On the surface I saw a lot of missing facts for that theory when I considered it for myself. Back then all we had was a diagram showing a cell growing into plants, then into fish, then into reptiles and birds, into mammals, and ultimately into monkeys and man, without any real proof that these mutations actually occurred. For me, there wasn’t enough proof to believe in it. Now we have DNA that show there is a sequence of codes and an intelligent design that direct our attributes, that one strand of DNA would reach to the sun and back, and that the probability that this intelligent code could have happened randomly, even for one living thing, even in a billion years, is zero. Animals exist, such as a woodpecker or a bombardier beetle that defy the evolutionary concept and point to their coming into being with all the components they currently possess vice evolving through trial and error and adaptive mutation. For me, the addition of DNA and a careful examination of the facts make the argument for evolution faulty at best and ridiculous at worst. That is not something I can hang my view of the world on. But admittedly, when I look at the story of Jonah and the whale, or Noah’s ark, or the virgin birth, it also challenges what I know to be true on a material level and I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit as much. Really? Ever seen a baby born without the sperm of a man in your lifetime? You mean Noah got two of everything into that ark? Two beetles, two of every spider, two of every lizard, two of every butterfly? Two koala bears? Two hippopotamus? Yeah, those are hard ones to swallow if you aren’t convinced of God to begin with. And when we read of the miracles of Jesus, it also defies logic. Have you ever seen a person blind from their birth suddenly receive their sight? Ever seen a severed ear grow back on a person’s head? Ever seen someone calm a storm with their spoken word? Or feed 5,000 people from a few loaves of bread and a handful of fish? I haven’t, although I admit I’ve seen healing and the miraculous in other ways. The point is that even today, as a believer in Christ, I don’t see everything through a crystal ball and some things defy the logic of what I see around me. The believer will say God can do all things and the evolutionist will say we will find other evidence of life in the universe someday. When we honestly examine the question of the existence of God, or the alternative for where we may have come from based on the evidence around us, that evidence comes up short and ultimately requires faith to convince us. Webster’s dictionary defines faith as “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof”. The Bible defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) and that “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). No matter what you believe, it requires faith to reach a conclusive position on where we came from because life does not give us enough proof one way or another to preclude us from mixing faith in our decision. This makes us have to choose for ourselves!

By both definitions, the evidence we see around us is less than conclusive, and can only point us in a direction where we ultimately decide by faith what to believe. So when I see living creatures producing life after their own kind, and apply that to man, the evidence leads me to believe that I was made in the same likeness or image of the thing that made or created me, and my faith allows me to conclude that God is the more rational answer than evolution. I have never seen a rock, or sand and water struck by lightning, create a living organism. And I have yet to see a lizard evolve to a bird, or a monkey to a man. On the other hand, I have never seen a virgin birth, or a whale swallow up a human and spit him out three days later, and such a thing would defy logic. So skeptics can point to these type of things in the Bible and choose to throw it out because of these inconsistencies, just like I have thrown out evolution based on all of its inconsistencies. In either case, with partial information and faith to decide. 1 Corinthians 13:9 says, “our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture.” But just like we don’t know everything about the world around us and can still make a conclusion based on the preponderance of the evidence, we can also make a conclusion on the Bible in spite of a few (apparent) inconsistencies just like evolutionists come to a conclusion in spite of all the missing links or information. When we examine archeology and writings, there is overwhelming support for the historical validity of the Bible. You can go to Italy or the Middle East today and see the building, tombs and geographical locations that coincide with the biblical account. Did you know there is more historical evidence for Christ than there is for George Washington or any other person to have ever existed? It doesn’t prove Jesus is God, but there is overwhelming evidence He was here and that the events and time frames in the Bible are accurate. Then I see there is also prophecy that predicted the coming of Christ, and the overwhelming odds those predictions would be fulfilled and I am convinced even more. I also see the treasure trove of wisdom that the stories and letter of the Bible bring and how it has stood the test of time. In life we see the evolution of psychology change into different things over time, from men finding their “feminine side”, to whether we should spank our children or not, and then someone comes along with “Men are from Mars and Woman are from Venus” and brings psychology back to its basics again and we all breathe a sigh of relief. The simple truths found in the Bible don’t take me through wild loops of psychology but rather, they stand firm through the test of time and I find that when I live by the principles contained therein, it brings a positive into my life. Likewise, when I examine all that I know about the earth, the universe, I see distinct laws that hold everything together, relativity, motion, gravity, and the unique balance that allow the elements of life to exist on earth. In contrast, I see a barren expanse and as of today, no indications that life, or aliens, exist elsewhere in the Universe. I can’t explain why stars collapse, or why asteroids seem to chaotically impact other bodies or planets, or where the edge of the Universe is, but I know that our unique atmosphere protects us from the millions of asteroids that would otherwise pummel the earth and I can still point to solid patterns that govern the earth and our universe as we know it that point to a unique and intelligent design. And in life, we can’t always explain why the unfortunate happens, but the unfortunate does not cancel out the patterns of life that point us to solid conclusions. We can point to each other and expose our faults, because we are, after all, human. So we only need to look as far as ourselves to realize imperfection is all around us. And yet, our body is also amazing in so many ways and the miracle of our body goes far beyond its imperfections. We will never have enough to know it all in this lifetime, but we have enough information to help us answer the question of whether or not there is a God. Romans 10:10 says “for with the heart a person believes”. Ultimately, belief is confirmed in our heart and in our soul, with the help of the limited and partial information that we bring into it. How many of us know that when we lack complete information, we rely on our instinct to help us out? Some call this “women’s intuition” or a “gut feeling”. Somewhere inside us, in the part that makes us live and breathe, we come to know the power of the living God who lies behind all that is and all that we see with our eyes and touch with our hands. It is not the “thing” by itself that proves anything, it is the life behind it that we must find that speaks to the life and mind behind our flesh. Recent studies in neuroscience have shown that some of our bodily actions - like moving a finger - are initiated and processed unconsciously at first, and only after enter consciousness and trigger a physical response. If we were simply matter evolved from animals, of if life evolved from inanimate objects, then our brain matter and our conscience would direct our actions, not our unconscious as science has shown. Even in our body, there is a power that comes from the unknown to produce the known, so why wouldn’t the world we see around us be the same way? An honest Christian doesn’t fear science, because over and over again, science gives us enough to help point our decision towards God when we examine all that is around us objectively. Questions will always remain, but we have enough to make a decision on that all-important question. Romans 1:20 says, “For the invisible things of Him [God] since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.” When we start to see the intelligence of design (even in DNA), the power and energy that extends beyond what we can see (including subconscious), the fact that life reproduces life after its own kind, that we are the only planet that got all the “good stuff” needed for life, those things begin to make a much more solid argument for God than for a random “bang” and a random existence. When we examine our inner man, we find a spirit that seeks to explore things outside or ourselves, that seeks to answer the question of where we came from and who we are, that seeks to know if there is a God and a power beyond us, and our spirit is a force within us that makes love, emotions and will stronger than the obstacles of matter and body and the world around us. We sometimes say the race is not always won by the stronger or faster man, but by the man who thinks he can. Our creativity lets us cross oceans on ships or under the ocean in submarines, fly planes across the sky and make crafts to reach outer space. That is creative power from within at work. What came first, the things we made (planes, trains, automobiles) or the creative thought? We say things like “you can have money and things but nobody can ever take away your education, etc. because we know there is real value in the intangible and that our inner value outweighs the material. We say these things and don’t even realize how we confirm God by making these statements!

The Bible says that God is a Spirit and those that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:24). Spirit and truth! That’s my argument here! Only when you challenge your inner man to seek God from the spirit that is within you, will you come to know Him in a real and personal way that brings power and peace to your life. It is not based on the external, although the external can point us to Him. And once you know Him, and know He had the power to create all that we know and see, some of the things we don’t understand through knowledge become easy to accept through faith (such as miracles that defy logic). Ultimately, knowing the living Christ means believing that He rose from the dead or else there is no point in speaking to a dead man who is still in the tomb. We may not physically see Christ, but history says there was an empty tomb and no body to be found, and the gospel account asked those who came to look for Jesus at his grave the question “Why do you seek the living among the dead” (Luke 24:5). I know that when you seek Him from the inner part of your being, He will find you just like he found me when I was a child, with all my anger, with all my disappointments and with all my questions about life. He came and revealed Himself to me, and it changed my life forever as I came to know Him and the power of His love. The questions I once had no longer rule me, they have been replaced by God’s grace, and His peace, and His godly wisdom, and I have a quiet confidence about my life and who I am and where I am going. I am still less than perfect, still make mistakes, still know only a fraction of what there is to know, but God fills the void and gives me peace. I pray you ask yourself the question “Is there a God” and seek to find the answer for yourself, and I pray that your quest leads you to the one who put the question there: God.