Letter One: Does God Exist?

Letters to an Honest Skeptic

Dear friend,

I promised you letters on the hardest questions, so let’s start with the one sitting underneath all the others. If this one falls, the rest don’t matter. Does God exist?

Let me show you my evidence first, and then I want to deal honestly with the best comeback you’ve got, because I think you’ll be surprised where it leads.

Four things you already know

I’m not going to hand you a philosophy lecture. I’m going to point at four things you’ve known your whole life.

Everything that starts got started. You have never once seen something come from nothing. Not a fence, not a barn, not a pot of coffee. And here’s what modern science settled, sometimes over the objections of the scientists themselves: the universe started. Space, time, matter, all of it had a beginning. Well then. Whatever started it can’t be made of matter, can’t live inside time, and carries power we can’t measure. You may not like the name yet, but you’ve just described Someone.

The settings are dialed in. Any man who has sighted in a rifle or set the timing on an engine knows that right settings don’t happen by accident. The physicists tell us the constants of this universe, gravity, the forces holding every atom together, are balanced finer than any gunsmith ever dreamed, and a hair off means no stars, no planets, no you. And before you say it: yes, I’ve smacked a TV into working too. But be honest about what happened there. You smacked it till it worked, a hundred tries at one loose dial. The universe got one throw, at dozens of dials, and every one landed dead-center.

There’s a rulebook in your chest. You believe some things are really wrong. Not “wrong for you,” wrong, period, cruelty to a child, cheating a widow. Wrong even if every government on earth legalized them tomorrow. But a standard that stands over all mankind couldn’t have been written by mankind. You can’t call a stick crooked unless you’ve seen a straight one.

And there’s a hunger nothing here feeds. Every culture ever found has worshiped something. And you know the ache personally, the one the raise didn’t fix, the new truck didn’t fix, the weekend never quite fixes. Thirst exists because water does. Hunger points to food. What should we make of an ache, built into every human heart, for something this world doesn’t stock?

You may weigh all that differently than I do. That’s your right, and I mean it. But here’s my claim, and I’ll stand behind it: believing in God does not require shutting your brain off. This is not blind faith. It’s the same kind of cumulative, converging evidence that decides real cases in real courtrooms every day.

Your best comeback

Now the objection, and it’s a fair one. If God is real and wants me to believe, why doesn’t He just settle it? Write His name across the sky. Show up. End the debate.

I want to give you a straight answer, and it starts with a distinction most religious people never make.

If God unveiled Himself this morning in full, undeniable glory, one thing would certainly happen: the question “Does God exist?” would be over. Fact compels acknowledgment. Nobody stands in front of Reality itself and keeps weighing evidence. And here’s something from my own Book that might surprise you, that exact condition already describes somebody. “The demons also believe, and shudder,” it says. The devil is not an atheist. He has stood in the presence of God. He has all the facts, compelled by Reality itself, and it did him no good at all.

Which tells you something important: the belief that matters was never “I acknowledge God exists.”

Let me put it in a picture. You’re on a plane. The pilot comes over the intercom: “Folks, this aircraft will hit the ground in sixty seconds, and the crash will kill everyone aboard. There are parachutes on the bulkhead. A parachute will save your life. Pilot out.”

Suppose the man next to you asks, “Do you believe him? Do you believe that parachute will save your life?” And suppose you spend your last fifty-five seconds declaring, as sincerely as a man can declare anything, “Yes, I believe the parachute will save my life, I believe it, I believe it”, all the way into the ground.

Your belief was real. It saved nothing. For that parachute to save you, you had to get out of your seat, strap it on, open the door, and step out, putting your whole life into its ability to bring you down. There are two completely different things hiding inside the word “believe,” and only one of them ever saved anybody.

Now watch what that does to your objection. If God turned the lights all the way up, He would compel the first kind of belief, acknowledgment, the demon’s kind. He could never compel the second kind, trust, because trust by its nature has to be given, not extracted. History bears this out even inside the Bible’s own pages: people watched seas split and dead men walk out of tombs, and plenty of them still refused to trust. Spectacle convinces the head. It has never once bent a knee.

And here’s the part I’d want to know if I were you. A “no” spoken against full, total disclosure is a finished no. There’d be nothing left to show you, nothing more to learn, no room to ever change your mind, because there is nothing greater than everything. The demons got exactly that arrangement, and my Book says no rescue was ever offered them. But a “no”, or an “I’m not sure”, spoken in the half-light? That one leaves room. Room to keep looking, room to change your mind, room for a letter like this one.

So here’s my honest answer to why God doesn’t just prove it: the dimness isn’t God hiding from you. The dimness is God leaving your options open. He’s given enough light for anyone who wants to find Him, and held back the blaze that would slam the door on you forever. Whatever else you conclude about Him, that’s not the behavior of a God who’s indifferent to you. That’s patience.

One question

I’ll leave you where I always will, with one question, and nobody hears your answer but you.

If it turned out God was real, would you want to know?

Don’t answer fast. The question sounds easy and it isn’t, because if the answer is yes, then some things would have to change, for me as much as for you. Sit with it this week. That’s all I ask.

Next letter, we take on the question hiding behind this one: can anybody actually know what’s true, or is truth just “true for you”?

Your friend, Mark

Letters to an Honest Skeptic is written alongside a study our church walked through together. You’re welcome any Sunday, questions and all. Walshville Christian Church, Walshville, Illinois.