The Invention of God

having cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares about you. 1 Peter 5:7 NASB

Cares – If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: the fundamental message of the Bible is “God cares.”  I believe it, but don’t ask me why.  Don’t ask because I feel what the prophets discovered. “History is a nightmare. . . . Others may be satisfied with improvement, the prophets insist upon redemption.”[1]  I can’t give you a rational explanation.  I can’t point you to overwhelming circumstantial evidence.  In a court proceeding, my belief that God cares would most likely be shot down.  But it doesn’t matter.  In one respect I have to believe.  If God didn’t care, what would be the point of all my struggles to try to please Him.  In fact, what would be the point of struggles?  Why wouldn’t I just do whatever I wished, resolved to the fact that in the end I will just die and fade away into history.  What does the Scripture say?  Oh, yes, “In his pride the wicked man does not seek him;  in all his thoughts there is no room for God” (Psalm 10:4 NIV).  In the same psalm, David describes such a man’s behavior: “He says to himself, ‘God will never notice; he covers his face and never sees.’”  Do what you want; God isn’t looking.  How often it seems that this is true!

Despite the nightmare of history, the Bible takes a very different view.  It even gathers the “good” people under this indictment.  The “good” people are rāšāʿ in biblical terms if they live as if God doesn’t matter.  They don’t have to be criminals, morally corrupt, or ethically impure.  They just have to crowd God out.  Like this:

“It is obvious to me that the ancients tried to deal with feelings of insignificance by inventing some god who considered us humans so important that he should turn his attention to surveying our every act”.[2]

Yalom is a Jewish atheist.  He claims that science demonstrates that religious claims are unjustifiable.  Where’s the evidence?  Where’s the proof that God even exists?  All that religion really does is provide a crutch for the weak-minded (as Bertrand Russell put it).  Face our reality!  Life is just an infinitesimal blip on the cosmic stage.  There is nothing else.  Deal with it!

David’s answer to this line of thinking is rāšāʿ.  Wickedness.  But David is a paradigm believer.  Inside the paradigm, his claim makes sense.  Outside the paradigm things look different.  Who’s to say which paradigm is true?  It seems to me that there is really only one reply: history.  Yes, history is also subject to interpretation, but there’s enough in the historical record to raise some serious doubts about Yalom’s claim.  Even if we question the interpretation placed on the events by the prophets, the fact remains that something happened.  That much is very difficult to deny, just as it is difficult to deny the nightmares of humanity’s record.  If we really want to know which paradigm is the true one, then we’ll have to seriously investigate the history.  In the end we might conclude that things didn’t happen quite the way they’re recorded or that religious explanations of the events might need correction, but we’ll still have to confront the fact that something happened.  Men were moved by something.  They didn’t make it all up.  And the more we investigate, the more we dig into the record, the more we’re forced to admit that something beyond human action was involved.  Men didn’t invent God in order to feel better.  They acknowledged that the world of human beings wasn’t enough to explain what occurred.

Topical Index: rāšāʿ, wicked, history, evidence, care, 1 Peter 5:7

[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol 1, p. 181.

[2] Irvin Yalom, Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir, p. 35.