MMM | Issue 8

Hi everyone,

Well, another week is upon us, albeit a snowy one (yuck!), but its time for another musing in conjunction with our Faith and Doubt message series.

As always, last Sunday's message is now on the website at www.rivercommunity.ca. Feel free to listen to it yourself or pass it on to a friend. You can also ask me a question on any topic in relation to faith and doubt by replying to this e-mail.

Let me start with this: How can we believe in Christianity if we don't even know whether God exists? Though there cannot be irrefutable proof for the existence of God, many people have found strong clues for his reality-divine fingerprints-in many places. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga believes that there are no proofs of God that will convince all rational persons. However, he believes that there are at least two to three dozen very good arguments or clues for the existence of God.

Let me share one that I find very compelling-the clue of beauty.

If there is no God, and everything in this world is the product of natural forces, then there is no actual purpose for which we were made-we are accidents. If this is true, then what we call "beauty" is nothing but a neurological response to particular data. You only find certain scenery to be beautiful because you had ancestors who knew you would find food there and they survived because they acted on that impulse. In the same way, though music feels significant, the significance is an illusion. Love too must be seen in this light. If we are the result of natural forces, then what we call "love" is simply a biochemical response, inherited from ancestors who survived because this particular trait helped them survive.

I find this to be a deeply unsatisfying answer. Christian or not, in the presence of real beauty such as a fantastic piece of music or great art, human beings feel a deep sense of meaning and satisfaction. I had a chance this week to visit a wonderful art show put on by a talented artist in our church community (Erica Wilk) and over and over again I found myself feeling what Goethe refers to as selige sehnsucht-blessed longing. Beauty leads us to long for something more, something better, something wonderful.

"So what?" someone might object. "Just because we feel something doesn't make it true." Just because we feel the desire for a steak dinner, for example, doesn't mean we will get it. Agreed. However, while hunger doesn't prove that the steak dinner exists, doesn't the appetite for food in us mean that food exists? Isn't it true that innate desires correspond to real objects that can satisfy them, such as sexual desire (corresponding to sex), physical appetite (corresponding to food), tiredness (corresponding to sleep) and relational desires (corresponding to friendship or love).

I think the blessed longings evoked by beauty are a strong clue that "something" more exists. I think that our longing for beauty is really a longing for the One that the Bible says radiates beauty and overflows goodness. Beauty is a reflection of our beautiful God who through the gift of music, art and dance invites us to taste his splendour and experience his goodness.

Blessings all,

Pastor Bruce