Besides, so many awful things happen in the world: children die in house fires, young mothers are stricken with cancer, hundreds die in earthquakes. The world seems to be filled with so many horrors (from the Holocaust in the thirties and forties to the Rwandan mass slaughters in the nineties) that it is difficult to believe a supremely good God exists. How can anyone believe such a God exists if every day, every person — whether rich or poor — is confronted by evil? It is hard enough to see good in one's fellow man; it is impossible to see good behind everything. So why should one believe God exists?

For example, I remember a friend of mine at my Catholic boarding school: she was probably the most religious of all of us, willingly attending church and actually paying attention and taking it to heart — she even attended Mass on the Holy Days, not just Sundays! But then she spent several weeks in Haiti, helping the poor people in the slums. When she returned, she could no longer believe. She told me that if God existed, he couldn't let people live in such horrible conditions; it was easier to believe he must not exist, because to have him exist and allow this misery was too much to comprehend.

In other words, if God does exist, then he's condoning some terrible actions and deeds on earth — some even done in his name. That sounds like a pretty cruel God. Is it any wonder so many people lose faith?

I must admit, though, it also sounds vaguely similar to the Old Testament God, the God of Judaism. He was disapproving, vengeful, and wrathful God. But is there such a dissonance between the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament God (a forgiving — and forgetting — and turning-the other-cheek God)?

But there's also a practical part of my question I really want you to answer. I plan to think some more about how to think about God and whether he exists. But, as I mentioned before, many of my friends already do believe in God, at least vaguely. Their feeling is, though, Why should we care? Just because God exists does not mean we have to believe in him or want to do anything about it.

DAD: Why should you care? Because you want to know the truth about yourself. And because, if your Maker loves you — as in Judaism and Christianity he says he does — reciprocating his love, and falling in deeper love with him, brings sweetness (and sorrow and suffering) beyond measure. That is one experiment in truth. Try it and see.

But there is also another. Believe that all the signs of intelligence so manifest in yourself are in vain, and that all is from chance, impersonal and mad, and in the end meaningless, a tale told by an idiot! Believe that if you can. That is an act of faith to which your father, who tried — really tried — could not leap.

The problem of evil throws a curve at this point because if there isn't any God, there isn't any problem of evil. And if there is no God, then there is a problem of evil. And if there is no God, then there is a problem of good! (Why is there so much good, if everything is idiotic and, in the end, positively cruel?) So let me deal, first, with why the question about God keeps arising, sometimes quite insistently, even in a secular scientific age. Then we will return to the subject of evil and come to our conclusion.

You mentioned, too, that it's almost impossible to prove the existence of God. People usually get this problem backwards. They somehow put the burden of proof on God. The actual problem is with our receptors. God is all around us, and within us, and it is our problem to find the wavelength, so to speak, on which to allow his presence to enter our consciousness. (Quakers will see what I mean here.) This may not be a "saving" awareness of God, but for many it prompts them to listen harder, and to ready themselves for the Word of God. Again, let me warn you. There is no "proof" of God's existence, only a set of arguments that weigh probabilities and follow "signs." There are "ways" to God through intellectual inquiry. To believe in God is an intelligent and realistic thing to do. But it is not like having a mathematical proof in one's pocket.

The second thing, honey, that you must wipe out of your mind is that God is an explanation — I know I'm repeating myself, but this mistake is so common I must. People like to think, now and in past centuries, that some things can't be explained by science, and that to explain those things is what God is for. That is an understandable mistake because we do come to God by way of inquiry. As in other matters, though, it takes time to learn, usually through mistakes, which sorts of inquiry are the fruitful ones. (It's almost as if an inquiry into inquiries is the first step.)

In the history of science, there are many examples of hounds barking up an empty tree, when the prey they sought was actually in the underbrush over there. You remember from classes in the history of science how wrongly people thought about blood circulation, until a better way of imagining the role of blood was hit upon — how they thought that "bad" blood had to be bled away, often by what now seem barbarous methods. To rid her of fever, the younger Dashwood sister in Sense and Sensibility was bled repeatedly. As one who dreads the sight of blood, the vision of a specially made bowl brimming with blood made me — and I believe you — turn away in horror.

What are the right questions to ask about God? That's the crucial part. Pseudoscientific questions are a waste of time.

In our time, the main reason for not believing in God is that imagination has become hostile to Him. People like their comfortable universe, at least people of the middle class and educated people. They can distract themselves with one thing after another. That's what life is, the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, "an endless series of distractions."

First, people thought that God is an explanation for how and why the world is, and then when they didn't find a need for God in science — or, indeed, any possible way of reducing God to a testable scientific proposition — they forgot about him. "God is dead," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a century ago, but "there will perhaps be caves for ages yet, in which His shadow will be shown." Many university graduates, I suspect, have only a shadow of God in their minds, even if they continue to go to church.

If you ask me, pointing to a brown extension cord on the floor, "Is there electricity in that wire? Is it live?" I can think quickly of certain tests. Is it plugged in? Can I plug a radio or a lamp into its receiving end and get the expected response? But when you ask me "Is God in this room? Is He in me? Is He alive?" we have to turn to tests of a different order. (Besides, you have loaded your questions with reasons why you cannot admit that you are in God's presence — the evils you see around you in the world.) Let me begin with the way that the question of God is different from the question about electricity and wires.

Scientific questions are answered by sentences establishing what the facts are and by theorems showing how the facts are related. Questions about God are not scientific questions. But far from not having meaning on that account, they are acts of wonderment that we are creatures able to ask questions in the first place. That we are self-conscious, awakened to a world of poignant consciousness, and unable to deny the many intimations of meaning that bear in upon us from so many of our experiences. We are not just science-machines. We wonder about the fact that we are, and about many other aspects of our peculiar situation. We are able to look up at the stars and to ask them (in my own private version):

How I wonder what we are.

That is how we know that God exists: not by the fact that we wonder, but by way of wondering. By way of not being satisfied by a good lunch, an easy chair, a good cigar, and the crinkling of The New York Times in our hands — by wondering about ourselves later: How smug and satisfied we seemed after lunch!

In this frame of mind, when wonder is upon us, what is called secular humanism seems as mechanical as a faucet, for our minds are remembering waterfalls we've come upon by surprise in a Venezuelan jungle or around a turn in the Rockies. Secular humanism may be fine when we read the Times — that's the frame of mind, the mood, it's written for. When we leave the club, when we baptize our new child or bury our mother, mere humanism seems too thin.




From Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions about God by Michael Novak and Jana Novak.
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Novak and Jana Novak

Used by arrangement with Pocket Books, Inc.