This book is for people who have a healthy uncertainty about life’s big questions—who, while knowing many things, reserve a measure of doubt on most everything.
Levin, a character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, gives voice to such doubt during his confession to a priest:
“I have doubted everything, and I still do,” Levin replied in a voice he himself found unpleasant, and fell silent. The priest waited a few seconds to see whether he was going to say something else, then closed his eyes and said quickly, in a provincial accent: “Doubts are natural to human weakness, but we must pray, that we may be strengthened by divine compassion. What in particular are your sins?” he added without the slightest interval, as though trying not to lose time. “My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and I am in doubt most of the time.” “Doubt is natural to human weakness,” the priest said, repeating the same words. “But what do you doubt most of all?” “I doubt everything. Sometimes I doubt even the existence of God,” said Levin involuntarily, and was horrified at the indecency of what he had said. But Levin’s words seemed to make no impression on the priest.[1]
1. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: Bantam, 1981) 470-471.
Levin desired an intellectual exchange with the priest. He wanted to probe and explore life’s big questions. Unfortunately, the priest never entered into conversation. For him, doubt was a sign of human weakness to be overcome by unquestioned acquiescence to the traditions of the church.
The purpose of this book is to have a conversation with the Levins of our day, those who are unsure what to make of the Christian faith. And while we, the authors, are Christians, we have no illusions about deciding life’s big questions for anyone. Renowned New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, in introducing one of his own books, captures our sentiment:
The purpose of this book is not to decide the religious issue of the present day, but merely to present the issue as sharply and clearly as possible, in order that the reader may be aided in deciding for himself.[2]
2. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1923), 1.
We write in the spirit of C. S. Lewis, who in the preface to Mere Christianity said:
In this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbors was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.[3]
3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 6.
This is the desire behind The Genesis Factor. It is an invitation to examine some important issues. It is a request for the reader to consider the ultimate questions of life where Christianity begins—with the book of beginnings.
A Conversation Starter
Most of us have heard people asking life’s big questions. Such questions are timeless. They confront every living person and contemplate the greatest of themes. They unite us to all peoples of the past as well as to those who will follow. They are questions such as:
Is there a God?
And, if so, does this God (he, she, or it) care about what is going on down here?
Where did everything come from?
Is the meaning in the universe?
Who are we, really?
Where did evil come from?
What is the matter with people?
Why can’t we fix all our problems?
Is there any hope for the human race?
In today’s individualized way of viewing the world, some of these questions become personal: “Who am I?” “Where did I come from?” “Where am I going?” And, “Is there any divinely orchestrated meaning to my life?”
Many people today are eager to find answers to these big questions. The sales of Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time attest to this interest. The book was on the London Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks, has been translated into forty languages, and has sold one copy for every 750 people in the world.[4]
4. Foreword to Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, tenth anniversary edition (New York: Bantam, 1998), vii.
Concerning its popularity, Hawking writes,
The success of A Brief History indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: Where did I come from? And why is the universe the way it is?[5]
5. Ibid.
And doesn’t this “widespread interest in the big questions” make sense? After all, if we are to live with a proper sense of being human then shouldn’t we, at some point in our lives, pursue these questions? And if so, what intellectual traditions should guide our exploration? What voices should we be interacting with? Ideally, probing life’s big questions together would take place face-to-face around a table—in a local restaurant, perhaps, over a leisurely meal. There are already a host of voices at the table—people who are willing to interact with us.
Some Voices at the Table
There is, for instance, the voice of naturalism: “Why all the talk about where we came from, or if there is a god? I believe what Carl Sagan said: ‘The cosmos is all there is, or has been, or will be.’”[6]
6. Quoted in Alvin Plantinga, ”On Christian Scholarship,” in Theodore M. Hesburgh, ed., The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), 269. Plantinga gives a succinct summary of modern worldviews, which we refer to as “traditions” or “voices” in this book.
Naturalism will be a familiar voice for most of our readers. Naturalism holds that matter is the essence of reality. Some label this view “philosophical materialism.”
Naturalism, while clearly belonging at the table, may have some self-imposed limitations when it comes to the bigger questions of life. By design, it limits itself to that which can be externally verified. In the words of a Time magazine article on religion and science, “Science was for the real world: machines, manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else.”[7]
7. “ln the Beginning: God and Science,” Time (February 5, 1979), 149.
Lesslie Newbigin, in his perceptive book Foolishness to the Greeks, outlines how naturalism tends to relegate life’s big questions to the periphery. He argues that naturalism is limited to a closed system. It deals only in the world of facts and data; it is concerned with physics, not metaphysics; real things, not spiritual things.[8]
8. For a more detailed argument, see “What Can We Know? The Dialogue with Science,” chapter 4 of Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 65–94.
What is good about naturalism is its impetus to exploration. At the same time, however, some people, while quite comfortable with naturalism, are uneasy with some of its implications. They feel something is missing in a world without God. Contemporary theologian David Wells describes the rise of this new voice for us. It is the voice of pervasive supernaturalism:
[T]he world, so recently emptied of the divine, is now awash with the supernatural intrusions, with strange voices and mystical experiences of every conceivable kind. . . . [I]f modernization has robbed our culture of the divine, it has in doing so also sown the seeds of longing for some inner sense of the supernatural.[9]
9. David F. Wells, No Place for Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 263.
J. D. Salinger captures this voice poignantly in his short story “Teddy.” He describes an incident where a spiritually precocious youngster recalls how he arrived at his view of God while watching his little sister drink her milk: “ . . . all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God.”[10]
10. J. D. Salinger, ”Teddy,” in Nine Stories (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 28.
Shirley MacLaine is an advocate of this voice as well. “For you see,” she says, “each soul is its own god. You must never worship anyone or anything other than self. For you are god.”[11]
11. Shirley MacLaine, Dancing in the Light (New York: Bantam, 1986), 358.
Pervasive supernaturalism is the view that the universe is to be identified with God. God and nature are thought of as the same reality.[12] New and popular expressions of this voice crop up everywhere today, especially in bookstores. You can’t miss the resurgence of interest in Eastern religions, mysticism, the New Age, spiritism, and the occult.
12. See The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids, MI.: Zondervan, 1974), 745.
This zealous discovery of God in various places offers a rising sense of self to replace the fading notion of God. It leads some to declare that all things are really the same thing, and, therefore, all things are really God.
Alvin Plantinga, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, emphasizes the imaginative and creative aspect of this voice:
Here the fundamental idea—in sharp contrast to naturalism— is that we human beings, in some deep and important way, are ourselves responsible for the structure and nature of the world; it is we, fundamentally, who are the architects of the universe.[13]
13. Plantinga labels this tradition, which we are calling pervasive super-naturalism, as ‘creative anti-realism’. His emphasis is on the creative aspect of this worldview. From a typed manuscript copy of the chapter, pg. 10.
That said, there are still other intellectual traditions vying for an opportunity to guide us in our exploration of life’s big questions. One such voice values the contribution of naturalism and is intrigued by the optimism of pervasive supernaturalism, yet wonders if there isn’t another way to address life’s big questions: “What about destiny? What if life does have some ineffable or transcendent meaning to it?” The voice of destiny is imbedded in the movie You’ve Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. From the outset, this movie is one of those guy-meets-girl things. What makes it work for some is watching the relationship come together in ways that neither of them has control over. For believers in destiny, life is controlled by fate.
At this point, some readers might be growing uneasy not only with the number of voices willing to guide us through life’s big questions, but with the certitude of their answers. After all, most of us don’t line up easily or consistently behind any single voice or intellectual tradition. Rather, we prefer to hold on to a measure of doubt about life’s big questions. Leo Strauss, who taught at the University of Chicago, expressed a life-long commitment to doubt with these words on the question of God’s existence:
Many of our contemporaries assume tacitly or even explicitly that we know that God as an omnipotent being does not exist. I believe that they are wrong; for how could we know that God as an omnipotent being does not exist? . . . I believe [it is] equally true that human reason cannot establish the existence of God. . . . From this it follows that . . . we are reduced to a state of doubt in regard to the most important question.[14]
14. Leo Strauss, in a lecture given in the “Works of the Mind” series at University College, University of Chicago, January 5, 1957.
Do you see what Strauss is saying? Life’s big questions demand a little reverence. He doesn’t want us to demean the majesty of the questions. A life-long position of doubt may be the most honest way to go.
And so we’ve come full circle in our search for guides, all the way back to Levin’s doubt. In a short time, a number of widely divergent viewpoints have been expressed. From Stephen Hawking to Carl Sagan, from Salinger and MacLaine to You’ve Got Mail and Leo Strauss, everyone has an opinion about the universal questions that confront us.[15]
15. This selection of worldviews or traditions is by no means exhaustive, but merely representative. We could just as easily have added ten others, including the various world religions such as Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, and the many variants of Protestantism.
The Voice Of Genesis
With this book we hope to add another voice to the list of those who might aid us in our search for answers—the voice of Genesis. Ordinarily today, people don’t turn to Genesis in their exploration of life’s big questions. After all, its voice speaks so definitively that it seems to chase all doubt away. It can appear to stifle our desire to probe life’s big questions. And yet, if we are intellectually honest, the voice of Genesis should at least be given a hearing. While it may not be the only perspective on life’s big questions, it is one at least worth some exploration. For centuries people have recognized that Genesis presents us with some very large answers to life’s universal questions. Doesn’t it make sense to try to listen to its voice—to hear the answers it proposes? Then you can come to your own conclusions about the integrity of its claims.
Some readers may be thinking, Are you kidding? People haven’t taken that book seriously for ages. What could it possibly contribute to our discussion of universal questions?
But we’re not kidding.
We believe Genesis has a great contribution to make to the universal conversation on life’s big questions. In fact, we believe it does so clearly—even strikingly—in its opening verse. When Genesis says,
In the beginning God . . .
it appears to touch on at least one of life’s big questions, namely, the existence of God. The Bible simply advances a declaration of God’s existence. By the fourth word in the English text, the presence of God is assumed.
The voice of naturalism might respond, “Are you advocating that we abandon hundreds of years of scientific learning and substitute in its place the voice of Genesis?”
And we would reply, no, not at all. The hostility between Genesis and naturalism has led some people (wrongly so, in our opinion) to discredit scientific pursuits.
Thomas Torrance, the renowned Scottish physicist and theologian, shows us a proper relationship between science and theology: “Theology motivates and gives meaning to science—science sharpens and clarifies theology.”[16] Hopefully, as our conversation with Genesis continues, we will come to a fuller appreciation of Torrance’s insight.
16. Attributed to Torrance; personal communication.
On an initial reading, the opening verse of Genesis might also have implications for pervasive supernaturalism:
In the beginning God created . . .
Could the additional word “created” be worth listening to? Isn’t it at least plausible to think that there is a distinction between God and the rest of creation? The opening line of Genesis states that “In the beginning God created.” You see, we might be in for a lively discussion, because Salinger’s milky character sees God in everything, and the voice of Genesis may not see God in that way.
What about destiny? Could Genesis have anything to say to believers in fate?
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .
The final phrase of Genesis 1:1 claims not only that God exists—and not only that this God creates—but that this God is responsible for having created the totality of the universe. If this were true, then would it not be plausible that God created everything for a purpose? Perhaps there is meaning in the universe. What if Genesis wants us to know something about God, ourselves, and our ultimate destiny? What if Genesis could challenge Strauss-like doubt and yet maintain a certain reverence for the questions themselves?
To this point we have only raised areas of interaction as a conversation starter. All we can say thus far is that Genesis might help us explore life’s big questions. This has been only a surface reading. We have not yet explored whether the voice of Genesis can sustain thoughtful and reflective engagement with the myriad voices vying for our attention. We (the authors) think that the following chapters will show that it can. And we attribute that to what we call “the Genesis factor”—the viable but often overlooked voice for our time.
And so, with the conversation started, we must now leave this exchange and step into the yet starless night of Genesis.
Editor’s Note: The above excerpt is from The Genesis Factor: Probing Life’s Big Questions by David Helm and Jon Dennis, Copyright © 2001, pp. 7–20. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.