What if there is no God?

When you write about prayer, you work from this fundamental assumption - God, an actual, real Presence to whom we pray, exists.

But we're almost overwhelmed today with skeptics who deny that same assumption.

Many of them find work as successful, professional mockers hiding behind a pseudo-intellectual mask while railing at religion in general, Christianity in specific and the very idea of God.

While such people might be irritating to the believer, we still should face the question... what if they're right? What if there is no God?

Then several things must be relatively obvious. If there is no God...

1. Mankind is the most advanced life form we know. He stands at the top of the animal kingdom with no being above him. Note how man has devised ways to master his environment and manipulate it to his advantage. Despite the protests of environmentalists, just look at man's dominance over the animal kingdom around him.

2. Therefore, man has no "umpire" to buffer his actions. If man is supreme, he can make the rules, enforce them as arbitrarily as he pleases, and change them to suit the "values" in vogue at the time. "Justice" gets defined only by the whim of the times.

3. Individual human beings mean little. They have no real existence nor any special intrinsic value unless they can serve the ends of the tribe. The individual is a brief candle, burning for a while and then being extinguished by time's winds and passing into oblivion.

4. Cognition of any objective reality outside the self is a hoax. One's thoughts are merely electrochemical events signifying nothing special. The individual life is meaningless.

5. Villains, victims and heroes are only defined in the eye of the beholder. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. There is no objective truth, so each fights for his own version of "truth".

6. All human aspiration becomes pointless. One can try to leave a legacy behind for future generations, but the individual will never see those aspirations come true. No one lives long enough to see any transcendent desires come to fruition.

7. Violence becomes a legitimate tool to get one's way. Although we protest it and decry it... in the Godless world, violence still works and has no lasting, meaningful consequences to the perpetrator (even the death penalty is merely a relatively painless shove into oblivion for the one who kills).

8. If there is no God to reveal a higher life to us, Hitler is no worse than Jesus. Stalin (and all the other secularist dictators who murdered millions) merely did what any other cunning super-animal would do - destroy the competition.

Depressing, isn't it?

Which leads to another question? Why, despite all the problems and contradictions in religion, do people still hope there is a God, and a better way?

Solomon, the wise Jewish king, explained it this way: "He (God) has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men..." (Ecclesiates 3:11 NIV).

We crave a better way because we have an antenna planted in us that responds to the eternal, the supernatural.

Like a man trying to check the temperature with a crescent wrench, the secularist wrongly assumes he can understand the supernatural with human capabilities. The supernatural doesn't come by investigation but by revelation. And that revelation comes primarily through God's Spirit as He uses the Bible to reveal God to man.

"The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned... But we have the mind of Christ." -1 Corinthians 2:14-16 NIV.