Is There A God Out There?

When I was a young kid a have a memory of laying in my backyard at night and looking up at the stars. I don’t remember doing this very often. I don’t know why I was in the backyard by myself at night at all. But there I was, staring up at the stars in the sky, and I remember saying the following all-important prayer to God: “God, please make me rich.”

I’m still waiting to hear from God on that one.

At the time, I was pretty sure I would play in the NBA or NFL and I knew that meant I would make big money. Enough to buy the things that really matter in life: boats, skyscrapers, and things like that.

Well, surprise, surprise, I never made it into professional sports, nor did I ever make it on “Wheel of Fortune” where I would have undoubtedly won millions of dollars. I would have then turned my winnings into gold coins that I could fill a vault with and go swimming in like Scrooge McDuck.

Maybe God didn’t hear me. I could try my prayer again. Maybe God is waiting for just the right time to start dropping money bags from Heaven. Or maybe, just maybe, there is no God.

Makes sense right? I didn’t get what I asked for. God didn’t meet me on my terms. There must not be a god or gods or supernatural anything. It's just me in the backyard talking to the stars and they can’t hear me because they don’t have ears and they probably don’t care about my problems anyway. Maybe you’ve prayed to God for something and you never got an answer. Why bother?

Evolution seems to be the predominant view taught in schools and universities now. We don’t have any empirical evidence for supernatural events anyway, do we? I mean, hasn’t science disproven the existence of angels and divine intervention and miracles? Maybe belief in God really is nonsense.

Or maybe not.

Actually, belief in God is rational. There are plenty of highly educated people that believe in God. Not only that, but they have really good arguments for why a belief in God makes sense. There are plenty of scientists that seem unconvinced by evolutionary claims and instead hold to a creationist worldview. Look at those stars. The Bible says, “The skies proclaim the works of His hands.” The stars point to a Creator.

I could also mention other reasons to believe in God like the historical reliability of the Bible, the historical integrity of Jesus Christ who Himself claimed to be God and backed it up through miracles, which people witnessed. We could point to the vast amount of people who have had spiritual experiences, which has resulted in their lives changed for the better. We could point to how it makes sense that belief in God would give us a foundation for how we know what is right and wrong and what is moral. It provides motivation for doing good in our world. God also gives us a source to explain the qualities everybody enjoys like love, peace, joy, and hope.

After thinking about this a little bit more, believing in God actually makes a lot of sense. An Almighty God could very easily put all those stars in the sky and then gently laugh at my childish prayers. In fact, the more I look at my life now as a husband and a father it shows me that God is pretty good to me. My life is filled with purpose, with satisfaction, and love. What more could I ask for? Maybe I don’t need a vault to measure my riches. Maybe I just need to look at the evidence right in front of me.