Concerning The Existence Of God

Upon leaving the confines of the Earth's atmosphere and entering the vastness of space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin is alleged to have remarked, "Where is God?" This was said out of a sense of mockery that the Lord of the universe could not be found in the final frontier rather than an honest inquiry from a soul awed by a majesty of the cosmos.

Several decades later, God might very well reply, "Where is the Soviet Union?" That nation, once referred to as the "evil empire" because of the threat it posed to human freedom, has become a shadow of its former self. This former superpower decayed from its own internal rot resulting primarily from the regime's rejection of the Judeo-Christian worldview as epitomized by that state's promulgation of revolutionary Communism.

Had Colonel Gagarin and his Soviet comrades been more willing to approach the issues in a more objective manner without the rose colored glasses of their Marxist ideology (perhaps "red" would have been a more fitting characterization) and without suppressing the conclusions that such evidence leads to, the world might have been sparred a Cold War costly in terms of both dollars and human lives. Even now nearly two decades later, the world still struggles to forge a global order and stands ready to fall into international chaos at any possible moment.

Despite what some political conservatives and Pentagon officials might think, the mentioned illustration should not be construed as arguing that the former Soviet Union was the sole source of evil operating in the world throughout the era of its infamous existence. Rather, that one nation merely came to symbolize what happens when man tries to expunge the evidence and knowledge of God from the society and its way of life through the use of violence and intimidation of its citizens. For while the Soviet Union and its kin in the Communist orbit may have perfected the outwardly horrific and bloodthirsty ways of suppressing eternal truths, the democratic West was itself busy finding ways to live as if God did not exist.

It could be argued that the methods used throughout Western society to suppress knowledge of God's existence are in one manner more sophisticated than those employed by the secularist's counterparts behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. For where the totalitarian Marxist utilized torture in the form of physical violence and coercive psychological manipulation, his Western counterpart simply made God irrelevant by declaring that, while belief in God was acceptable for those too weak to live without Him, this character flaw was to remain a private issue and not to impact the public marketplace.

Phillip Johnson in "Reason In The Balance" characterized this as a primary tenet of naturalism, the belief that the physical world is all that exists in the closed system of the universe and that man can only look to himself for any kind of values (8). Applying the Protagorean ethic of man as the measure of all things with the satisfaction of natural desires as the highest objective, contemporary man has lived up to this lofty goal with all the zeal, fortitude, and ingenuity over which the secular humanists deified the species in the first place --- with a trail of corpses and chaos laying in the social wake.

No sphere of human endeavor has remained untouched from this effort to remove God and His standards from civilized life. These trends illustrated themselves no better than in the field of sexual morality.

According to Cal Thomas in “The Death Of Ethics In America”, the metaphorical death of God and the abolition of His standards causes those adhering to a naturalistic outlook to see the divinely sanctioned rules governing this sphere of existence as an illusion to be ignored by the liberated individual. Yet in a surprising twist, those same individuals holding to a do-your-own-thing kind of ethic change their tune when it comes to doing one’s own thing when it comes to religion, especially if the belief under consideration is traditional Christianity. According to a New York Times poll, a significant number of young adults believe that belief in God is a personality disorder and that theists cannot cope with reality (Thomas, 93).

However, the rules governing these intimate behavioral matters and their Creator are not illusions to solidify the power of an authoritarian priesthood or to comfort the psychologically imbalanced. These precepts were in fact promulgated with the goal of protecting the ultimate happiness and welfare of the beings made in the image of their loving Creator. Mankind ignores these standards at his own peril --- with abortion, venereal disease, and broken hearts the rewards of such folly.

Thomas points out that sexually transmitted diseases now rank as the primary form of communicable disease (93). However, even these kinds of terrifying consequences barely phase the calloused anymore. One student matriculated in a school near Thomas remarked, “We’re not going to get pregnant....If we slip up, we’ll get an abortion (105).”