Week 1 Sunday
Week 1 Sunday
We Begin the Quest
Genesis 1:1-3; Matthew 28:20; John 1:1-5
Life can never be abundant unless it has abundant resources. It is obvious that no organism can expend more in energy than it takes in from without. Just what does “the without” consist of: physical nature and human society only? Or is there a third dimension in addition to “the within” and “the around”? Is there an “Above”? Many have decided that there is no “Above.” At least, there is none they can contact; so they have short-circuited life to “the within” and “the around.” But, to their dismay, they find that “the within” and “the around,” instead of offering resources to abundant living, offer resistances to it. “The within” is clashing, and “the without” is contradictory. The resources are in reverse, pulling the other way.
Someone has said, “If we haven’t that within us which is above us, we will soon yield to that which is around us.” We become circumstance-conditioned and circumstance-fed, and grow weak and anemic on the fare. And if we turn within for our resources, we find the well is dry. Harvard professor William Ernest Hocking, speaking as a philosopher, says: “Man comes up to a certain point and then finds he hasn’t resources in himself to complete himself, so he remains incomplete and frustrated.”*
There ensues what an able and earnest man described as “a sense of cosmic loneliness. I am not sure,” he continued, “whether my doings have anything cosmic back of them, whether I am working with anything significant, or just working meaninglessly, alone with no one to back my work or care.”An atheist has been described as “a man who has no invisible means of support.”
“A sense of cosmic loneliness”—that is the frigid thought that lays its cold hand on our hopes and our endeavors. Can it be lifted and the sense of a warm, living, cosmic Presence—who is with us and for us—take its place? If so, then that would hit the spot: the central spot. For if the central spot is empty and meaningless, then all of life turns empty and meaningless with it. But if that central spot is full and meaningful, then all of life turns meaningful with it.
O warm, living, cosmic Presence—if there be such a Presence in this inscrutable universe—help me as I begin this quest for you and your resources. I shall need your help even to inspire me to begin the quest, for I am not sure at all that you are there. I am only sure of this—that Something beyond myself ought to be there. So I begin. Help me. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 1 Monday
Is There a Cosmic Presence?
Job 10:20-22; 23:1-3; 1 Corinthians 15:16-19
We began yesterday with the question of whether a cosmic Presence is in the universe, and we ended by saying that Something ought to be there. If there isn’t anything there, then we have no framework of reference, no star to steer our little boat by; we are tossed from wave to wave of inane and meaningless existence, with no star and hence no harbor. We are beginning to see the result of losing God; if we lose God, then we lose the meaning out of life, the bottom drops out of it. For if there is no God to give worth and meaning and goal to life, then we are only animated bubbles that rise to the cosmic surface, glisten in the sunlight for a brief space, and then burst, leaving a nasty wet spot on the surface of things. And it is all over. Or, to change the figure, “Life is a fretful child that must be played with until it falls asleep.” If there is no God, we go through loud days that have no meaning and no end, a weary round of nothingness.
We know now that, if we lose our sky, we shall soon lose our earth. An artist said of his nature paintings, “I can get the picture right, if I get my sky right.” If you can get hold of God, or God gets hold of you, then the sky is right and everything falls into its place, the whole thing meaningful.
Someone has said, “Man has never been the same since God died. He has taken it very hard.” He has. For life has become hard, since the sky has turned to brass. “I sometimes wish that God were back,” said a wistful soul.
A modern man of insight reported a dream: “I thought,” said this friend, “that I saw you standing on a hilltop and we, a great host of us, were crowding around eagerly waiting for what you might say. We could see your lips framing the word, but no sound came. We tried to help you by calling out the word your lips were sharing; but we also were dumb! And that word was. . . .” Was it God?
O God, if there be a God—I still have to say that—help me to get this matter clear. For my sky is overcast. In the words of the Breton fisherman: “O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” I need a star to steer by. Let the clouds open and let me see—really see. Amen.
Week 1 Tuesday
God Fading Out
Genesis 27:35-36; 31:53 (Moffatt); 32:24-30
How has God faded out of the mind of this age? Well, the age, like thoughtless children, believed that the toyland of material wealth was a sufficient world; then God faded out, smothered by preoccupation. As a prosperous New Yorker and his wife came to the small town where they had grown up, he said to her complacently, “Well, that’s where we came from, dear.” And she replied with an unexpected answer: “Yes, and I am just wondering where we got to.” She felt the emptiness amid the plenty.
A certain Professor Summer put it this way: “I never consciously gave up a religious belief. It was as if I had put my beliefs into a drawer, and when I came again to look for them the drawer was empty.” The thing has happened to this generation that happened to the three generations of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jacob could say, “my father’s God, the God of Abraham, the Awe of Isaac” (Gen. 31:42 Moffatt).
God was God to Abraham; he had ventured forth with God, his “Friend,” who was intimate and firsthand and real. But in the next generation, God was not “the God of Isaac,” but only the “Awe of Isaac.” God had faded and become secondhand. Still Isaac stood in “Awe” of his father’s God. In the third generation—in Jacob—the result of this gradual fading of God began to be shown in the decaying morals of Jacob; moral rottenness appeared. He stole his brother’s birthright. He was ready to take the main chance without regard to God.
The same things have happened with us: Our forebears had firsthand experience of God through the evangelical revival of the nineteenth century. The next generation clung to the church for their fathers’ sake, but God was only the “Awe”—the afterglow of a fading faith. The third generation is reaping the result of a fading faith, which is producing decaying morals and a decaying civilization. Our loss of God is working out in moral decay. We are going to pieces morally, for we have gone to pieces religiously. We have lost God and have thus lost the basis of morals.
Jacob met God on Jabbok’s banks in his midnight wrestle and emerged a new man (Gen. 32). Unless we, like Jacob, find a moral renewal in finding God, we are done for.
O God, I know that with the loss of you some chord has dropped out of my symphony. Life has lost its music. But now I see further; I see that I have no basis for action, no moral world that makes sense without you. I must find you again, as Jacob did. Amen.
Week 1 Wednesday
We Cannot Live by a No
Deuteronomy 32:20; Mark 4:40; 11:22; Hebrews 10:38-39
We saw yesterday that if God goes, then the basis of our moral universe is gone. A lie detector has shown that only 3 percent of employees in department stores were honest in character; only 5 percent of tellers in banks were dependably honest if there were no outer measures for checking fraud. Suppose we double the percentages of the “lie detector”; nevertheless, a nation living on this narrow margin of moral reserves is drawing too heavily on its resources and nearing moral bankruptcy. Before the war, our crime bill could have paid our national debt in two years. Our moral basis is decaying. We must get God back. But can we?
I think we will, for the half-gods that have taken the place of God are letting us down. If reason cannot lead us to God, then disillusionment may drive us there, or sorrow may yet “toss us to his breast.” But is there any hope of a reasonable faith? Can we be believers with the consent of our whole beings, including our minds? I think we can, for the situation is clearing for the modern person.
Humanity is beginning to see that we cannot live, as we once thought, on the denial of other people’s faith. The generation of people that lived on denials soon found themselves disillusioned even with their disillusionments. They had “three sneers for everything and three cheers for nothing.” And they soon found they couldn’t live by sneers; to live by sneers is poor fare. If we should walk to the table each day and look over the food and then turn away in high disdain, we could get away with this disdainful attitude for awhile, but only for awhile. In the end, hunger would bite us and drive us to affirm something about food and to act on our affirmation. Both physically and spiritually, we are positive beings and cannot live on a negation. We cannot live by a no; we must live by a yes. And that yes must be God, or it will let us down.
The future of the world is in the hands of believers, for the nonbelievers cannot act. They are suffering from “the paralysis of analysis.” They can only deny.
O God, I come to you for clearer light. The light is dawning—I now see that without you my universe tumbles to pieces. With you it makes sense; my sums come out right. Help me to find you—the Key. Amen.
Week 1 Thursday
Could the Universe Have Happened by Chance?
Job 38:31-33, 36; 42:1-6
The situation is clearing for the humanity. We see more and more that we must affirm some yes about the universe, and that yes may be God. For how could this universe come by chance into a cosmic orderliness, which stretches from the molecule to the outermost star and controls everything between? And how could this orderliness just happen to stay by chance through millions of years? That would be a stark materialistic miracle—universal chaos by chance gives birth to universal order! The one who believes that must spell “chance” with a capital C and mean by it, God. How long do you think it would take for you to throw up a font of type into the air and have it come down by chance into a poem of Browning? I asked a printer that question and he replied, “Both you and the type would wear out first.”
Someone has figured out the odds it would take for the world to have happened by chance, and the figures go round the world thirty-five times. “A preposterous figure,” says Dr. Millikan the scientist. Sir James Jeans refers to the analogy that it would take a hundred million years for a hundred thousand monkeys, pecking at random on a hundred thousand typewriters, to happen by chance upon the plays of Shakespeare.* And then, after they had happened upon the arrangement of the letters, they wouldn’t know what the letters meant!
When I pick up a book and see that there is intelligence in it (that sometimes does happen!), then I know that behind that book is an intelligent mind expressing itself through that intelligence. When I look at the universe, I find that it responds to intelligence; it can be intelligently studied. Intelligence has gone into it, into its very structure. The simple conclusion must be that behind that intelligence, which is built into the structure of things, is an intelligent mind, and since that built-in intelligence seems to be universal, I will have to spell it in capitals: a Universal Mind.
O God—I say the word now with more confidence—I begin to see you; help me to act as though you are. You are beginning to come into my intelligence. Help me this day to take you into the rest of my life. Amen.
* The Mysterious Universe (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932), 18, 21.
Week 1 Friday
The Intelligent Out of the Nonintelligent?
Psalm 14:1; Isaiah 8:19-20; John 14:8-11
Yesterday we began to see how impossible it would be for the nonintelligent to bring forth the intelligent. “Out of nothing, nothing comes,” is the universal law. But here is intelligence; you and I have it. Did that intelligence come out of the nonintelligent? If so, that is a materialistic miracle. Nature brought forth something it didn’t have. Again, you and I have purpose; we choose. Did that purpose come out of a nonpurposive universe? That too would be a materialistic miracle. As someone puts it: “Do we see the inkpot determine to write a Bible? Do the stones decide to come together to form a Taj Mahal? If one does not believe in God, one is forced to believe in miracle, the very thing the nonbeliever condemns in the believer.
Suppose in the end I find that there is no God, that belief in God was all a mistake. Then I would not regret having held to a God, for life works better with this hypothesis. My life sums come out better; the results are superior. The universe is meaningful, and my life is happier. Moreover, I would rise up in the end and confront the universe and say: “Well, I thought better of you; I thought there was Intelligence, and now I see that there is none. I thought there was Purpose; now I see that the universe is purposeless. You have let me down. I am superior to you, for I acted on a higher hypothesis than you could sustain. I have thereby been superior. I cannot regret that I was.”
A professor of electrical engineering, after passing through agnosticism to faith, put it this way: “If anyone could prove to me scientifically that this thing I have found is not true, I would still have to believe it, for the universe wouldn’t make sense without it.” He was profoundly right.
The universe does not make sense without God. As Voltaire says: “If there were no God, we would have to invent one to keep people sane.”*
O God, I am being hemmed into a faith in you. Life is closing in on me and forcing me to faith. Faith is becoming inescapable. And yet I would not escape, for escape would be escape from sanity, from the Open Door. Help me to enter. Amen.
*In Bertha Conde, What’s Life All About? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 23. https://archive.org/stream/MN41780ucmf_5/MN41780ucmf_5_djvu.txt, accessed April 14, 2014.
Week 1 Saturday
God in the Unexplained Gaps?
Isaiah 25:9; 40:28, 31; Malachi 2:10
While the matter of God is clearing, doubts still linger. Has not the doctrine of evolution made God unnecessary? Is not the whole thing being worked out by resident forces? Isn’t science filling up more and more of the unexplained gaps in nature—gaps into which we used to put God?
We made a mistake in trying to put God into the unexplained gaps, for science has come along and has filled these up. Then God was gone! Instead of putting God into the gaps, we should have put God into the intelligence, the order, the dependability, the very process, for there God belongs. That intelligence, order, and dependableness cannot get along without God! The universe is orderly and dependable, because God is an orderly, dependable God. God works by law and order instead of by whim and notion.
About evolution—When you say that “resident forces” are capable of producing the universe, we ask: How could resident forces move toward intelligent ends without being intelligent? Toward moral ends without being moral? You smuggle God into the process and then say God is not necessary! But God would be as necessary for evolution as for a once-for-all creation. Which takes the more intelligence: to strike a billiard ball straight into the pocket at one stroke, or to strike a ball, which in turn strikes another, and that another, and that another, until the last one goes into the pocket? Obviously, the latter stroke. God seemingly creates something, which creates something, and the whole thing moves on to a moral universe in which you and I stand, not pushed from behind by blind forces, but beckoned to from before by ideals—a universe of moral freedom, where our evolution is in our hands; we can go up or down according to choice. The framework has been created in which the greatest thing in the world can emerge by choice: character.
O God, I begin to see the school, the framework in which I have to win or lose the battle of life. The framework is hard, unbending, exacting, but I am grateful; for while the rules of the school are strict, they are working for one end—my character. Help me obey and help me to win. Amen.