God Cannot Be

A tweet from an account called “Atheist Forum” recently went viral:

CHRISTIANITY: Belief that one God created a universe 13.79 billion yrs old, 93 billion light yrs in diameter (1 light yr = approx. 6 trillion miles), consisting of over 200 billion galaxies, each containing ave. of 200 billion stars, only to have a personal relationship with you.

— Atheist Forum (@ForumAtheist) February 8, 2020

The tweet appealed to fellow atheists who rallied around the nonsense of believing in such a massive yet personal God; it appealed to Christians who rallied around the glory of believing in such a massive yet personal God.

And that, my friends, is how you create viral content — something for everybody.

This tweet is the crux of everything that both unites and divides our culture over God.

One side is obviously correct; the other is obviously crazy. From both the atheist’s and Christian’s vantage points of the other.

It all comes down to our natural wiring and lenses for how we see the divine. For example, I am inherently inclined to believe in “meaning” or “fate” or “The Force” or something beyond myself.

I’m the John Locke of LOST island, convinced that something special and purposed is brewing here, and I refuse to believe in random chance.

I’m certain that even if I hadn’t been raised in a Christian home (and Christian school with Christian science textbooks) but had this same personality and outlook of the universe, I’d have sooner than later found my way to a God — if not the same one I follow now.

The God who I believe is the one and only: creator of untold galaxies and creator of you and me.

And yet many cannot wrap their minds around such a contradictory notion — a massive and personal God.

No shade. Simply stating that reality from the tweet above.

Going back to LOST, I identified so strongly with Locke and so against the so-called “hero,” Jack Shephard. Jack was the “man of science,” always antagonizing Locke, the “man of faith” (though from Jack’s perspective it was Locke doing all the antagonizing).

Season after season, the two were at odds: science and faith. Logic and magic. Warring and surviving, side by side on some illogical island.

No spoilers for how that relationship ended.

I’d like to think atheists and Christians could also live side by side on this spinning rock. Twitter included. We’re not that different. We see and occupy the same universe, and we all retweeted the same tweet.

We all lean back and look at the sky, lost in the endless up. He is a God of confusion. Or mystery. Depending on your lens.

A God who created billions of brilliant things: galaxies, stars, planets.

A God who created humanity.

A God who spins planets and expands galaxies throughout all time.

A God who became human to restore his relationship with humanity.

A God who is that big and that small.

A God beyond our comprehension and right here in our midst.

And everything rides on this question:

Could it be?

Could it really be?