About this time each year, I take our cars to a local tire shop to have studded tires put on for the winter. This is a ritual known up here as "change over". This morning, as I waited for the shop to open (it's a good idea to arrive early since everybody else is doing change over, too), I finished listening to a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson on the existence of God. I wrote earlier that this debate, and others between them, is the subject of Collision, a new movie soon to be released.
I also wrote that I was struck by Hitchens' worshipful tone as he spoke about the transcendent beauty of the universe. His point was that an atheist, though he denies the existence of God, is not unable to appreciate the numinous and awe-inspiring. In fact, according to Hitchens, only by jettisoning age-old religious superstitions has man been able to discover the beauty of our universe. He appealed to the stunning images of the far reaches of space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (thus the starry picture above). How can anyone say that a burning bush in the wilderness is more glorious, or beautiful than that? Or how can the miracle of Jesus casting a legion of demons into a herd of swine be considered anything other than vulgar in comparison to the revelation of beauty found in nature?
I believe there are good answers to these questions. But, what I found fascinating in his argument was the explicit language of worship. He spoke of the "absolute magnificence," "underlying beauty," "majesty", and "awe" of nature. This is why I believe that Hitchens may be in fact closer to pantheism than atheism. Though he denies God, he transfers to nature the language of worship and awe that properly belongs to God.
What Hitchens implies by all of this, is that nature, or creation, is sufficient in itself to satisfy our innate longing to experience the transcendent, the glorious, the numinous. And there I believe he is wrong. As awe-inspiring as the Hubble images may be, they, or any wonder of creation, cannot in the end answer to our God-given longing for eternity. Nature is finite, but we are created in the image of an infinite and eternal God. And we were made to know him. "He...put eternity into man's heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Therefore, nothing less than God can satisfy our longing for the transcendent. Hitchens has replaced God with nature, and is in effect worshiping what John Calvin called a "shadow diety".
Ravi Zacharias said, somewhere, that the only thing that can sustain wonder in the human heart is another person. God has given us the creation, with all its beauty, so that we would be led by it to know the Creator who made it. Only when we look to God do we find the one source of beauty, majesty, and wonder that will fully satisfy our heart's longing for the eternal and transcendent.
When Jesus prayed his high priestly prayer in John 17, he said, "Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world" (v.24). Jesus knows what is the deepest longing of our hearts, and that is to see (and worship) that which is infinitely, eternally glorious. That glory is not found in nature, but in Christ.
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