Absolute Proof
W. Carl Ketcherside
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A young friend whom we have never met, but who is attending a prominent state university, writes to ask if we can produce in simple and useable fashion absolute proof of the existence of God. It seems that if we cannot do so he is ready to become a skeptic and abandon what he has been taught from childhood in order to maintain what he defines as his "intellectual integrity."
I take all such letters seriously but I must confess that they do not perturb me as they do a lot of those in my generation. I rather expect such communications from those who are freshmen and sophomores in college because I realize that they are passing through a period when they must question and re-evaluate all they have been taught in order to arrive at a personal and disciplined faith. We cannot always go through life trusting for support upon what our fathers and grandfathers believed. We must fight our way through the jungle of terrifying doubts until we emerge into the sunlight on our own.
At a certain time in our lives we are betrayed by our very inexperience, coupled with our search for assurance and meaning, into demanding dogmatic data upon which to rest our case. Increasing growth toward maturity eventually leads us to the place where we recognize that happiness in the intellectual and moral sphere is not contingent upon a collection of correlated propositions in a well arranged catalogue. God cannot be reduced to a
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An absolute is one thing and absolute proof of the absolute is a wholly different thing. There may be no absolute proof for the simple reason that the prover is fallible and all of his proof must be relative. The finite cannot embrace the infinite with reason nor encompass the ultimate with logic. God is greater, if he is God, than any criteria we have by which to measure. But the fact that a package is greater than the range of a scale to weigh, does not prove the parcel does not exist. It but proves the inadequacy of the device upon which we depend for ascertaining weight.
Now one is not dependent for well-being solely upon what he can test or prove by the limited criteria available unto him. He may project himself upon wings of faith beyond the reach of rational proof. One may see with a powerful telescope that which is outside the range of his gun, and he may envision with the eyes of the inner being that which cannot be bagged by the weapon of logic. Faith is as much an attribute of the spirit as reason, and the man who refuses to employ it is as handicapped as one who blinds an eye until it is atrophied from disuse.
It is a fallacy to assume that everything can be proven or must be proven to be believed. Such an assumption itself would have to be proven in order to be accepted. There is ample evidence available that men have fervently believed things which they could not finally prove and have been as profoundly changed by that faith as if they could test the reality in a laboratory or an experimental research. If the ultimate proof of God's existence available to man is the effect of his transforming penetration into our personality, such a change achieved by faith is as meaningful as if we could establish it by a logical process.
To merely prove the existence of God as another fact of intellectual perception, or to have a prize book on the library shelf dealing with the logical sequence essential to arriving at the conclusion is useless. If God is personal the real proof must be person-to-person, and it must lie in the rising above the purely human and the triumph over the natural.
The inability of man to present absolute proof constitutes no ground for affirming the non-existence of God. To so affirm would mean that the one making the declaration possessed unlimited knowledge and infinite vision. Everyone who promulgates the proposition that there is no God ends up by making himself a God. If man is powerless to present absolute proof of God's existence, his powerlessness does not constitute absolute proof of God's non-existence. No fact is affected by the ability or inability of one to prove it. The fact is one thing, the ability to prove it is something else, and outside of the fact itself.
Our friend who rejects God for want of absolute proof can turn to nothing else for security. If he predicates his "intellectual integrity" upon such proof as he requires he will eventually be unable to build upon science or any other scholastic discipline for none of these can furnish absolute proof. Thus, his reaction is not intellectual at all, but anti-intellectual. Integrity is not conditioned upon demand for absolute proof in advance of faith, but upon unprejudiced examination of data as it is disclosed or discovered, and the interpretation and acceptance of all such data as appears to be relevant, with a mind held open for reception of additional testimony which may subsequently appear.
It possibly gives one who is forced to re-examine the grounds of his faith by exposure to new ideas on the college campus, a real feeling of sophistication to announce that he is rejecting his childhood faith to maintain "intellectual integrity." Being a lot older and having long since passed through the same stage of development, I trust that I may be excused for smiling rather than exhibiting the profound shock which such announcements are intended to provoke in old fuddy-duddies and traditionalists like myself. You see I do not equate intellectuality with arrival at such doubts any
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Most of us in our intellectual development are like a wasp, which is bigger when first hatched out than at any other time. Fortunately some of us live long enough to be able to look back with a patronizing smile upon our former selves, and to learn that the truly sophisticated do not measure the universe finally and irrevocably by their own feeble and limited resources and thought processes. Once we quit playing God it is much easier to resume praying to him. And we need to pray!
As for myself, I have examined the available data related to God and revelation, and I humbly accept for my own life in simple trusting faith the existence of God and the authenticity and genuiness of his word. When I see rabbit tracks in the newly fallen snow I cannot prove absolutely that the rabbit exists but I believe that if I patiently follow the tracks I will eventually see the rabbit. There are too many God-tracks on the face of the universe for me to ignore. I'm following them with confident anticipation that some day I shall see him as he is. Does that strike you as sort of childlike? It is!