Psalm 14
January 14
Someone told me once that April 1 was “National
Atheist Day,” and it wasn’t until later that I got the connection between that
and this psalm.
I have never been
able to track down this quote to be directly attributable to Abraham Lincoln,
but if he didn’t say it, he should have. “I can see how a person can look down at
humanity and be an atheist, but how can one lift up his eyes to the heavens and
declare ‘There is no God.’”
If you haven’t
noticed, atheism is gaining traction. There are a number of books out
proclaiming that there is no deity. Which as the psalmist says is actually
quite foolish.
Consider: Can you categorically
state that there is no person in all of the world whose name is John-Jacob-Jinkleheimer
Schmidt? As ridiculous of a name as it is, of course you cannot. Not even
Google has the search capacity of telling us the names of seven billion people
in the world. Even more foolish is to categorically state that there is no God
simply because a person thinks such an idea is preposterous.
Creation needs a
creator. For a finite human to not be able to comprehend an infinite God is
actually quite reasonable. Of course we cannot explain or understand “who made
God?” because only God could truly understand the fact that no one had to make
an uncreated deity who has always existed. And the fact that God is infinite
and we are finite also demands that there are some things that we simply will
not understand.
But for finite
human to believe with absolute assurance that there is nowhere in all of the
universe (and even beyond our universe) an entity who created the universe. Well, that’s simply … foolish.
