Figuring Out God From Creation

If we can figure some things out about God from creation, it wouldn’t really be surprising if people had tried to, you know, figure some things out about God from creation. 

So, let’s put ourselves in other people’s shoes and suppose for a minute that we wanted to try to figure out some stuff about God on our own.  Maybe we live in a place where there isn’t a lot of religion, maybe we don’t think that whatever religion(s) we have come into contact with really have it right, or maybe we just want to start from scratch?  How might we go about figuring out the God question? 

We probably could begin looking to see if there is a God and asking what we can know about God from creation.  But, beyond that, we would have a lot of personal questions to find answers to - especially “What does God want from me?” 

Unless God actually reveals to us what He wants from us, we pretty much just have cause and effect to go on.  If good things happen, then God must be pleased with us.  If bad things happen, we must have done something to upset God, and we should probably try to figure out how to fix it.  What we basically end up with is our best guess as to how to make God happy (or at least not tick Him off too much).  Perhaps, in the process, we’ll also figure out how to get what we want sometimes (though probably not as often as we would like). 

As you can no doubt tell, this doesn’t get us very far.  Assuming that there is a God, we might end up with some things right, but we’re probably going to get lot of things wrong as well.  We’re going to have a really fuzzy picture of God.   Of course, we really should not expect much else from man’s attempts to reach up to God.  Finite and flawed human creatures are going to have a hard time reaching up to the infinite and unflawed creator.  It just doesn’t work very well. 

A lot of people say that all roads lead to God.  But, if you think about trying to figure out God from cause and effect, how far can we actually get?  Suppose we did the experiment with several groups of people and asked them to try to come up with what their God looked like.  And, after all was said and done we compared the results, would we have done any better? 

I think the problem with saying that all roads lead to God is that we’re really not even talking about roads.  All attempts to find God on our own really are just us fumbling around in the dark.  Given enough time, we might find something useful.  Of course, it is just as likely that we would fall down a hole.  There are no roads; there is only one road. 

I do want to be clear about something.  Christianity does not teach that there is no truth in other religions.  There is some truth, because we can know something about God from looking at creation.  However, there are also a lot of mistakes.  What Christianity teaches is that the only place that you are going to find all truth or the full and complete picture of God is through Christ.  That is why Christ is described as the image or representation of God.  If you want to know what God is like, you must look at Christ.