The man upstairs.(Everything You Always Wanted to Know about God (but were afraid to ask))(Book review)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know A bout God (but were afraid to ask), by Eric Metaxas (WaterBrook, 240 pp., $14.99)

THE title of this book is amusing, but it encapsulates something of the utmost seriousness--that the reason many of us know very little about God is not because the evidence is not there but because we really don't want to know. We're afraid to ask, because we know that the answer will define how we should live, and we'd rather be free to decide that for ourselves.

Christians call this phenomenon original sin, and it is the source of all the suffering in the world--as Eric Metaxas explains in this conversational but ultimately very serious book. Metaxas, a humorist who has written children's books as well as scripts for the Veggie Tales video series, notes that the evidence for God's existence is all around us. He organizes that evidence and presents it in an accessible question-and-answer format.

The book sets out to level the playing field between theism and materialism--a necessary task, because the standard of proof to which atheists hold claims about God is much higher than their standards for accepting their own belief in a purely material existence. Metaxas points out, correctly, that no one can prove that the material world is all there is. He further considers the meaning of the word proof usefully noting that we know God exists "the same way we know lots of things, such as whether someone loves us or whether electricity is real or just a crazy idea. We base our view of things, and our view of the world, on observation, including other people's observations."

This is a crucial point in any argument about the existence and character of God: There are more ways of knowing things than simply through scientific proof, the testing af falsifiable propositions. In fact, the way we really know things is by perceiving them and experiencing them. We know gravity exists because we see things falling and weft, el its effects on us. The same is true for arguments about God. Just as we know that gravity exists because we perceive it and experience it, believers know that God exists because 1) they perceive and experience the presence of God, and 2) they understand what that experience means. Unbelievers do not deny God because they have scientifically tested the proposition of His existence and found it untrue; they deny God because they cut themselves off from that experience and refuse to understand it when they see it in others.

They are able to do this, Metaxas writes, because God gives us freedom to choose whether to acknowledge and worship Him. God did this because love cannot be real unless it is freely given:

 
   God created us out of love, and He wants 
   us to love ...