Discovering God: Exploring the Possibilities of Faith

By Dennis McCallum

Are you a spiritual being or only material? What if you could experience a direct, personal relationship with God? Is there life after death? Can people every really know these things, or do they just have to blindly believe?

Before you answer, consider reading this short, provocative book. In Discovering God, you may learn things you have never seen before.

Learn how God decided to authenticate himself to humans. Learn how we can gain a high degree of certainty about God. Most important, learn how you can experience a personal relationship with the God who created us. And if you already believe but have trouble explaining your faith to others, Discovering God can help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Paradigm Publishing
• Release date: Dec 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983668145

Dennis McCallum

Dennis McCallum is founder and lead pastor of Xenos Christian Fellowship, a nontraditional church composed of several hundred house churches. He also leads Xenos' college ministry at Ohio State University. A graduate of Ashland Theological Seminary, he is the author of several books, including The Death of Truth. Dennis and his wife, Holly, live in Columbus, Ohio. Their three adult children lead house churches at Xenos.

Book preview

1 Is God Real?

Imagine being ushered into a large party hall with numerous booths and pavilions, each offering different activities or products. You can do anything you want at this party. Thousands of people scurry from one booth to another, engaging in various activities.

Some booths offer art and music lessons. One popular section offers assorted sexual experiences. Another booth offers people a wide assortment of drugs. One very large booth offers people exercises to enhance their bodies. Several booths feature tasks that entitle participants to be rich. Still another booth contains a laboratory for scientific research.

One problem: When they usher you in, they explain that you have a viral infection that will kill you in three hours, if not sooner. The same is true for everyone at the party. Everyone you see is going to die within three hours of arriving.

How could you enjoy a party like that? All the pieces for enjoyment are there, but the overarching death sentence casts a terrible chill on everything.

To make matters worse, as you visit various booths, you occasionally see people collapse in sickness and die. Guards carry them out to be buried. Before long, you notice that you’re feeling sick!

This depressing party represents a sad picture of what we face in life if God doesn’t exist. Our course might last seventy years instead of three hours, but the trajectory would be the same. Compressing the time span into three hours only makes it easier to see the problem.

Beings that appear and then disappear are ultimately pointless beings. And if they have high-order conscious that enables them to understand what’s going on, they are necessarily unhappy on some level, because no matter what they do, their activities and contributions are soon to vanish.

You might argue that you could help others, so maybe that’s meaningful. But in the party scenario, others suffer the same predicament. They, too, will soon disappear and never remember they existed, so your help is hopelessly fleeting and not lasting.

Ultimately, thinking about life being like this party illustrates what professor Nicholi of Harvard observes: Atheistic students struggle with depression as a result of their feelings of cosmic insignificance. For so many of them, life seems too pointless to live.¹

Some claim that life might be meaningful even if we are nothing but a grain of sand on the shoreline of history, soon to disappear. But such meaning is only relative to our setting (like Moby Dick is important to that novel). It’s not ultimate meaning, which bestows real and permanent value and purpose. It takes courage to face these facts. And the fact is that under atheism—a scenario without God or an afterlife—if you end up as nothing, you are nothing.

The big questions

Are we alone? Are we strange organisms without purpose in a vast, silent universe that doesn’t know we’re here?

Or are we created—known, perhaps even loved by some great creator?

What is our fate? Are we destined to a non-existence so profound that we won’t know we ever existed? Or can we look forward to an awesome future that endures forever? Is spirituality just something people fabricate because they need it, mere wishful thinking? Or is our sense that we are more than mere bodies that live and die correct?

An icicle drops off a gutter. Is that a meaningful, significant event, or just matter responding to physical law? I think we know the answer. But am I, a human, any different? Am I just matter and energy conforming to physical laws, or is there more? Why does it seem like I have a consciousness, a self that goes beyond the strictly physical?

Once you start thinking you might have a spiritual side, you’re thinking outside the natural, into the supernatural, especially if you think such a soul might survive death. That would be a non-physical soul. Where would that come from? Quickly, you realize you’re thinking about God.

What if a real God exists? What if he is someone you could come to know? Maybe even a God of love?

Perhaps most important: Can we ever really know the answers to questions like these?

Yes, we can, and with a high level of confidence! Not only that, but the news is good—maybe better than anyone would guess.

Why not devote some minutes of your life to carefully read this book and find out how you can know the answers to these kinds of questions? If you do, you’ll never regret the time you invested.

My journey to faith

We’re going to look at a dozen lines of evidence that God is there and that we can know and experience him. If these reasons carry weight in your mind, it would make sense to call out to God, asking him to reveal himself. You wouldn’t be committing yourself to anything. You’re just saying that if God is real, personal, and wants a relationship with people, he can hear you calling and answer.

That’s what I did. When I reached a point in my life where I began to think my atheism might be mistaken after all, I knew I wouldn’t be able to rest easy unless I called out to God.

It felt strange. I had never prayed in my life, other than doing what I was told as a child. I didn’t speak out loud. I just said in my mind, If you’re there, if you hear me, I’m ready to hear back from you. But I can’t just decide to believe; I need something. I need you to show me this is actually real.… I even said I would keep my eyes open and look around for evidence. That seemed fair.

Nothing much happened at that moment, although I felt good about it. I believed I had done the right thing. I knew I wasn’t going to lie to myself. Then I went to sleep. You could do that during your time reading this book. It’s not dangerous, and it gives you the best chance of making contact with God.

¹ Armand Nicholi, The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life (NY: Free Press, 2002), 125.

2 Why Believe Anything?

How can you know real answers to the big questions we raised in the previous chapter? Let’s consider two ways to evaluate claims.

Making sense

First, to believe something, it needs to make sense. You have no reason to believe anything that is nonsense. We are all reasonable creatures. Every time you argue for anything, you use reason. When you notice that two plus two is four, or that something you heard was a lie, you use reason. When you refuse to believe something that is self-contradictory, you use reason.

People either have reason-based belief or blind faith. To understand reason-based belief, consider this scenario:

I go to the doctor because I feel sick. He checks me over, does a blood test, and a throat swab before concluding that I have strep throat. He writes a prescription and says, This is what you need. You’ll feel better in a day or two.

As I walk into the pharmacy, I wonder if the doctor is correct on this diagnosis and prescription. He could be mistaken. I