This blog offers some final reflections on my reading of Stephen Hawking’s book The Grand Design. For me, the most troubling thing about Hawking’s book is not the science, the science is actually fairly favorable to the cause of intelligent design and creation. What is troubling as I consider the big picture is the relative lack of tangible evidence for the presence and activity of God in the universe as we experience it. If God is real and wants to be known and loved, why is He so silent? Why is He so absent from the gaze of honest, open-minded people like Hawking seems to be. Why is He so unwilling to be experienced and detected by our best efforts? Why doesn’t He just show Himself? Why doesn’t He settle our doubts and lay out the evidence for us? Why did he even play games with Job and tell him everything except the actual reason why Job was suffering?

I received glimpses of an answer reading an essay by Marty Phillips entitled "Glimpses of His Glory: Towards a Working Definition of Faith Development in Context," in the book A Man of Passionate Reflection: A Festschrift Honoring Jerald Whitehouse, edited by Bruce L. Bauer (Berrien Springs, MI: Department of World Mission, Andrews University, 2011), 281-312. Marty notes in the essay how God has left "footprints" of His presence and glimpses of His character in various forms in every people group. Nevertheless, His self-revelation is limited among non-Judeo/Christian communities. He has left hints of His will and character in such cultures, but they are often "encoded" in obscure forms and rituals rather than taught with clarity.

Why would God do that? Why not simply be clear? The beginnings of an answer lies in a war story that is referenced in passing in Revelation 12:7-10 and other parts of the Bible (Revelation 20, Ephesians 1, Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 and Genesis 3). In the beginning, before there was a planet we call earth, the entire universe and all who lived in it were in harmony. But one of the highest of God’s creatures, called Lucifer, rebelled against God and accused Him of being arbitrary, dictatorial, unforgiving, and unjust. The whole universe was thrown into disarray because of these charges. God could have responded with indignation and put down the rebellion with force. But the rest of His creatures would from then on have served him out of fear and doubt rather than out of trust and love. So God chose to redeem the situation by opening Himself up to judgment, by giving Lucifer time to expose his true character of self-centeredness, lies, and coercion, and the whole universe time to examine the two options and decide for themselves if the charges against God were true.

To demonstrate the falseness of the charges, God has chosen to win the cosmic conflict from a point of utter weakness. Due to the accusations leveled against Him, He has limited His self-revelation to those who are weak and fragile in the eyes of the world, people like Abraham (Gen 12:10-20; 15:1) and like Paul (2 Cor 12:7-10). Instead of winning the war with power and brilliant persuasion, He woos us with a "still, small voice." He reveals Himself to Abraham, a man with no future (his wife was barren). When Jesus comes to reveal God, He is not born in a palace, but in a donkey’s feedbox. Jesus surrounds Himself, not with the great minds of his day, but with a dim-witted group of fractious fishermen. The greatest intellectual of the early church, Paul, had physical disabilities that enabled him to "delight in weakness, . . . for when I am weak, then I am strong."

This is God’s story. In the end good will triumph over evil, not by force, but by the power of truth delivered in seeming weakness. In other words, God’s presence and His goodness will be best apprehended in the context of human weakness. It is God’s will that people find Him and understand Him without Him exercising the advantages of power, brilliance and wealth. History demonstrates that it must be so. Whenever religion becomes powerful, wealthy and respected, it quickly loses sight of God and begins to act in the ways God is accused of acting: arbitrary, dictatorial, unforgiving, and unjust. Religions quickly confuse their own ethnic, social and religious identity with the sum total of God’s work in the world, and thus make religion the basis for power over others and the accumulation of worldly wealth. God cannot ally Himself with human power, wisdom and wealth, because in the context of this world, they would only distort the truth about His character. God’s form of government is superior, not in its power and glory, but in its character of humility, grace, gentleness and goodness.

So God is not only hidden to science, He is hidden quite often to religion as well. Human pride and self-sufficiency seeks a God that will make us famous, wealthy, powerful and brilliant. But such a God is not like God, he is in the image of the rebel Lucifer. We are most like God when we are content with weakness and obscurity.

In light of the cosmic conflict, we should not be surprised that God is so difficult to detect with the instruments of science. Were He to erase all of our doubts, we would quickly seek to appropriate Him to our own advantage and make Him over into the image of our own distorted characters. It is when we turn our eyes away from the attractions of power, wealth and brilliance that we begin to detect His presence in weakness. It is when our eyes are turned away from ourselves, that we begin to see glimpses of Him everywhere. Science is not inherently opposed to God, it is just a different source of knowledge about the universe, one well designed for its purpose, but not well-designed to detect His "still, small voice."