Thankful for Two Reasons

As I enter this post, I'm thankful for two things--that we are created to know God and that a book, Connecting Faith and Science, which includes a chapter I wrote on the subject, was just published!

In the seventeenth century—right at the flowering of modern science—the mathematician Blaise Pascal offered another proof for God. He began, in a similar vein to Augustine with our existential search for rest: “By nature, we all seek happiness.” But where do we seek it? “Some seek the good in authority, some in intellectual inquiry and knowledge, some in pleasure.” Pascal continued by observing that all these various potential sources for happiness, for a beautiful life, leave us craving for more. He pondered what that meant:

"What else does this craving, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him… since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself." Blaise Pascal

C. S. Lewis echoed this conclusion about three hundred years after Pascal with a simple, logically compelling, phrase in his apologetics: 

If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.” C.S. Lewis

Lewis believed that this argument from desire constitute one of the strongest proofs for God’s existence.

            
It may surprise some in the Reformed tradition—at least those who have read Karl Barth’s cavils against “natural theology”—that the seminal voice of Reformed theology, John Calvin, wrote similarly of the “awareness of divinity.” Calvin was not out to prove God, but to state that inherent in human existence is a basic, vague, and powerful natural knowledge of God. Indeed, in Calvin’s vastly influential 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion, he wrote, 

“There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity.” John Calvin

This awareness of divinity or sensus divinitatis is “beyond dispute” according to Calvin. It is the foundation of the natural knowledge of God.

Which indeed is cause for thanksgiving.