It’s time for a little update, not much, but I am no longer new to blogging. I have been at it a few years. Not that I have gained any particular stature. I simply can’t claim to be new at it. I still write as part of my profession, but blogging is more interesting. Blogging is my way of sharpening ideas and fleshing them out. It’s a journey, and I know I don’t always “get it right”, but I take it seriously.
I have been on a journey for truth since I emerged from the haze and confusion of adolescence, much of it self-induced. Stepping out of that myopic existence I began to get an inkling that a world of truth lay in front of me to encounter, and so I set off. I didn’t realize, then, how much faith is required to seek truth.
The primacy of faith may never have been more prominent than it is today in this post-postmodern, metamodern world. AI experts say that “hallucinations” are inevitable and unavoidable in the way AI works. Skepticism has already become the default posture of people in this social-media dominated world in which fake news is old news. It’s no longer what you trust, but who you trust. “Pick your poison, and go with it” is the metamodern response.
The advent of AI and its looming takeover may unravel the very foundation of our confidence in knowledge. If skepticism has long been the province of intellectuals in the know, it is now the common denominator of everyone who trusts only what they know from the people they trust and news outlets that feed them.
If we are not postmodern enough already, our skepticism will increasingly become more necessary than ever. In just a few years of the AI revolution, determining what content on social media is AI, not AI, or only partially AI is becoming increasingly fraught. The challenge will only get more difficult as AI gets better. Even college professors have difficulty determining student work product from AI work product
AI is only going to get better (or worse, depending on your viewpoint). The capacity of AI to churn out convincing content with great confidence (and lurking uncertainty) may overtake our ability to keep up with it. Over fifty percent of all social media content is currently produced by bots, a form of AI, and that statistic is likely to climb higher. Human productivity cannot keep up with the productivity of AI.
AI feeds on itself. Garbage in produces garbage out. AI repeats itself by design, and it will inevitably repeat the good with bad, leaving us ever attempting to discern and decipher which is which.
In a world like the one we are facing, faith becomes more important than ever. By faith, I mean trusting and having confidence in something. What we put our faith in will become more and more important.
This revelation comes as postmodernism is breaking down. That postmodernist, existentialist angst is hard to live with. We have to put our faith somewhere – and this is the meta-modern trend that we are now facing. Faith – where we put our confidence – is the question of the day.
Metamodernism has taken hold on our culture and psyche according to people who study these things. Despite the post-modern assumption that we can trust nothing, we choose to trust something in a metamodern world because the alternative is untenable and unsustainable.
Social psychologists say that we are living in a world marked by anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and isolation, and these problems are falling with heaviest weight on our youngest population. In a world like that, they learn they have to cling to something. They have to find something solid they can hold on to. If they don’t, everything is always falling away from them. They have nowhere to stand.
In a world like that, faith is inevitable and unavoidable. It is necessary for survival.
Perhaps we are arriving at this place too late. It certainly isn’t too soon. In fact, the place where we now stand, where it seems there is nothing solid to stand on, was foretold thousands of years ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
When King Solomon completed the Temple for God in Israel that David committed to build, he praised God for being true to His promise, for bringing His people out of Egypt, for choosing them to dwell among, and to have a Temple dedicated to Him in the City of David – Jerusalem. (2 Chronicles 6:1-11) He said,
“Lord God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven or on earth – you who keep your covenant of love with your servants who continue wholeheartedly in your way.”
2 Chronicles 6:14 (NIV)
At the same time, Solomon acknowledged that not even the highest heavens can contain God – much less a temple built by human hands. (v.18) Our God is the Lord over all the earth, and He made a covenant with Abraham to bless all the nations of the earth.
Solomon petitioned God to hear the prayers of the people of Israel (vv.19-21), to remember them when they repent for failing to love their neighbors, to judge those who are guilty and vindicate the innocent are wrongfully accused, and to forgive them when they repent of their sin, to “teach them the right way to live,” and to fear the Lord and walk in obedience. (vv. 22-31) Strikingly, Solomon included foreigners in his prayers:
“As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when they come and pray toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place. Do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel, and may know that this house I have built bears your Name.“
2 Chronicles 6:32-33
Solomon was mindful not just of the people of Israel; he was mindful of foreigners “who come from a distant land” because of God – asking God to do for them what they ask. He did this “so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you.” In doing this, Solomon remembered and honored God’s great promise to Abraham to bless all the nations through his descendants.
Let us remember and honor this promise of God today in our own land and in our own lives. God is no respecter of persons – or nations – who do not align themselves with and live out the promises and global purposes of God. Just as God promised judgment and and hardship for the ancient nation of Israel if they failed to live out their own covenant promises to God, He is and will be true to that promise for His people today – wherever they are scattered around the earth.
We are blessed when we are not just hearers of His word, but only if we are doers of His word. (James 1:22-25) God does not describe exactly how we do that. We need the guidance of His Holy Spirit to discern how to live this out in the 21st Century where we live. If we want to blessed by God and faithful to Him, however, we cannot ignore these things.
I pray that we will lean into God’s great covenant promise to all the nations of the world to live out His purposes and intentions to attract all people to Himself. May we learn to follow the prompting of the Holy Spirit in our own lives acknowledge and honor God in this way in our daily lives, individually and corporately, as the people of God.
I am reminded often that God’s faithfulness is new every morning, and God’s faithfulness is the subject of my inspiration today. I am going to start my meditation with the Euthyphro dilemma – a strange place to begin, maybe, but it sets the stage for some thoughts I have on faithfulness.
The Euthyphro dilemma poses a seeming conundrum: Is God good because He determines what is good as a matter of fiat, or is God good because goodness is objectively required of God just as it is required of us? In other words, does God arbitrarily establish what is good, or is God subject to what is good?
Of course, this is a false conundrum. It assumes there are only two possibilities: that God arbitrarily establishes what is good or that God is subject to what is good.
There is at least a third possibility—that good is determined by the very nature of God. Good is simply a description of who God is. Faithfulness is good because God is faithful, and the virtue of faithfulness is a reflection of God’s very character.
If we take the Bible for our revelation of God, His faithfulness always is, always was, and always will be. It’s not as if God actually trots out a new dose of faithfulness every morning. The saying is poeti:c that God’s faithfulness is new every morning. We experience God’s faithfulness anew every morning.
It dawns on me, though it shouldn’t come as any revelation, that God desires us to be like Him. As our Father, He is proud of and appreciates when His children emulate Him. Just like the child who is proud of her father and wants to be like him, pretends to be him in play because she loves him and honors him in her heart, we are grateful for God’s faithfulness, and we seek to be faithful like Him.
If God is faithful and His faithfulness is new to us every morning, as the psalmist says, then we should desire to be like Him in faithfulness in our own lives. We should desire to be like him in this way.
I am aware that the virtue of faithfulness isn’t the most exciting virtue we could adopt. Faithfulness, perhaps, doesn’t get the kind of attention that faith, hope, and love get, for instance. But where would we be without the faithfulness of God, who gives His word and keeps His promise? Whose yes is yes and no is no. Where would we be if His faithfulness was not new every morning? If we could not count on His grace? If we were uncertain that God would keep His promise to us?
I have been listening to Pensées by Blaise Pascal, who has become a favorite philosopher, theologian, and thinker for me. I resonate with his sentiments about reason and intuition in particular. He was brilliant in science, mathematics, and theology – way ahead of his time. He lived during the initial headwind of the Enlightenment. He was a contemporary of René Descartes, yet he was able to remain objective. He wasn’t swept up in the current of the Enlightenment. He managed to remain aloof from it.
I am inspired to think of death today from my reading of Pensées. Death is the great equalizer. It will come to all of us. The longest-lived among human beings may live to be 110. Most of us will not see 100 … or even 90; and many of us will not see 80 or 70 or even 60. Try as we might, we do not control our fate. We will die, and that reality is inescapable.
Pascal talks about the people who distract themselves from the reality of death. I suppose it’s natural to want to ignore something that is as grim as death. We can’t add a day to our lives by worrying and being anxious about it. Yet, anxiety about death is also natural for the same reason – we dread it, but we can’t avoid it.
I imagine that my cat has never thought a day in its life about the fact that it will die, but I have rationality, consciousness, and awareness of myself that my cat does not seem to have, certainly not in the same measure. To the extent that we have that ability, it seems to me that ignoring the reality death that we can certainly grasp is to be something less than human. To ignore the reality of death is, therefore, beneath us. It denies the qualitative difference between us and other animals.
The proverbial deer standing frozen in the headlights of a hurtling vehicle has little idea of the imminent impact those headlights impend. Like the deer we might shut our minds off in the grim headlights of death … but we know better. The deer doesn’t know any better.
Not that we should have any pride in the fact that we have greater capacity than the other animals. It wasn’t anything we did. It simply is what it is.
Thus, to live into our capacity seems only fitting. Our anxiety about death is fitting for creatures with rationality, consciousness, and awareness of themselves.
I was first impressed about this humanly poignant characteristic – preoccupation with death – in college as an English Literature major. Death was the subject of many a novel, sonnet, and other forms of literature. Death is a common theme across the literary ages. The desire to escape the inevitability of death runs strong in creative and artistic minds living into the fullness of what it means to be human.
It was in a class on William Shakespeare, focusing on the sonnets, that the reality of the creative preoccupation about death crept into my own awareness. In that same time period, I must have been reading Ecclesiastes, because I associate Ecclesiastes 3:11 with that time in my life. Indeed, it has become my favorite verse in the Bible:
“For God has made everything beautiful in its time, and eternity has been set in the heart of man, but not so that he could see the beginning from the end.”
We do live in a world full of beauty, even if the world is also full of pain, struggle, and anxiety. The contrast between beauty and the ugliness of pain and death does not escape us. Ultimately, these things are painful reminders of our own finitude that we would rather not face.
To put it in biblical fashion, the reality is that we are like a mist. We are like a flower that blooms one day and dies the next. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “Everything is meaningless” in a world like that.
In that sense, we are no better off than the animals. From dust we were born and to dust we will return. We end up in the ground just like they do.
Everything that we accomplish fades into other people’s memories when we die. Most if not all of those memories will long be forgotten in a few generations. The things we accumulate that do not rust or rot while we live will be left to rust or rot for someone else. In more modern, poetic terms, no one tows a Cadillac to the grave.
And yet, the very fact that we wrestle with the poignance of death is something that arouses hope. This was the realization I made in that class on Shakespeare.
Why do we even care? Why does it even enter our mind to be anxious about it? Why aren’t we, like my cat or a deer in the headlights, clueless about it? The fact that we think about it and long for a different reality suggests the possibility of such a reality.
According to Britannica, Blaise Pascal was a french mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who lived in the 17th century (1623-1662). He died young but he accomplished much. He revolutionized multiple scientific and mathematical fields1.
As a teenager, his essay on conic sections became known as Pascal’s Theorem in projective geometry. He invented mechanical calculators. He didn’t invent Pascal’s triangle, a three-sided arrangement of integers such that every number equals the sum of two diagonal numbers above it, but he found novel uses for it, including calculating probabilities. He also laid the groundwork for modern probability theory2.
Pascal did pioneering work in the physical sciences, laying the foundations for hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. Because of this work, a unit of pressure is named after him. Pascal’s Law – that pressure applied to a confined fluid is transmitted undiminished in all directions – underpins modern hydraulics. Experiments with vacuums and fluids led him to develop the syringe and the hydraulic press.
Blaise Pascal is known as much for his philosophy and theology as he is for his mathematics and science. Pascal’s Wager is a brilliant critique of atheism based on probability theory. Many people misunderstood Pascal’s Wager to be an apologetic argument for the existence of God. Pascal believed in God, of course, but he doubted the ability of finite human beings to prove the existence of God with logic and reason.
Pascal maintains that people perceive the existence of God on an intuitive level. He would argue that we use our reason to support or deny that intuition, but the reasoning power of a finite being is insufficient to establish proof.
Pascal did not eschew the reasoning capabilities of human beings. He used his own brilliant mind in the advancement of science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology. Rather, he was mindful of our limitations as finite beings.
All of this is nothing, however, but setting the stage for my own summary of a point Pascal makes in his work Pensees. The fact that Pascal had a brilliant mind is not proof of the existence of God to be inferred from the fact that he believed in God. Pascal would be the first person to deny that kind of proof, yet Pascal had confidence in the existence of God.
Blaise Pascal says that we cannot find happiness within us as the Stoics suggest. Neither can we find happiness outside of ourselves in amusements, nature, or anything else. These things are fleeting – temporal. We can only find true and lasting happiness in God, who is both within us and outside us.
God makes himself available to us in “the inner man” (my words), and He makes himself available to be known in and through the world He created. God is neither part of us nor part of the world. He is not contained in us nor contained in the world. Yet he is present; He is transcendent in everything.
Blaise Pascal talks about the fact that the Bible reveals a God who hides himself. Pascal says we have no obligation to provide proof of such a God, because such a God is revealed as one who hides himself. What proof can we then give? To undertake such proof is to deny such a God, says Pascal. To accept that God is hidden is to affirm Him.
Yet, Pascal spoke about God, as I do. I also have come to the same place Pascal reached in my own thinking, which perhaps is why I resonate with him as much as I do.
He is not completely hidden, of course, to the extent that men like Blaise Pascal – and many other people before him and since him – are convinced that such a God exists. Such a God however cannot be known by proofs that finite beings demand.
As I think about these things, it occurs to me that a hidden God will remain hidden to the man who demands and requires proof. What proof should such a God give? What proof should a finite man require?
The God of the Bible is revealed as not being such a God. Such a God does not reveal himself to a man who makes demands.
Indeed, we make no demands on nature. We seek only to discover, to understand. We don’t make any demands on gravity. We don’t create the natural laws, neither do we control what they should be or how they should prove themselves to us. Such a task would be a fool’s errand, and we would know nothing to undertake it. Why would we then make similar demands of God?
Indeed, if God exists, and I believe He does, we can only undertake to learn who God is on His own terms, just as we learn what nature is on its terms.
Neither should we expect God, who created nature, to be revealed in the same way nature is revealed to us. A God who creates nature is a God who is “other” than nature. Such a God must “stand apart” from nature in order to create it. Such a God must have agency. Such a God must have capacity to determine to create or not to create. Such a God does not exist according to a law like gravity. Such a God may only be known in a way that corresponds to who such a God must be to have created this universe.
Skeptics say that people have created God in their own image. The person of intuition and faith says that we know God because He has created us in His image. He has created us with capacities that are like Him, that allow us to know Him as He is.
Not that we have the same capacities as God. We don’t because we are created beings. We can only have some aspect of God’s capacities and not all of them. We sense, though, that we do have some divine-like aspects because we can think. We can perceive. We can reason. We are self-aware. We understand things like beauty and love, science, philosophy, mathematics, and theology.
These capacities are not the same as the capacity of a thing like gravity. It may be more like a thing like dark matter or dark energy, but only in the sense that we do not understand those things. Yet we know they exist because we see evidence that they exist, and so we may know that God exists because we see evidence that He exists. We know He exists, however, in a way that is different from the way the universe exists – as different as a created thing is from the creator of that thing.
God is hidden to those who set the parameters on where God should be found. God is hidden to those who assume that God is found in the same way that a thing like gravity is found. God is hidden to those who demand that God be known in the way they want to know Him.
As creatures made in the image of God, who have some capacity to know God and be like Him, perhaps, it shouldn’t be surprising that we attempt to be like Him in the way of making such demands. To demand that the world bow down to us, that even God bow down to our demands for proof, is the natural danger of God making a creature in His own image.
And so God hides himself of necessity because such a creature would be a danger to any universe God created. Indeed, if God is true to Himself, He could not allow such a thing. He must, of necessity, be hidden to such a creature so that only a creature who is willing to humble itself, to set aside its desire to be like God, may know Him – a creature who is willing to know God on God’s own terms, and to know God for who He really is and not for what such a creature wishes him to be.
It seems to me it could be no other way: that God would have to hide Himself so that He would be discovered and known by those people willing to know Him on His own terms, to know Him for who He really is and not for who they wish He was – a god they can control.
We cannot anymore demand that our spouse be the person we want them to be and make them to be it, than we can demand that God be the god we want Him to be and make Him dance to the tune of the music we play. It is a fool’s errand even to conceive of it and to entertain it. Such a god that we can manipulate and control would not be the true God.
So the fact that God is hidden is not surprising. The fact that God is hidden is expressly disclosed throughout the Bible. It is not hidden to us that God is a hidden God.
What proof, therefore, should we give of such a God?
Perhaps, the only proof we can give is the hope that such a God can be found, and indeed, that some people have found Him – that He has revealed Himself to people to whom He desires to reveal Himself because they desire to know Him as He truly is.
And so we can offer this proof: that the one who seeks God, the one who seeks to know God as He reveals Himself to be, the one who seeks God with his whole heart and his whole being, yielding all that he wishes to demand to such a God, that such a person can and will know Him, as the Bible says, and that such a God who is approached that way promises to be found.
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Blaise Pascal, Brittanica.com, Lucien Jerphagnon, May 1, 2026 ↩︎
Navigating by Faith 