The Weed of God

Someone offered me weed. I'm a curious soul. So I did some research on how weed works on the brain. In other words, I wanted to know why the product is so effective. I learned that it has to do with neurons, neurotransmitters, synapses, protein receptors, cannabinoid receptors, etc. I am not impressed with folks who smoke marijuana. I am thoroughly impressed with the brain so affected by it. It might be the most complex of creations. So I thought of the Creator.

Then I was flipping channels late one night and came across Bill Maher, the fool. He was in a discussion about God with some other foolish folks. And Maher said that faith was "a belief in nothing." He elaborated. He spouted with conviction that God cannot be proven. So faith in God is confidence in nothing. "Faith is nothing," he said. So Bill believes that the believers are the fools.

But faith is not nothing. Faith is something. It's the one and only something that will tie a person to their Creator redemptively. And, faith is rooted in visible evidence. Faith is reasonable. For example, it deduces that the complexity of the human brain did not evolve over hundreds of millions of years by chance. Faith has the sense to look around, consider the delicate functioning creation (including the brain), and reason back to the existence of a Life-Giver with a mind of His own (Ps 119; Ro 1; He 12).

Faith also looks inward, at conscience, and the innate moral code that exists across a world of various cultures. This is mostly what holds societies together. It's not the fear of governmental punishment, for example. It's the inward witness forbidding destructive behavior (Ro 2).

For the record, the Christian Scriptures, called the Bible, do not present faith as a leap into the darkness, but as the most sensible of conclusions, and a coming out into the light. A person cannot reason him or herself into trusting Christ alone as God the Son to cover all of his or her sins. That's saving faith, and it requires an act of God in which He opens the unbelieving heart and scatters the absurdity of self-reliance. But simple faith in one's Creator, that's just rational. It begins with what one can see and understands the visible as pointers to the Invisible. God has revealed Himself, generally in creation and conscience, but also savingly in Scripture and Jesus Christ.