When I was growing up in the 1950’s, in Akron Ohio, the paperback book revolution was in full bloom. You could buy quality paperbacks for what now seems like a pittance. Here is an edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince that I bought back then. How much do you think I paid for it?_____It cost me 35 cents!

Once a week or so, my best friend Beaner and I would ride our bikes the six blocks to a book store that sold nothing but paperbacks. We would leave our bikes outside the store—no need for locks—and spend an hour or so browsing the shelves. Several times I bought a book by my favorite philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Indeed, I read so much Bertrand Russell that friends called me “Bert.”

I particularly remember Russell’s book Why I Am Not a Christian. In that book, Russell asks, “If Jesus was as powerful and merciful as Christians believe, why, instead of simply healing a few lepers, did he not banish disease from the face of the earth?” To me, that seemed a knockdown argument.

Russell’s philosophy purported to base everything on logic and nothing on metaphysical assumptions. In one passage, he wrote:

" [Man’s] origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand."

And, of course, Russell is not the only prominent thinker to embrace materialism. In our day, there has arisen a movement called “The New Atheists,” whose partisans loudly reject God and  consider religion to be a poison. Perhaps the most prominent of this group is Richard Dawkins, a professor of biology at the University of Oxford. Consider what Dawkins says in his book The God Delusion: “There is almost certainly no God.” Belief in God, says Dawkins, is infantile, like faith in the Tooth Fairy or in Santa Claus, and can be described as a “virus of the mind.”  Dawkins insists that the universe has “no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”  So it is not surprising that he maintains that “bringing up children within a religious tradition is a form of child abuse.”

Well then, shall we all just go home and resolve to stop abusing our children by raising them as Christians? What response can we give to the materialists? What justifies our faith?

We cannot prove that God exists by scientific experiment or by the pure reason of logical deduction. No, God can be realized only in the realms of human experience. Against Russell and the New Atheists, we believers maintain that God created mankind in his own image.[i] Does this mean that we are like God in form and physique? No, rather, it means that we are indwelt by the divine spirit. Yes, we have physical bodies subject to material laws. But as the Apostle Paul says, “Your body is the temple of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the Spirit is God’s gift to you.”[ii] We have something from God himself that actually dwells within us.

Jesus taught that “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It is possible to ignore or obscure this indwelling Spirit that is the deepest, truest part of us. But when we search for God with all our being, we discover the indwelling Spirit that is part and parcel of the divine. It is this Spirit that is the source of our faith. The wholehearted search for God ultimately leads the seeker to recognize that to doubt God’s existence or his goodness would be to deny the deepest and most real part of himself—the divine spirit within.

The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God, said “When you call me and come and pray to me, I will give heed to you. You will search for me and find me, if only you seek me wholeheartedly.”[iii]

I know the reality of Jeremiah’s declaration from my personal experience. I was born into a Jewish family and was bar mitzvahed. In high school, under the influence of Bertrand Russell, I became an agnostic. Some years later, I discovered yoga, which presented a vision of spirituality and a spiritual path that appealed to me. I devoted myself to yoga and almost became a swami. But after several years, I came to realize that the yoga goal of attaining enlightenment by losing your individuality in the Absolute ocean of Being was an illusion. I left the yoga path and for several years did not think about ultimate things.

But in time, I became reawakened to the idea that, beneath the surface, there was a spiritual reality. I resolved to devote myself heart and soul to realizing this spiritual truth. When I did so, the Spirit within answered me. It gave me the assurance that my passion for seeking the truth and following it wherever it led had earned God’s favor. And shortly thereafter, the Spirit made Jesus known to my hungry soul.

Do we realize what a gift this Spirit is? It is nothing less than the will of God abroad in the universe. By aligning our will with God’s will, we can achieve the sublime and dynamic peace that passes all understanding, the peace that comes from our confidence that our career in time and eternity is wholly in the hands of an infinitely wise, powerful, and loving God. We can become like Paul who said, “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”[iv]

It is the divine presence within that enabled the Roman centurion to have such faith in Jesus.

This Spirit is also the inspiration for our aspirations to discern truth, experience beauty, and recognize and achieve goodness. God is not the psychological projection of our yearning for truth, beauty, and goodness. Rather God is the very source of the yearning for these supreme values.

Paul, in his letter to the Romans, tells us that “those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God….When we cry, ‘Abba, Father,’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are God’s children….If we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ.”[v] We can share Christ’s service. We can share his love. We can share his joy. And we can share his sonship with God the Father.

In the scripture passage from John, Jesus tells Nicodemus and us that if we are reborn of the Spirit, we will have eternal life. In John 20:17, the risen Jesus says, “I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.”

So, my brothers and sisters, let us rejoice! We have been reborn, reborn by the spirit into eternal life! The Spirit has told us that we are God’s children, the children of the everlasting Father who loves each of us with an infinite love.

If we are reborn of the Spirit, we know with certainty that, of all facts, God is the most real; of all truths, God is the most alive; of all friends, God is the most loving; and of all values, God is the most Divine.