The Longing for the Numinous

The most unifying aspect of human experience, from as far back in time as you care to look, as distantly removed by geography as you care to travel, is the sense that there is more to our reality than the material. All people everywhere at all times in history have had a sense that they are not alone.  There is more.  There is an ultimate reality that grounds and perhaps even rules over the mundane physical reality with which we interact in our daily lives.  The most general term for this "greater, more fundamental, mysterious 'otherness,'" is the "numinous."   Every nation, tribe, and tongue in all of history has had to wrestle with this basic understanding of what lies beyond the material. 

Of course, all of these different nations, tongues, and tribes have done different things with this universal sense of the numinous in our lives.  Tribal paganism of diverse stripes proliferated as people struggled to describe this sense.  In some cultures, ancestors looking over them fulfilled this search.  In some cases, an impersonal magical aspect of nature lies at the base of all things.  In the modern secular West, the human intellect and our subjective experience have been deified and given all explanatory power, so much so that many have convinced themselves that the universal draw of the numinous was only for the simple and uneducated.  Ironically, this secular humanism is no less a religion; it has simply tricked the mind into believing that the human mind can be all that is needed to explain all things.  That is just another version of faith. 

We find ourselves in a time when we need to justify to ourselves, in opposition to our culture, a belief in the foundation of every society throughout time.  Not until the rise of naturalism as a foundational assumption in the last two hundred years have any significant number of people anywhere questioned the existence of the numinous, the greater "other" out there on which everything else depends.  We are unique in the need to argue for the acceptance of this belief. We are, in a cultural and historical context, unprecedented.  

Still, here we are, needing to lay again the foundations of every culture ever. 

Yes, there is more to reality than the material.  Yes, there is something more, something more foundational, more powerful, and more profound than anything made of matter and energy.  

Below, you will find numerous arguments for the existence of a god in general.  Of course, as a bible-beliving Christian Church, we believe that the answer is much more precise, but we can begin here. 

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The Cosmological Argument for God

The Moral Argument for God

The Teleological Argument for God

Other Arguments

In The Beginning, God

Pastor Mike addresses the fundamental questions about the existence of God.
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