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May 29th 2009
I was chatting with a friend who claims to be an atheist the other day. His problem was that he could not believe in anything by faith. If he couldn’t see, hear, smell, taste or feel it, then to him it was not real.
And of course, his inability to believe in what he could not see led to his atheism. How can someone believe in an invisible God, angels, the devil or heaven if we can’t touch them?
Good questions.
I told my friend the story of the family of mice who lived inside of a huge grand piano. Every day the little rodents would sit together and wonder at the magical sounds which filled their small world. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there must be someone bigger than themselves who was making the beautiful music, someone who was invisible and yet very close to them. They loved to think and talk about the Great Musician whom they could not see.
Then one day, a brave little mouse among them ventured out of their nest to pursue the sound of the music they heard. He then made an awesome discovery. It was the wires. Wires were the secret to the sounds that they had been attributing to the Great Musician. He came back and breathlessly reported to his friends that he’d finally unraveled the secret to the music. “When the wires vibrate and tremble, different notes are sounded.” No longer did the mice believe in the myth of the Great Musician. They were educated.
Later on, another mouse explorer ventured even further than his brother had gone, and he discovered a deeper secret. It wasn’t just the wires after all—there were hammers hitting the wires, and that was the source of the music. His research proved that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. They laughed at their own ignorance that they once had held. “Imagine our thinking that there was an unseen Great Musician. Our studies have proven beyond a doubt that he does not exist. It is only when the various hammers hit the different length strings that the beautiful music sounds. The unseen Player was simply a myth of the past.” But the pianist continued to play.
For me, a memorable moment came as I was watching a TV program on the Discovery channel. They were showing, magnified hundreds of times, the invisible world that lurked in Susan’s and my bedroom. Have you seen those creatures we call bed bugs? They are monstrous. With no head or eyes, only a stomach and legs, they crawl by the millions through our pillows and blankets while we sleep. Every breath that we take sucks in scores of them, and then we breathe them out again. I was horrified (Susan refused to even watch the show) by the mind boggling inhabitants of the invisible world around me.
But those are only insects, God also tells us in his written word that there is another whole dimension of his creation, which is truly invisible to our naked human eyes. In that world, which cannot be seen through a microscope, are billions of angels. They are of various ranking from servants and messengers to overseers who live around the throne of God himself.
For my friend, I think our discussion turned a small nightlight on in his mind. As Helen Keller said, “There’s nothing quite so sad as a person who has eyes, but cannot see.”
- Barry Buzza
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