Does God speak to us?

Here is a response I gave to my friend blog on God speaking to us:

This is a really interesting topic! I like your entry on "Does God only speak to Christians?" I believe that He speaks to everyone, though being a Bible-believing Christian helps because the Bible tells us that God speaks to us.

I like to use the analogy of a phone call. Have you ever noticed that when your friend calls on the phone (let us assume you do not have Caller-ID), you will recognize his voice even if he does not tell you who he is? Being able to recognize someone's voice comes with a relationship. Having a relationship with God -- praying to Him, telling Him our problems, listening to Him respond to our problems, trusting Him in our difficult times -- all these help us to hear His voice better day by day.

Just as your friend can write emails, or send pictures, or talk to you over the phone, or meet you face to face, I believe God can speak to us through all these avenues too! Through emails (His Bible), through pictures (dreams and visions), through phone conversations (His voice in our head, or audible voice), or face to face (Moses' encounter with the Lord, seeing only His back). When I first began as a Christian, I was amazed how God spoke to me through pop music: the lyrics would answer the questions I had. Then, God started speaking to me through the words in the Bible. At that time, I thought I knew all about how God speaks to us. At that time, I found it funny that people like Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Moses heard God spoke to them, with a voice. I thought perhaps God doesn't do that anymore. Yet, I could not find any scripture to prove this.

After being Christian for three years, I started to question the voices I heard in my head: what if the voice is not my own, but God's? So I asked the voice, Are you God or just a figment of my imagination? Surprisingly, the voice spoke back and said that He is God. Still, I thought I was hallucinating. I wrestled over this issue for months, and the voice continued to teach me that He is God, not myself. He taught me to have conversations with Him. He asked me if I thought the wisdom that was in the voice is from myself, or from someone outside of myself. He also warned me that there are many times when the voice is indeed not Himself, but my own voice, or the voice of evil. He taught me that in order to discern His voice more, to separate His voice from other voices, I have to read the Bible more. The Bible is a record of His Confirmed Words: i.e. there is no doubt the Bible is His voice. When I read more of the Bible, I will learn what His voice sounds like.

One day, I gave in, and confessed that I could not ignore the voice any longer. I confessed that the voice is God's own voice. Since then, my new commitment to this caused exponential growth in my ability to hear His voice. I have seen some people claim that such a thing is heretic: it lessens the importance of the Bible as God's Word. I disagree. Since accepting His voice, I gained a deep hunger to read more of the Bible. God says that He desires to speak to us clearly and directly, through the Bible, through friends, through the church, through pictures, through songs, and even through our thoughts, the voice in our head. "Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy." 1 Cor 14:1

The more love, for God and for His people, we have in our hearts, the clearer we hear His voice, and the more love we gain in the process as well. Learning to hear God's voice is a life-long process: now we can only hear in part, but when we see Him at the end of time, we will hear clearly (1 Cor 13:9). We must always bear in mind that because of our sinful nature, we often do not hear God 100% correctly. We should always test what we hear with scripture and with others (1 Cor 14:29).

Hearing God's voice is pure joy! Imagine what our Quiet Times will become with His voice guiding us! "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened."

Dude, who made the car?

Science discovers how the world works, pretty much like a mechanic investigating how a car works. In science, we do not invoke God in explaining our theories, just as a mechanic does not investigate who designed the car in the first place.

Yet, such questions about who created our world can be an important one.

We need find an answer for ourselves, whether this world has a Maker in the first place, and if it has one, who is this Maker. We should not leave the question unanswered because of our bias in how we think this world should operate: e.g. believing that this world should operate in a completely random and deterministic manner. Some people go through their lives without questioning their beliefs.

If we believe that this world operates in a random fashion, without a God, the question is: what are our reasons for believing this? Similarly, if we believe that this world has a God, what are our reasons for believing this? Contrary to popular belief, Faith goes hand in hand with Reason.

When I was an atheist, my reason for believing there is no God is this: because I do not see any evidence of His existence. I have heard stories of miracles, but I have never witnessed one in my life. It seems to me that all the miracle stories are made up by over-zealous Christians or other religious people. Many times, these people believe their own made-up stories!

Many events have occurred in my life since God revealed Himself to me. To me, the evidence of God is now undeniable. When I look back on my life, I realize that I was not approaching the question of God's existence in a fair manner. I had often rejected people's experiences or historical texts like the bible as false. I never investigated these accounts in a scientific manner, which is to reject them only when I find evidence of falsity. I rejected them because I had a bias: I believed that there could be no God. Instead, I was finding evidence to support my belief. "Evolution", "Dinosaurs", "Big Bang", "Science says so": these were some of the evidence which I collected against the Bible. And the best part was that I had never read or studied the text which I attacked so much.

As a science researcher, it excites me to learn new things about how our world works. It amazes me even more now, that all the beauty and symmetry in the laws of physics and in mathematics I had admired since young -- all this beauty is there because we have a wise, smart and creative God. This is one of the reasons why I love science so much: because I know that God has so much more in store for us to discover in His wonderful creation!

Science and Religion

I finally recorded my talk on Science and Religion! I gave the talk to some colleagues here at my worksplace on 1 Dec, and we had some really interesting discussion after that. Thanks to my brudder Joel, you can access the presentation file and voice recording at this website:

http://www.stanford.edu/~joelgoh/shaowei/talk/

Here is a short gist of what I spoke about:

1. Science vs Religion

Three major arguments by Science against Religion:

• To understand our world, there is no need for a "God hypothesis".
• We cannot observe God, so God cannot be real.
• Evolution and Big Bang has proven that God does not exist.

We will discover that these arguments are true to a large extent (which is why they are so convincing), and will uncover some deep unexpected questions as well.

2. If God exists, how are we supposed to find Him?

We discover that the Greeks who lived 2000 years ago wondered about the same question, and a man named Paul had some answers for them.