And God Created SOUND!

        For many years, a favourite hobby of mine has been Bible “apologetics”. No, this doesn’t mean apologizing for the Bible! What it does mean is studying various Bible events, or stories or sciences and trying to understand them in the light of current attitudes and knowledge.

        For instance, in another article, we looked at the wonder of light—God created it and made us able to see and appreciate it. He makes it come at us in colour. He brings it to us undimmed, from the farthest star. And yet He shuts it off for a few hours each night for peace and rest.

        This spring, I’ve particularly noticed how the sunlight enhances all the colours of the leaves as they burst out—every shade of green, yellow, burgundy, and even touches of red—God is a great Artist!

        But now I want to think about sound—the murmur of a creek, the rustle of leaves in a breeze; or some bigger sounds: thunder itself, the crash of Niagara Falls, the outburst of Old Faithful. The list could go on for pages—think of the happy songs of a robin every morning or the whirr of a heat bug all summer. We’re told that even whales sing.

        All this leads us to the astounding fact that, just as God created light, He also created sound. We’re not thinking so much of the individual sounds we’ve just listed, but “sound” itself. We know that sound is vibrations of different frequencies, hitting on our eardrums. But we could have been made with no eardrums—what a different world that would be.

        And so, we come around to our starting topic of “apologetics”. I’ve found that there are theologian/philosophers who make an argument for the existence of God from what they call ‘Aesthetic Experience’. For instance, Peter Kreeft, in his Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics in all seriousness gives this argument in only three lines:

            “1. There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

              2. Therefore there must be a God.

              You either see this one or you don’t.”

        John Stott says a similar thing when he finds himself worshiping during Handel’s Messiah.

        Let me just add my own experience. I love John Newton’s hymn “Amazing Grace”—bagpipes, orchestra, or choir, it sounds wonderful. In particular, Judy Collins sang it with the Harlem Boys Choir at an outdoor concert in 1993. She sang it with enjoyment and great feeling; in the singing, she included the boys’ voices and thousands in the audience. She wasn’t even afraid to use the word “wretch” about herself. But as she finished! —the words were hardly necessary, or the instruments, or even her name as the soloist—the music—the music was heavenly. That one of God’s creatures can produce such beauty! God is a great Musician!