Earlier this week (the day I did not blog), I visited, as I try to do once or twice a year, as he is rather far away, a friend of mine, Ralph by name, who is prison.  He has been there for eleven years; he has another ten years to serve.  An otherwise thoroughly decent and upstanding man, Ralph one night drank more than he should have and caused an accident.  Unfortunately, the car with which his car collided had a defective fuel system, causing the car to catch fire on impact.  Two children died.
     It's a horrific situation, tragic for all parties concerned.  (The children's family eventually sued the car manufacturer over its faulty fuel tank design and won a settlement of several million dollars.)  No one can bring those children back, no one can undo what happened.  It's irreversible.
     Ralph believes in God, he believes in Jesus.  He has repented for what he did, and sought forgiveness from the victims' family (which they eventually granted).  Being a Christian does not make one immune to wrongdoing, and it certainly does not prevent one from saying or believing the wrong thing.
     So why bother?  The larger point is that our very humanness screams for the existence of God.  We condemn Ralph's action because we are moral beings, yet we could not be moral beings if we are products of an impersonal universe.  Emergent properties notwithstanding, chemicals cannot produce morality.  Shapelessness cannot produce a moral sense.
     Not to say that God somehow "magically" made us moral, but to say that until we are able to prove that impersonal matter produces morality, which is unlikely, we are well advised to look at the universe as the work of morality and intelligence (something even some of my atheist friends acknowledge), and not quantum blips and virtual particles.
     Ralph repents because we are moral beings, and we forgive him because we are moral beings.  In an impersonal universe, however, none of us has reason (and what is this in a groundless cosmos?) to do either one.
     Pray for the family, pray for Ralph.  Pray for the moral universe.