I was watching an old episode of “Silent Witness” the other day. Silent Witness is one of those TV programmes which tells the story of the activities of forensic pathologists – gleaning evidence from the dead victims of crime. In the episode I was watching Nikki Alexander was convinced that a particular suspect was guilty. The evidence all seemed to point that way. She was happy with that conclusion and had seen enough. Her job was done and she was ready to give the file to the police and leave them to arrest and charge the suspect.

But her colleague Harry knows the suspect. In fact he is in a relationship with her. “I know she is innocent” he says. He goes back over the evidence and turns up something which had been missed by the others. A rather obscure piece of evidence but, nonetheless, evidence which proved that actually the suspect, his current girlfriend, is innocent of murder. More than that still, it proves that she has been deliberately framed.

Harry explains to Nikki that his different perspective enabled him to find evidence she could not. He was prepared to keep looking, because he knew that the woman he was seeing was not capable of murder. He was never going to be satisfied by the conclusion that she was guilty and so he kept looking and in the end, as a result, it was him who saw the truth, while Nikki had believed what was just a convincing lie. He had eyes that were open to see the truth. Hers were closed.

In our times in this country the dominant belief and the thinking that is generally held to be true, is atheistic. That is, there is no God. Life can quite happily be lived assuming that this life is it, there is nothing after it, and if there is it is nothing at all to worry about. Of course, religion gets a mention, but very often in a rather patronising way. There is no thought that belief in a god of any kind should have any influence on society, on laws, or on our daily lives.

The trouble is, that when a belief becomes generally accepted – and oh, yes, atheism is really a belief – you cannot prove that God does not exist, you have to believe he does not – but when any belief becomes generally accepted by a society, people get lazy. That is, you don’t really have to think anymore. After all, “everyone knows the truth”.

A bit like the Silent Witness episode above. We know the answer. We can stop looking.

But, much like that, there are actually real weakness in the accepted theory. Just to take one example, to be able to rationally explain away God, we need an explanation of how our world is populated by such an amazing array of life. It seems to be generally assumed in our culture these days that this question has been basically settled by scientists. However, in reality there remain big problems. Perhaps the biggest is how on earth life got started in the first place. Despite the headlines “scientists close to creating artificial life” the reality is different. Stuart Kauffman an evolutionary biologist has said “Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on earth… is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows.”

Without an explanation of how life began in the first place, there is no explanation of how we came to be. For the ball to be rolling, something has to have started it off. To say “scientists will get there soon” is just another example of the great faith we place in scientists – or perhaps the great hope we have that the answer we want will soon be found.

But unfortunately most people in our times, when it comes to the question of God, have stopped looking. We think we know the answer. It has been settled. We can safely put that question to the bottom of the pile.

Can we though? What if there is no natural explanation for the start of life? What if other nagging questions still remain? What if there has to be a powerful intervention from the outside – from a designer creator God?

Sometimes we stop looking before we find the truth. And when it comes to God, that might mean missing out on the most important truth we could ever know.