The movie God’s Not Dead was released in March of 2014 and based on Rice Broocks’ book God’s Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty. I remember hearing a little bit about the movie when it first came to the screen, enough to know that it was about a college student defending God’s existence against the professor of his philosophy class who claimed that God was dead.

The movie was free with my Amazon Prime membership, and now that I’d finally made my way through a whole bunch of ‘chick flick’ movies about the holidays, I thought it would be a good change of pace.

I have to be upfront and state that I seldom, if ever, watch a movie the entire way through in one sitting. I almost always take at least 2 days to get through a movie. Perhaps it is because I watch so little TV that it feels uncomfortable to sit that still for that length of time. Perhaps it is because, while the movie might be good, it’s often predictable or simply a way to pass time when I need a break from reading.

I began the movie at around 2 PM. I finished watching the movie before 7:30 PM on the same day. You may be thinking, “Well, it took you more than 5 hours to watch a movie that wasn’t even close to being that lengthy.” And I won’t disagree with you on that. However, in my defense, having a weak bladder while simultaneously having the need to be sipping on some liquid means using the pause button frequently. I was also watching it during a time when I found myself feeling hungry, so there was a longer pause while I moved into the kitchen and stared inside the fridge, the freezer and the cupboard while deciding what I was hungry for. The reason that time frame is significant as it applies to me is that other than pauses in which I moved out of my recliner for any reason, I returned to it and immediately pushed the button to continue playing.

I wish I could write here about the entire plot of the story, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it and decides they’d like to based on this post. In other words, the movie impacted me in a much greater way than merely an escape to focus on for 1 hour and 53 minutes. What I will share is that I think the dialogue was brilliantly written, the cinematography was excellent and certainly, Kevin Sorbo is still as easy on the eyes as I’ve always thought him to be (Dean Cain was a supporting actor and he’s still easy on the eyes as well!)!

I have not deleted the film from my list of films to watch, as I usually do at the end of (and occasionally, before the end of) a movie. I was truly drawn into the story and realized after the fact that I paid more attention to the acting when the student and the professor were debating the existence of God than the actual things they said to support their arguments. I really want to go back and listen to those parts with an open mind and from an intellectual standpoint.

I had one issue, not huge but for me not small either. I was taught in my own church what made someone an atheist and I just looked up the definition of the word. The dictionary defines an atheist as “a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods”. That’s akin to what I was taught. Because of that, I feel like I was misled by the title of the book and the movie. The gist of the debate is whether or not God is alive or dead, but in order to be dead, he would have to have been alive. Therefore, the discussion and differences in the movie (and this issue does come to light near the end) all point to God having had an existence, whether current or past. That’s far different than a discussion about whether or not God never existed. I had to do some research about this difference, and I found an answer that satisfies me.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is the person credited with making the statement, “God is dead” well known. It is said that the statement was often misunderstood, considered to mean that God as a being was dead. His intent, however, is believed to be that he was simply stating that the idea of the existence of God was no longer alive. What he meant was that the concept of God had died a death due to the process of secularization.

Interesting. Either way, it’s wrong, but interesting…

(Photo is just a little bonus in case anyone else wants to go, “hubba, hubba!”)