Thanksgiving: the Inescapable Logic Underpinning It

Happy Thanksgiving!

But who or what are you thankful to? If God has no place in your answer to that question, it is to you I wish to address this article, showing that without God in your life (that is, without believing in God, the Creator—not only His existence, but His rightful place in your life), you cannot, logically speaking, be truly thankful at all.

In other words, without God, whenever you utter the phrase “I am thankful for…,” you utter it into thin air and it vanishes into oblivion with no one to receive your thanks. There is no meaning to the words or the sentiment of thanks. You immediately protest saying, “Well, I can be thankful to another person without God in my life.” No, actually you cannot. Let me show you why.

Please allow me to show you that the “logic of thanks” or thanksgiving—that the logical pathway of any thankfulness, must by deduction, lead directly back to God.

What exactly is the “logic of thanksgiving?” The logic of thanksgiving runs along these lines:

We exist. We do not exist as human beings just out of nowhere. We exist because of some force, influence, power or person, external to ourselves. It is to that entity that all thanks must ultimately be attributed, for such a force or being is responsible in some direct and or indirect way not only for our existence, but for all the ensuing providences that make up our existence. Therefore, that force is sovereign over our lives. Therefore, thanks must be rendered to it/Him.

Now, of course, you will see the total absurdity of rendering thanks to a force or an object, because neither of these have the capacity for personhood. Which means they cannot understand or accept any thanks. Only a person can understand what it means to be thanked; only a person can receive thanks; and only a person can reciprocate thanks. A force, influence, or object cannot do any of this.

In the Christian worldview, we believe we are created by a person, God, who brought the world and everything in it—including human beings—into being, with thoughtful design and clear purpose: so that the created order might be in a right relationship with Him, and the most sentient and intelligent beings within that created order, might by virtue of that right relationship with the Creator, be able to thank Him for all His blessings.

The Christian worldview does not hold to the claim that we humans blindly evolved from a blob of primordial goop, which then by some blind processes overseeing it, became human beings over the course of millions and millions of years. No. That is fiction. And people who live in the world of reality are unable to thank fictitious causes. You just cannot thank the Bang that was Big which supposedly caused you to exist. You cannot thank Darwin for propounding his wild and fictitious theory of where we came from, for he is dead. You cannot thank any of the electromagnetic forces that make up nature, neither the so-called evolutionary processes, macro or micro. But you know full well that you can thank a living, intelligent, feeling, and accessible person.

Indeed, it is innate in even the most hardened of skeptics, naturalists, and atheists to be thankful for something—whether to people or to something else. If you are a skeptic, naturalist, or atheist, you know and experience this. But have you ever stopped to think whence this impulse to give thanks comes from?! I submit to you that it comes from the One who created us, the One who put that impulse in us, so that we may thank Him. He who created us, created us with the capacity to be thankful, first to and for Him, and then to and for each other. The benefits of being thankful (living with an attitude of gratitude, versus living with an ungrateful and unthankful mindset) are tangible. I encourage you to observe people who are thankful and those who are not. Do your own research.

Thus, from any and every angle you approach the logic of thanks or thanksgiving, it must originate and terminate in the person of God.

Who will you thank for whatever you are thankful for, this Thanksgiving? Will you thank some “unseen force,” unworthy of your thanks because neither are you sure of its existence, nor can it receive your thanks? Or will you thank God, who is worthy of your thanks for everything in your life, the One who through His Son Jesus Christ was seen and felt tangibly? He waits for our thanks, not because He is some being desperate for adulation, but because in our thanking Him we proclaim our dependence on Him, and He stoops to bless the created one who thanks Him, with needs and wants that only He in His infinite wisdom and power can supply.

That’s why the Bible says unequivocally, “Know that the Lord, He is God: it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves… be thankful to Him and bless His name.”—Psalm 100:3&4

—Kenny Damara, 2023