Faithless Faith:
It takes faith to put your eternal security in the resurrection of Christ, but our faith is minuscule in comparison to that of an atheist. We believe in history while their fate rests in the balance of a calculator and a ton of untested scientific theory. You have to go against the grain of every logical pattern of thought available to end up with the conclusion that something came from nothing and that nothing evolved into humans, fire ants, and dandelions. Let's say we were walking through the mall and we came across a small spherical object about the size of a gumball. The object was beautiful appeared to be of some value. It gave off colors we had never seen before and changed temperatures at preset times. Anyone you could show that object to, regardless of their religious affiliation, would come to the same few conclusions; that it was created by someone, that it belonged to someone and that it was there for a reason. Now take that same sphere and make it the size of the Earth and an atheist will deny all three of those conclusions about the same object. I use this analogy for the simple purpose of establishing that atheists do have faith, a ton of it, but it just doesn't yield any fruit.
In a later series I hope to address more of the scientific arguments against the concept of everything beginning with nothing, but this set of posts isn't planned to push back on the atheists beliefs on our beginning. Here I want to address what our present life and eternity would look like in a world where God doesn't exist. In the end I hope to show why Biblical Christianity is the only worldview that can offer someone the two things necessary for a meaningful life, God and secured immortality. I want to make it clear that immortality alone is not enough to give meaning or purpose to human life, but more on that later.
The Evolution of Inconsistency:
I'm not much of a "scholar" on any level, but this is especially obvious when compared to the men that I read and study. As part of my coursework I had to read through bits and pieces of some great atheistic scholars and philosophers. Without trying to sound pretentious, I'm amazed at the consistent contradictions in their logic. They all hold that evolution is fact, which is expected since it would be the only way they could rationalize their existence while denying that we were all created in God's image. They explain the entire spectrum of human emotion away by assigning them each with a corresponding evolutionary necessity (lust is necessary for reproduction, fear is necessary for defense, etc), but when it comes to hope they avoid it all together. In my humble opinion, hope of eternal life seems like it would be vital as it pertains to evolution and society. If there were no God and literally no hope then it seems that society as a whole would crumble. It seems to me that hope itself would be a basic survival instinct of man. Hope would be worth fighting for since it would be man's way of going down swinging and holding on to a belief that there was anything beyond our short lives here on Earth.
In a world without God we are in a constant state of evolutionary progression. If that were true then wouldn't mankind be evolving towards Biblical Christianity if for no other reason than hope? Why then is the number of people that believe in the afterlife dwindling from generation to generation according to an American Values Survey from the Pew Research Center? Since atheism means there's no hope, and numerically people are evolving towards atheism, then it just seems to me that hope refutes evolution. If evolution isn't an available option then atheism has to be dismissed given that it would indicate that human beings were intelligently designed. We live in a time where nothing is a fact unless you can see a YouTube video of the event. If it takes a leap of faith to believe in a creator or believe in creation by chaotic randomness, then I would push all my chips towards the side that offers hope, even if hope was the only reward. Fortunately for the believer in Christ, there is no need for a leap of faith and hope of an afterlife is a fact. I will lay out the evidence for the resurrection in a later series, but for now you can know that there is evidence, which is more than any atheists has.
Going Forward:
In doing some research on general blogging practices, it appears that I've been going way too long on my posts. Apparently the average amount of time that a web page will hold someone's attention is far less than it takes to read some of my previous posts. So going forward I will submit shorter entries with a longer overall series. For that of you that just signed up to be polite, I'll apologize in advance for the emails. Feel free to unsubscribe. For those that stick it out, I will continue to probe around on the topic of a life without God. Believe it or not, I do have an outline. I'm not blogging in the blind. I want to discuss meaning, purpose and human values in a Godless world and then show you where Biblical Christianity answers all of the questions that atheism can't. For now I just wanted to show you why the term faith wasn't exclusive to religion, but it seems that hope is reserved for the believer.