Is God Dead?: Side By Side

Filling in the Gaps:

  I think by now it's become painfully obvious that atheism is not a consistent, nor is it a logical worldview.  It's merely a worldview that rejects God and then appears to scramble around to fill in all that His absence leaves.  The more I study it, the more it makes the atheist look like a toddler caught in a lie.  When confronted with logic that they know is ridiculous, they retreat into child-like defense modes (like the Noble Lie option I discussed earlier).   So Biblical Christianity picks up precisely where atheism fails us.  Since the Bible explains creation in full we no longer need to guess about it.  The Bible assigns meaning to our Earthly life because our actions will be measured in eternity.  I need to point out that I'm not speaking of salvation by works here.  I'm just saying that you will stand before your creator one day and there is a level of responsibility that you will shoulder for the sum of your life.  This gives you meaning, it gives you values and it provides a logical explanation for those meaning and values.  Now none of this actually proves that God exists, it just proves that atheism is a horribly inconsistent worldview that offers no reward in your present life or death. 

Side by Side:

  Below I'm just going to summarize atheism and Christianity.  It's hard to do so with no bias, but I'll try to point out the oddness in both systems.  They might both come off as irrational, but I believe that the end result of each actually presents Christianity as the only logical conclusion.

Christianity is the belief that an unseen God created the universe and everything in it.  He is big enough to create everything we have seen or ever will see in the universe, yet He is personal enough to listen to prayers about your aunt's, neighbor's, hip surgery. He then laid out rules that we couldn't possibly follow.  Seeing how terrible we were in obedience He sent his only Son to die to absorb his wrath toward us.  Keep in mind that His son was fully man, yet fully God, yet still fully man.  So we killed him, buried him and He came back from the dead.  So now we're gladly waiting on this guy that WE KILLED to return on a white horse, covered in tattoos, wearing a robe dipped in blood and holding a sword.  All we have for evidence is a really old book that most of the world feels is filled with fairy tales and folklore. 

Atheism is the belief that something came from nothing, and the nothing that produced the something doesn't really need an explanation.  Over trillions of years the something that was created by the nothing started to mutate, but we're not sure why it would feel the need to change if it weren't guided by a predetermined intelligent process.  All of this beginningless matter evolved over an undetermined amount of time into another shape or form.  Somehow heat and cooling were involved, but we don't really know what created those either nor do atheist feel the need to explain that.  Over trillions of years of unguided fine tuning, by random heating, cooling, expansion and contraction,  we somehow get planets, starts, moons, etc.  On these planets the random adaption continues but at least it has a place and some parameters to guide it.  Within those parameters single celled organisms begin to develop and as more time elapses they become more complex.  Eventually, and totally unguided by the way, these complex organisms become beagles, bugs, bears, ponies, people and pine cones.  There is literally no tangible evidence that any of this happened, anywhere, ever. 

  Now if you were in a coma for your entire life and you were awakened with these two concepts you'd have to admit that both would sound a little odd.  When you were then presented with the fact that one of these promises eternal life with the God that created you and the other offers you eternal blackness at best, it's hard for me to imagine anyone that would chose atheism. 

Going Forward:

  I'm done with atheism from a philosophical standpoint.  I don't think you'll be able to find an atheist that can stand firmly when confronted with this line of thinking.  They will refute with more scientific claims, but unless they are a scientist then it all comes off as sort of silly to me.  At that point aren't they just stepping out on faith?  I'm not really sure what I'll go to next, but I think a good topic would be the historical evidence for the resurrection.  After studying the evidence, I'm as convinced that Christ rose from the dead as I am that Tiger Woods has played a round at Augusta. 

Is God Dead?: The Noble Lie

Value and Purpose in a Godless Universe:

  This won't take long.  In a universe with no God there is no purpose and there can be no values.  I had some people ask questions about my last post.  So just to clarify, this is how the world would look without God.  This is how the atheist has to view humanity in order to be consistent.  Granted, you won't find an atheist that lives this out, because consistency is not at the heart of atheism, randomness is.  If nature is the only thing available then you can't protest the result.  In nature the consistent pattern is that the strong survive in order to advance the species.  In a godless world you can have no altruism.  What's inside of us that propels us to feel sympathetic toward the weak, handicapped or marginalized in our society? Shouldn't we want them all exterminated if nature is our guide?  In the heart of the atheist there is terrible inconsistency in sympathy.  The interesting thing that I've found in studying is that the atheists (at least the bright ones) realize this and wrestle with it.

  Outspoken atheist and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote the following towards the end of his acclaimed book The First Three Minutes: "It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe.  It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat.  The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."  You see, the really intelligent atheists agree with my given statements in their own words.  Everything is pointless in this universe, especially if this is all there is.  Weinberg nailed it, without God the universe doesn't just "seem pointless," it really is.

The Noble Lie Option:

  Here we have a truly terrible dilemma to face in this godless world of ours.  The atheistic stance provides no road to a happy and consistent life.  In order to live consistently within the boundaries of atheism, a man will find himself profoundly unhappy.  In order to live happily, one must be profoundly inconsistent.  In this realization there are atheistic philosophers that have come up with options, so let's walk down that road.

  In an address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in 1991, Dr. L.D. Rue proposed that we simply lie to ourselves so we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we and the universe do have value.  This became know as the "Noble Lie" option.  In his statement Dr. Rue said, "The lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case." He expounded on this by saying that "the consequence of this realization is that the quest for self-fulfillment and the quest for social coherence fall apart." A life void of defined meaning leads to relativism, and in relativism the search for purpose and fulfillment becomes privatized.  Each person will in turn chose his own set of values and meaning.

   Rue didn't present the "Noble Lie" as the only option, he went further.  He also offers us the "Madhouse Option."  This is one option in which each person will pursue self fulfillment regardless of the consequences of the destruction of social coherence.  To round out his list, Rue presented the Academy with the "Totalitarian Option."  In this option the state imposes social coherence at the expense of personal fulfillment.  Now to be clear in this, Rue leaned toward the Noble Lie option and presented the Madhouse and Totalitarian options because he somehow assumed that those would be so absurd that the Noble Lie would just make sense.  In closing the speech he further defined the Noble Lie option as "one that deceives us, tricks us, compels us beyond self-interest, beyond ego, beyond family, nation and race."  When studying this speech I couldn't help but feel sadness towards this worldview.  The verdict is out, and the decision has been announced. In order to survive, a godless man must live in a pattern of self-deception.

Going Forward:

  This post closes out the worldview of the atheist from the words of their own.  I want to be clear that I went out of my way to avoid the "Barnes and Noble" atheist crowd that are more concerned with selling books than finding answers.  The men I quoted were all atheist, but at least they knew it was a social failure.  In only being able to use a blog format I want to say that this was about 5% of the information I had to study, but studying the material did nothing but solidify my faith in Biblical Christianity as the best possible end result in the quest for meaning, value and purpose in life, and my next post will show you why to a small degree.  I believe it's obvious, but I still want to take the time to show where Christianity fills in all the gaps and answers all the questions that atheism can't.  At some point I will take a more scientific approach on atheism, but for now a philosophical one is really a better starting point (plus it's the subject matter that I'm studying).  The sad thing about atheism is that it's really just a quest to explain the beginning, but once they rejected God as the source of creation then there was no turning back when they had to explain the present and future.  The Noble Lie is all they have to fill the void of eternity.

    Most atheists seek to be free from religion since they view it as a series of rules that one must adhere to in order to pacify God. What they fail to realize is that all Christians have already been set free.  As Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, "All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful, but not all things build up."  To also pull a quote from the great C.H. Spurgeon on the subject of Christian freedom, "There is nothing in the law of God that will rob you of happiness; it only denies you that which would cost you sorrow." You can't be set any more free than that.

  Someone confronted me recently to say that my time and money would be better spent pursuing Biblical degree programs other than apologetics.  Their concern was that it did nothing for evangelism.  I've just started in what will be a long process, but I can honestly say that I couldn't disagree more.  It's emboldened me more towards evangelism.  It's awesome to know that you don't have to put your intellect in one pocket and your faith in another in fear that you simply don't have the facts.  Christianity IS NOT blind faith.  It's history, and it's supported by an infra-structure of facts and logic.

 

Is God Dead?: Worthless Cosmic Orphans

From Nothing to Nothing Without Anything In Between:

  This is the opportunity for some of atheism's best and brightest to give us their take on the purpose, values and meaning of man.  I will be pulling material from some of the speeches and writings of some of the best scholars this worldview has to offer.  I refuse to give men like Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens the right to embarrass atheistic philosophers in my allotted space.

  Loren Eiseley wrote, "Man is the cosmic orphan. He's the only creature in the universe who asks, 'Why?' Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions" 'Who am I?' 'Why am I here?' "Where am I going?'" The answer for the atheist is horrifying and hard to bear.  To the atheist, man is simply an accidental by product of nature.  The sad and pathetic result of matter plus time plus chance.  Atheists set out to be free of finding these answers within the constraints of religion, but instead of being free they ended up being orphaned and alone with nothing but the doom of death at the end of every question.

Meaningless:

  The first point at which atheism fails is in an attempt to define meaning in life for the human being.  John-Paul Sartre decided that a man can find meaning in the universe by simply assigning it one and then following that course, but this cannot be consistent. What if I assign it one meaning and you assign it another?  Which meaning is right and who are you to decide that meaning (relativism in action)?  What if your meaning is to live a a long and healthy life and my meaning is to kill you?  Simple duration of your existence is not meaning.  If you came from nothing and end in nothing then what does it matter if you existed at all? If man is doomed to an eternal nothingness then absolutely nothing you can do on this planet in your short life will matter.

  Some might argue here and say something like, "well what if I cure cancer?" Well so what if you do.  While your pursuit is noble, you're still not doing anything by curing cancer.  You're just delaying the inevitable progression into nothingness that we're all doomed to.  All you've done is kept people around longer that are still doomed to an eternal blackout.  As for the years you've added to the lives of millions of people, well, their lives were meaningless when they were short and now their meaningless for that much longer.  So what did you really accomplish? Again, simple duration of existence is not meaning. You see nothing, again nothing, has meaning if all you have are a few short years on a dying planet.  No matter how much you accomplish, no matter how many lives you save, no matter what you do you cannot stop what's coming. Death.

Going Forward:

  Next I will discuss values and purpose briefly because it will be quite redundant to try and drag these out for too long.  I think you can tell from the segment on meaning where I'll be going with the other two.  While these points sound harsh, I want to re-establish that I'm writing as if the lack of a creator is a given and not discussing God as if He were an option until later.  At that time it will be clear that Biblical Christianity fills in all of the holes that atheism can't.  If you're dealing with a true atheist then remember the Gospel is still at the heart of your discussion, but they certainly won't accept the Gospel until they have accepted that there is a creator.  I know a lot of people that claim to be atheists, but their claim is usually because of their desire to understand the beginning of creation and they feel the Bible fails.  It's really rare that you meet an atheist that's truly thought all of this out. So as you engage in conversations and start to bring some of these points up it's important to know that this subject matter might not come out in a loving manner.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't take them down this road, it just means we need to drive slowly.

  I don't mean to sound like I'm giving you talking points here, but apologetics offers structure in which to present your content so I would be doing you a disservice not to give you some guidance for handling this topic.  I'm writing this series on atheism and then plugging in God at the end because my assumption is that the majority of people reading are believers, but if you're talking to an atheist you need to fill in the gaps with God throughout the conversation and not at the end.  You might not make it to the end of the conversation or they could shut you out before you have the opportunity to define the meaning that you, the believer, have and why.  After all, the goal in breaking down this wall is to share the Gospel, not just make them "religious."  Making someone religious apart from Christ might be worse than just leaving them in their atheistic state.

  

Is God Dead?: Faithful Yet Fruitless

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.

Is God Dead?: Entry Level Atheism

 "Several hours or several years make no difference once you have lost eternity." Jean-Paul Sartre

Old Atheism:

  The magazine cover above looks like something that could be on it's way to bookstores any day now, but in fact this was the April 1966 edition of TIME magazine.  Atheism was alive and well 50 years ago as was Christian apologetics, so I'm not plowing a new field here.  What follows might sound odd, but there was a time when atheistic scholars were respected among their Christian counterparts and considered by many to be among the greatest philosophers of their time.  They clearly didn't agree on everything, but there was a mutual respect and a common goal which was an effort to answer the big questions like purpose, life, value and eternity.  

  French existentialist and atheist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was one of the biggest names in the field during his time.  His father died of fever when Sartre was two.  He would later go on to serve in the French military, only to be a German prisoner of war for nearly a year.  Although I've never read it anywhere, one could comfortably infer that his atheism was a result of not being able to reconcile a loving God back to the evil he experienced.  As an atheist, Sartre wrestled with the origin of morals.  He was empathetic towards issues like feminism and was in strict opposition to Nazi anti-Semitism, yet his atheistic worldview couldn't offer a sufficient explanation for these emotions.  In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and he refused it.  He is quoted as saying that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution." Sartre was a far cry from today's book touring, self promoting atheistic "scholars."

New Atheism:

  Today's leading atheists are reaching far more people and selling far more books than ever imagined.  Atheism has become an industry, and business is good.  The atheism of the day is lead by a group that some refer to as "The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism." This group is comprised of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011).  All of these men have held the #1 spot on the New York times best seller list with one or more books at some point along their path. By trade, Harris is a neuroscientist, Dawkins an evolutionary biologist, Dennett a cognitive scientist and Hitchens was a journalist.  While all of these men are, and should be, recognized as leaders within their field of study, none of them are trained and formally educated theologians or philosophers. The exception is Dennett, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, but is by far the least outspoken when it comes to atheism itself. Instead he goes deeper into explaining his field of science than making a concentrated effort to rid the world of religion. When given all of their resumes it's hard for me to understand how they have become so influential when it comes to the subject of God.  You might argue that they don't need to be theologians to disprove the existence of an intelligent designer, but we will just have to agree to disagree.  Given that the natural flow is that there had to be theism before there was atheism, then the burden of proof lies squarely on the atheist here. I find it embarrassing that someone would try to disqualify a God that they know nothing of.  If this same logic were applied to our legal system, it would be no different than hiring a divorce lawyer to defend you in a murder trial.  The problem is that jail time is temporary and hell is eternal. 

  I've been going to the same doctor for several years.  He's a great physician, brother in Christ, philanthropist and missionary, but I'm just not that sure he's the guy I'm going to call if my car won't start tomorrow morning.  So why are millions of people putting their eternal fate into the hands men who simply aren't qualified to discuss the subject?  It's because these are entry level philosophers catering to entry level atheist. I'll admit that I've never invested the time to read their work in full, but you have to assume that their popularity alone indicates that they are palatable and well suited for the masses, much like a Justin Beiber album.  If a book is deeply philosophical and soundly written then the average person will labor to read it.  Christian theologians John Calvin and St. Augustine were both profound intellectuals and reading their work took real effort from a layperson such as myself. Most of the more academic Christian philosophers of today don't think much of the work of the horsemen. When interviewed on the subject of the new atheists, Dr. William Lane Craig (an actual philosopher, apologist and theologian by both degree and profession) had the following to say; "The spade of new books published by the new atheist like Harris and Hitchens and Dawkins and so-forth are not sophisticated books intellectually. These are, for the most part, angry bitter diatribes against religion. And while someone like Dawkins may be a good scientist in his field, when he begins to talk about philosophy and theology he is merely a layman. Their books are very unsophisticated intellectually. As a philosopher I am just appalled at the arguments given. It is an embarrassment really." 

How We Respond:

  In keeping the Gospel at the heart of this post, I want to get us to a point that allows us to really sympathize with atheists.  If you struggle with loving them then you need to be in prayer.  They are not the enemy, they are the target.  The next time you get into a discussion with an atheist you need to understand that they have been led astray by popular, yet vastly unqualified men with hardened hearts that have no problem toying with the eternal destination of other men in the name of pleasing their publishers.  I think if we're honest, we can find ourselves intimidated by someone that claims atheism as a worldview.  We tend to think that the only way to get to them is by showing them love and avoiding real discussion in fear that they have the upper hand.  In reality I think that it's the atheist that need to be presented with the facts about Christianity to appeal to their intellectual appetite.  By all means present the truth with love and humility, but do not be intimidated.  

Going Forward:

  Clearly I plan on moving forward with atheism, but again this is to be a philosophical approach.  I want to give the atheist a fair shot here, so I'm going to push some of their beliefs to the extreme to see where they take us.  I want to put all of the aspects of atheism on the table so we can see what a world without God looks like and how unthinkable it would be to live in such a place.  I think if you were to sit down with someone claiming to be an atheist and lay out all the ramifications of a truly random, meaningless existence then at the very least they would want to experience a small taste of the hope that believers rest in daily.  Be in prayer for the atheists.  If you want to see someone radically changed by the drawing of the Holy Spirit then you should pursue the atheist and not avoid them.  Some of the greatest apologists, evangelists and theologians we have were once atheists.  You might be the person that plants the seed for the next Lee Strobel or C.S. Lewis.