(I would like to pause by saying, there are a lot of Christians who jump into these conversations and start telling these atheists right off the bat that they are going to hell. Please don’t ever do this! The conversation quickly becomes combative and nothing really gets accomplished! I was saddened to see some of the Christians behaving this way. We are called to be the light in the dark world but going about it in this manner is NOT honoring to God. )
I made the statement: my belief and faith in God and my study of science do not contradict each other. The person responded to me by saying that they believe education has precedence over creed. (A creed is defined as a system of beliefs.) My response: I think education and creed should be aligned. Otherwise, wouldn’t that make a person a hypocrite or shall I say a divided person. The same person went on to say that his cultural creed is Christianity, even though he doesn’t believe in God. He stated that he celebrates Christmas and sings Christmas carols. I am not sure if anyone would agree with me on this but – if you don’t believe in God why would you sing Christmas carols like away in a manger or Oh Holy Night if you don’t believe in a God? I did not want to be rude by asking him this poignant question.Granted, I get why he would celebrate Christmas because it has been so commercialized that it really doesn’t really have to be attached to a faith per se.
(ADD moment: As a side note, I find it interesting that people will say they celebrate Christmas but won’t wish someone Merry Christmas - it’s happy holidays. There must be power in the name Christ- mas!!)
Another person, chimed in and said “Christians are pitiful because all you have is blind faith”. I love what Josh McDowell says in response to a statement like this: “I cannot believe in what my mind rejects”. What this means for us as Christians, is that our belief and knowledge about the world around us should go hand in hand. The heart or the seat of your emotions and your mind were created to work together not as separate entities. There is no way to be a holistic person when the head and the heart are working independent of one another.” Faith is the assurance of the heart in adequacy of the evidence.” (McDowell)
Matthew 22: 37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
Atheist comment: "This so called faith is really the belief that you don't really die when you die. Ever try to make someone let go of that thought? It’s interesting to see someone realize that there is no such thing as good being rewarded and bad being punished. We are responsible and that's all there is to it." Actually, I believe this statement is postmodernism at it's finest - this view stresses the relativity of all meaning and truth, and denies the principles, which are commonly accepted truth that form the starting point of all philosphical enquiry. (They create their own truth.)
"Postmodern thinkers.... argue that we do not simply encounter a world that is "out there" but rather we construct the world using concepts we bring to it. The content that we have has no fixed vantage point beyond our own structuring of the world fron which to gain a purely objective view of whatever reality maybe out there." (Stanely Grenz)
A belief can be defined as the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition of premise to be true. (web definition) "It can be said that a belief held by an individual involves the mind, the emotions and the will.” (McDowell) Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. In essence, “Faith in the Christian sense goes beyond reason BUT not against it!" (McDowell) Can this guy truly prove without a shadow of a doubt that there is soul or that heaven doesn’t exist? No one can, this, whether he likes it or not, is his own belief. However, what’s his belief based on? How does he know that when we die we JUST die? Is he willing to base his eternity on that? Why even be responsible? I received no answer to these questions. I am going to include an exert which I think is well written. It basically is stating that if a person already has made up his or her mind before the start of the investigation process for truth than their findings are basically skewed from the start.
“For many today, the study of history is incorporated with the idea that there is no God, miracles are not possible, we live in a closed system, and there is no supernatural. With these assumptions or presuppositions they begin their “critical, open and honest” investigation of history. When they study the life of Christ and read about His miracles or resurrection, they conclude that it was not a miracle or a resurrection because we know (not historically, but philosophically) that there is no God, we live in a closed system. Therefore, these things cannot be. What men have done is to rule out the resurrection of Christ even before they start an historical investigation. These presuppositions are not so much historical biases but rather, philosophical prejudices. Their approach to history rests on the “rationalistic presupposition” that Christ could not have been raised from the dead. Instead of beginning with the historical data they preclude them by “metaphysical speculation. The fact of the resurrection cannot be discounted on philosophical grounds; miracles are impossible only if one defines them – but such definition rules out proper historical investigation.” (Josh W. Montgomery)
Immanual Kant’s philosophical ideas and arguments about systems beginning with presuppositions support the idea of a person making presumptions based off of a body of truth already known. (a presupposition of a statement is a proposition which must be true in order for the statement to make sense) Our thoughts can be placed into several categories such as, causality, logic, time, space and order, which are structured by our minds; therefore, our minds shape our behavior and the way we experience the world around us. In essence, if we in our mind decide a presupposition to be true then we have automatically decided some facts exist which are already true. Being that we cannot verify categories of thought by touch, smell, sight etc. they must be thought of as created and arising from our minds. Thus providing the criteria for things that can be empirically verified, that is, information gained by means of observation, experience or experiment. (web definition) This led Kant to conclude that if we are to think of anything at all we must think in terms of everything being caused by something logically and temporally prior to it. The modern world uses Kant’s presupposition of method, which yields a body of truth already or rather truth that already exists. I think it would suffice to say that “we are operating only with the presupposition of scientific method and not with rationalistic assumptions of scientism”. (Josh McDowell) The term scientism refers to the view that natural science has authority over all interpretations of life such as, philosophical, religious, mythical, spiritual or humanistic explanations. John Frame describes rationalism as: any attempt to establish the finite human mind as the ultimate standard of truth and falsity; whereby stating that the human mind is able to fully and exhaustively explain reality. This ultimately lays the ground work for the autonomous intellect within the context of rejecting God’s revelation of Himself in both nature and the Bible. (John Frame)
I may have lost some of you on that paragraph – when studying philosophy it is often difficult to put into words these highly complex ideas and thought processes because everything builds off one idea to another. First of all, the definition of what a system is may be helpful: a group of interacting, interrelated or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. (web definition) In order to have a system you have to have interconnected / interrelated parts or ideas. This is where the idea of a presupposition comes from. A presupposition suggests that there has to be an assumption of truth in order for an idea or statement to make sense. Our thoughts are put into categories that are outside the realm of the physical world. However, these thoughts are interpreted and created by our minds, allowing our minds to shape our behavior and the way we experience life. Kant suggested that if we think of anything it should arise from something logical and known to exist. Modern thought, is operating under the assumption of the human mind to determine truth and falsity from pre-existing truth. These supposed “pre-existing truths” come from the mind of an imperfect human and are being incorporated, or rather more appropriately, indoctrinated as a way to reject God and the Bible without any real truth to back up the claims.
“The strongest argument against historical skepticism…. Is this: the man who doubts the possibility of correct historical evidence and tradition cannot then accept his own evidence, judgment, combination and interpretation. He cannot limit his doubt to his historical criticism, but required to let it operate on his own life. He discovers at once that he not only lacks conclusive evidence in all sort of aspects of his own life that he had quite taken for granted, but also that there is no evidence whatever. In short, he finds himself forced to accept a general philosophical skepticism along with his historical skepticism. And general philosophical skepticism is a nice intellectual game, but one cannot live by it”. (Warwick J.Montgomery)
There is another term referring to the disontinuity in/to reality which we refer to as agnostic. The word literally means no knowledge. Kant basically states that we cannot know that God exists. Others are waiting because they currently do not have knowledge of God. This converges into two paths where 1) the first group has ruled out God altogether and the 2) view is that there is not knowledge obtained about God. Kant's theory results in the agnostic view claiming that nothing can be known about reality.
"The fundamental flaw in Kant's hard agnostic position is his claim to have knowledge of what he declares to be unknowable. In other words, if it were true that reality cannot be known, no one, including Kant, would know it. Kant's hard agnosticism boils down to the claim: "I know that reality is unknowable." ( Norman L. Geisler)
Let’s shift the focus on to history. A historical record is a writing having historical value and is a record or narrative of past events. A basic definition of history “is knowledge of the past based on testimony.” (Lincoln analogy: Do you believe Abraham Lincoln lived and was President of the United Sates? Yes. However, no one I know has ever met personally or observed Lincoln. The only way one knows is by testimony - physical, verbal and written. (Josh McDowell) This is the manner in which the Bible was written, as multiple eyewitness account of encounters with God and Jesus. Here are some of the New testament eye witness accounts: 2Peter 1:16, 1John 14:1-3, Acts 10:39-42, Luke 1:1-3, Acts 1:1-3, 1Cor. 15:6-8. John 20:30-31, 1 Peter 5:1, Acts 1:9, Acts 2:22, Acts 26:24-28. These accounts were from men that history can account for. “the purpose of historian is not to construct a history from preconceived notions and adjust it to his own liking but to reproduce it from the best evidence and let it speak for itself.” (Philip Schaff) One of the atheists mentioned the fact that the idea of Christianity has been replicated before in Greek mythology and the like. However, the similarities stop when you realize that mythological characters were not applied to real flesh and blood individuals, but instead to non-historical, fictional, mythological characters. In comparison, “when it comes to Christianity these events are attached to the historic Jesus of Nazareth whom the New Testament writers knew personally”. (Josh McDowell)
“If the biblical critic tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel..... I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this." (C.S. Lewis)
Aldous Huxley, the atheist who has destroyed the beliefs of many and has been hailed as a great intellect states this:
“I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumes that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with problems in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why he should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern the way they find most advantageous to themselves…. For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.”
I am sorry but I know for myself, I cannot live my life by this man’s motives and base my eternity on it!! I want something that has more substance other than his own personal beliefs!!!!!!! God is not some cosmic kill joy in the sky trying to keep us from really living life. In fact, that is the exact opposite. Although it’s true, He has placed guidelines and rules for us to follow – but they are only in place to help us to experience REAL freedom. (really think about that last statement!! ) So if an atheist states that his belief that lying, cheating, murder, steeling, coveting, adultery, not obeying parents, etc is a good thing – then it is a good thing because he believes it to be??? REALLY??
I am going to leave this post with this quote from Blaise Pascal:
"The evidence of God's existence and His gift is more than compelling, but those who insist that they have no need of Him or it will always find ways to discount offer."
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