Tag: Atheist

The Seeing Eye

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Apologetics, Faith

The Seeing Eye

 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”  Matt 6:22-23

I once had a man compare believing in God to believing in unicorns or a spaghetti monster.  His augment is that he never saw a unicorn, so he does not believe in them, and because he has not seen God he could not believe in Him.

It is not uncommon for people to say they cannot believe in God because they cannot see Him.  However, it seems to me that humans believe in a lot of things they cannot see.  In fact, some of the most important things in life are things we cannot see such as love, joy, and hope. Yet, we believe in them and we believe they are real.  We believe in the wind and the force we call gravity, and yet we do not see them.  All we see and feel are the effects of them.  We believe we see light but do we?  In essence, we believe in these things not because we see them but rather because we experience them.

The truth is that sometimes we must believe in order to see. For example, if scientists did not believe in atoms, they would never have found them. There were natural philosophers (scientists) that believed in atoms 2500 years ago. They had no way to see them, but they had a hunch they existed and they began a long search to prove their hunch.   Even to this day, no one has actually seen an atom, all we can see is a trail of one or a computerized image of one, yet we believe they exist. In like manner, if scientists did not believe that there was life at the bottom of the sea, they would not have found the incredible life forms that they have found recently. They actually found creatures that are more unbelievable than unicorns.

If humans believed in only what they could or have seen they would believe very little.  The truth is we believe as much in what we have experienced as what we have seen.  Things like love, joy, and hope are not seen but most of us have experienced them to some degree. Of course, sadly, there are some who have not experienced these things.  However, their lack of experiencing these things does not prove they do not exist.  We could say that experiencing something is just another way of seeing or knowing. In spiritual matters, we call this the Seeing Eye, “blessed are the poor in spirit for they will see God.”

Spiritually minded people often speak of their experience with God. In the Bible, men speak of having visions, dreams or hearing a quiet voice. I do not think the majority of us will experience God this way or have a burning bush experience like Moses, but I do believe we all experience God to some degree though we often fail to recognize it.  We need the Seeing Eye and the hearing ear of faith.

We all may not hear the voice of God directly, but all can hear the echo of his voice when we sense that we were created for the stars and in our longing to explore.  We hear it in our love for life and our disdain for death.  We hear it in the universal need for meaning and self-esteem.  We hear it in the human cry for justice. We hear it in death as well as life. In death, we hear the voice tell us that we are not God. In life we hear it say that life is moving to completeness.

If you are seeking God, go to a quiet place and drop all your worldly beliefs.  Remember, it is these beliefs that keep you from seeing. Truth is often found through subtraction not addition.  Then think of your life and see if you can see God at work in it and in the lives of those around you.  Ask God to open the eyes of your heart that you might see Him and hear His voice.  Jesus promised that those that keep asking and seeking would find.

 

 

The Source of Unbelief?

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Apologetics, Faith

The Source of Unbelief?

 “He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’  “Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’  “‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’  “He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.'” Luke 16:27-31

It seems that a large number of unbelievers feel that God is unjust for not showing himself in an overwhelming way and then judging people for not believing. The truth is that God has given sufficient evident for his existence, so that all men should believe[1]. However, the evidence is only sufficient, it is not overwhelming. God has never given overwhelming evidence of his existence  because that would force men to believe and obey out of fear. If I understand the Bible correctly God wants a love relationship in which man freely enters, not a shotgun wedding brought about by fear.

Therefore, it seems that the real problem is not the lack of evidence which involve the intellect, but rather the lack of a will to believe. Unbelievers could be divided into two different groups of people. Those who to varying degrees are indifferent towards God; we could call this group “practical atheists”. These individuals are everywhere in the world and even in the church. For this group, there is simply no room in their lives for God. This group would include religious  people who have what we might call a lukewarm faith; they have a cognitive recognition of a God but not enough faith (trust) to act on it. Next, there are those who are hostile to God and want to prove that He does not exist in order to justify themselves either intellectually or morally[2].

Both groups of unbelievers will say that if they had more evidence of God’s existence then they would believe and act differently. Of course this would be true of anyone, unless they are mentally ill and why would not anyone act differently in the face of overwhelming evidence that there is a God?  However, the question is, do they believe and act differently because they have a will to believe and want to obey God? Or did their transformation come out of fear? If they changed out of fear, could you say that they were free?  Could they ever be happy living in such a relationship?  This raises the question,  how can an all-powerful God reveal Himself and at the same time protect the free will of his creation? It seems that the only way He can do this is to hide or veil himself in such a way as to give humankind a choice. Then in freedom, a person could will to believe and obey, and at the same time be free and happy in relationship with God.

When we turn to the scripture that is exactly what we find. We are told that God is a God, who hides himself[3]. Hiding himself gives people the opportunity to serve him out of love and freedom; responding in obedience to the sufficient evidence that that God has given. This  response is what the Bible calls faith.  True faith is accepting that there is a God, trusting his promises and obeying him.  This faith begins with a passion to find the hidden God; this passion we might call the ‘will to believe’.

Now, here is the bitter pill. Most unbelief comes from the will, the rebel passions and the hubris of man, rather than the intellect.  In a large percentage of people, the intellect is a much smaller player than they would like to admit. For most, the reason and intellect are called on by the will to justify itself and its rebellion against it creator. This truth is stated in the story of rich man quoted above, that someone coming back from the dead would not convince someone, which does not have a will to believe. They would simply say that it was an illusion. This raise the question, what would God have to do to change a person, which does not have the will to believe?

The atheist says they want more evident under the assumption that the problem is the intellect. However, it is much more likely that their unbelief at least initially was the problem of the will and emotions, i.e. a heart problem. Once unbelief is accepted then ego comes in to support the intellectual unbelief.  This is the worst kind of problem, because a person’s intellectual pride locks them into unbelief.

If we are right about the source of unbelief, the begin place to escaping it, is too humble yourself before the creator of the universe and ask for the gift of faith, while seeking God with all of your heart.

[1] Some might raise the objection, if the existence of God is self evident, why are there so many, which do not see it? Jesus said “some people have eyes but do not see”.  Sometime over exposure deadens are sensitivity to a thing. We are often actually insensitive to our senses until they are impaired in some way. We seldom think about seeing or of our eyes until something threatens our sight. When we look out a window we will not often see the glass unless we focus on it. The reason being we have given our full attention to the things we are watching outside the window. However, if the window is dirty or has a crack in it we see it immediately.  The problem with modern man is that he is too focused on things to see God. Through neglect he has lost his ability to sense God.

[2] Of Course there are others cause for unbelief, which I study in a essay on “The Making of A fundamentalist Atheist”.

[3] Isa 45:15, “Truly you are a God who hides himself, O God and Savior of Israel.

The New Atheists

Posted on by Lyle Duell in Apologetics

 

The New Atheists

“I was at this time of living, like so many Atheists or Anti-theists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.” C.S. Lewis

Who are the new atheists?  Unlike the traditional atheists of the past, the new atheists are a movement loosely organized around a host of websites and celebrity leaders.  They are very evangelistic and spend a large amount of time and money[i] propagating their faith, which they vehemently deny is a faith, though their movement seems to be increasingly taking on the characteristics of a religious cult.  Their purpose as a group seems to be to destroy faith in God and all religion, which they believe is evil.  So in essence, they believe they are angels of light, taking a message of freedom to the world, a freedom from a faith, which they believe poisons everything.  However, are they really angels of light?

The new atheists seem to be nice guys like any group which has little power.  However, when given power as in Russia and China, atheists behave no better than any other group or maybe worse.  In fact, they have the propensity to use force, especially state power, to spread their ideology and oppress others.  In other words, they behave very much like the thing they hate, i.e., organized religion.

They also represent the narrowest of belief systems, which a person can have, for they must reject  every religious belief system and argue for a total materialist world view.  In contrast, the Christian faith believes that it is the true and the most complete faith; but it also believes that there are many truths to be found in other faiths.  The new atheists are truly narrow people, and their thinking is one-dimensional and resembles the thinking of a fundamentalist religionist.  It is not surprising that their superstars resemble the TV evangelists.

They also share in other characteristic of religion, which is judgmental attitude and a critical spirit. Atheists embrace a naturalistic world view which, if they were being consistent, would eliminate all morality and all moral judgments.  Yet we find them making moral judgments on religious people all the time.  In fact, one of their spokesmen has recently published a book in which he even sets himself up as the moral judge of God.  The book is entitled God Is Not Good.  However, the title is misleading, for most of the book is about the failures of religion over the last few thousand years.  He seems to have missed the obvious observation that religious people are just people and people do bad things when given too much power, like the atheistic Communists of Russia and China, which he conveniently overlooks.

Because the new atheists believe that their unbelief is grounded in science, they have the tendency to elevate science to a place it ought not to hold.  For many atheists, science seems to be like a religion, which they guard as the fundamentalist religious person would guard his holy books.  This is understandable since atheists believe that science is proof of their ideology. Of course, the truth is that science does not support their faith and any true science would be the first to test and challenge any human knowledge, even atheism.  True science dictates that doubters doubt their own doubts. This might suggest that atheists are even poor skeptics.

To the new atheists, science is the proof that there is no God.  Yet the consensus of science is that science proves no such thing.  The US National Academy of Sciences has gone on record with the following statement: “Science is a way of knowing about the natural world.  It is limited to explaining the natural world through natural causes.  Science can say nothing about the supernatural.  Whether God exists or not is a question about which science is neutral.”  If this is the consensus of science, why do the new atheists keep appealing to science to justify their atheism? And why do they keep propagating the very opposite of the consensus of science?

However, no matter what the consensus is, the new atheists continue to line up behind the rebel scientists who want to use science to prove their atheism.  This simply means they are either ignorant or dishonest.  It is also strongly evident that science has little to do with making people atheists.  To read more on what makes people atheists read my paper “The Making of a Fundamentalist Atheist.”

Are the new atheists angels of light[ii]?  I don’t think so.  I personally think they are a group of people who are very angry at an existence, an existence, which to them seems meaningless and without purpose.  The only meaning in life, which they can find is to be free from anything that might restrict their appetites and to convert people to their way of viewing life.  My response is, “No thank you.”  A life without limits and meaning is not worth living.

[i] I have often asked the new atheists where they get their funding for the organized efforts to support their evangelism.  I have never received a response.  However, I believe it is highly possible that some of their funding comes from Communists like George Soros.  The Communist Party of the United States has funded attacks on religion for a century.  They know that America will never become completely Communist as long as it is religious.

[ii]  An honest unbeliever, Dr. E. Wengraf once confessed, “Every piece of anti-religious propaganda seems to me a crime.  I surely do not wish it to be prosecuted as a crime, but I consider it immoral and loathsome.  This not because of zeal for my convictions, but because of the simple knowledge, acquired through long experience that, given the same circumstances, a religious man is happier than the irreligious.  In my indifference and skeptical attitude toward all positive faith, I have often envied other men to whom deep religiosity has given a strong support in all the storms of life.  To uproot the souls of such men is an abject deed.  I abhor any proselytizing.  But still, I can understand why one who believes firmly in a saving faith tries to convert others.  But I cannot understand a propaganda of unbelief.  We do not have the right to take away from a person his protecting shelter, be it even a shabby hut, if we are not sure we can offer him a better, more beautiful house.  But to lure men from the inherited home of their souls, to make them err afterward in the wilderness of hypotheses and philosophical question marks, is either criminal fatalisms or criminal mindlessness.”