Atheism

On September 30, England’s Guardian reported that Phillip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy was second on the American Library Association’s most banned book list.

The list ranks the top 10 books and authors which are successfully banned from schools or frequently challenge, usually by parents concerned about what their children read or by religious groups, such as the Catholic League.

Pullman has come under fire for his atheist views and in particular for one scene in his final book where his protagonists kill a character called “God.”

The first of Pullman’s books was made into a movie, “The Golden Compass,” in 2007 starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig of “James Bond” fame.

ALA’s rankings came in the middle of the annual “Banned Books Week,” where libraries across the country celebrate freedom of speech.

A couple of weeks ago, Desiring God’s blog pointed me to the movie “Collision”, which comes out in October on DVD to those of us not living in New York or LA.  The movie is a documentary about the tour atheist Christopher Hitchens and Christian Douglas Wilson did to promote their book, “Is Christianity Good for the World?” While the movie is sure to be good, you can read their exchange in a series of articles they did for Christianity Today.

My favorite quote from Wilson: “But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true athesim. One: there is no God. Two: I hate Him.”

I don’t know about you, but if I ever want to get your tempers flaring, all I have to do is take one afternoon and surf the Internet.  Recently, I re-discovered a video that made me want to go Rambo.  Marshall Brain, founder of How Stuff Works and the infamous WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com, launches his campaign against Christianity in a 10-minute video called “10 Questions Every Intelligent Christian Must Answer.”  I am normally challenges by questions from non-Christians.  But these ten that I supposedly “have to” answer make me want to hit something rather than explore my beliefs further.

I’ll spare the details of the questions in this rant, but the main presupposition of Brain’s video is that Jesus Christ as God does not and did not exist.  It isn’t because there is no historical evidence.  Jesus as we understand Him does not exist because He is allegedly imaginary.  We know He is imaginary because the claim that He is good and loving does not match up with the way the world works.  Why doesn’t it match up?  A few examples: bad things happen to “good people,” people starve, God apparently has a bias against amputees and God demands the death of “innocent” people.  Humanity is essentially good and because the Christian God does not give humanity what it wants, God can’t be good. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter whether or not God exists, there is no denying that one Biblical truth hit us right up on the nose. There is no denying that humanity is dead in its sin. You’d figure that after 10,000 years of our species walking on this green Earth, there would be some sort of growth, some sort of intellectual evolution. But apparently, we all were asleep during those 100 centuries; probably dreaming about a fantasyland of unicorns and rainbows. Morality was just a job we didn’t want to wake up to.

One place that I think this is evident in is our philosophies. I hate all of this talk about “post-modernism” because that is just another example of mankind’s laziness. Whereas Nietzsche had the audacity to proclaim that God is dead and then build up a plan for how humanity would deal with that “truth,” whoever came up with post-modernism just basically stated something we already were aware of. We know nothing. I am sure there is some stupid essay about this that says we are incapable of establishing some universal moral code or truth, but that’s not really an idea. That is reality. We have spent those precious centuries of life debating about how the world has taught us some new divine truth, some God-given law that we ought to heed to. I doubt anyone but one man has ever even got close to what God’s plan is for humanity, and yet we have prophet upon prophet saying they know what it good for us. Give me a break. Read the rest of this entry »

In his letter to the Christians of Asia Minor, Peter commands Christians to be able to defend their faith.

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” –

1 Peter 3:15

I have always found this verse interesting because it talks about apologetics (the discipline of defending one’s faith) in an unusual way. Apologetics, in my experience, is taught as being a secondary matter that one could study if one desired, but one shouldn’t regard it as imperative to learn.

Read the rest of this entry »

“If the world hates you, understand that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own. However, because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of it, the world hates you…but this happened, so that the statement written in their law might be fulfilled: ‘They hated me for no reason.’”
-John 15:18-19, 25

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been exploring the vast world of YouTube and getting an update on the world of man. Because I have a tendency just to waste time watching television during the summer, I thought I would try to guard my time somewhat by keeping up with the arguments the world tries to come up with against the Gospel. If there is one thing that I can say about the arguments, they are numerous.

Along my journey on cyberspace I once again encountered the ever-so-critical Richard Dawkins, a Professor at Oxford University and author of “The God Delusion.” Some time ago, he made a documentary on faith called “Root of all evil?” where he presents his case against religious practices. Faith, he says, confines the mind and keeps people from using their minds to discover what he calls the true nature of the universe (1).

Just as I discovered when I read James Watson’s “The Double Helix,” the realm of science on the level that Dawkins and his colleagues work in is way too complex for me. As I tragically saw in Dawkins’ documentary, many Christians come off as proud and are confounded by the level of scientific knowledge evolutionary biologists have. Most, if not all, of his arguments for evolution are backed by loads and loads of evidence, whereas ordinary Joes like me know nothing about Darwin’s theory and how it has evolved since its conception in the late nineteenth-century.

But in watching this documentary, Dawkins made a flaw in his argument against the Christian faith. He bashed the Old Testament prophets and the writings of the Apostle Paul, and yet when it came time to talk about Jesus, Dawkins said not a bad word about Him. Indeed, when I watched I would not have known he was an atheist had he not ripped Moses and Lot a couple of minutes before.

The fact is that no one can raise an argument against the Gospel itself, and that is the mistake many atheists make when they attempt to critique our faith. Jesus Christ was so perfect and His message is still so all encompassing that no one, not even an enemy of God can tear it down: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Psalm 118:22).”

In this passage from John, Jesus is talking to His disciples about the persecutions to come after He ascends into heaven. On the night before Good Friday, Jesus imparts this wisdom to the Twelve because He can already see the arguments and the knowledge of the world to come. And as Jesus teaches yet again, the world, filled with people like Dawkins cry out sarcastically, “He relies on the Lord; let Him rescue him, let the Lord deliver him, since He takes pleasure in him (Psalm 22:8).”

But what this passage also teaches us and should remind us is that Jesus knows exactly what we all go through when we struggle each day, trying to depend on an invisible God. The fruits of the Spirit are a little less obvious when we go to work, to school, or are just hanging out at home. Throughout Scripture, the theme of persecution repeats itself: “They hated me for no reason.” And yet, throughout all the changes and amendments the world makes to its assaults against Christ, the risen Lord remains strong in His message: He is the way to pay for sins, and the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

So what are we to do? Proverbs 3 tells us that we should not rely on our own understanding. There is a wide realm of thought on Christian faith, and many people outside of one’s own comfort zone can be objective when it comes to seeing others as they try to live the life. We don’t want to be static and unchanging in our beliefs, because chances are that we are wrong. Talking to fellow Christians, reading up on Scripture, and especially prayer will allow us to become more enlightened. Keep asking, searching and knocking (Matthew 7:7-12) . “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:32).”

As always, we should also remind ourselves of how Jesus is the core of all truth and is key to any argument. It is expected that if someone talks of Jesus, no one will be neutral on Him. If the Gospel is at the center of all argument, then it should be easy to defend it.

(1) Dawkins, Richard. Root of All Evil?  (15 May 2008). <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oooitli1reg>

This is part of a series on atheism and the Gospel.  David Wells can be reached at dave60op@yahoo.com.