The Faith of the Atheist
Part 3
THE FAITH OF AN ATHEIST
Jack MacArthur
In our opinion, it takes more faith to be an atheist than it doe to believe in God.
The late Bishop Fulton J Sheen relates this intriguing incident. He said, “Some years ago as I went to a church in London, I found a young woman haranguing the congregation on atheism. ‘I go out every night to Hyde Park, ‘she shouted, ‘and talk against God. I circulate England, Scotland and Wales with pamphlets denouncing God.’
“I listened to her a few moments and said, ‘Suppose I circulated pamphlets in those same countries against 20-legged creatures and 7-fingered ghosts. What would happen to me?”
“She answered, ‘You would be locked up; you would be crazy.’
“’Why, then, ‘asked the Bishop Sheen, ‘do they not lock you up.’
“She replied, ‘The reason is I would be fighting against the figment of the imagination, which is a mark of insanity.’
To which the Bishop replied, “But you would be fighting against something as real as the thrust of a sword or an embrace. Do you think there would be anti-cigarette laws unless there were cigarettes? Would there ever have been prohibition unless there was something to prohibit? How can there be atheism unless there is something to atheate?
“The young lady replied, ‘I hate you, now you have answered me; atheism is not a doctrine, it’s a cry of wrath.’”
Atheism Is a “Cry of Wrath!”
I believe the young lady stated her case very honestly. From our point of view, atheism is not a tenable position, and at least in the case of the atheist Mrs. O’Hair, it does, indeed, seem to be, sadly, a “cry of wrath.” This becomes obvious in the hostility and the viruperative language Mrs. O’Hair uses in all of her public debates and appearances, constantly punctuating her remarks with profanity in an obvious attempt to insult and shock her hearers. What is intriguing is that her son has become a committed believer and has written a book concerning his triumphant life changing faith in Jesus Christ.
In past Newsletters we have suggested that independently of the Divine revelation we find in the Bible and in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, the existence of strong reasons for believing God, indeed, in believing in the God revealed to us in the Word of God.
A Meaningful Form of Evangelism
In the kind of a skeptical age in which we are living this is a very meaningful form of evangelism. Many Christians are anxious for some reasons, explanations, some sensible answers for questions that are directed at them, by a rationalistic, unbelieving, secular, scientific world.
IN our consideration of reasons for believing in God apart from Divine revelation, we made the important point that these arguments are probable, not demonstrative. Taken singly, none of them can be considered absolutely decisive. However, together they furnish a corroboration of our primitive conviction of God’s existence which is of great practical value and in itself often sufficient to bind the moral action of men.
Evidence to Substantiate God Exists
We pointed out that the value of these arguments is much greater if taken together than the argument of any single one. One thread in a piece of rope might be broken easily, but a great number woven together would be very difficult to break. Let me say again that we cannot prove there is a God, we can only say, from our point of view, there is more evidence to substantiate the existence of God than there is to deny His existence, because proof takes place in the mind. However, we affirm that unbelief is frequently associated with almost incredible credulity (A disposition to believe too readily).
Space does not permit us in each Newsletter to review with any kind of detail the arguments already presented, but we have said, the one who does not believe in a great cosmic intelligence must believe in effects without causes, and an effect without a cause has never been witnessed. We believe a Divine intelligence produced the universe or that mud and time are a sufficient explanation. We also said an atheist must believer in a design without a designer. He must believe in law without a law giver.
Further, we have seen man is a moral being, he possesses an innate capacity to know right and wrong. The atheist must explain how a morally responsible being could come from a purely materialistic source. These arguments were presented in previous Newsletters, however we have only touched the surface of what could be said.
The Argument From Intuition
There is, for example, the argument from intuition. There is a universal belief in the existence of God. Modern anthropology tells us that man is incurable religious, whether he is a Jew or Gentile, whether he is educated or uneducated, whether he lived in ancient or modern times, whether he is an urbanite or a primitive hill farmer. His natural instinct, wherever we find him, has been to worship a higher being.
The language of every nation and tribe in the world has a name for god. This fact extends through all the time man has walked the earth. Even the primitive people of the stone age buried their dead with religious ceremony. Man everywhere believes in the existence of a supreme being (or beings) to whom he is morally responsible and to whom propitiation must be made. This belief does not come from outside sources nor form reason, argument, or tradition. All the evidence indicates that this universal faith in the existence of God is innate, that is comes from his rational intuition. His belief may be crudely, even sometimes grotesquely stated and manifested, but the reality of the fact is no more invalidated by such crudeness than the experience of a father who is invalidated by the crude attempts of a child to draw a picture of that parent.
Whether There Really Is An Atheist Is Open To Question
G.B. Hardy suggests that man should trust this instinct more because instincts are kinds of prophecies. He says maybe this is the key to man’s survival.
The Persian saw God in the sun and in the fire. The black man of the Sahara, the red man of America, the yellow man of the Far East, the brown man of India, each had his god or gods. It takes tremendous faith to contradict the voice of humanity’s soul concerning the fact of God. So universal is the belief in the existence of God that it is questioned whether there is such a thing as atheism in the true sense of the word!
David Hume is known as a famous skeptic and yet he is reported to have said to Adam Ferguson, as together they looked up into the starry sky; “Adam there is a God.”
Voltaire, the avowed atheist, prayed to God in a thunderstorm.
Robert Ingersol, when charged with being an atheist, indignantly refute the charge, saying, “I am not an atheist, I do not say there is no God, I am an agnostic; I do not know that there is a God.”
George Romanes, the philosopher, said that the soul of a man is a vacuum that nothing but God can fill.
Intelligence Cannot Spring From Non-intelligence
The distractions of intellectual and scientific research, philosophical speculation, and artistic pleasure are but high confectionery to a starving soul. The soul will starve until it feeds on God. Believe in God and you can explain yourself. Deny God and your own conscience will remain a perpetual mystery. The only answer to the fact that man is a moral being is that a moral God was his maker. Intelligence cannot spring from non-intelligence; the moral cannot be produced from the non-moral.
The Ontological Argument
Where does man get his idea of God but from God Himself? By this way, this is known as the ontological argument. If God were not real and had not placed in man a desire to know Him, man would have no need to seek God. In addition, man would have no need to go to such tremendous effort to deny Him as the atheists and agnostics often do. IN other words, if a man did not have any real reason or cause within himself to believe that God exists there would be no reason for him to bother about it all. He wouldn’t think about God any more than a horse does.
The late Dr. J. Oliver Buswell illustrated it this way. If we should discover at tropical island, apparently flat, and if we should find that the people on this apparently flat tropical island has a word for a snow-capped mountain, we should find it necessary to make inquiries as to the source of their idea. We should conclude that either there was a snowcapped mountain far in the interior of their island, or that they had migrated from some region containing high mountains, or that some traveler had told them of snow-capped mountains. From the data of a flat tropical island natives could not build up the idea of a snow-capped mountain. Knowing that heat increases as one approaches a fire, they would naturally suppose that heat would increase as one might approach the sun. The idea of a snow-capped mountain must have a source and an explanation outside of their apparent environment.
Similarly, it seems to me that the inductive form of the ontological argument, seeking for an explanation of the idea of the God of the Bible, has considerable weight.
We Cannot Force Me to Believe in God
As we have suggested, we have just touched the surface of these arguments. There are many more. The kind of proof we have been discussing is, however, inferential proof, which like a bundle of rods is an accumulation of many lines of evidence pointing to what seems an inescapable conclusion. We cannot put God under a microscope, or see Him when we travel in space. Scripture says, “God is Spirit and they that worship Him must worship Him in truth and spirit.” So there is no way we can ever force men to believe in God.
Dr. Gleason Archer’s Strong Argument
The evidence of God’s existence may seem plain to those of us who believe, but sin so blinds some men’s eyes they cannot see what is plainly before them. In his “Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, “Gleason L. Archer makes a strong statement concerning atheism when he says, “…consistent atheism, which represents itself to be the most rational and logical of all approaches to reality, is in actuality completely self-defeating and incapable of logical defense. That is to say, if indeed all mater has combined by mere chance unguided by any Higher Power of Transcendental Intelligence, then it necessarily follows that the molecules of the human brain are also the product of mere chance. In other words, we think the way we do simply because the atoms and the molecules of our brain tissue happen to have combined in the way they have, totally without transcendental guidance or control. So then even the philosophies of men, their systems of logic and all their approaches to reality are the result of mere fortuity.
“There is no absolute validity to any argument advanced by the atheist against the position of theism (belief in God). On the basis of his own presuppositions, the atheist completely cancels himself out, for on his own premises his arguments are without any absolute validity. By his own confession he things the way he does simply because the atoms in his brain happen to combine the way they do. If this is so, he cannot honestly say that his view is any more valid than the contrary view of his opponent. His basic postulates are self-contradictory and self-defeating; for when he asserts that there are no absolutes, he thereby is asserting a very dogmatic absolute. Nor can he logically disprove the existence of God without resorting to a logic that depends on the existence of God for its validity. Apart from such a transcendent guarantor of the validity of logic, any attempts at logic or argumentation are simply manifestations of the behavior of the collocation of molecules that make up the thinker’s brain.”
Faith Decides the Issue
The evidence for God is there and those of us who have accepted that evidence believe only the Holy Spirit can make men accept it. Remember the Apostle Paul, under the Divine inspiration of the Spirit of God tells us, “In the wisdom of God man by his wisdom knew not God” (1 Corinthians 1:21). Just as men put faith in atheism, so men must put their faith in God Faith is exercised in either case. However, we assert once again, it takes fantastic faith to be an atheist.
The Existence of God Is Assumed in the Bible
That brings us to the fact that the existence of God is assumed in the Bible. The Word of God declares that we can know God’s power and Deity from the creative and recognize that we should worship Him. The Apostle Paul declared, “Because that which may be of God is manifest in them; for God hath shown it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse”(Romans 1:19,20). This clearly indicates that it is possible even for a nonbeliever to know that a God of power sufficient to create the universe exists and should be worshipped.
History Is a Medium of Divine Revelation
Its entire thrust arises from the claim that God has manifested His presence and power in historical events, which cannot be otherwise explained, except by acknowledging His existence. The validity of the gospel record rests upon actual historical occurrences. The apostles of the resurrected Christ appealed to the record of history because they believed it would yield evidence Dr. Clark Pinnock comments that the religion of the Bible approaches the question of God’s existence from the angle of history. to the impartial observer of the truth of the gospel. They were so convinced Jesus’ rising from the dead was a plain fact and so did not fear close examination.
In both the Old Testament and the New Testament, history is the medium in which revelation has unmistakably occurred. It is the structure of the biblical religion, which determines the approach to the question of God’s existence. It seems that not one of all the writer of either the Old Testament or the New Testament felt the need to prove or argue the existence of God. To the 40-plus authors of the Bible it was a fact taken for granted.
In Exodus 3:14 we read; “And God said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” In this initial self-identification of God it is significant that the verb is in the first person. The speaker names Himself, thus emphasizing His person identification. It is the announcement of a present God who has come to fulfill His covenant and keep His promise to the afflicted posterity of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
In Scripture it is also assumed that He is the source of all life. “For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). The sublime opening of Scripture announces the fact of God and His existence; “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Scripture further recognizes that men not only know the existence of God, but also have a certain circle of ideas as to who and what He is. This is something to which men should give serious consideration, because if what the bible teaches is true, no one can escape God’s control. A man might deny that he is revolving around on the surface of the earth at a thousand miles an hour, and decide that because he is the master of his own destiny he will not go with the earth as it revolves, but his decision would in no way alter the fact. And so the unbeliever’s denial of the existence of God does not change his relationship to God’s control for a single instant.
The Existence of God Is a Vital Concern to Us All
Certainly this question of the existence of the triune God concerns everyone and is especially pressing when death approaches, when the fuse is burning and the countdown is moving toward zero. Is there a God to whom we must give an account for the way we have lived our lives, for the sins we have committed, for the attitudes we have taken, or does death end it all?
Everyone at sometime uneasily wonders about these questions. Even the existentialist, in all his bravado must have uncomfortable moments as he thinks about approaching death. The Communist dictators pretend to scoff at the subject, but we may be pardoned if we lift a skeptical eyebrow as we listen to them.
William Randolph Hearst, it is said, would not allow death to be mentioned in his presence; that of course, merely proved that the fear of death was every with him.
Be he agnostic, or atheist, indifferent man of the world, or philosopher in his study, men never escape a nagging fear of what happens after death.
Interestingly, the Bible claims to give such information from God. It is a Divine revelation from God. The Bible declares there is a judgment after death and that man’s attitude here in this life toward God the Son. The Lord Jesus Christ of history, determines the sentence imposed by the Divine judge Jesus Christ on the judgment day. “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36).
The question of God’s existence is therefore the most important question in the world.
Sir Bernard Lovell, probably the world’s greatest astrophysicist, tells u on national television, for twenty years he tried to prove the universe had a materialistic base, but every experiment he performed essentially to prove this seemed to demonstrate the contrary. He declared, the universe Dante indicated had a spiritual origin. Moreover he said, whereas space has probably no edge, it does appear to have a center, and that center, a centripetal force, is veritably the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.
No mystery then, the Bible opens with the grand statement, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Truth, Jonathan
yours must be a truly sad life and you know what, I do not pity you. To have a life governed by the ramblings of such a pathetic lil book is so so sad.
