17 Nov What if the Atheists are Right?!?
THE FUNDAMENTAL WORLDVIEW QUESTION IS: “IS THERE A GOD?”
Whether or not there is a God should be serious business to us all. Do you want to get to the end of life and discover you were wrong? I don’t! And, I want evidence to make the decision, not opinion or intuition. As a young man, before I became a Christian, I was – in the words of the old spiritual – “tired of living and scared of dying.” The Vietnam War was raging, and I lived in fear of being sent to Vietnam and getting killed. Then what?!
The issue of whether or not there is a God is a deadly serious question to me. It is not a parlor game, or an intellectual question that you can entertain for a while and then, after the game is over, forget about it and go on your way unchanged.
I want to know if there is a reason to live.
And I want to know if it is safe to die.
I want to know if there is a God… and if anyone says there is, I want to know why. After I became a Christian, I learned the old hymn, “He Lives!” In the refrain of the hymn, the writer asks: “You ask me how I know He lives… He lives within my heart.”
Well that’s warm and fuzzy and it might have been good enough for the hymn writer, but I can tell you, it wasn’t good enough for me.
I already knew that any internal or personal experience I have could be thrown off by perceptual malfunction. I already knew that my internal guidance system had been wrong a million times or more… and so, I need for anything I’m going to believe to have something greater than myself, or my experience, to verify it.
- I don’t know how anyone finds the faith to believe something that cannot be verified.
- I don’t know how anyone can believe something that is internal, based only on emotion or feeling or experience.
- I don’t know how anyone could trust their eternal destiny to something that they believe just because they are influenced by what others around them believe.
I want evidence!
But is there enough evidence to be utterly convinced of the existence of God? What if the atheists are right?!?
Richard Dawkins, noted atheist and author of many books, including The God Delusion, has written: “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
Mark Twain wrote, similarly but more succinctly: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”
So, if there is no God, I want to know it. And if there is a God, I want to know it. And I don’t want to believe something that I “know ain’t so.” And I don’t want to believe in something “in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
And the wonderful thing is… there is evidence. Powerful and compelling evidence! There is evidence so powerful and compelling that if you follow it, going where it leads, without an anti-supernatural presupposition, you end up kneeling at the cross saying, “Lord Jesus, save me!” The atheists are not right! The evidence has been evaluated, and faith wins!
Next week, we will look at the evidence for the existence of God. And when we do, it will lock into our minds and hearts the fact that God does exist, and lay the foundation upon which we can build a truly Christian worldview that can withstand anything that life can throw at us.
See you next week!
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