Reading — The God Delusion
First of all, you have to have rules. In order to find out anything, there must be a process for doing so. Jesus said, "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek , and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you."
One thing this means is that you find what you look for. This can be either good, if you actually find what you want, or bad, if what you "find" is not true. Most everyone has heard stories (truth or fiction) about the police jumping to a wrong conclusion about who is guilty, and then dredging up enough "evidence" to convict the wrong person.
So, rule number one is this: Truth is reality; Reality is truth. Truth is what really happened, and the way things really are — separate and apart from the way we want things to be. Most reasonable people would have no problem accepting Rule #1.
But here is where Christians and Atheists part company. Reality, to a Christian, includes the spiritual, non-physical, side of the Universe. Reality, to an Athiest, includes only the physical side of the Universe, because by definition, if an atheist believes in some supernatural, non-physical entity or spirit, then he is not called an atheist.
So, if the question of whether or not God exists is to be examined scientifically, as Richard Dawkins suggests, then we need another rule.
Rule number 2, also known as Occam's Razor is this: The simplest explanation is usually correct. This is not always correct, but usually it is. What I mean is this --- we must examine our Assumptions or Axioms. If we throw out half of the evidence on an A Priori assumption, then our final conclusion, simple though it is, will not explain all the evidence.
Dawkins defines the God Hypothesis with these words: "There exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us." But then he arbitrarily throws out all possible evidence of a possibly supernatural nature. As an atheist, he cannot concede the possibility of miracles, therefore miracles must not have happened, and there must be some other explanation for the phenomena.
The surprising thing is, the people in the Bible who saw the miracles were just as hardened against them as he is. I am not talking about the leaders of the Jews who arbitrarily denied that Jesus was the Christ, even when they could not deny the miracles. I am talking about Jesus' disciples themselves. In Mark 4:41, after Jesus stilled the storm, saving them from drowning, "they were terrified and asked each other, 'Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him.'" And after Jesus multiplied five loaves and two fish into enough food to feed five thousand men (Mark 6:39-44), and then he came to his disciples, walking on water in the middle of the sea of Galilee, it says, "they thought he was a ghost. They cried out because they all saw him and were terrified." But when he got into the boat with them and the wind died down, "they were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened." (Mark 6:49-52) And when the women saw Jesus after he rose from the dead and told the eleven about it, "they did not believe the women because their words seemed to them like nonsense." (Luke 24:11)
The issue is this: Does there exist a spiritual side to the universe? Or is the Universe completely physical? We cannot scientifically examine the question, "Does God exist," by first throwing out all possible evidence for his existance. Perhaps we should first examine the question of whether or not the Bible is true before denying the spiritual or miraculous parts of it.
Logan
No comments:
Post a Comment