Questions about God: 3. Isn’t faith a leap in the dark, and aren’t the atheists really on the right track?

3. Isn’t faith a leap in the dark, and aren’t the atheists really on the right track?

As atheism is placarded before us in bookshops and on the media, let me deal with this question fully.
I love the Hans Christian Anderson story, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. I first came across it as a children’s song. A couple of conniving conmen pretended to be tailors. Knowing the king’s vanity about his clothes, they began a scheme to weave invisible garments. They told the king that only a fool could not actually see the clothes, and the king bought into it! He took off all his clothes and put on the invisible suit. Then he walked in a royal procession down the streets thinking he was showing off his magnificent clothes. At first the crowds exclaimed praise over what the king was wearing. No one dared expose the king’s folly for fear of being thought a fool themselves. Then one little boy had the audacity to say, “Look at the king! Look at the king! He is altogether as naked as the day he was born!” The truth spread like wildfire, much to the chagrin of the king.

Recently, there has been a rise in fundamentalist atheism that is militant and ‘in your face’. These ‘new’ atheists are parading something which is novel and telling us that if we can’t see what they can, it is our own stupidity. They say that belief in God is akin to believing in Santa Claus.3[i] These atheists regularly appear on radio and television expressing beliefs that either go unchallenged, or are questioned by rather quirky or ill-informed ‘Christian’ people. These ‘no God for me’ atheists, as the Bible depicts them, write books which through heavy promotion are best-sellers, advertised on the side of buses. They mock believers in colleges or universities and have accused anyone who disagrees with them as being ‘ignorant’. They have portrayed themselves as the final authority on questions of morality, beliefs and what defines an intelligent person. They give the impression that anyone who knows anything about science cannot be a Christian.[ii]

Atheism and its cousin Secularism have led to an attempt to banish Christianity from schools and the workplace. So we have seen cases of people being suspended from work for wearing a cross, for offering to pray with an elderly patient, or for sharing beliefs at work or in a classroom because it is deemed politically incorrect in our secular climate. The idea is imposed on us that Christian belief is not for today. There is a desire to airbrush out of history the fact that it was scientists who believed in God – and believed that He created discoverable laws – who pioneered so many of the foundations of scientific research: Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, Humphry Davey, Samuel Morse, Sir James Simpson and a vast list of others in more recent years.[iii]

Yet it is amazing how easily exposed are atheistic arguments when they are intelligently challenged. It was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, so on BBC Radio 5’s late night phone-in programme, Richard Bacon had as his guest atheist, Professor Steve Jones of University College London. Though not as well known as Richard Dawkins, he comes across as less fanatical. He explained his belief that evolution made it unnecessary to believe in God. The callers simply accepted all that Steve Jones had to say until a guy called Vinny (Vinny Commons, a football coach from Southport), simply asked three questions, which totally silenced the professor and left Richard Bacon trying to cover for him. Frankly, it was embarrassing for the atheist who was found in the ‘altogether’. The questions which left him floundering were:

1. You say you believe in the ‘big bang’. What went bang?
2. How did life come from non-life?
3. You weren’t there when the world came about, so how do you know what happened?

He couldn’t bring himself to admit what Richard Dawkins had already done when speaking about evolution in a speech at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. He said “We don’t need evidence. We know it to be true.”[iv]

Think about this: it is not hard to believe that there must always have been something, for something cannot come from nothing. So if there was never nothing, what was there before time and matter began?

This book is, as it were, a small voice crying out amidst the crowd, that atheism is not what it seems and does not stand the test of cross-examination. There is a basic ‘dishonesty of atheism’[v]. If that sounds harsh, it is because in our sceptical age we are often taught that we cannot be absolutely sure about anything. There is an intense dislike of any appearance of certainty. Of course, in some ways scepticism is a good thing. We have grown increasingly sceptical of what politicians, journalists, philosophers, religious leaders and the like tell us; it is right to be questioning. That, though, does not mean that there can never be certainty.

Christians, people who have put their trust in Jesus Christ, have a knowledge of God that is certain. They not only believe – they know that God is real and that He has revealed Himself to humanity.

At the heart of atheism is human pride. Something in us all fights against there being Someone superior to ourselves. We want to be in control of all things. A true scientist, like anyone else, will admit their own weakness and fallibility. Carlos Frenk reflected, “We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form.”[vi]

So, briefly, what is the evidence that God is real?

Everything we know about God is what He has revealed to us about Himself. He has made Himself known in many ways but here are listed some basic ones:

1. The wonder of creation.

To look at the petals of a beautiful flower, to consider the dexterity of the fingers of our hands, to hear the dawn birdsong, or the crashing waves of the ocean, cries out that behind design there must be a Designer, and creation must have its Creator.

Whether one looks through a telescope or a microscope there is evidence of careful, bold, intricate design. Gazing through the telescope one sees the vastness of billions of stars, billions of light years apart and through the microscope is the detail and intricacy of the DNA system and the billions of cells.

Sir Fred Hoyle wrote: “Now imagine 1050 blind persons (that’s 100,000 billion, billion, billion, billion people; standing shoulder to shoulder, they would more than fill our entire planetary system) each with a scrambled Rubik’s cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling (random variation) of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operation programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance from a primordial soup here on earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”[vii]

But muse on the positioning of planet earth in our solar system. Earth is perfectly positioned so that if our axis or distance from the sun was just minimally altered we would all either freeze or burn.

As someone expressed it, it is easier to believe that the Encyclopaedia Britannica came about as a result of an explosion in a printing factory than to believe that all of creation came about without a Maker. Chance would be a fine thing! The order, variety and extravagant beauty of our world reveal to us something of the nature of the creative God.

With our scientific advancement and the ‘creation’ of living forms within the laboratory, it has been suggested that we don’t need God any more.

Someone told this imaginary story:

A scientist got into an argument with God. “You’re not the only creator,” he declared. “I also can make a man.” So God said, “Let’s see you do it.” The man walked over to some dirt. But God stopped him, and said, “Get your own dirt!”

Creating is making something out of nothing; manufacturing is making something out of something else! Only God can create.

2. The witness of our conscience.

Nobody is born an atheist. Richard Dawkins tells the story of how he tried to drill out of his daughter’s consciousness the belief that there must be purpose in our existence (most of us would feel that that is brainwashing). God has placed eternity in the minds of men and women, so that we are at times overtaken with a sense of awe, wonder and the awareness of Someone greater than ourselves. We recognise the futility of life without God and whenever we are confronted by death something within us cries out that there must be more. Innately we are convinced of existence beyond the grave.

As well as this, within every human being there is a sense of right and wrong, of fair play and justice. One of the defining moments in the twentieth century was when the atheist Soviet Union President Khrushchev banged his shoe on the United Nations desk shouting, “It’s not fair; it’s not fair!”

If there is no God, there can be no absolute standard of morality or fair play, and yet morality, right and wrong, justice and fairness are written deep within our psyche. Where did they come from? Conscience is like a court of law built within us. It is willing to judge against us and find us guilty when we go against what we inwardly know to be right. We were created spiritual as well as physical beings, so we are made with an innate awareness of our responsibilities towards God and others.

Of course, conscience can be moulded by society, so a person’s standards can become warped and twisted. In fact the Bible explains that this is exactly what has happened, and this ushered into our world chaos, calamity and cruelty. The early chapters of the Book of Romans in the Bible are a powerful explanation of the Christian message. In the first chapter we read, ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.’[viii]

3. The Word of God, the Bible.

The Bible was written over a period of 1600 years by about 40 different authors from the Egyptian, Hebrew, Babylonian and Roman cultures. Yet there is total unity in thought and theme. There are 66 books in the Bible – 39 in the Old Testament, written before the birth of Jesus, and 27 in the New Testament, written after His birth. Some of these books are history, some poetry, others are prophecy, and a number are letters written originally to individuals or churches. They were finally bound together in one volume in recognition that God had spoken through these books to humanity as a whole.

The accuracy of the Bible needs to be explained away by atheists, if they won’t believe it is the word of God. It has proved to be archeologically and historically accurate, often to the surprise of those whose initial thought was that the Bible could not be correct. The Bible has pronounced on scientific issues thousands of years before scientists have ‘discovered’ what it had already said. For example:

• The oldest book in the Bible speaks of the earth’s free floating in space thousands of years before modern science discovered the fact. ‘(God) stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing.’[ix]
• Long before Galileo talked about the earth being a globe, and when others talked about the earth being flat, the Bible spoke of the ‘circle of the earth’.
• Thousands of years before medical science discovered the fact, the Bible taught that blood is the source of life and health. ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood …’[x]
• Centuries before oceanography the Bible taught that the ocean floor contains deep valleys and mountains. We read, ‘Then the channels of the sea were seen, the foundations of the world were uncovered …’ and Jonah said, ‘I went down to the moorings of the mountains … yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.’[xi]
• Long before Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) and Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) had established germ theories, the Bible taught sound rules of hygiene. For example, “When he who has a discharge is cleansed of his discharge, then he shall … wash his clothes, and bathe his body in running water; then he shall be clean.”[xii]

The Bible reveals to us:

who God is, and

who we are;  

what God has done, and   

what He wants us to do.

Throughout, the Bible makes it clear that it is impossible for human beings to make their own way to God but that God has taken the initiative and reached down to us. It teaches that we are not saved by the good things we do. Rather, it is because of God’s mercy that Jesus came into the world to be the substitute/sacrifice who would pay for our sins. Dying on the cross, Jesus carried the can for all of us, so that we could find forgiveness, and reconciliation with God. This comes about when we put our trust in Jesus who died, was buried and rose again.

This contrasts with every other religion in the world. They each teach that we have to do certain things and become very good people to have any hope of being accepted by God.

But how do we know whether the Bible is true and is therefore the revelation of God?

Scores of times throughout the Bible we read that God speaks to reveal the future. These are not vague predictions such as one reads in a horoscope, but are very detailed and specific. (Incidentally, have you ever wondered why fortune tellers are not multi-millionaires, for they should be able to predict the lottery numbers successfully!) Bible prophets predict the fate of individuals, of cities and nations. There are numerous examples of these but to illustrate let us examine just one set of prophecies.

The whole of the Bible is about Jesus. The Old Testament anticipates His coming, His life, work, death, resurrection and His lasting influence. Over and over, there are detailed prophecies about Him, so that nobody would have an excuse if they missed His coming. The New Testament, written when there were hundreds of eye witnesses still living, describes Him, His work and teaching, and so demonstrates how this one solitary life fulfilled all the prophecies contained in what is really a Jewish book, the Old Testament.

Christians could not tamper with these prophecies because they had been made centuries earlier and were contained in the Scriptures owned by the Jews. The prophets had foretold long before Jesus was born, and centuries before crucifixion was devised as a means of capital punishment, what would happen to the coming Messiah:

• He would be betrayed by a friend
• His back would be beaten until it was like a ploughed field
• He would be spat upon
• He would die a poor man’s death but be buried in a rich man’s grave
• He would be crucified between thieves
• He would have His hands and feet pierced
• He would have even His garments gambled for
• the bones of His body would be pulled apart but not a bone of His body would be broken
• even the words that Jesus’ executioners would utter were predicted
• His body would not decay
• He would rise again from the dead.[xiii]

Now let the atheist explain who wrote in the present what would happen in the future, and get things so right! If there is to be honesty among the atheists, they need to explain all these Bible prophecies. Who, but God, knows the future as well as the past? He has revealed Himself through His written word, the Bible.

When people begin to read the Bible, they find that God speaks with authority, convincing them of its authenticity.

4.     The work of Christ.

There are many things about Jesus that I believe because they are recorded in the Bible. The Bible tells me that in Jesus, God became flesh and made His dwelling among us. Therefore it is not difficult for me to accept that Jesus was born of a virgin: He came into this world as the God-man and therefore was born of deity and humanity. I cannot prove that Mary was a virgin at the time of the conception of Jesus, but I believe it.

Neither can I prove that Jesus fed thousands with a few loaves and fish. However, being God Himself who was walking on planet earth, it would be perfectly natural for Him to do this.

If Jesus really is God, His love would be such that He would want to heal the sick, and His power would be sufficient to do so! He would be able to calm a storm at sea by the word of His power, to cast out demons and to know the thoughts of those plotting against Him.

As the one who said of Himself, “I am the way, the truth and the life …,” I would expect Him to be able to raise the dead and to conquer death by raising Himself from death.[xiv]

Intriguingly, the greatest of all miracles is Jesus’ own resurrection from the dead and it is concerning this miracle that there is an overwhelming weight of historical evidence. Jesus did what no religious or political leader could – He conquered the grave.

There is no doubt that Jesus was dead. Professional Roman executioners were not going to be duped into pronouncing one of their crucified victims as dead unless they were certain He was demonstrably dead. Jesus had undergone the horrors of crucifixion as well as carrying the sin of the world on Himself. He gave up His own life, but to ensure that He really was dead the soldiers speared his side and noticed that blood and water poured out, as a sure sign that death had occurred. Then the body was taken down, tightly wrapped and laid in a tomb which was sealed.

The tomb was guarded to ensure that no one could tamper with the body. This was requested by the religious leaders of the day who knew that Jesus had said He would rise from the dead. But three days later the stone rolled away to reveal that the body of Jesus had gone and for the next forty days Jesus showed Himself risen and alive to literally hundreds of people, most of whom were still living when the record of the events was written. Of course, some were doubtful. Some, like the disciple Thomas, just did not believe, saying that unless he could put his fingers in the wounds of Jesus and his hand in His side, He would not be convinced. But when Jesus appeared before Thomas, he fell on his knees saying, “My Lord and my God”.

The Jews and the Romans would have loved to have silenced the early followers of Jesus by taking them to the body of Jesus in the grave where He had been laid but they could not, for the body had gone!

Some have suggested that Jesus’ body was stolen but who would have done that? Why would they do it? What would they have done with the body after that? No Jew would cremate a body and Jesus was already buried in a suitable place. How would the thieves get past the guards? Who could have acted like Jesus, with wounds in his hands, feet and side convincing even His closest disciples that He really was risen from the dead?

Some object saying that the disciples may have had some sort of hallucination, or maybe just falsified the story of Jesus rising to enhance who Jesus was perceived to be. But then why did the Jews and Romans not produce the body of Jesus, which they were guarding in the grave? Who convinced the sceptics like Thomas? Also, would the disciples, who were a fairly timid lot, be willing to die a martyr’s death for what they knew to be untrue?

Further, to compound the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, remember that it was prophesied in the Old Testament long before Jesus was born. Jesus Himself repeatedly said that He would be crucified and on the third day rise again. The resurrection was recorded by Gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, who were in effect Jesus’ biographers. Other Christian writers also wrote of His resurrection.

In addition to the testimony of Christian writers of the day, Roman and Jewish writers of that time also wrote about Jesus, His death and resurrection.

If atheists are going to come clean and be honest, they have to explain how Jesus rose from the dead.

5.     Christian Conversion.

Christian belief is not merely academic. God has revealed Himself to the world at large, but He also makes Himself known to individuals and changes their lives. For two thousand years men and women have been radically transformed the moment they ask Jesus to become their Lord and Saviour. God has turned around the lives of men and women in such radical ways, that again the onus is on the atheists to explain what has happened. Conversion like this knows no parallel in any other religion or philosophy.

How else do you explain what happened to the self-seeking, materialistic, Yorkshire politician, William Wilberforce, who upon asking Jesus Christ to be His Lord and Saviour was so transformed that he gave himself unstintingly to the abolition of the slave trade and the founding of over 70 charities including what we know today as the RSPCA?

Who changed Lord Shaftesbury into ‘the poor man’s earl’ devoting his life to the reform of the factory laws, children’s working conditions and care of the underdog? His biography explains it was the moment of Christian conversion which made such a radical difference. It was the same for John Howard and Elizabeth Fry working to improve prison conditions, and for Dr. Barnardo and George Müller who cared for the orphans.

In more recent times, UVF terrorist David Hamilton was sentenced to life in prison for the crimes he had committed. An old lady started to pray for this ‘no hoper’. Two and a half years into his prison sentence, served in the notorious Maze Prison in Northern Ireland, he read the title of a little gospel leaflet, which he mocked and threw away. But then, he strangely found that there was an inward pull to read the New Testament which was in his prison cell. He had already used many of the pages as cigarette paper, but he started reading and later that night, he who was guilty of crimes society regards as the worst, knelt by his bed and asked Jesus Christ to forgive him and to come to live in His life. That was all he did! Jesus did the rest. Now David works as a pastor of a church in the North of England. Can some honest atheist explain what happened?

Alison Stewart never knew a stable home life as child, and it was hardly surprising that eventually she would turn to drugs and prostitution to try to find fulfilment. Instead she found addiction, homelessness and abuse. She went on nine different drug rehabilitation courses all to no avail, as her life spiralled into increasing misery and meaninglessness. In a last desperate attempt to get out of the trap of addiction, she went to a Christian centre for drug addicts. After just three days a lady sat down with her and lovingly explained to her the gospel. Alison heard, for the first time in her life, of the God who loves her, who came into this world and died paying for her sin, and how the risen Jesus has the power to forgive and change her life. She prayed asking God to do just that, and in a moment she was set free from her addictions, and has found a new, purposeful life. Let the atheist explain that, please.

Professor Michael Clarkson was the professor of Veterinary Parasitology at Liverpool University. He came from an atheistic background in which his father had been a member of the Freethinkers. Yet as an undergraduate at university he had attended a lecture entitled ‘The Impossibility of Agnosticism’, in which he was challenged to read the Gospel of John. As he did so, he became convinced of the truth of Jesus and was to turn from all that was wrong in his life, and to turn to Jesus as His Lord, Saviour and Friend. Sixty years since then, despite many tough times in life, he has no doubt about the validity of the Christian message and the reality of a true and living God.

I once remember hearing Professor Norman Nevin, the professor emeritus in Medical Genetics at Queen’s University, Belfast. As a pioneer scientist, whose discoveries concerning the value of folic acid have affected lives across the world, he explained to a huge crowd in Northern Ireland his absolute confidence that the Bible is totally reliable in all areas and the impact that Jesus has made on his life.[xv] And this is the sort of man Dawkins calls idiotic!

What God has done for these four people – and millions like them – He is willing to do for you today. The Bible says that the fool has said in his or her heart that there is no God.[xvi] If you are willing to leave unbelief and your sin, then ask God to become your Lord and Saviour. If that seems a step too far, perhaps you would at least read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and allow the real Jesus to introduce Himself to you. He loves you as you are – but He loves you too much to leave you as you are.

Because Jesus has paid for sin on the cross, He will forgive you if you turn to Him. As Jesus has risen from the dead, He will give you the power and the desire to live for Him. Then, when it comes to eternity, you will find that the sin which would condemn you to hell has been dealt with. Heaven is not a reward, it is a gift for all who trust the Lord Jesus in a personal way. Hell is for those who refuse and reject the offer of new life in Jesus. The Bible teaches that God desires that none should perish and promises that if we seek for God we will find Him. In fact we will find that He has been patiently seeking for us.

Today, scientists are on a quest to find a grand unified field theory. They long to discover the ‘glue’ that brings quantum theory and astrophysics under one force or theory. Actually, it is God Himself who is the unified field they are looking for. There is a God-shaped gulf in every human being and, as it is God-shaped, only God can fill it. Only God can hold all things together, and through the finished work of Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us on the cross, we can come to know Him now and for eternity.

It is not easy to turn away from an established position of atheism, but honesty requires it and God will help you if you are willing. Neither is it easy to carry on parading in the Emperor’s new clothes.

Question 4: What is God like?