I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (32 page)

4. This Moral Law is God’s standard of rightness, and it helps us adjudicate between the different moral opinions people may have. Without God’s standard, we’re left with just that—human opinions. The Moral Law is the final standard by which everything is measured. (In Christian theology, the Moral Law is God’s very nature. In other words, morality is not arbitrary—it’s not “Do this and don’t do that because I’m God and I said so.” No, God doesn’t make rules up on a whim. The standard of rightness
is
the very nature of God himself—infinite justice and infinite love.)

5. Although it is widely believed that all morality is relative, core moral values are absolute, and they transcend cultures. Confusion over this is often based on a misunderstanding or misapplication of moral absolutes, not on a real rejection of them. That is, moral values are absolute, even if our understanding of them or of the circumstances in which they should be applied are not absolute.

6. Atheists have no real basis for objective right and wrong. This does not mean that atheists are not moral or don’t understand right from wrong. On the contrary, atheists can and do understand right from wrong because the Moral Law is written on their hearts just as on every other heart. But while they may
believe
in an objective right and wrong, they have no way to
justify
such a belief (unless they admit a Moral Law Giver, at which point they cease being atheists).

In the end, atheism cannot justify why anything is morally right or wrong. It cannot guarantee human rights or ultimate justice in the universe. To be an atheist—a consistent atheist—you have to believe that there is nothing really wrong with murder, rape, genocide, torture, or any other heinous act. By faith, you have to believe there is no moral difference between a murderer and a missionary, a teacher and a terrorist, or Mother Teresa and Hitler. Or, by faith, you have to believe that real moral principles arose from nothing. Since such beliefs are clearly unreasonable,
we don’t have enough faith to be atheists.

Chapter 8
will cover:

1. Truth about reality is knowable.

2. The opposite of true is false.

3. It is true that the theistic God exists. This is evidenced by the:

a. Beginning of the universe (Cosmological Argument)

b. Design of the universe (Teleological Argument/ Anthropic Principle)

c. Design of life (Teleological Argument)

d. Moral Law (Moral Argument)

4. If God exists, then miracles are possible.
.

5. Miracles can be used to confirm a message from God (i.e., as acts of God to confirm a word from God).

6. The New Testament is historically reliable. This is evidenced by:

a. Early testimony

b. Eyewitness testimony

c. Uninvented (authentic) testimony

d. Eyewitnesses who were not deceived

7. The New Testament says Jesus claimed to be God.

8. Jesus’ claim to be God was miraculously confirmed by:

a. His fulfillment of many prophecies about himself;

b. His sinless life and miraculous deeds;

c. His prediction and accomplishment of his resurrection.

9. Therefore, Jesus is God.

10. Whatever Jesus (who is God) teaches is true.

11. Jesus taught that the Bible is the Word of God.

12. Therefore, it is true that the Bible is the Word of God (and anything opposed to it is false).

8

Miracles: Signs of God or
Gullibility?

“If we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed,
you have no security against it. That is the bargain.”

—C. S. LEWIS

W
HO
M
ADE THE
C
UT
?

We need to pause for a moment and put together the pieces of the puzzle we’ve discovered so far. Remember, we’re looking for unity in diversity. We’re trying to put together the seemingly diverse pieces of life into a coherent picture. So far our coherent picture shows us that truth exists and it can be known. Any denial of truth presupposes truth, so the existence of truth is inescapable. And while we can’t know most truth absolutely due to our human limitations, we can know many truths to a high degree of certainty (i.e., “beyond reasonable doubt”). One of these truths is the existence and nature of God. From the lines of evidence we have reviewed—the Cosmological, Teleological, and Moral Arguments—we are able to know beyond a reasonable doubt that a theistic God exists who has certain characteristics.

From the Cosmological Argument we know that God is:

1. Self-existent, timeless, nonspatial, immaterial (since he
¹
created time, space, and matter, he must be outside of time, space, and matter). In other words, he is without limits. That is, he is infinite.

2. Unimaginably powerful, since he created the entire universe out of nothing.

3. Personal, since he chose to convert a state of nothingness into the time-space-material universe (an impersonal force has no ability to make choices).

From the Teleological Argument we know that God is:

1. Supremely intelligent, since he designed life and the universe with such incredible complexity and precision.

2. Purposeful, since he designed the many forms of life to live in this specific and ordered environment.

From the Moral Argument we know that God is:

Absolutely morally pure (He is the unchangeable standard of morality by which all actions are measured. This standard includes infinite justice and infinite love).

Theism
is the proper term to describe such a God. Now here is the amazing truth about these findings:
the theistic God we have discovered
is consistent with the God of the Bible, but we have discovered him without
use of the Bible.
We have shown that through good reason, science, and philosophy much can be known about the God of the Bible. In fact, this is what the Bible itself says (e.g., Psalm 19; Rom. 1:18-20; 2:14-15). Theologians call this revelation of God
natural
or
general revelation
(that which is clearly seen independent of any type of scripture). The revelation of Scripture is called
special revelation.

So we know through natural revelation that theism is true. This discovery helps us to see not only what the true box top looks like, but what it
cannot
look like. Since the opposite of true is false (chapter 2), we know that any nontheistic worldview must be false. Or, to put it another way, of the major world religions, only one of the theistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—could be true. All other major world religions cannot be true, because they are nontheistic.

This may seem like a grandiose claim—to deny the truth of so many world religions at this stage. But by simple logic—using the Law of Noncontradiction—mutually exclusive religions cannot all be true. Just as certain football players are rightfully cut from the roster of possible players because they lack necessary abilities, certain world religions are rightfully cut from the roster of possible true religions because they lack necessary qualifications.

So, logically, if theism is true, then all nontheisms are false. Now this does not mean that every teaching of a nontheistic religion is false or that there is nothing good in those religions—there is certainly truth and goodness in most world religions. It simply means that as a way of looking at the world (i.e., a worldview), any nontheistic religion is built on a false foundation. While some details may be true, the core of any non-theistic religious system is false. They are systems of error, even though they have some truth in them.

For example, Hindus rightfully teach the truth that you reap what you sow, even though the worldview of Hinduism—that “you” don’t really exist because everything is part of one indistinguishable reality called Brahman—is false. Secular humanists rightfully assert the reality of evil, even though the humanist worldview—which denies an objective standard by which we can detect evil—is false. Mormons rightfully teach that there are moral standards we ought to obey, even though the Mormon worldview that there are many gods is false.
²

This last point about Mormonism raises a question. Namely, why does the existence of a theistic God disprove polytheism? It disproves polytheism because God is infinite, and there cannot be more than one infinite Being. To distinguish one being from another, they must differ in some way. If they differ in some way, then one lacks something that the other one has. If one being lacks something that the other one has, then the lacking being is not infinite because an infinite being, by definition, lacks nothing. So there can be only one infinite Being.

Now one could argue that finite beings (or “gods”) exist that are more powerful than human beings. In fact, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all teach the existence of angels and demons. But that’s not polytheism, which denies that there is a supreme, infinite, eternal Being to whom all creatures owe their existence and to whom all creatures are ultimately accountable. Since theism is true, polytheism is just as false as atheism, pantheism, and all other nontheistic worldviews.

But we digress. The main point is that the right box top for the universe shows a theistic God. That means that only one of the three major world religions has made the cut of truth: either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Now, logically, all of these theistic world religions cannot be true—because they make mutually exclusive claims. Moreover, it could be that none of these world religions is completely true. Maybe they have theism right but little else. That’s possible. However, since we know beyond a reasonable doubt that God exists and that he has the characteristics we’ve listed above—characteristics that include design, purpose, justice, and love—then we should expect him to reveal more of himself and his purpose for our lives. This would require that he communicate with us. One of the three major theistic religions is likely to contain that communication.

H
OW
D
OES
G
OD
C
OMMUNICATE
?

As we have seen, God has already communicated to us through creation and conscience (natural or general revelation), which gives us basic ideas about his existence, power, and moral requirements. But how could God reveal himself so that we could get a more detailed understanding of what his ultimate purpose is for us?

Why couldn’t he appear to each one of us? He could, but that might interfere with our free will. C. S. Lewis has some great insights on this topic. In his
Screwtape Letters,
Screwtape, the senior demon, writes the following to his disciple Wormwood:

You must have wondered why the Enemy [God] does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to human souls in any degree He chooses and at any moment. But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the two weapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use. Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.
³

If God has not chosen the overpowering option of face-to-face interactions with every person on the planet, then perhaps he has cho- sen a more subtle method of communication. (In fact, the Bible says God is not always as overt as we would like him to be [Isa. 45:15].) Perhaps God has manifested himself in some way to a select group of people over many centuries and inspired them to write down what they witnessed and heard from him. Written language is a precise medium of communication that can easily be duplicated and passed on to succeeding generations, yet it also can be easily ignored by those who freely decide that they don’t want to be bothered with God.

So a book would work as a valid but not overpowering means of communication from God. But whose book? Has God communicated through the book of the Jews, the book of the Christians, or the book of the Muslims? How are we supposed to tell whose book, if any, is really a message from God?

T
HE
K
ING
’
S
S
EAL

In the days before mass communications—when all long-distance messages were sent by hand—a king would place his seal on his message. This seal would be a sign to the recipient of the message that the message was authentic—it really came from the king and not from someone just posing as the king. Of course to make this system work, the seal needed to be unusual or unique, easily recognizable, and it had to be something only the king possessed.

God could use a similar system to authenticate his messages—specifically, he could use miracles. Miracles are unusual and unique, easily recognizable, and only God can do them. Even skeptics, by demanding a sign from God, are implicitly admitting that miracles would prove his existence.

What is a miracle? A miracle is a special act of God that interrupts the normal course of events. Atheist Antony Flew put it well: “A miracle is something which would never have happened had nature, as it were, been left to its own devices.”
⁴
So we might say that natural laws describe what happens regularly, by natural causes; miracles, if they occur at all, describe what happens rarely, by supernatural causes.