God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (5 page)

Reason demands that we examine claims made in the name of faith or science in the same way we would examine the ingredients on a pill bottle or food item on a store shelf. Not all claims are equal. Many skeptics assert that the only reliable tests for truth reside in the realm of science. As will be shown, science points to God. Inductive methods exist to test the reasonableness of and
credibility not just for belief in God, generally, but Christianity, specifically.

I hope to demonstrate that
faith and reason
are vital partners and complementary components for the discovery of truth. Tim Keller, a best-selling author and pastor in
New York City
, made this challenge to skeptics: “I urge skeptics to wrestle with the unexamined ‘blind faith’ on which skepticism is based, and to see how hard it is to justify those beliefs to those who do not share them. I also urge believers to wrestle with their personal and culture’s objections to the faith.”
⁵

G
OD OR
S
CIENCE?

Time
magazine’s November 13, 2006, cover story was titled “God vs. Science.” The title alone suggested that one must choose between the two. The tagline to the online edition of the article stated, “We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for
miracles
and for MRI’s. But are the worldviews compatible?
Time
convenes a debate.”
⁶
The debate was between Francis Collins, a
geneticist
and a Christian who wrote about the fantastic evidence for intelligence found in
DNA
in the book
The Language of God: A Scientist
Presents Evidence for Belief
, and Richard Dawkins, a biologist and an atheist. Collins breaks the stereotype of a closed-minded religious person that Dawkins characterizes as people of faith. In fact,
Time
noted before it presented the debate between the two men that a growing number of scientists were becoming more vocal in their support of an alternative to the harsh battle lines Dawkins and his cohorts were drawing: “And to balance formidable standard bearers [of atheism] like Dawkins, we
seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony—that, indeed, science is of God.”
⁷

The article went on to mention scientists like Collins who find no conflict between science and faith and are pointing out the common ground that allows for constructive dialogue. Similarly, physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne has referred to the vital connection between faith and science as “binocular vision.” He explained, “Seeing the world with two eyes—having binocular vision—enables me to understand more than I could with either eye on its own.”
⁸
Remember, the notion being sold to the public is that science deals in fact and religion deals in faith. Yet science has its own tenets of faith, and real faith is based on facts.

S
CIENCE AND
F
AITH

Science is indeed “of God” as
Time
stated. Because the
Christian
worldview pointed to the fact that the universe was designed, it could be rationally understood. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”
⁹
Albert Einstein would concur, “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
¹⁰
They believed the universe was crafted by a purposeful God who created humanity in His image, creatures who could (to borrow Johannes Kepler’s famous phrase) “think God’s thoughts after Him.” To Kepler, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been
imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language
of mathematics
.”
¹¹

When atheists reference the church’s brutal treatment of
Galileo
as a result of his scientific discoveries, they are overstating the real story. It is not typical for faith to so oppose science. First, Galileo, as well as most scientists of that time, were people of faith. Second, he challenged not only the religious views of his day but the scientific and philosophical ones as well. In the end Galileo’s observation that the earth was indeed rotating around the sun had no bearing on any tenet of faith but merely on an interpretation of
Scripture
that would eventually change. Some interpretations of scientific data seemed, at first, to contradict Scripture but later had to be adjusted and ended up confirming Scripture (such as the universe having a
beginning
), so the door swings both ways.

I
NSULTS
A
REN
’
T
A
RGUMENTS

The tactic of insulting the opposition has never worked in this debate. Ridicule and mockery are, in fact, evidence that there is a reluctance to engage theism on rational and theological grounds. Just a few months before the 2012
Global Atheist Convention
in Melbourne was the United States’ gathering in Washington, DC. Keynote speaker Richard Dawkins called for this bitter tone and tactic from all present. “Mock them, ridicule them in public, don’t fall for the convention that we’re far too polite to talk about religion. Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits.”
¹²

He isn’t alone in his emotional grandstanding. The legions of
the unbelieving have learned to cry “reason” while they consistently hit below the belt with one emotional appeal after another. Any mistake made by someone with religious faith is gathered and collected as evidence that because of the mistakes of those who are believers, God isn’t there. It’s a little like saying that because my children make mistakes, I don’t exist.

Peter Hitchens, the brother of Christopher Hitchens, one of the most outspoken atheists of our times, witnessed this firsthand and wrote about this tendency is his book
The Rage Against God
:

The difficulties of the anti-theists begin when they try to engage with anyone who does not agree with them, when their reaction is often a frustrated rage that the rest of us are so stupid. But what if that is not the problem? Their refusal to accept that others might be as intelligent as they, yet disagree, leads them into many snares.

I tend to sympathize with them. I too have been angry with opponents who required me to re-examine opinions I had embraced more through passion than through reason.
¹³

In a
New York Times
review of atheist Lawrence Krauss’s book
A Universe from Nothing
, David Albert identified the unreasonable anger that is exhibited against religion.

. . . it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like [Krauss], in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know,
dumb
.
¹⁴

F
AITH AND
R
EASON
A
REN
’
T
E
NEMIES

Somehow the perception is that believers are afraid to deal with the hard questions that faith can give rise to. The picture is painted that believers must be sheltered from any opposing view and just “quit asking questions.”

Joe Marlin, an MD and PhD student at NYU as well as an atheist, had read
The God Delusion
by Dawkins and many other works that attempted to dispel faith in God. He told me in an interview that at times he was “militant” in his atheism. “Especially when someone would ‘thank God’ for something. I felt they were giving God the credit for something a person had actually done.” He described the process of beginning to doubt his doubts about his atheism and meeting consistently with a person of faith and openly, objectively dealing with his questions. He said, “Reason actually led me to God not away from Him.”
¹⁵

When something happens that we don’t understand, suggesting the occurrence is simply “God’s mysterious ways” is not abandoning reason and blindly accepting everything in the name of faith. If a drunk driver kills an innocent family, we ask, why did this happen? The reasonable answer is that it happened because someone was careless and illegally drove a car while impaired, and the death of an innocent family was the result. But the real question is, why did God let that happen? Couldn’t He have stopped it? We hear of stories of divine intervention, so why didn’t it happen in this case? When we appeal to mystery, we are simply acknowledging that there are many things we don’t know. That certainly doesn’t mean we live our lives with a fatalistic resignation. We should continue to seek for answers to
these great questions. Many times the real mystery is in grasping the motivations of people who do the things they do.

In the next chapter, we will talk in more detail about
evil and
suffering and attempt to address the perplexing question of why bad things happen in our world.

F
AITH
I
S THE
P
RODUCT OF
T
HINKING

Faith involves reasoning, remembering, and researching or study. Faith is hard work. We have to do our part to understand what God is promising, grasp the conditions of those promises, review the evidence of His faithfulness in the past, and hold on to our convictions about this regardless of our mercurial feelings, as C. S. Lewis suggestsed:

When I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods “where they get off”, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.
¹⁶

Lewis was saying that faith is actually holding on to what your reason has led you to conclude despite your changing moods. This is almost completely opposite of how it is represented by skeptics. We are called to love God with all our hearts and minds. It is when we apply ourselves to understand, seek
wisdom, examine everything, and hold fast to what is true that we discern the right path and make the wise decisions about our lives and our world.

F
AITH
I
NVOLVES
T
HREE
K
EY
I
NGREDIENTS

Faith is the basis of all our relationships with one another and with God. In a marriage, we pledge faithfulness—our fidelity—to one person. Committing adultery is therefore called
infidelity
. Business is based on trust. Two parties make an agreement and pledge through a contract to each meet various obligations. In cases of both marriage and business, there are three key ingredients to faith:

1.
Knowledge:
the specific details of the agreement
God chose to communicate with us through words. “In the beginning was the Word,” begins the gospel of John. The knowledge of the Lord is the information He allowed to come into the earth. That knowledge is the bedrock of our faith. When my father told me he had purchased me a car after I graduated from university, I believed him without seeing the car. The basis of my faith was his promise. This knowledge is found not only in the Scriptures (see
chapter 8
) but also throughout nature:

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display
knowledge
.

There is no speech or
language
where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world. (Psalm 19:1–4
NIV
)

God wants you to have
knowledge
of Him. This knowledge comes not only through Scripture but also through the evidence exhibited in the world He created. That which is known about God is evident through that which has been made (Romans 1:20).

2.
Assent
: willingness to enter into a contract
This assent is the product of reason. Having considered the promises and weighed the reality of the evidence to substantiate the specific claim, then we are to agree as a result of thinking and considering a matter. The aspect of assent is critical in that God has given man the right to choose freely, therefore this choice must be sincere and uncoerced. God doesn’t want you to do something against your will. You, therefore, must desire to know Him and have a relationship with Him. “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19
NIV
).

3.
Trust
: belief that both parties will do what they say they’ll do This trust is not blind. It is based on knowledge and evidence that demonstrate the person making the promise is trustworthy.

How important is this to God? It is the ultimate sign of real faith in Him. Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Trust
in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1
NIV
). The Scripture is filled with praises to God for His faithfulness and trustworthiness. “Those who know your name
will trust in you, / for you, L
ORD
, have never forsaken those who seek you” (Psalm 9:10). Trust is possibly the most important ingredient in building a relationship. This is true not only between people but in a relationship with God as well.

U
NBELIEF
I
S THE
P
RODUCT OF
N
OT
T
HINKING