Tag Archive for: Believe

By Al Serrato

To the skeptic, most Christians – certainly most who appear willing to “defend” their faith – may seem a bit one-dimensional, perhaps in some cases fanatical. They seem so convinced of their views, regardless of how bizarre some of these views seem to the unbeliever. Many conclude, then, that the believer is simply biased in favor of what he wants to believe. He has accepted a “bill of goods” without having struggled over where best to place his trust.

But this is not an accurate description of the faith journey of many believers. Indeed, most go through a period of doubt in which they struggle with what they were taught in childhood. That was certainly my experience. Having been raised in the Catholic Church, I was taught doctrines and rituals which were both mysterious and comforting. Until I began law school, though, these beliefs went largely unchallenged, leaving me unprepared to defend what I thought was “the truth.” Encountering highly intelligent people who were not afraid to point out why they viewed my faith as foolish, I began to believe that all religions were pretty much the same – they could provide comfort, but they weren’t really true. Truth, after all, was a relative concept, dependent on one’s point of view and cultural narrative. And science had pretty much shown that there isn’t a need for God. While faith might make a good crutch when bad things happen, it probably did more harm than good in the long run, because it was at odds with reason. These conclusions just happened to coincide with an increasing desire to put the restrictions of Christianity behind me and to put aside whatever feelings of guilt would arise from time to time.

As I look back on it now, I realize that despite my upbringing, I did not actually have a bias to believe in Christianity. My bias, as I was discovering, was to take the path of least resistance. As a practicing Christian, I needed to conform my behavior to something outside myself, depriving me of a certain amount of freedom. Removing the restrictions of religion would allow me to remain “moral” but would also allow me to define morality any way I chose. After all, with no law-giver, there was no reason to comply with rules that I did not make for myself.

Since I knew many believers, I would raise these issues with them, hoping that they could respond to my challenges. Most, unfortunately, would talk about faith as a feeling or remind me that the Church’s teachings were infallible. They would suggest that my skepticism was not pleasing to God and raise the specter of eternal punishment. In short, they were telling me that I was wrong, but not why I was wrong. I would just have to take it “on faith.” They were wrong: I wasn’t persuaded by discussions of how faith would make me “feel” (I already felt good in church) or with threats of hell for failing to follow someone else’s rituals. I also wasn’t satisfied with “infallible teachings.” If in fact the world was broken down into “faith” and “reason” – as my law school friends maintained – then I knew I would side with reason.

I thought this conclusion would satisfy me, but in the end, it did not. Two things continued to nag at me. The first was this concept of truth. As a criminal investigator and then a prosecutor, I had chosen a field in which truth actually mattered. After all, it just wasn’t okay to get a conviction if I had the wrong guy. I became increasingly fascinated with and drawn to the concept of objective truth. From my legal training, I also had developed a strong interest in reason. Concepts such as “the reasonable person” standard and proof beyond a “reasonable doubt” showed that the thinkers who laid the foundation for the orderly society we developed put a great amount of stock in the mind’s ability to reason to a just result. I didn’t know how this applied to religion, and I still suspected that no one religion had the corner on truth, but I made a commitment to myself that I would follow truth where it led. In other words, I realized that I had some strong motivations to ignore the truth, especially when it seemed inconvenient, and I made a promise to myself that I would seek the truth and submit to it, to the best of my ability.

The second problem nagging at me was with the notion that only simpletons adhered to religion. As I learned more about history, I realized that some of the greatest and most powerful thinkers in history grappled with the same questions that troubled me and that they concluded that there is, in fact, a God and that he is the God described in the Bible. These included not just philosophers, but also the scientists who essentially developed what we recognize today as Western science. The more I learned, the more I realized that treating religious belief as an “opiate for the masses” just wouldn’t fly. There was something there, and I wanted to find out what it was.

In sum, then, my journey began with faith and that faith ran into a brick wall that I thought was “reason.” It ended with the realization that the dichotomy between faith and reason was in fact false. The two are in fact compatible. Christianity was never based on wishful thinking, nor is it dependent solely on “faith.” Instead, it was based on specific truth claims about events which occurred in history, and which were verifiable. This evidence supports a conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead, providing a rational basis to place one’s faith in his message of salvation.

Sadly, the nonbeliever accuses those who have taken this journey of having a closed mind. Quite the contrary is true: while my mind is open – to receiving and evaluating new evidence – given what I have seen so far, I am not ambivalent. Can the skeptic say the same?

It is also worth noting that remaining perpetually “on the fence” – unwilling to reach a firm conclusion – brings with it risks as well. In my next post, I will attempt to lay out just what those are.

 


Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2Av6bXX

By Natasha Crain

Today I’m starting a blog series called, “Bad Secular Wisdom.” If you’re not familiar with the term, a blog series is where an author writes multiple posts on a related subject. I’m not normally a fan of such series because I think they get old fast, but in this case there are so many interesting and important topics for Christian parents that fall under the umbrella of “Bad Secular Wisdom,” I’m excited to do it. I’ll be posting once per month in the series, with remaining posts on other subjects.

The reason this series is so important is that our world is filled with bad secular wisdom…little pieces of a godless worldview that spread like a virus and infect the minds of young people before they even realize it. They sound good, but are harmful narratives that kids too often attach to their Christian worldview without understanding the great inconsistencies. My hope is that this series will inspire you to challenge your kids to think critically about each of the subjects we cover.

For the first post, we’re going to tackle the illogical idea that how we live is more important than what we believe.

Is How We Live More Important Than What We Believe?

I first came across the phrase “how we live is more important than what we believe” on a chalkboard outside of a coffee shop last year. I shook my head, thinking the baristas should stick to coffee making. Since then, however, I’ve seen the idea pop up in all kinds of places.

One well-known person who actively promotes this notion is Gretta Vosper. Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister…who’s also an atheist.

In 2015, a review committee from her denomination found that she was “not suitable” to continue in her role because she doesn’t believe in God (a shocking committee conclusion, I know). But Vosper’s congregation has insisted on keeping her as pastor, despite the fact she no longer preaches about Christianity.

If that sounds hard to believe, this quote from one loyal church member will help you understand the mentality of the congregation: “It’s not about coming to hear that I’m a sinner. That is so yuck. This fulfills my need to feel upbeat. The services are more happy and joyful, more interested in community and justice.”

Vosper has authored several books, including one called, With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe. On her website, she emphasizes, “We’re not going to stop trying to make the world a better place. We hope you don’t either.”

Vosper and her church community are clearly committed to living lives that benefit the Earth and those who live on it. They’re presumably doing many good things for society, and that’s commendable. But is Vosper’s claim true, that how we live is more important than what we believe?

As we’ll see in this post, this is bad secular wisdom.

It’s not consistent with atheism or Christianity!

Inconsistent with Atheism

Saying how we live is more important than what we believe presumes there is some way all people should live. No one has an objective basis for claiming that, however, if God doesn’t exist—should implies a moral obligation. But if humans are nothing more than a bunch of molecules in motion, to whom would we be morally obliged? To other molecules in motion? Clearly not. In a world without God, no one can prescribe a way of living for anyone else because there’s no moral authority, and, therefore, no objective basis for doing so. How a person “should” live can only be a matter of opinion.

An atheist who chooses a life of crime because he or she doesn’t believe there’s any moral significance to our existence is living more consistently within the atheistic worldview than one who claims all people should live in a particular way.

Inconsistent with Christianity

The Bible says that what you believe about Jesus has eternal significance:

  • John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
  • Romans 10:9: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
  • And John 14:6 says Jesus is the only way to God: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

From a Christian perspective, how you live cannot be more important than what you believe—what you believe determines where you will spend eternity. To be clear, however, that doesn’t mean the way in which a Christian lives his or her life doesn’t matter. The Bible says that “faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (James 2:17).

A genuine love for God results in a life of good works for God’s glory. Belief and action go hand-in-hand.

Furthermore, only Christians and other theists have an objective basis for determining what it means to do “good” works in the first place. In a godless world, there’s no objective moral standard by which works can even be called good.

The Bottom Line

Anyone, regardless of what they believe about God, can do good things with their life. Christians, atheists, and people with all kinds of other beliefs help the homeless, give money to charities, participate in environmental causes, fight child abuse, advocate for crime victims, and much more. For atheists, doing things like these that Christians and other theists would call good is a matter of preference…one as morally legitimate as a life of crime. While some atheists, like Vosper, might say all people should live to make the world a better place, that’s an objective claim that’s inconsistent with an atheistic worldview. “How you live is more important than what you believe” is a belief itself, and ironically determines how a person lives.

While the lives of atheists and Christians sometimes look similar in the good works they do, the Bible is clear that those similarities don’t make believing in Jesus any less important.

Belief matters…in an eternally significant way.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2oM0gDt


There has been a lot of debate against my recent articles that stems from a common mistake made by atheists. This article is a little more in depth, but if you can get this you will really have something good to chat about with your atheist friends.

Many of you who are Christians may struggle with the arguments made by atheists against our beliefs. You’ve heard it before that believing in God is the same as believing in Unicorns, Fairies, Santa Claus and the like. An opponent challenged me to prove that God wasn’t just another one of these superstitious characters.

Atheists will use these superstitious characters in one of two ways usually: 1) They will show the absurdity of believing in imaginary creatures and use that as an analogy for believing in God, or 2) They will ask you if you believe in Unicorns, Fairies, and Santa Claus and when you say, “no” they will try and turn the tables on you and say, “see, now you show me your evidence for not believing in those things.”

Another very popular argument was born in Stephen F. Robert’s statement made to Theists in 1995 (later popularized by Richard Dawkins) that, “I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

This is a common misunderstanding and conflation of 1st and 2nd order questions. Listen up. This will help you.

A first order question for our purposes explores the “what” of God. In other words, what is the general idea of a being that is God? An answer from Alvin Plantinga explains that this idea of God is something “having an unsurpassable degree of greatness—that is, having a degree of greatness such that it’s not possible that there exist a being having more.”

It is impossible to have two beings (or more) that possess an infinite degree of greatness. It is a metaphysical impossibility.  A universe with two or more omnipotent, or supreme, or infinite beings is absolutely impossible.

Now, a second-order question explores types or the “who” of God. The answer can be many possible conceptions of God.

A Theist rejects all other conceptions of God without being an “atheist” about Thor, Odin, etc. because what makes a person a Theist is not the “who” or type of God but the “what” or nature of God. Rejecting the Thor and Odin “who” type conceptions of god goes hand in hand with the positive acceptance of the Theist “what” type of God. I’m not just disbelieving in the others. I’m believing in One that eliminates the others altogether. It’s like killing a thousand birds with one stone.

So when you ask me to show that God is not a superstition or ask me to prove that Thor isn’t God, you are conflating the “what” is God and the “who” is God questions. The Christian God is outside of time, without matter, and is not confined by the material universe. Unicorns, fairies, Santa Claus, Thor, Odin, Wotan, Zeus, Ashara… are technically still possible in a logical sense, but since they are within time, composed of matter and confined by the universe, they are inferior.

Finally, most people who reject God are rejecting a figure that I would reject also. The “what” of God is often times assumed, as if we Christians believe in a Family Guy type god who sits on a cloud, wears a white toga, and smites people. If we can get on the same page about what God is, a lot of these common questions will answer themselves or just not be applicable.