Self-confessed atheists are likely to be infuriated by the suggestion that there is really no such thing as atheism. But the idea that everyone, at heart, believes in God is a soundly biblical one.
To be sure, we should offer unbelievers sound reasons for the existence of God. But we should resist the idea that their professed unbelief is as deep-seated as they might have us suppose.
As has often been pointed out, the Bible never tries the prove the existence of God. …
Although I’m sympathetic to the idea of theistic evolution, and, in any case, do not regard such theories of origins as of fundamental importance, I think it’s worth taking account of the theological objections that have been levelled against Darwinian theory.
Some of these objections were set out by Alistair Donald in this article published in Evangelicals Now in April 2010.
To summarise:-
1. Adam formed by a distinct creative act
Although the precise genre of Genesis 1:1-2:3 is notoriously difficult to pin down, the same is not the case for Gen 2:4 onwards, which is written in standard Hebrew narrative style. …
I was prompted a recent episode of Premier Christian Radio’s ‘Unbelievable’ programme to do a little bit of reading around this subject. That episode featured an interview with noted Christian apologist William Lane Craig, who at the end of last year participated in a panel discussion which also involved Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins repeated his oft-expressed view that although the universe seems to be designed, this is illusory. Design implies purpose, and purpose implies mind. There is no mind, and therefore not purpose or design in the universe at large.…
I suppose that the most wide-recognised form of Christian apologetics is evidentialism. As practiced by Josh McDowell (Evidence That Demands a Verdict, etc.) and others, this type of apologetics seeks, as the name implies, to pile up historical, scientific, and others kinds of evidence to prove that Christianity is ‘true’.
Presuppositionalist apologetics, on the other hand, insists that the natural mind is so perverse that it is incapable of being converted by evidence and argument. …
In chapter 4 of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins attempts to demonstrate that the existence of God is extremely improbable. He gives pride of place to his ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit’. This argument, he says, is ‘the big one’.
The starting-point is the comment attributed to Fred Hoyle that the probability of life originating on earth by chance is no greater that a tornado in a junk-yard asembling a fully-functioning Boeing 747. Theists often like to say that that the universe is so complex that only God could have brought it into being.…
Earlier in the year, Professor Paul Davies was interviewed for the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.
Professor Davies is committed to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. He thinks, however that rather than earthlings receiving intelligible radio messages from aliens, still less being actually visited by beings from elsewhere in our galaxy, it is more likely that we will one day detect some kind of ‘beacon’, which we will infer could only have been caused by intelligent life. …
It is not only theists who commit God-of-the-gaps fallacies (“I can’t explain it, therefore God must have done it”).
Stephen Hawking, in his new book ‘The Grand Design’ claims that there is no need to postulate a god who lit the blue touch paper and set off the Big Bang:-
…Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
‘For seven years,’ (writes Tom Wright) ‘I was College Chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford. Each year I used to see the first year undergraduates individually for a few minutes, to welcome them to the college and make a first acquaintance. Most were happy to meet me; but many commented, often with slight embarrassment, “You won’t be seeing much of me; you see, I don’t believe in god.”
‘I developed a stock response: “Oh, that’s interesting; which god is it you don’t believe in?”…
Antony Flew, the noted philosopher, died in April of this year. Albert Mohler has a helpful post explaining why Christians can be encouraged by Flew’s rejection, at the age of 81, of atheism, but why we should also be warned by his rejection of Christianity.
Flew was the son of the Methodist minister, and until his mid-teens regarded himself as a conscientious, if unenthusiastic, Christian believer. But reflection on the problem of evil (how can God be both all-loving and all-powerful?)…
Arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens repeatedly held out the following challenge to religious people:-
“Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”
Hitchens seems to think that he has religious folk stumped. “As yet,” he claims, “I have no takers.”
I am very far from wanting to defend ‘religion’ in general. So I would respond by asserting that it is not difficult to find multiple instances of moral acts that would only be performed by followers of Jesus Christ, and others that would more prevalent amongst followers of Jesus Christ than among non-believers. …
