I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (3 page)

Finally, we are grateful to David Limbaugh, who not only wrote the foreword but did so with great zeal and insight. His enthusiasm for Christ and his desire to defend the faith inspire us. We hope this book will in some small way help produce more Christians who share those same passions.

Introduction

Finding the Box Top to
the Puzzle of Life

“One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs
is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.”

—PHILLIP E. JOHNSON

THE UNIVERSITY RELIGION professor gave his wide-eyed undergraduate class a clear warning the very first day of the semester. “Please leave your religious beliefs at home!” he demanded. “As we look at the Old Testament, I may make some observations that will run contrary to what you’ve been taught in Sunday school. It’s not my purpose to offend anyone, but it
is
my purpose to be as objective as possible in analyzing the text.”

That sounded great to me. After all, I (Frank) enrolled in that class because I was in the midst of a spiritual search. I didn’t want any religious party line. I just wanted to know if there was a God or not. What better place, I thought, to get some objectivity about God and the Bible than a secular school like the University of Rochester?

From the beginning, the professor took a very skeptical view of the Old Testament. He immediately affirmed the theory that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible, and that many of the Bible’s supposed prophetic passages were written after the fact. He also suggested that the Jews originally believed in many gods (polytheism), but that one God ultimately won the day because the final editors of the Old Testament were “religious-fanatic monotheists.”

Most of the students had no trouble with his analysis, except one young man a couple of rows ahead of me. As the semester wore on, that student became visibly more agitated with the professor’s skeptical theories. One day, when the professor began to criticize sections of Isaiah, the student could no longer moderate his displeasure.

“That’s not right!” he blurted out. “This is the Word of God!”

“That guy’s too religious,” I quietly whispered to the person sitting next to me.

“Look,” the professor reminded everyone, “I told you all at the beginning that you must leave your religious beliefs at home. We will not be able to be objective if you can’t do that.”

“But you’re not being objective,” charged the student as he stood up. “You’re being overly skeptical.”

Some in the class began to heckle the student.

“Let the professor teach!”

“Sit down!”

“This isn’t Sunday school!”

The professor tried to defuse the situation, but the flustered student stormed out and never returned.

While I had some sympathy for the student and could see that the professor had his own anti-religious bias, I also wanted to hear more of what he had to say about the Old Testament, and particularly about God. When the semester ended, I was somewhat convinced that the professor was right—the Old Testament was not to be taken at face value. However, I still didn’t have an answer to my most basic question: Does God exist? I felt completely unfulfilled when the last class ended. I had no closure, no answer. So I approached the professor, who was surrounded by students asking final questions.

“Professor,” I said, after waiting until just about everyone else had left, “thanks for the class. I think I’ve learned a new perspective. But I still have one huge question.”

“Sure, go ahead,” he said.

“I enrolled in this class to find out if there really is a God or not.

Well . . . is there?”

Without a moment’s hesitation he snapped, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I have no idea.”

I was stunned. I felt like scolding him by saying, “Wait a minute, you’re teaching that the Old Testament is false, and you don’t know whether there’s a God or not? The Old Testament could be true if God actually exists!” But since final grades were not in, I thought better of it. Instead, I simply walked out, frustrated with the entire semester. I could have respected a qualified “yes” or “no” with some reasons given, but not “I don’t know”—I could get that from an uninformed man on the street. I expected a lot more from a university religion professor.

I later learned that my expectations were too high for the modern university. The term “university” is actually a composite of the words “unity” and “diversity.” When one attends a university, he is supposed to be guided in the quest to find unity in diversity—namely, how all the diverse fields of knowledge (the arts, philosophy, the physical sciences, mathematics, etc.) fit together to provide a unified picture of life. A tall task indeed, but one that the modern university has not only abandoned but reversed. Instead of
uni
versities, we now have
plura
versities, institutions that deem every viewpoint, no matter how ridiculous, just as valid as any other—that is, except the viewpoint that just one religion or worldview could be true. That’s the one viewpoint considered intolerant and bigoted on most college campuses.

Despite the denials streaming from our universities, we believe that there
is
a way to discover unity in diversity. And if one were to discover such unity, it would be like seeing the box top of a jigsaw puzzle. Just as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are difficult to put together without the picture on the box top, the many diverse pieces of life make no sense without some kind of unifying big picture. The question is, does anyone have the box top to this puzzle we call life? Many world religions claim that they do. Are any of them correct?

R
ELIGION AND THE
B
OX
T
OP

World religions are often attempts to provide a box top that allows you to see how the many pieces of life’s puzzle make a complete, cohesive picture. This picture usually—and for good reason—begins with some sort of claim about God. What someone believes about God affects everything else that he or she believes. When Mortimer Adler was asked why the “God” section was the largest in the Great Books of the Western World series (which he edited), he insightfully observed that it’s because more implications flow from the subject of God than from any other subject. Indeed, the five most consequential questions in life are these:

1. Origin: Where did we come from?

2. Identity: Who are we?

3. Meaning: Why are we here?

4. Morality: How should we live?

5. Destiny: Where are we going?

The answers to each of these questions depend on the existence of God. If God exists, then there’s ultimate meaning and purpose to your life. If there’s a real purpose to your life, then there’s a real right and wrong way to live it. Choices you make now not only affect you here but will affect you in eternity. On the other hand, if there is no God, then your life ultimately means nothing. Since there is no enduring purpose to life, there’s no right or wrong way to live it. And it doesn’t matter how you live or what you believe—your destiny is dust.

So which world religion, if any, answers the God question correctly? Does any religion provide the true box top for life? The common wisdom says no, for a number of reasons.

First, many say it is unreasonable to believe that one religion could be exclusively true. If one religion were really true, it would mean that billions of religious people from every other religious faith are wrong today and have been wrong throughout the centuries. (And that’s a big problem if Christianity is true because Christianity seems to teach that non-Christians are going to hell!) There’s also the not unfounded fear that those who think they have the truth will be intolerant of those who won’t accept it.

Easygoing Americans are more apt to believe that no religion is
the
truth. This sentiment is often illustrated by the favorite parable of many university professors: the parable of the six blind men and the elephant. This is where each blind man feels a different part of the elephant and therefore reaches a different conclusion about the object in front of him. One grabs the tusk and says, “This is a spear!” Another feels the trunk and says, “This is a snake!” The one hugging the leg claims, “This is a tree!” The blind man holding the tail thinks, “I have a rope!” The one feeling the ear believes, “This is a fan!” And the one leaning on the elephant’s side is certain, “This is a wall!” These blind men are said to represent world religions because they each come to a different conclusion about what they are sensing. Like each blind man, we are told, no one religion has
the
truth. No one religion has the complete box top. Religions are simply different paths up the same mountain. This, of course, greatly appeals to the broadly tolerant American mind.

In America, truth in religion is considered an oxymoron. There is no truth in religion, we are told. It’s all a matter of taste or opinion. You like chocolate, I like vanilla. You like Christianity, I like Islam. If Buddhism works for you, then it’s true for you. Besides, you ought not judge me for my beliefs!

The second major problem with truth in religion is that some pieces of life seem to defy explanation—they don’t appear to fit any religious box top. These include the existence of evil and the silence of God in the face of that evil. These are especially powerful objections to anyone claiming that an all-powerful (theistic) God exists. Many skeptics and atheists argue that if one true, powerful God actually exists, then he would intervene to clear up all the confusion. After all, if God is really out there, then why does he seem to hide himself? Why doesn’t he just show up to debunk the false religions and end all the controversy? Why doesn’t he intervene to stop all the evil in the world, including all the religious wars that are such a black mark on his name? And why does he allow bad things to happen to good people? These are difficult questions for anyone claiming that their theistic religion is true.

Finally, many modern intellectuals imply that any box top based on religion wouldn’t be legitimate anyway. Why? Because, they say, only science yields truth. Not only has evolution removed the need for God, they say, but only what is testable in a laboratory can be considered true. That is, only science deals in matters of fact, while religion stays merely in the realm of faith. So there’s no sense trying to muster evidence or facts to support religion, because that would be like mustering facts to prove that chocolate ice cream tastes better than vanilla ice cream. You can’t prove preferences. Therefore, since they insist that religion is never a matter of objective fact but merely subjective taste, any box top derived from religion couldn’t provide the objective picture of life we’re looking for.

So where does all this leave us? Is the search for God and for life’s box top hopeless? Should we assume that there’s no objective meaning to life, and each invent our own subjective box top? Should we be content with the professor’s “I don’t know” answer?

We don’t think so. We believe that there is a real answer. And despite the powerful objections we have identified (which we will address in later chapters), we believe that the answer is very reasonable. In fact, we believe this answer is more reasonable and requires less faith than any other possible answer, including that of an atheist. Let’s begin to show you what we mean.

W
HAT
K
IND OF
G
OD
?

Before we go any further, let’s be sure we’re clear on terminology. Most of the world’s major religions fall into one of these three religious world-views: theism, pantheism, and atheism.

A
theist
is someone who believes in a personal God who created the universe but is not part of the universe. This would be roughly equivalent to a painter and a painting. God is like the painter, and his creation is like the painting. God made the painting, and his attributes are expressed in it, but God is not the painting. Major theistic religions are Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

By contrast, a
pantheist
is someone who believes in an impersonal God that literally
is
the universe. So, rather than
making
the painting, pantheists believe God
is
the painting. In fact, pantheists believe that God is everything that exists: God is the grass; God is the sky; God is the tree; God is this book; God is you; God is me; etc. Major pantheistic religions are of the Eastern variety such as Hinduism, some forms of Buddhism, and many forms of the “New Age.”

An
atheist,
of course, is someone who does not believe in any type of God. To follow our analogy, atheists believe that what looks like a painting has always existed and no one painted it. Religious humanists would fall into this category.

Here’s an easy way to remember these three religious worldviews: theism—God
made
all; pantheism—God
is
all; atheism—
no
God at all. In fig. I.2 theism is depicted as the hand
holding up
the world, pantheism as the hand
in
the world, and atheism as
nothing but
the world.