A Faithful Atheist?
According to Richard Dawkins, famed atheist and author, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
If this quote offends you, you’re not alone. Unfortunately, snobbery and derision are often the opening volleys to any discussion involving the existence of a supreme deity.
But that doesn’t bother me.
I don’t get my undies in a twist because someone finds my Christian faith to be a bit beneath their modern sensibilities. No, I work myself into a dither because most Christians fail to ask the logical follow-up.
“Compared to what?”
Unfortunately, I find that most Christians have sheepishly accepted our culture’s claim that faith in God is for children and old folks. Modern, sensible adults no longer need stories about saints and sinners and the promise of Eternity. We know that the universe was created by the Big Bang and life as we know it evolved from the “primordial ooze”. We have a secular materialist explanation for all of life’s big questions and no longer need to turn to the Bible for answers.
In my opinion, this blind belief has led to the watering down of the Christian faith and has caused most mainline denominations to focus their attention on how to stay “relevant” instead of on how to lead their congregations to salvation.
All the while, Christianity continues to precipitously plummet across the western world. This is certainly true in Europe and is also happening in the US at an alarming rate.
But let’s go back to that logical follow-up question for a moment.
“Compared to what?”
If you are going to make the case that Christianity is an illogical worldview, then you must provide a more sensible alternative.
Let’s look at the Big Bang Theory for a moment. The theory posits that the universe began as a “primordial atom” that exploded casting off heavenly bodies in all directions.
Now, to be clear, I have no qualms with the Big Bang Theory. I think it does explain how the universe came into existence along with distinct properties of the universe, such as the cosmic microwave background, that are still observable today.
However, it is odd that mainstream physicists the group that originally derided the Big Bang Theory and its founder, Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, for being “religious fundamentalism at its strongest” are the same group that now see it as proof for their atheism.
The Big Bang Theory is not a clear indication of God’s existence, nor is it “scientific proof” for His non-existence.
At the core of the problem lies this fact.
The Big Bang Theory doesn’t just explain the origins of our universe. It explains the origins of space and time itself. To talk about what came before the big bang doesn’t make any sense from a scientific perspective.
Nothing came before it. It is the beginning of everything. Period.
Note: once you ask about what came before the Big Bang, you have moved from a scientific discussion into a religious debate.
But this just doesn’t sit well with us.
The idea that time itself was created from nothing doesn’t jive with our own experiences about how things come to be. We know that you can’t get something from nothing. Everything has a cause. Humans have spent millennia arguing over this cause.
So… what did come before the Big Bang?
To borrow from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Christians identify God as the “Unmoved Mover” or as Aristotle put it, the “Prime Mover”. He is the original force that brought time and space into being. The book of Genesis tells us, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.”
Or to put it another way: there was nothing, and then God made something… out of nothing.
In the absence of God, an atheist searches for a materialist explanation for the Big Bang. They use theories such as the Multiverse Theory and the Simulation Hypothesis to fill in the gaps left by their worldview.
I’m not going to get into the details of these theories here. If you’re interested, feel free to Google them.
Suffice it to say that neither of these theories can be tested. You can’t confirm the Multiverse Theory any more than you can confirm the existence of God.
Time and space started at the Big Bang. It’s impossible to observe anything that happened before the existence of time itself. And science can’t test anything that science can’t observe.
So, if you choose to believe the Multiverse Theory or that God created the universe, recognize one fact. You choose to believe it. Every supposed cause for the Big Bang requires as much faith as any other – whether Richard Dawkins likes it or not.
Conclusion
At our core, humans are a religious species. Whether it be the God of Calvary or the gods of modern science, we assume faith in the latter and discard our faith in the former as soon it falls out of fashion. We continue in our search for answers to life’s big questions:
- Why are we here?
- What is our purpose?
- Why are our lives valuable?
Make no mistake, modern science has replaced Christianity across much of the western world as the most popular “religion”. However, it is incapable of answering life’s most important questions. At best, it says that “There are no answers.” and “There is no higher purpose.” This is wholly inadequate and is a worldview to which the logical conclusion is nihilism and hopelessness for those that hold it.
Christianity offers more. It offers answers. It offers hope. It offers meaning.
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