Archives for March 2016

The Blind Faith of Atheism (Part 1 of 4) – Human Limitations

God created and sustains all things. His every work bears His fingerprints and signature, giving such clear, comprehensive, and compelling testimony to His power and genius that all people are without excuse for not worshipping and giving Him thanks. Believers and unbelievers, alike, swim in a sea of evidence for God’s nature and existence. But, for the sake of argument, let’s ignore this basic fact for a moment and ask the question: How much knowledge is necessary for an atheist to know that God does not exist?

Infinite Knowledge
The short answer is knowledge of everything in the universe and beyond. In other words, one must have the omniscience of God to legitimately deny the existence of God. Or put another way, one must be God to deny God.

The Garage
Yet, all people are subject to great human limitations. If I can’t know the contents of my neighbor’s garage without looking inside it, how can I possibly know what is beyond the three or four dimensions of my existence or on the other side of the universe?[1] Can we trust the opinion of people concerning ultimate realities when they have a hard time remembering where they put the car keys?

Baseless Opinion and Limited Perspective
Atheism, therefore, rests on faith; faith in the authority of human opinion and faith in a presumed ability to know what cannot be known by people with great human limitations. Is it any wonder that Psalm 14:1 says, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘there is no God’”? God’s words to Job are instructive:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Now gird up your loins like a man, and I will ask you, and you instruct Me! Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding, who set its measurements, since you know?” (Job 38:1-5 NAS)

And as God’s words through Isaiah remind us:

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and marked off the heavens by the span, and calculated the dust of the earth by the measure, and weighed the mountains in a balance, and the hills in a pair of scales? Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD, or as His counselor has informed Him? With whom did He consult and who gave Him understanding? And who taught Him in the path of justice and taught Him knowledge, and informed Him of the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales…. All the nations are as nothing before Him, they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless (Isaiah 40:12-17 NAS).

A Proper Perspective
Indeed, a proper view of God provides a proper view of our limitations, and the limitations of those who would deny Him: “Thou hast made my days as handbreadths, and my lifetime as nothing in Thy sight, surely every man at his best is a mere breath” (Psalm 39:5 NAS). And while all atheists will eventually meet the God they work so hard to deny, we need not be intimidated by their arguments of faith and unfounded opinion until they do. So, the next time you feel intimidated by the sophistication and confidence of atheists or the thickness of their books, remember that they don’t know what is in your garage, let alone what is on the other side of the universe.

[1] See Craig Biehl, The Box: Answering the Faith of Unbelief (Carpenter’s Son Publishing, 2015).

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The Box: Answering the Faith of Unbelief by Dr. Craig Biehl

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Speculation About God Apart From His Revelation Is Worthless

God is infinite. And people? Well, not so much. In fact, God is so great that we could never know Him if He did not stoop down to reveal Himself to us. “’For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways,’ declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts’” (Isaiah 55:8-9 NAS). One of the most basic and important truths for right thinking and living is our human limitations before an infinite God. We do well to be still and know that we are not God. As created and limited, we depend on God for all things, including knowledge of Himself and His world.

Guesswork and Wondering in the Dark
And given that God is infinitely beyond all things and we depend on Him for all knowledge, one person’s speculation about God and the ultimate nature and meaning of His world is no better than another’s. Apart from God’s revelation, all speculation about God amounts to mere guesswork. Yet, because God is infinitely beyond us and we lack the ability to know anything about Him beyond what He has chosen to reveal to us, we can be thankful He has revealed Himself to us in creation and Scripture. We need not wonder (and wander) in the dark or be shaken by the unjustified speculation of unbelievers.

Know Thy Limits
As created by God in His image, we pursue science to understand and use His works for His glory and the benefit of His creatures. Yet we should do so with the proper understanding of our humble status before the infinite Source and Sustainer of all things. We need wisdom to search out what God has created us to know, and humble reverence to accept our limitations.

It is not right for man unrestrainedly to search out things that the Lord has willed to be hid in Himself, and to unfold from eternity itself the sublimest wisdom, which he would have us revere but not understand that through this also he should fill us with wonder. He has set forth by His Word the secrets of his will that he has decided to reveal to us. These He decided to reveal in so far as he foresaw that they would concern us and benefit us.[1]

Secret Things and Things Revealed
Indeed, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law” (Deuteronomy 29:29 NAS). Because God exists and orders all things, unbelievers know many things about God’s world, make great scientific discoveries, and build a great many things for the blessing and comfort of humanity. Yet, speculation about God and ultimate issues beyond or contrary to God’s explanation produces the false opinions of our limited and fallen perspective, even while elevating our opinion over God’s revelation and authority. God has so revealed Himself that we might experience the greatest blessings in relationship to Him in Christ. Thus, may “grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence” (2 Peter 1:2-3 NAS). The secret things we’ll leave to Him.

[1] John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, vol. 1, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 3.21.1.

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God the Reason: How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith by Dr. Craig Biehl

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The Danger of Practical Deism

Behind all right thinking and a God-honoring view of the world stands an awareness that all things depend on God as their creator and ongoing sustainer. Yet, as important and obvious as this truth may appear, we don’t always appreciate it.

Taking Order for Granted
We are so accustomed to the elements of the universe operating in certain ways that we sometimes take God’s ongoing work of ordering and upholding it for granted, as if the physical laws of the universe can operate independently of His power. After all, everything seems to work the way it did yesterday, last year, or a thousand years ago. We fully expect to wake up in the morning as the same person, in the same house, with the same car we parked in the same driveway the night before.

We study the universe and develop accurate explanations of how it operates, including the stars in the sky, life on the earth, and the smallest building blocks of matter. We use this knowledge to the great benefit (and destruction) of mankind. Yet, we can forget that all these things continue and operate by the ongoing power of God. If God ever stopped exerting His power to sustain the universe for a moment, all things would cease to exist.

Piety Includes a Right View of the World
Believers exert great care to honor God in issues of piety and obedience, yet we sometimes miss how piety and obedience involve how we think about God and that which He created. We are mindful of spiritual opposition to our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the necessity to “put on the full armor of God” to “stand firm against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11), but sometimes forget that the devil’s schemes involve promoting wrong thoughts about God and His world. And promote he does—we are confronted daily with his lies as they increasingly form the fabric of our post-Christian culture. And since our sin displays a kind of practical atheism that exalts our will over God’s will, so we exhibit a practical kind of Deism by viewing the universe as begun by God but operating according to independent physical laws. In this we unwittingly echo the lie that God does not order and uphold all things. We need to take care that we do not affirm the desire of unbelievers to define life and the universe as existing and operating apart from God.

As Christians we acknowledge and study physical laws, but we know them to be the display of how God orders and sustains the universe. The alternative involves the absurd notion of random chance as the ground and explanation of a universe of ordered and uniform laws. Since when and where does random chance produce or sustain uniform and universal laws? God’s ordering of the universe allows believers and unbelievers to make great scientific breakthroughs and, viewed rightly, all such discoveries reinforce our faith in Christ. And so the more we understand the nature and need of God’s ongoing control of the universe, the more we will view the world in a way that honors God as its creator and sustainer, and our dependence on Him for all things. To Him be all the glory, forever.

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God Exists and Remains Unchanged by What People Believe

The very thought sounds almost too obvious to mention, yet the issue underlies discussions with unbelievers more than you might think. The importance of communicating this simple truth to people cannot be overstated, because trust in one’s own ability to answer ultimate questions and interpret ultimate reality apart from God’s explanation has terrible, eternal consequences. One’s personal perspective and opinion forms an inadequate, untrustworthy, and eternally destructive object of faith. All people will meet the God of Scripture someday whether or not they acknowledge His existence and authority.

Thinking Does Not Make Him So
God created and sustains the universe and everything in it, yet He remains independent of all things. His existence and attributes remain unchanged by what anyone thinks, says, or believes. Nonetheless, history and personal experience tell us that many fail to appreciate or accept this simple and important fact. From the Garden of Eden until today people imagine God to be whatever they want Him to be. The golden calf in the wilderness was merely one variation of this universal tendency to define God according to our fallen preference and desires. And while we may not physically carve a block of wood or silver into an object of worship, we do so mentally when we imagine God to be other than what He has revealed Himself to be, as if thinking makes Him so.

Faith in a Guess
I recently encountered an atheist admonishing Christians to stop worrying about his eternal destiny because he did not believe in God and therefore would never meet Him when he died. Our worry, he thought, was “misplaced.” Weekly, I am told by a patient where I minister that nothing awaits us beyond our earthly life. “We die and that’s it,” she says. When I ask how she knows this, she appeals to “common sense.” It gives her pause, however, when I explain that our common but limited perspective and opinion cannot determine the nature of ultimate reality. Further, she has entrusted her eternal destiny to a mere guess about something she can’t possibly know, even while Scripture clearly speaks of life and judgment after death. In responding to these two atheists, as with all unbelievers, we help them by explaining the untrustworthy nature of personal opinion as an ultimate object of faith. Every atheist and agnostic will meet their Maker and bow the knee before Christ, regardless of what they believe. They may not thank or even like us for telling them, but we do them a favor, nonetheless.

Enduring Promises of a Faithful God
So, as the world grows darker and atheism and unbelief grow in popularity, we need not be intimidated. Should the whole world follow after contemporary apologists of unbelief, God and His promises remain unaffected. Should the entire academic community and cultured despisers of Scripture and the Gospel laugh at our “naïve” and “foolish” faith in Christ, God and His truth endure forever. Christ told us that the way to eternal life is narrow and that few people find it (Matthew 7:13-14), and if people hated Him they will hate us also (John 15:18-21), so we need not be frightened into compromising or denying our faith by the strength and popularity of unbelief. God is not going to change or go away because people with a misplaced faith deny His existence. The fear of man is a snare (Proverbs 29:25), while God remains our sure and firm foundation, forever.

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The Divine Laws of “Nature”

A Lecture at 35,000 Feet
A few years ago I was privileged to share an airline flight with a physics professor from a prestigious Ivy League university. A cordial and refined gentleman, his gray hair matched his gracious manners and impressive credentials. He was a quark expert, specializing in the sub-atomic building blocks of the material universe, and he did not believe in God. Our flight passed quickly as I quizzed the captive but willing scholar about his studies and the nature of the world. His answers were thoughtful and detailed, with helpful charts, diagrams, and formulas composed on several scraps of paper. Throughout our talk, having asked him every question I could muster about the nature of atoms, quarks, and the laws of physics, he said nothing that contradicted the biblical account of reality. In fact, everything he described presented a marvelous picture of the necessity and genius of God to arrange and uphold all things. From his perspective, however, nothing he said gave the least evidence for the existence of God.

Lost in Space
At one point the professor observed that if you remove all of the empty space from a 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000 meter cube of water, the matter remaining would only fill a cubic centimeter. Interestingly, a few weeks earlier I viewed a lecture where a physicist claimed that even the cubic centimeter of matter could be compressed further, leaving nothing but space!

As the plane began its descent I asked my teacher why everything held together in such an organized, uniform, and consistent pattern when things are mostly space with electrical charges “bouncing around.” He noted that scientists can measure and predict things, and observe that things hold together in particular ways, but ultimately they don’t fully know why. He basically said the same thing about gravity.

God’s Classroom
We know from Scripture, however, that apart from God, nothing would exist, let alone hold together in the amazing order and complexity that animates our universe. Christ “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 13), and “by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible….and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17 NAS). What we discover in science reflects how God orders and sustains the matter and energy He created. What we call a miracle involves God ordering an aspect of His universe in a different way, at a particular time, for a particular purpose. God alone, then, determines what is possible and impossible in the universe, not those who observe and discover how He orders and sustains it.

And so the uniformity or laws of nature are no more than how God orders the various aspects of the universe as He sees fit, for as long as He sees fit. In fact, they are not really laws at all if by “laws” we mean they exist and operate apart from God’s ongoing power. In the end, we do better calling “natural” laws “divine” laws, for apart from God’s ongoing ordering of the smallest measure of matter and energy, no such laws would exist, nor would we exist to discuss such things.

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