THE IMPORTANCE OF LOGIC IN CHRISTIANITY
FOR A SOUND DOCTRINAL, SPIRITUAL & MENTAL LIFE
Intellectual Reasons for the Faith, part 1: Why believe
in God?
Why believe in God? We can’t see Him. We can’t feel Him.
We can’t hear Him. We
can’t touch Him. And human emotions and zeal were
never designed to establish any universal truth: in fact, I know of at least
one Christian who later rejected the notion of God after realizing that when he
had believed in Him it was due to his highly charged emotional need/state. After he came off
his emotional high, he asked himself ‘now was this real or just an experience?’
After his emotions subsided and he had time to think, he wondered if it was all real or just an emotional way to
cope with life. Apart from reasons (natural,
Scriptural and doctrinal), once the
energy and excitement of the emotions are gone, many have left the faith
because they did not have any intellectually good reasons to continue to believe. This is a
well-established problem among Charismatics who constantly have to go back to
church to “recharge their faith” with more positive “thinking” (which they call
“faith”) only to go home to continue the fight with their doubts by some type
of zealous emotional religious activity. Some end up leaving the faith while
others continue the fight with their emotions and religious zeal. Those who try to
work on their faith through their emotions never really get to the place where
they believe that Christianity is true beyond any shadow of doubt. By the way a
person who stays in Christianity merely
for personal practical reasons really does not think that Christianity is all
about absolute Truth—the metanarrative
(universal absolute truth that applies to all people at all times regardless of
how anyone feels about it)! A person who stays
in Christianity for merely pragmatic
reasons really has no confidence that Christianity really is all about the
Truth. What a
person needs is reasons to believe—
his emotions simply cannot get the job done. Note what Paul said about the
unsaved Jew that ‘they had a zeal for the God, but not
in accordance with truth.’ Their zeal was as apparent as it was fanatical and
it was for the true God.
However, they would still end up in Hell because of rejection of
Christ. Truth simply cannot be established on human sentiments. Zeal was not the
answer. What they needed was Truth. And Truth is what Christianity is all
about.
Without
good reasons for the faith, the
person simply either leaves the faith or continues to play the religious game.
If he does not leave the faith, the person will sooner or later default to a
mindset of faith in faith—which
really is a faith that has been bifurcated from truth, a faith that has been separated from truth. I do need to add: once a
person believes in Jesus for eternal life, even in the midst of a great deal of
emotionalism, he is still save forever, for all it takes is just a modicum
of faith/truth to receive eternal life. However, without reasons the person simply lives by faith in faith not because it is
absolute truth, not because it is the metanarrative, but because it works and
makes their lives more bearable in some way. Among other things such a person
is not a seeker of truth because deep down he has become postmodern and no
longer believes in absolute truth that applies to all people. The only “truth”
the person is interested in is defending what works for him. He has stopped
seeking truth because truth simply is not an issue in his life—look at the
average believer today! Considering the fact that Christianity is the only philosophical system that
celebrates metanarrative Truth, it is aberrant for any believer not to be
interested in truth for truth’s sake rather than a “truth” that only helps him.
Christ is the Truth and came to testify to the Truth and for a believer not to
be a truth-seeker, i.e. a true philosopher (“love of wisdom”), really speaks of
a deep down skepticism regarding the reality and/or value of Truth. Such
“faith” of a Christian has been separated from truth!
Faith without truth is nothing but nonsense! And nonsense has come and boy has
it come both inside and outside of the Church!
So why do you believe in God? What are the reasons? Say
you just gave someone the gospel, and he responds by “I can’t believe in Jesus
because I do not even believe in God—let alone the Bible,” and he adds “why do
you believe in God?” Here
are some of the things that an emotional or a postmodern Christian would say
(things that have nothing to do with reasons or the Bible): makes me feel better…. works for me….because
I just know it is true…. because I felt Him come into my heart….because you
just “gotta” believe man…. because I have seen Him
work in my own life….because that was the way I was raised.
I think we can all agree that the
unbeliever does not give a whit about all of that “stuff.” These are not reasons. No reasonable person is going
to believe in God because of your experience, background, what works for you,
and certainly not because of your emotions. Furthermore, the unbeliever
deserves a good answer. The Bible commands us to defend the Christian faith by
giving a reason for the hope that is
in us and to know how to answer the
unbeliever (1 Pet. 3:15; Col. 4:6). The Bible commands us to give answers, and
the world demands answers. People want answers to their questions. People have
objections to Christianity.
They do not believe everything we believe: they do not believe in
God, the Bible, Jesus as God, or the metanarrative of Christianity. Do not
expect people to take a blind leap based on your
faith.
Back to our question: Why should
anyone believe that God exists? BECAUSE THERE ARE GOOD REASONS TO
BELIEVE IN GOD!! Let’s look at
three reasons:
#1 - Because of obvious
design factor: every design must have a designer. The anthropic principle tells
us that from the very moment that the universe starts it was finely tuned,
perfectly pre-adapted for human life. There must have been a mind behind it.
Biologists tell us that when they look through their microscope and they look
into the cell they see that there is enough information in a one celled animal
to fill a thousand volumes of the encyclopedia. Now no reasonable/sane person
would believe that a thousand volumes of the encyclopedia resulted from an
explosion in a printing shop. There must have been an intelligent being behind
the information.
#2 – The Big Bang: even
scientists tell us that the universe had a beginning. Of
course everything that has a beginning had
a beginner. If this universe began with a Big Bang (however many years ago) and
it has been expanding ever since, and if you contract it back, it contracts
down to nothing: no space, no matter, no “nothing.” Once there was nothing and then bang and there was something, just like
in Genesis 1:1 where we are told God created
everything out of nothing (BARA). Robert Jastrow, the
famous agnostic astronomer, wrote a book called God and the Astronomer in which he said that all of the evidence
points to a supernatural origin of this world “just like the Bible says.”
#3 – The Moral Argument:
every moral law has a law giver. Every prescription has a prescriber. We all
know there is a moral law. We all know that the killing of non-threatening
innocent life is wrong, stealing is wrong, bigotry is wrong, defamation of
someone’s character is wrong, lying is wrong, et al. The fact that there are moral laws means
that there must be a moral lawgiver—a source for those moral laws.
If we just put these three reasons together we have a God who is
moral, who is also the omnipotent creator of the universe, and who is also the
designer with a plan. What
we have is the God of the Bible! The same God that reason and science points to is the same
God that Scripture points to. When a person understands the reasons (both inside and outside of
Scripture) then he is able to move out of his shadows of doubt. When a person
understands the reasons and the importance of reasons then he realizes how
unreasonable, irrational, and illogical it would be to not believe in God in
light of the evidence. Instead of having difficulty believing in God, he has
difficulty seeing how someone could not believe in God in light of what we
know about life and the universe. In other words, by orienting to reasons he
would have difficulty not believing in God and realize who irrational (mad,
insane, absurd, nuts) it would be to believe that all this came from nothing by
its own nothingness which nothingness designed it all and which nothingness
gave us moral law. By orienting to reasons it is hard not to believe in God.
The only way someone could not believe in God in light of these reasons is to take
an irrational (illogical, insane) leap of blind faith for which they have no
reasons. Any honest atheist will frankly admit, when confronted with these
issues, that he has no reasons for disbelieving in God. All he has is his irrational leap of faith in
atheism that denies the very basic laws of science and humanity. He
too has a "religious" zeal - but not according to established
body of knowledge/science.
While reason and science point to
the God of the Bible, how do we know that the Bible is the infallible Word of
God? Once we
establish that belief in God is in accordance with reason, and that it would be
irrational not to believe in God in light of the evidence, what about the
Bible? How can we establish it by reason? In the next DDR, we will look at the
rational reasons behind faith that the Bible is in fact the supernatural
inerrant Word of God.
Doctrine
matters!
Don