"God suffered in Christ. He knows what it is like to experience pain."
Allister McGrath
Some atheists picture God as a man with a white beard standing in the clouds throwing down lightening bolts like Zeus and delighting at watching people burn forever in hell. God doesn't want us to be scared into repenting. In other words, God does not want to kill you for His glory. He does not find it delightful nor do the angels in heaven sing and praise the Lord every time a sinner goes to hell.
Isaiah 27:4, 5
Fury is not in Me.
Who would set briers and thorns
Against Me in battle?
I would go through them,
I would burn them together.
Or let him take hold of My strength,
That he may make peace with Me;
And he shall make peace with Me.
He doesn't want us to repent because of His fury or wrath. But He wants us to repent because of His kindness. The angels in heaven rejoice when a sinner repents. Ezekiel said, "God does not delight in the destruction of the wicked."
"God has no pleasure in your death; He is not seeking to magnify Himself by the destruction of so a paltry of foe; He could devour you in a moment; He could burn you up like stubble; and you mistake it if you think that is renown on so poor a field of contest is renown that He is at all aspiring after. This is not what He wants: He would rather something else. Be assured, He would rather you were to turn, and to live, and to come into His vineyard, and to submit to the regenerating power of His spiritual husbandry, and be changed from the nature of an accursed plant to a tree of righteousness. By your death He could magnify the dignity of His Godhead; But He does not want to magnify Himself over to men in this way; He has no ambition whatever after the renown of such a victory, over such weak and insignificant enemies."
Thomas Chalmers
Ephesians 2:1-7
And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together min the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
John 3:16
For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
1 John 4:9-10
In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Revelation 21:4
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.
Facing Terminal Illness
There is growing speculation
on humanity's ultimate destiny—death
and what comes after it, if anything. After this 'Dawkin's Delusion' comes to an end, which I would say is soon, a consideration to religion will eventually be attractive because people will come to terms that science can't fill in all the answers to life's biggest questions, especially about morality. Religion gives one meaning and identity, whereas, atheism says that you are only a product of mere chance. But that's not how the universe works. We live in a cause-and-effect universe. God created everything in the universe and He created man in His image. Initially, God is infinite, He always has been and always will be—God causes Himself to exist—even if that's hard to believe.
The 9/11 tragedy created the impression that religion has a potency to violence, thus making it all the more important for a Christian apologist to address this issue. The main atheist challenges seem to be the following, according to academic debates and discussions with atheists:
- Christianity, like all other religions, leads to violence.
- God is just an invention designed to console losers.
- Christian faith is a leap in the dark without any reliable basis.
- The natural sciences have disproved God.
Responses:
- In the nineteenth century, atheism argued that it abolished violence and tyranny by getting rid of what ultimately cause it: faith in God. Religion can in doubt lead people to do some very bad things. But that is not the real issue. Atheisms argument is: get rid of religion and the world would be safer and kinder. As the popular euphoria at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 made clear: atheist states end up oppressing people. Some of the greatest atrocities of the twentieth century were committed by regimes that espoused atheism, often with a fanaticism that some naive Western atheists seem to think is reserved only for religious people. The real issue is extremism, whether religious, antireligious, or political. The point is simple. All ideals, whether divine, transcendent, human, or invented, are capable of being abused. That's just the way human nature is. And that happens to religion, as well.
- This argument has its roots in the works of the left-wing German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who was argued that the idea of God arises understandably, but mistakenly, from human experience. Religion in general is simply the projection of human nature unto an illusory transcendent plane. Karl Marx argued that belief in God arose from sociological factors, and Sigmund Freud argued that it arose from psychological pressures. Feuerbach's critique is just as effective a criticism of atheism. On the basis of Feuerbach's analysis, it is not simply Christianity but also atheism that can be regarded as a projection of human hopes. Might not his atheism itself be a wish fulfillment? There is a fatal error in Feuerbach's analysis. It is certainly true that nothing actually exists because I wish it to. But does this mean that because I want something to be true, it cannot be? Let me explain. Imagine the man who longs for a drink of water on a long, hot, dusty day. Does water not exist because he wants some? Hardly!
- The prominent atheist Richard Dawkins has famously argued that faith is a "process of non-thinking." His analogy is the belief in the existence of God, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus as being in the same category. Everyone knows that people do not regard belief in God as belonging to the same category as these childish beliefs. Faith in God, Dawkins argues, is like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. When you grow up, you grow out of it. This is amateurish and unconvincing. I stopped believing in those things when I was a child. I discovered God when I was nineteen! A large number of people come to believe in God in later life.
- As the late Stephen Jay Gould, American evolutionary biologist pointed out, "Science simply cannot [by its legitimate methods] adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists." If the God question is to be settled, it must be settled on other grounds. It is this: the sciences are, by their very nature, incapable of answering big-picture questions. As philosopher Gilbert Harman pointed out some years ago, the sciences are not capable of the kind of proof these questions demand. The alleged certainty of scientific atheism is simply an illusion that cannot be defended on scientific grounds. They want to argue that the sciences disprove God. And yet they find themselves unable to justify this by argument, by experiment, or even by an appeal to the scientific community as a whole. It reminds us that atheism itself is a belief system, a set of ideas that cannot actually be proved.
References: Beyond Opinion by Ravi Zacharias; Challenges from Atheism, The New King James Version of the Holy Bible.
