Atheism: Bumping into Reality

Reality on our Side

Does God Exist?

-This is the most decisive issue of life, because our answer to this one question sets an irrevocable course for everything that follows.

-We don't have to guess when it comes to answering this question, instead God’s fingerprints are all around us.

-The real world is THICK with evidence for God.

-This study reviews details of reality that Christianity can make sense of but Atheism can not.

Define Terms

Theism- A BELIEF in a personal God.

“The heavens declare the Glory of God; And their expanse declares the work of His hands”  -Psalm 19:1

Atheism- A BELIEF there is no personal God.

“The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”  -The Atheist

‘God is the BEST EXPLANATION for the way things are’

Explanatory Power- What best explains the features of the real world?

-If you have 2 ideas, and the first idea explains the question well and the second idea doesn't.  Then the first idea has better explanatory power, therefore is more likely to be true.

As Christian Theists we have a powerful ally…Reality.  Reality is on our side…Francis Schafer noted that ‘if Christianity is true, then it is an accurate view of reality.’  This means that all human beings are really made in the image of God, and all humans are living in the world God made.  Even if they don’t believe it.…Therefore if Christianity is true and it's the better explanation of reality, atheists who deny God (and are living in His world) must be living in denial of reality and sooner or later will have a run in with reality that makes no sense for them but perfect sense for Christains.

Richard Dawkins (Atheist)- “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”

-These remarks above completely agree with his world view of atheism.  HOWEVER…. in his book ‘The God Delusion’ he says “The God of the Old Testament is…a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully”.....This complaint against God, makes no sense given his world view (atheism)…So Dawkins is living in a contradiction on this issue.  He talks on one hand like an atheist, but when his guard is down his natural understanding of morality that God built into him is coming out…

In the example above, When an atheist contracts himself, this is a point of tension…. When we see an atheist having a run in/bumping into reality, Francis Schafer says when atheists raise those kind of moral complaints against God, and they are trading on our (Christian) world views, not theirs…that’s where we can draw attention to it and use that on our behalf.

Christianity has better explanatory power, in other words, it fits the world the way that atheism does not on some very important issues.  And these are issues that resonate with our deepest intuitions with reality, our deepest understanding about the way the world actually is.

3 Bumps

These are features of reality that create serious problems with the world view of the Atheist, but support Christians worldview perfectly.

Bump of Stuff

Bump of Bad

Bump of Me

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