WHY DOESN’T GOD PROVIDE STRONGER EVIDENCES?

 I am often confronted with this argument: 

·       If god really wanted me to believe in him, he would have provided more evidence. 

As I have tried to argue in this book, He has already provided it…with flashing neon lights! Paul argued that the evidence is so compelling that we are “without excuse” if we reject it: 

·       For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. (Romans 1:19-20, ESV) 

Of course, the skeptic disputes that humanity could be so utterly blind to the evidence for God. However, most people are like the bulimic teen, who is convinced that she is fat, even though she is continually told that she is not. She can observe herself in a mirror, but even the visual evidence does not change her self-perception.  

We are surrounded by the evidence of God but cannot or will not see it. As a seven-year-old, I was exposed to the Lord’s Prayer in public school. When I would get into bed at night, I would clasp my hands together and pray that whole prayer in Jesus’ name. Astonishingly, many incredible things happened for this seven-year-old. However, once I turned eight, I learned that I was Jewish, and that Jews didn’t do that sort of thing. Therefore, I quit praying entirely. I had placed my ethnicity above what I knew about God, reaping disastrous consequences.

How are we to understand such a thing? Why did my ethnic identity take precedence over what I knew through experience? It certainly was not the case that God had disappointed me.

The experimental evidence that humanity is in denial about unwanted knowledge is rampant. In a 2007 New York Times article, “Denial Makes the World Go Round,” Benedict Carey, by virtue of the overwhelming evidence, concludes: 

·       “The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and the author of the coming book Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. “…we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggle out of speeding tickets, and to forgive others for doing the same.”  

     Everyone is in denial about something; just try denying it and watch friends make          a list. For Freud, denial was a defense against external realities that threaten the      ego, and many psychologists today would argue that it can be a protective       defense in the face of unbearable news, like a cancer diagnosis.¹ 

Perhaps we are also in denial about God—the One who makes moral demands and judges us when we fail to obey them. 

Within the world of clinical psychology, observations of denial are extensive and perhaps most apparent in the field of addiction: 

·       The concept of denial calibrates widely shared ideas about language with the clinical regimen that characterizes mainstream American addiction treatment. Since the 1930s, denial has stood at the ideological center of the field and has enjoyed a wide range of professional adherents across otherwise distinctive theoretical orientations. As in so many contemporary addiction treatment programs, the professionals I studied believed that addicts are—by definition—unable to clearly see themselves. By extension, they also believed that addicts are unable to speak about themselves and their problems authoritatively.² 

Psychologist Shelley E. Taylor writes that denial does not just apply to the addict, but to humanity as a whole: 

·       As we have seen, people are positively biased in their assessments of themselves and of their ability to control what goes on around them, as well as in their views of the future. The widespread existence of these biases and the ease with which they can be documented suggests that they are normal.³

Perhaps denying the evidence for God might also be a product of our biases. God not only interferes with our autonomy, awareness of Him also brings disruptive guilt feelings. 

Psychologist Roy Baumeister has extensively researched the relationship between high self-esteem and performance. He concludes: 

·       There are now ample data on our population showing that, if anything, Americans tend to overrate and overvalue ourselves. In plain terms, the average American thinks he’s above average. Even the categories of people about whom our society is most concerned do not show any broad deficiency in self-esteem.⁴ 

In other words, we have a great capacity to believe those things that make us feel good and to deny those realities that threaten our self-esteem and autonomy. This also pertains to the evidence for God, as even skeptics have admitted: 

·       We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated commitment to materialism…we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.⁵ 

·       Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such a hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic.⁶

                                                   v   v   v

The resistance to the evidence for God is well documented, but what can explain it? Jesus taught that God’s existence is very threatening: 

·       “And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.” (John 3:19-20) 

We cannot allow the truth about who we really are to be exposed. Truth is painful, as the Book of Proverbs points out: 
 

·       Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she raises her voice; at the head of the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you. Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded, because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof.” (Proverbs 1:20-25) 

Why do we refuse to listen to wisdom’s rebuke? Because it humbles us, revealing our true identity and conduct. But this is the only way that true wisdom can begin its work in us—by correcting us. That is how the lens through which we see everything else is wiped clean. Only then can we really see. 

  

Admittedly, even we Christians can become insensitive to the evidence around us. As a result, we too cry out to God: “Why don’t You strengthen my faith? Reveal Yourself to me in a miraculous manner!” 

Interestingly, we are in good company. Even while surrounded by Jesus’ miracles, His disciples were unable to incorporate what they had observed into their worldview. Therefore, even they had asked Him to increase their faith (Luke 17:5). When John the Baptist was languishing in prison, racked with doubts, he asked his disciples to go to Jesus to ascertain if He really was the Messiah (Matthew 11). 

The problem was not that they had been granted insufficient reasons to believe. John had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus. He had identified Him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The Apostles had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jesus’ miracles, and yet they still doubted. What then was their problem? 

I think that John the Baptist and the Apostles had become humanly calloused in their hearts. Therefore, the problem was not a lack of evidence, but a lack of fully integrating the evidence into their daily lives. The same holds true for us. Because of our callousness, the Bible warns that we are not to forget what God has done for us. According to the Psalmist, Israel’s problem was not that there was little evidence of God’s mercy. Instead, the Israelites had willfully forgotten what they already knew: 

·       They did not keep God’s covenant, but refused to walk according to his law. They forgot his works and the wonders that he had shown them. In the sight of their fathers he performed wonders in the land of Egypt, in the fields of Zoan. He divided the sea and let them pass through it, and made the waters stand like a heap. (Psalm 78:10-13)  

I find that I too must mentally rehearse what God has done for me. I must be vigilant to remember His multiple evidences. It has been out of these many rehearsals that this book was born.