OUR INTUITIVE BELIEF IN GOD

The theory of evolution claims that we have evolved traits that have given us a “survival advantage.” However, one of our imprinted traits is the belief in God. It is now generally agreed that we are wired for God. Child psychologist Deborah Kelemen suggested that young children are thus “intuitive theists” who are “disposed to view natural phenomena as a resulting from nonhuman design.” (Jonathan Wells, Salvo Magazine, Winter 2016, 43)

How peculiar from an evolutionary point of view! If God does not exist, it would seem that this belief would interfere with our attempts to understand the world and to positively adapt to it, cluttering our minds with unnecessary baggage.

Consequently, Kelemen and many others have been attempting to implement strategies to “suppress [theistic] competing intuitive theoretical explanations” by inculcating a secular worldview. We call this “brainwashing.”

Ironically, the belief of God, namely in Christ, has been associated with so many benefits – “survival advantages” – to the believers. Why then would the evolutionist be opposed?  

THE NEW PAGANISM

We are all interconnected. The priestess’ sermon communicated this point very clearly. She had vacationed on an island off the coast of Maine, which had eliminated its mosquito problem by draining the cranberry bogs. However, along with the mosquitoes, they also eliminated the cranberries, birds, night sounds, and an assortment of fish.

From this she reasoned that by changing one thing, all is changed. One action flows everywhere like water. Likewise, we are not merely a single drop of water, but a drop that impacts all other drops. What we say and do will impact those around us, and they will impact those around them.

This principle is undeniable, but what do we do with it? We ritualize it. The church gave water to each person. They were instructed to pour their water into a common trough to symbolize our connectedness. Then, this new batch was combined with last year’s water to symbolize our continuity with the past.

This principle also pertains to our beliefs. When we change one belief, we also change every other belief. When we eliminate God from our thinking, we are compelled to fill this faith-void with substitutes. Clearly, this is exactly what this church has done. It has invented new rituals, accompanied by meditation and an assortment of radical causes.

If meaning, love, validation, and forgiveness are no longer the product of a relationship with God, then alternatives must be found. Instead, we are taught to forgive ourselves and to validate ourselves through our activism. And, we can derive meaning and dignity from knowing that we are like a drop of water that flows everywhere, right?

However, will this awareness truly ennoble us? Will it cause us to respect and cherish every other drop of water? Will it enable us to honor others more?

Another way to envision these questions is to think about the water in a toilet bowl. Even though we might understand that this water will flow into the great oceans of this world and will be gathered up in clouds to water the earth, it fails to give us the honor and dignity that we so need as human beings.

Instead, this is an honor that can only come from the Creator who has created us in His image and has called us to represent Him, endowing us with a value and a purpose far in excess of every other created thing.

It is because of our special status that we are constrained to honor and love all other people.

·       Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. (Romans 12:10)

This is something that we cannot do for every drop on the planet. To love everything is to love nothing.

Besides, it is because I know that God loves, forgives, and cherishes me that I can pass it on to others, however imperfectly. It is because He accepts me that I can accept others. In contrast, we use water for very menial purposes. However, humans are not to be used but to be served.

At the end of the service, we sang, “There is a river flowing in my soul…telling me I’m somebody.”

It cannot be a literal flow of water that tells me I’m somebody, but rather the fact that God has created me and loved me so much that He has died for me. I need to know that I am more than an interactive part of the universe. Instead, I need to know that I am part of God’s family, and that this is something that will never change.

I was disturbed by the sight of this new paganism. I wanted to scream, but I also must love.

EVIDENCE THAT CONSCIOUSNESS DOESN’T REQUIRE A LIVING BODY

What if consciousness exists apart from a physical body? Many would then have to revise their worldview. Instead, it is easier to dogmatically proclaim that this is not within the purview of science.

However, it seems that science can speak to the question of consciousness existing apart from a body:

·       Of the 2,060 patients from Austria, the US and the UK interviewed for the study who had survived cardiac arrest, almost 40 per cent said that they recall some form of awareness after being pronounced clinically dead. http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/670781/There-IS-life-after-DEATH-Scientists-reveal-shock-findings-from-groundbreaking-study

·       Of those who said they had experienced some awareness, just two per cent said their experience was consistent with the feeling of an outer body experience – where one feels completely aware and can hear and see what’s going on around them after death. Almost half of the respondents said the experience was not of awareness, but rather of fear.

One man was able to recall the events in the hospital with “eerie accuracy” after he had “died temporarily.”

This finding has often been reported but often ignored. Why? Perhaps Dr. Parnia’s response is illuminative:

·       “The detailed recollections of visual awareness in this case were consistent with verified events."

·       "This is significant, since it has often been assumed that experiences in relation to death are likely hallucinations or illusions.”

Such findings are ignored, because they do not fit into the prevailing materialistic paradigm that nothing exists outside of the physical world. To suggest otherwise opens the door to considerations about the existence of God – an inconvenient truth.

CAN IRRATIONALITY PRODUCE RATIONALITY?

This is precisely what atheistic, naturalistic evolution maintains -- that mindless natural selection produced a thinking mind with billions of neurons and trillions of neuronal connections.

Atheist turned Christian, C.S. Lewis, doubted that this was possible. He compared mindless evolution to someone with a damaged brain:

·       "Whenever you know what the other man is saying is wholly due to his complexes or to a bit of bone pressing on his brain, you cease to attach importance to it. But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be completely worthless. Therefore, naturalism is completely worthless. If this is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat."

Although I sympathize with his reasoning, I think that it will leave the naturalist undaunted. Why? Because he already believes that our eyes are able to perfectly mirror the physical world because of a mindless process. If our eyes can picture this world, why cannot our thinking also capture this world?

However, our thinking seems to transcend what our eyes can do. While our eyes can see, possibly because of deterministic and invariable laws of biochemistry, which do not require freewill, it is much harder to conceive of our thinking in this way.

Thinking can only be of a very rudimentary nature if it is entirely determined by unvarying biochemical forces. This would mean that our thinking is determined by laws locked into predictable patterns.

However, this is precisely what human thought is not! Rather, for thought to discover truth, it needs freedom and flexibility that deterministic laws do not allow. These forces simply repeat the same patterns. Instead, thought has to be able to take wings and break out of its social, biological, and psychological bonds.

I had this experience as I began to grow into Christ. As a new Christian, I had the strange realization that there were thoughts I wanted to think, but could not, places I wanted to take my mind, where it refused to go.

Over the years I have experienced a greater mental freedom to explore and to discover. I think that this is the same freedom an artist experiences.

However, if all thinking is predetermined, then it would have been impossible for me to experience in such a tangible way the liberation from my mental prison.

THEISM AND SCIENCE

Does belief in God stimulate or stifle science. Atheist Peter Atkins believes that to invoke God is both lazy and detracts from the work of science. Lennox counters with the example of Isaac Newton, for whom a belief in God did not stifle his scientific curiosity:

·       After uncovering the workings of gravity, Newton didn’t say, “Now that I understand gravity, I no longer need God.”

Instead, Newton understood that the source of science, the elegant, immutable that made discovery and science possible rested upon its Creator.

NATURALISM VS. THEISM

Atheist Peter Atkins claims that a belief in God(s) is not only wishful thinking but that it also adds unnecessarily to the elegance and simplicity of science by introducing an external and foreign agent.

However, doesn’t the addition of “naturalism” equally introduce an external and foreign agent – a kind of God-substitute?

Instead, it would seem more reasonable to ask:

·       Which of these explanations (theories) of origins and causation better explains the facts?