DO THE BENEFITS OF FAITH IN GOD OFFER ANY EVIDENCE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD?

If Christian beliefs enable the Christian to live longer and more joyfully, does it say anything about the existence of the Christian God? The atheist Richard Dawkins dismisses any connection between the existence of God the benefits derived from a faith in God.

Nevertheless, most will acknowledge the benefits. Dag Hammarskjold, a late Secretary General of the UN, observed:

• God does not die in the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond reason. (Markings)

We are sustained by those things that can only come from God. The late novelist, George Elliot, confessed:

• God is “inconceivable” and immortality “unbelievable” but duty is nonetheless “peremptory and absolute.” (Os Guinness, The Journey, 132)

We need duty and purpose, but these can only be grasped in any absolute sense if God exists. Otherwise, these are merely the accidental and arbitrary products of evolution, social whim, or merely just a bio-chemical reaction.

According to the Deist Ben Franklin, we even need God for a moral society:

• If men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it? (119)

The benefits even extend to our most intimate relationships, as former atheist, Patrick Glynn, reports:

• A 1978 study found that church attendance predicted marital satisfaction better than any other single variable. Couples in long-lasting marriages who were surveyed in another study listed religion as one of the most important “prescriptions” of a happy marriage. (God: The Evidence, 64)

Glynn also relates religious belief to better physical and emotional payoffs:

• “Religious belief is one of the most consistent correlates of overall mental health and happiness. Study after study has shown a powerful relationship between religious belief and practice, on the one hand, and healthy behaviors with regard to such problems as suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, depression, even, perhaps surprisingly, levels of sexual satisfaction in marriage, on the other” (61).

In contrast to this, the atheist experience is admittedly dismal, although it might commence with a sense of freedom from constraints. Jean-Paul Satre confessed that, “Atheism is a cruel, long-term business.” Bertrand Russell described his atheistic religion in this manner:

• The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain… Brief and powerless is mean’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. (Why I am not a Christian)

H.J. Blackham, a former director of the British Humanist Association, wrote:

• The most drastic objection to humanism is that it is too bad to be true. The world is one vast tomb if humans are ephemeral and human life itself is doomed to ultimate extinction… There is no end to hiding from the ultimate end of life, which is death. But it does not avail. On humanist assumptions, life leads to nothing, and every pretense that it does not is a deceit. (106)

However, does any of this offer any objective evidence for the existence of God? I would say so. The things that creatures desire and choose tend to bring objective benefits. Even grazing animals tend to eat nutritious greens and to reject the poisonous ones. They know to drink when they get thirsty, to find shade when they get hot, and to rest when they get tired. They are able to make positive adjustments to an objective reality that surrounds them, and they derive benefits from this.

Why then choose to believe that Christians are deluded and yet are deriving unmistakable benefits from their delusion?

BUT ARE WE WIRED TO FLOURISH THROUGH DISTORTED THINKING? Atheists claim that a belief in God represents gross self-delusion. They have many pejorative phrases to describe faith in God: “imaginary friend,” “big-daddy in the sky,”  “complete nonsense,” or “self-delusion.”

However, here is what is incomprehensible about these charges. Delusions put us out-of-touch with reality, especially a “delusion” that lies at the basis of our entire lives. Instead, of assisting us to constructively manage our jobs, relationships, home, and even driving a car – and all of these endeavors require accurate feedback in order to derive positive benefits – delusion about a God who guides our lives and infuses them with a whole range of “illusory” doctrines should interfere with any prospect of a positive adjustment to any of life’s endeavors. Instead, we flourish.

Why? Just consider riding your bicycle blindfolded. You would soon crash incurring great costs. Close to home, consider someone who navigated life with rose colored glasses. He might think that all women secretly love him. Consequently, he would not take “no” for an answer. I knew such a man who was arrested repeatedly for harassment because of his cognitive distortion.

Or consider a woman who was confident that she was performing better on the job than she really was. Consequently, she saw no need for improvement and was eventually fired.

Or just consider the people who are unable to understand others but are confident that they were treating them appropriately, when they really aren’t. Eventually, they lose their friends.

Generally speaking, distorted think causes distorted behavior with negative outcomes. In All in the Playing, Shirley MacLaine had explained her distorted worldview:

• I went on to express my feeling of total responsibility and power for all events that occur in the world because the world is happening only in my reality. And human beings feeling pain, terror, depression, panic, and so forth, were really only aspects of pain, terror, depression, panic, and so on, in me!

How would such distorted thinking affect her relationships? Wikipedia concluded its posting on her this way:

• In 2015, she sparked criticism for her comments on Jews, Christians, and Stephen Hawking. In particular she claimed that victims of the Nazi Holocaust were experiencing the results of their own karma, and suggested that Hawking subconsciously caused himself to develop ALS as a means to focus better on physics.

Her thinking understandably created relational problems, among other things. Why then is it that those who believe in a “heavenly Christian sky-daddy” – an all-encompassing “delusion” – make positive adjustments, while others do not? From an atheistic perspective, this is impossible to understand.

Building Self-Esteem, Self-Deceit, and Self-Acceptance

When the non-Christian is asked, “If there is a heaven, will you be admitted,” the vast majority answer “yes.” When asked why, 95-98% answer, “I’m a good person.”

Are we all “good people?” By what standard have we determined this? It seems that we have merely deceived ourselves into believing in our surpassing moral superiority, as many parallel studies indicate:

• In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, “when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.”

• 25% of college students placed themselves in the top 1%, relative to their ability to get along with others.

• 84% of Medical Residents thought that Doctors influenced by gifts from pharmaceutical companies, but only 15% of the respondents thought that they would be so influenced.

• Psychologist Shelley Taylor writes, “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (Positive Illusions, p.214)

We don’t suffer from a low self-esteem but an inflated and costly one. The more we inflate ourselves, the more we need to justify our inflated esteem against reality and the more scaffolding we need to maintain our façade. While servitude is measured by the incessant need to maintain a front or image; freedom is not having to. It is the freedom to simply accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, and not have to worry about what people might think!

This is the point of humility – not to beat ourselves down but to simply accept the painful truth about ourselves, the truth from which we have always fled, including the fact that we are not worthy of any of God’s gifts.

The Apostle Paul explained why he had to be vigilant against inflating himself and trusting in his moral merit before God:                           

·       But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. (Philippians 3:7-9)

Paul was not arguing that his attainments were rubbish. Instead, trusting in their merit before God was rubbish. Considering himself more deserving than others, because of his attainments, was rubbish.

However, this kind of self-trust is worse than rubbish. It is a spiritual and inter-personal poison. The higher we think about ourselves, the lower we think about Christ and His cross. The more we trust in ourselves and our own attainments, the less we will think about His gift of righteousness. Therefore, Paul actively regarded all those things that had given him a sense of entitlement as manure - nothing that would entitle him to receive anything good from God.

However, manure provides a good basis for growth, as long as we are willing to recognize its utility. Why was Paul so strenuous about this practice of humility? So that he would “gain Christ!” Receiving Christ requires that we see ourselves as we truly are – sinners who need a Savior. It also requires that we see Christ as He truly is – our only hope of deliverance from the darkness of conceit and death.

It had to be broken by decades of depression followed by panic attacks before I was willing and able to see my manure. Once seeing it, I began, with more earnestness, to cry out for the only One who could turn my rotting life into a garden.

Pursuing an accurate self-concept doesn’t simply get us into salvation’s door; it also bears a continual harvest – “the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” Learning more about Him and about us is the “truth that sets us free” (John 8:31-32).

How? In so many ways! As we learn and grow convinced of His all-sufficiency, we learn to put down our guard, to accept ourselves, and then to live the life to which He has called us.

Strangely, as my Savior has become more, and I less, I have been set free from so many self-concerns that had imprisoned me. I no longer obsess about myself but about Him and what He has done for me. As a result, I just want to serve Him.

Quakerism: Silence, Spirit, and Disdain for Theology

In a traditional Quaker meeting, there is no sermon or Scripture. Instead, all sit quietly until the Spirit stirs someone to get up and speak. One of their guiding lights, R. Jones, had written that Quakerism:

• “Turns away from arid theological notions and insists instead upon a real and vital experience of God revealed to persons in their own souls.”

Quakerism prides itself on being doctrine-less. Although Jones insists on turning away from “arid theological notions,” his claim is highly theological. Nevertheless, he is right that God can speak to us in many ways, even directly into our heart and mind, as Scripture even asserts:

• For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. (Romans 1:21)

• "And He, when He comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.”  (John 16:8)

In fact, as Proverbs tells us, the wisdom of God is all around us, crying out to be taken by all:

• Out in the open wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; on top of the wall she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech: “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways? How long will mockers delight in mockery and fools hate knowledge? Repent at my rebuke! Then I will pour out my thoughts to you, I will make known to you my teachings. But since you refuse to listen when I call and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand… (Prov. 1:20-24)

Wisdom is available but rejected. Why? It is painful. It carries a “rebuke.” This is because wisdom first requires us to see the truth about ourselves and repent – the last thing in the world we want to do! It is only after we remove our own blindness that we can see clearly enough to correct others (Mat. 7:1-5) However, according to Jesus, we therefore prefer to hide away in the darkness of denial and rationalizations:

• “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.  Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”  (John 3:19-20)

Consequently, unless we are being drawn into the light of truth we will hate it. In order to cover up this hatred, we might even boast that we are seeking or even that the Spirit is talking through us. In fact, Scripture warns us of our almost limitless ability to delude ourselves:

• Thus says the Lord of hosts, "Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; they speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord. (Jeremiah 23:16)

• Then the Lord said to me, "The prophets are prophesying falsehood in My name. I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility and the deception of their own minds. (Jeremiah 14:14)

• Thus says the Lord God, "Woe to the foolish prophets who are following their own spirit and have seen nothing.” (Ezekiel 13:3)

How is it that we can be so horribly self-deluded? There are two reasons for this – one voluntary and one involuntary. We voluntarily harden ourselves to God. As a result of this, we beckon in the darkness of self-delusion (Rom. 1:18-32):

• But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would none of me. So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked in their own counsels. (Psalm 81:11-12; 2 Peter 2:18-21)

We also struggle against blindness and involuntarily remain in darkness. Growth into the light is a slow process, as Jesus indicated:

• “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples.  Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Without being born-again, we can have little assurance that we are receiving the truth. In fact, it is offensive to the non-born-again:

• The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. (1 Cor. 2:14)

However, when someone does have the Spirit of God, they love the Word of God:

• “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27)

What does it mean to hear His voice and to follow Him? Jesus explained:

• “If you remain in me and my words remain in you… As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.  If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.” (John 15:7-10)

In His Great Commission, Jesus reaffirmed the centrality of His Word – His teachings:

• Therefore go and make disciples of all nations… and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (Mat. 28:19-20)

For Jesus, His teachings weren’t “arid theological notions,” but living and essential truths. Are these Quakers then hearing from God? Not unless they are repenting of their sins and crying out for the mercy of God!

Bad Things and Good People

Do bad things happen to good people? For the vast majority of people, the answer would be “yes!” And because of this, many reject the Judeo-Christian God. To restate the problem – If God is all good and powerful, there can be no possible reason for Him to allow holocausts and tsunamis.

This is certainly the way that Job had thought. He was most righteous among humanity. He had done everything that he was supposed to do, and yet the worst of tragedies befell him. He, therefore, concluded that God was unjust and consequently, didn’t deserve worship:

• "As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made me taste bitterness of soul.” (Job 27:2)

• “All was well with me, but he shattered me; he seized me by the neck and crushed me. He has made me his target; his archers surround me. Without pity, he pierces my kidneys and spills my gall on the ground. Again and again he bursts upon me; he rushes at me like a warrior…yet my hands have been free of violence and my prayer is pure.” (Job 16:12-17)

However, Job’s assessment changed after an encounter with God. God asked Job a series of questions, and Job couldn’t answer one of them. Finally, Job got the point. He was in no position to judge God:

• "I am unworthy - how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer--twice, but I will say no more."  (Job 40:4-5)

• “You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know…My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:3-6)

Perhaps we too need to reassess our indictments against God? Perhaps, like Job, we lack the facts necessary to charge that God is unjust. However, this doesn’t mean that we can’t make moral judgments. But we have to bear in mind that certain judgments might be too difficult for us.

The Christian philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, has made an important distinction regarding the question of “bad things.” If we are sent into a pup tent to see if there is an elephant inside, we can be very confident of our answer. However, if we are instead sent into the same tent and asked if there is a microscopic spider-mite inside, our judgment should be very uncertain. Similarly, Job learned that the judgments that he had been issuing were as uncertain as spider-mites.

We tend to talk glibly about both “bad things” and “good people,” but do we really know enough about these things to indict God? While we might know enough about bad things to not choose to vacation in North Korea, we might not know enough to insist that we know better than God how to run our lives. In fact, we are told that we don’t even know what to pray for:

• We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. [27] And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will. (Romans 8:26-27)

Likewise, this was God’s complaint against Job:

• "Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?” (Job 38:2

We don’t have to be a Bible-enthusiast to see that our judgment is very limited in this area. Surveys show that, while people who win the Lotto had been convinced that the money would change their lives for the better, more often than not, the money destroyed them.

Also, a recent survey revealed that when successful people get the things that they were certain were good, they become less moral and altruistic. Perhaps we don’t know what’s good for us!

So often we see how people who endure great tragedies learn so much through them and become more other-centered. Likewise, tragedy teaches us to treasure the relationships that we now have but sometimes take for granted. Consequently, I enjoy walking through cemeteries and reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. These too remind me to treasure what I have.

Suffering can serve as soul-medicine. Scripture teaches us that it’s a token of God’s love (Hebrews 12:11), an opportunity to become more Christ-like (2 Cor. 4:7-11) and a builder of character (Romans 5:3-5). The prophetic Elihu explained to Job that God used suffering to bring people to repentance and the knowledge of the truth (Job 33:13-28).

Perhaps we can’t see the big picture? Perhaps we don’t even know what are “bad things?” And perhaps we don’t even know who are the “good people?” Job was the best of people, but he finally repented of his ways:

• "I am unworthy how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth. (Job 40:4)

 The New King James Version translates “unworthy” as “vile.” If Job had been vile, what does this say about the rest of us? Perhaps we aren’t the good people we think we are. A truckload of psychological surveys all affirm that we are self deluded about our goodness. Abcnews.go.com (11/9/05; Self-images Often Erroneously Inflated) reports:

·             “In one study of nearly a million high school seniors, 70 percent said they had “above average leadership skills, but only 2 percent felt their leadership skills were below average.” Another study found that 94 percent of college professors think they do above average work. And in another study, ‘when doctors diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia, predictions made with 88 percent confidence turned out to be right only 20 percent of the time.’”

Psychologist Shelley Taylor adds,

·             “Normal people exaggerate how competent and well liked they are. Depressed people do not. Normal people remember their past behavior with a rosy glow. Depressed people are more even-handed…On virtually every point on which normal people show enhanced self-regard, illusions of control, and unrealistic visions of the future, depressed people fail to show the same biases.” (Positive Illusions, p.214)

However, once the psychological torment leaves, self-delusion returns.  Taylor confesses,

·             “When depressed people are no longer depressed, they show the same self-enhancing biases and illusions as non-depressed people.” (p.223)

Perhaps we don’t know much about “good people?” And perhaps we need some “bad things?” More importantly, we might want to reassess our rejection of God.