Clarifying the Question
What could be behind the statement “I don’t believe in God”?
It is important to clarify what you mean by “God”. The dangerous assumption that rarely gets challenged is that we all mean the same thing when using the term “god.”
Ask the question: “What kind of God do you not believe in?” Sometimes the answers indicate that they are not talking about the God of Christianity. Common assumptions about God:
- God is angry all the time, looking to punish people for being who they are.
- God lets evil things in the world happen without any consequence.
- Believing in God means opposing reason or science.
- God is impersonal, apathetic to humans.
- Believing in God means supporting a political party that I oppose.
- God supports the rich and powerful and keeps the dominate in power over the weak and marginalized: men, white, old, wealthy over against women, ethnic minorities, young, poor. Today the assumption might include heterosexual/cys gender over LGBTQ+ with the assumption that God might favor an ungodly straight person over anyone who is queer.
It can be disarming to affirm that you don’t believe in a God like that either! Otherwise you will be trying to defend a very un-Christian god.
The OT writers distinguish the true God from the way others use that term.
Exodus 3:13–14 “Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” [14] God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
Notice, God is referred to by the name YHWH (sometimes pronounces Yahweh) throughout the OT. The word may mean “I AM.” English Bibles translate the word LORD. What difference would it make if we used YHWH as God’s name instead of the title Lord?
The risk in referring to God with a title rather than a name is that it can depersonalize him. God is not a concept, a philosophical topic to debate, or a detached, unknowable being. God has revealed himself in personal terms.
“I am who I am” is a way of saying that God is in a class by himself and cannot be classed with others as a peer. He doesn’t offer any comparisons in describing himself. He doesn’t say, “I am like ___” or “I am greater than ___”.
The NT writers also clarify the term God: 1 Corinthians 8:6
[6] yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.
Centering on the Claims of Christ
Paul had no time for philosophical debates about God with the Corinthians who loved such debates: 1 Corinthians 2:2 “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.”
1 Corinthians 15 can be called the bedrock of what Christians believe. This is what we are defending.
1 Corinthians 15:3–6
[3] For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, [4] that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, [5] and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. [6] Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
According to Paul, in v. 14, nothing else matters:
14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.
Dorothy Sayers is right when describing the story of the Bible when she writes, “The plot pivots upon a single character, and the whole action is the answer to a single central problem: What think ye of Christ.
Often Christians think the best strategy for proving Christianity is to begin with the concept of God broadly and then narrow that down to the God of the Bible. The thought is that if you move someone from atheism to theism that you’ve won a crucial battle in conversion. The truth is you may have lost the war.
Christian apologetics begins and ends with Christ. What is more, it has to be Christ’s self-disclosure: What did Christ say about his life and mission? We rely on his interpretation of himself, not our interpretation. We have no basis to claim that Christ was a good moral teacher, merely an example of self-sacrifice, or even a zealous martyr. God’s word is our only guide for the meaning of Christ.
Can God be Proven?[1]
As we can see above, the truths of the Christian faith are given to us through history. 1 Corinthians 15 emphasizes that the object of our faith is what God has done in the past, delivered to us by the testimony of many.
Modern thought has asserted that we cannot have certainty about whether events of the past occurred. Facts, it has been assumed, are only things that can be determined empirically.
Philosopher G.E. Lessing (1729-1781) stated that an “ugly ditch” lies between the events of the past and the present. The implication is that truths of history can never be considered proof, thus ruling out any kind of historical foundation of faith.
Historical Events Us
\ugly ditch of time preventing certainty/
It becomes impossible to “prove” Christianity, based on this assumption, but is Lessing’s “ugly ditch” true.
- According to its own principle, it cannot prove itself. How could Lessing even be sure that he had said these words! Total skepticism about the past is unsustainable and inconsistent. It should lead you to become skeptical of your skepticism.
- The reliability of the past should not be completely rejected; it should be determined by the credibility of the witness who have passed down their accounts. The “ditch” is filled in by faithful testimony of tradition.
- To reject relying on testimony and to only accept empirical evidence as proof is yet another sign of our utter commitment to independence. In other lessons, we’ve shown how the root of sin demands that we think independently from God. We are, however, limited creatures and depend on others for knowledge all the time.
- The assumption behind Lessing’s “ugly ditch” is that God has not spoken. It denies what Scripture claims about itself: that it is a revelation from God. If God is the one giving the testimony about things He has done in the past, then God himself bridges the gap between past and our own time.
Summary: Ordinarily, we should not expect to have absolute certainty of historical events. We are finite creatures and rely on the testimony of other limited creatures in relaying events of the past. If, however, God is relaying events, then we can have certainty of the testimony He gives us.
Can we prove God? It depends on your criteria of proof. Many devise criteria of proof such that it excludes Christianity by definition. These criteria itself cannot be proven and should be challenged.
Why isn’t God’s Revelation Clear to All?
Belgic Confession:
Q2. By what means God is made known unto us
We know him by two means; first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God… Secondly, he makes himself more clearly fully known to us by his holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to his glory and our salvation.
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush aflame with God;
But only those who see take off their shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How would an agnostic or an atheist respond to the claim that God has made himself clearly known?
Romans 1:18-20 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. [20] 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.
Those with saving faith can clearly see God’s revelation in nature and trust it in scripture. Those without saving faith offer alternative interpretations of this revelation: evolution/chance/mythology.
God’s Revelation and Our Faith
God does not enter humanity to show himself to us as a piece of evidence. He isn’t trying to prove himself with magic tricks. He is coming to reconcile you to a relationship with him that you were created for.
God’s revelation is a call, a summons. He is calling you with a message that is both an invitation of love and a call to follow. Faith is your response to that call.
The concept of faith can be a stumbling block for many today. How do you have faith? If receiving God’s revelation is a matter of faith, then how do you conjure up belief?
Let’s remove a few false assumptions about faith:
Faith is not a feeling. You do not acquire faith by sensing God, feeling his presence, or having a religious experience. To wait until you feel God or desire God is to misunderstand the nature of faith.
Faith isn’t the opposite of thinking. It does not involve turning off your brain. It does call us to abandon some presuppositions that we intellectually operate with.
Faith is not an act of making something. Belief in God’s revelation doesn’t make Christianity right. Jesus claims to be Lord whether you respond to him or not. This must change the way you approach the question of faith.
Faith is not a blind leap from a firm neutral position. The call to believe in Christ never comes to someone who has no experience exercising faith. The call to Christ is always a call away from something you already put your faith in.
We all operate with a set of beliefs about God and the world that cannot be proven. The one who says there is no God, the one who says we cannot know God. They both hold those convictions by faith.
Not believing in Christ is a resting your faith in something else. If you are thinking about faith in Christ or having doubts about your faith, remember that there is no “non-faith” option.
Faith begins as an act of the intellect (we understand the truths of Christ). It then involves an act of our will; it accepts the label sinner and receives Christ’s work on our behalf. Faith is completed by action; we rely on Christ for our salvation.
Doubt Your Doubts
There is nothing wrong with doubts. Christian faith is not the removal or suppression of all doubts. Go ahead and explore your doubts, question your faith. God is big enough to handle it. It will hold up.
But, don’t forget to doubt your doubts. Christianity isn’t the only belief that needs to be vetted. Put your doubts up to critique. Can it be justified that there is no God? Can it hold up that Christ was not who he said he was? So few people take this seriously: Can you actually have any confidence at all in your convictions that Christianity is not true?
How Can I Believe in God?
If it isn’t a matter of just investigating evidence in a cold and detached matter, how can I find faith?
The scientific method isn’t designed to answer a question like this. It isn’t a problem with God; it is a limitation of the method. God can’t be put in a test tube, because he is not a part of creation.
So, the way forward must come from a different approach.
As philosopher C. Stephen Evans put it: “To believe in God is to believe the universe has a certain character; to disbelieve in God is to believe the universe…has a very different character.”
You can’t prove Christianity, just as you can’t prove secularity. They are systems of thinking about everything. It isn’t a piece of evidence; it is a viewpoint that changes how you see every piece of evidence.
Tim Keller says the questions we should be asking are, “which system makes the most sense of our experience, of things we know and need to explain? Which one makes the most sense of our social experience and addresses the problems we face? And which of these is the most logically consistent? In short, we need to ask which of these views of reality makes the most sense emotionally, culturally, and rationally.”
How do we find that out?
Some things can only be known by participating with or relating to them not just thinking about them from a distance. The only way to begin finding answers about Christianity is to begin to participate in community.
Christianity is more than just a message that we can put in a little flyer or memorize and pass along to someone. It involves a community that lives and acts in light of who Christ is and what he has done.
The starting point to faith is starting to get involved with this family. This has always been the way people find faith. This is the way of evangelism. Revivalism has twisted this as if you can find God apart from community.
George Lindbeck among others makes this observation about how Christianity spread in the First Century. He writes:
Pagan converts to the [Christian] mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life... they submitted themselves to prolonged catechetical instruction in which they practiced new modes of behavior and learned the stories of Israel and their fulfillment in Christ. Only after they had acquired proficiency in the alien Christian language and form of life were they deemed able intelligently and responsibly to profess the faith, to be baptized.”
If you are trying to find who to have faith, the answer begins by participating in a faith community. Trying it on, understanding its plausibility, experiencing how its answers line up with reality; in the words of Psalm 34, “Taste and see, the Lord is good.”
[1] Substance of this section taken from https://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/lessings-ugly-ditch/