World Religions week 4

Rejecting God for Atheism or Doubts

Pg. 38 in “Making sense of God”

Even if one adopts a “doubting” worldview, he may not realize he rejects belief A because of doubt, but he still has a measure of faith in belief B.

“No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion,’ without assuming at that moment that you know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain of that.” pg. 38

List of Atheist Doubts compared to the Christian:

Meeting a real atheist who was not an immoral, unhappy people-hater (misanthrope).

Eph. 2:8-9 We are save by grace alone through faith alone.

being good does not equal a relationship with God any more than being bad does not equal a relationship with GOd.

There are lots of bad people in heaven and lots of good people in hell.

There is no logical reason why an an atheist then might be a far better person than a Christian.

Seeing believers, good people, suffer horribly for no good reason.

I know a guy who turned away from his belief in God for this very reason. I’ve probably known many who have done so honestly, but this guy was one of the few honest enough to admit the reason was because of human suffering did not align with a gracious God.

Is it reasonable to believe that we, humans, who have a finite mind can comprehend the motives of an infinite God? Is that reasonable? Is it reasonable to think that creation, in all its limitations, could discover the complete motives and plans of an infinite God? - No, I do not believe that is reasonable.

That is only reasonable on 2 conditions:

That we are not finite but are also infinite in knowledge

That God is not God.

Witnessing corruption or hypocrisy in a religious institution.

Often the standard used here is a CHRISTIAN/Biblical standard.

Why should one worry about being “christian” enough if Christianity isn’t true eat all?

Folks who turn away from the faith because they think Christians are hypocrites are themselves hypocrites.

You can’t say you reject Christianity because people aren’t Christian enough because you are holding them to the standards you rejected in the first place! That double standard can’t stand logically.

Realizing the basic unfairness of the doctrines of hell and salvation.

It is tough, really tough, to have friends who believe different than you and witness them experience death.

An Indian friend who may believe in Hindu, what do you do when her father dies? Or her Grandmother? Who you know is in hell… How do you handle the weight of that mentally?

We need to remember, this is actually a result of our Western experiences. Living under a democratic republic government. Most people in the world don’t assume the world is run the way we do. Therefore, they would assume God has more authoritative power than we might assume he has.

An unanswerable contradiction or error in the Scripture.

This is quite simply a shallow, uneducated belief. For every “contradiction” one might accuse Scripture of having, there are thousands of pages written on that very contradiction from a PhD dissertation.

If you have an issue with Scripture, do some research on it from appropriate sources and tell me you’re faith won’t be strengthened.