Apologetics Class - Week 24
Notes
Transcript
When it comes to whether or not we should believe in God,
The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal,
said that it ultimately comes down to a wager.
It’s a bet.
His theory, known as “Pascal’s Wager,”
says that it makes more sense to bet on God’s existence that to bet that He doesn’t exist.
After all,
If we bet that God exists, and we are right,
Then we everything to gain: eternal happiness, heavenly reward, and never-ending joy.
And if we wager this no God, and there is,
We face an eternity in hell.
But, he says,
if we wager that God exists, but it turns out that God doesn’t exist,
then we’ve only miss out on enjoying some of the world’s sinful activities.
Therefore, we should wager (or bet) that God exists.
So what do you think?
Is this a good argument, or a bad argument?
<Discussion>
Richard Dawkins says it’s not a good argument,
Because this isn’t an argument for truly believing in God,
Instead, Dawkin’s says, it’s an argument for FAKING belief in God.
It is, as Mark Twain said, “Believing what you know ain’t so.”
And he’s right.
we cannot force ourselves to believe in something our reason cannot accept.
Sure, we could force ourselves to go to church,
for ourselves to pray to God,
and strive really hard not to sin,
But it would be play acting,
it would all be fake!
Plus, and all-knowing God would surely see right through this.
But there’s a problem with Dawkin’s understanding of Pascal’s argument.
Pascal wasn’t talking about what Dawkin’s is talking about.
Pascal believed there were two tests for belief in God.
The empirical test - which is based upon evidence.
and the existential test, which was based upon our human intuitions and the longing of the human heart.
And those are two very different things.
The empirical test tells the facts about God’s existence,
But the existential tests tells us about our human intuitions and what our hearts know to be true.
And while Pascal believed that Christianity fully passed the empirical test when it came to Jesus and believing in the resurrection.
But he went one step further and pointed out that Jesus satisfies the longings of our heart that no one else can.
He speaks to our souls.
and because of this, the tie goes to placing our faith in Christ.
This is what Dawkin’s got wrong.
Pascal wasn’t saying we should make an intellectual wager,
But a wager on what world view satisfied the longings of the human heart and soul.
This is why the atheist journalist Katha Pollitt said that atheism alone,
as the rejection of gods and the supernatural,
is incapable of meeting our deepest human longings for connection and inspiration,
But maybe art can perhaps fulfill what atheism cannot.
Yeah, I don’t think so…
Because even beautiful art cannot fill the god-shaped whole in our hearts.
Only God can.
In The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope,
Andrew Delbanco argues that a worldview cannot succeed unless it offers hope.
Real hope that overcomes the finality of death and the grave.
And because of this, we can see why Christianity has been so successful,
Because it is fundamentally a message of hope.
Which is why I tell people that even if they don’t believe in Christianity right now,
They should want to,
Because only Christianity is capable of passing both the empirical and existential tests of the heart.
Now, it’s true that there are advantages to believing in atheism.
It gives us complete freedom,
it models bravely in the face of death,
But it still fails to give us hope,
which is why Christianity is a MUCH better world view.
Atheism tells us that, as Dawkins says,
the universe “has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
See… no hope.
Plus, as we’ve seen,
Atheism tells us that most of basic intuitions cannot be trusted,
since they are false positives that come from evolution to help us survive.
Life has no meaning,
Free will is an illusion,
along with beauty, love, morality, and God.
But the fact is, no one can truly believe this,
since no atheists actually lives this way.
Not really.
And it’s because,
deep down,
We know better.
We know that are basic intuitions are reliable.
Which is why belief in God is a self-evident truth that we cannot prove
but can’t not know,
for it is foundational to our existence.
This is why even when we allow our mind to tell us that life is ultimately meaningless,
our heart won’t allow us to live this way.
When we stand in the presence of great art or natural beauty,
we know it is not meaningless.
We know, deep down, that life is not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The message of Christianity is ultimately one of hope.
It is a love story of how the God of the universe entered into His broken creation, in the person of Jesus Christ,
to rescue His lost children so that one day everything could be made new.
It explains why our world is so beautiful, yet so broken.
It tells us that we are not our own,
but that we are His,
and that we were created for a purpose that was not meant to end in the grave.
It is the story of how God invites His lost sons and daughters to return home and rejoin the dance of God by becoming who we were always meant to be.
For these prodigal children, suffering and death are not the end,
but the beginning,
as their loving Father has promised to one day make everything bad come untrue.
In Matthew 11:28, Jesus offers an invitation,
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
In this passage, Jesus isn’t simply inviting tired workers who just finished a long day’s work to come and rest in His home,
He is saying that the God-shaped hole in our hearts can only find existential fulfillment in Him,
and so He invites us in.
And I can tell you from experience, that if you do accept His invitation,
you’ll find that Jesus is everything your heart was looking for and more—so much more.
And so maybe you’re here struggling to believe the Christian story.
Perhaps you maybe even want to believe it,
but you are not totally convinced yet,
and so you think you can’t.
Here’s the thing about that though.
If you are waiting until the day you are fully convinced, it will never come.
No Christian has ever come to Christ because every single one of their doubts were settled.
To be a Christian is to accept Jesus Christ for who He says He is,
the God and Savior of this world
and to place your trust and faith in Him.
While I was in seminary,
my church hosted a discussion forum where we invited non-believers and skeptics to come and study the Gospel of Mark with us.
For several weeks, we broke into discussion groups consisting of Christians and their unbelieving family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
At our last meeting, everyone was asked to write down on a scale of one to ten how confident they were that Jesus was who the Bible claimed He was.
And the responses were quite interesting.
For example, one elderly gentleman who was in his eighties had been a Christian for a large portion of his life,
and so he quickly and boldly wrote down a ten.
Some of the other Christians at our table ranged between seven and nine,
while the non-believers ranged between two and six.
Lastly then, I revealed my number to be a six,
which surprised many of them.
After all, if this seminary student who was their discussion leader was only willing to put a six down for his confidence level,
so what does that say for the believability of Christianity?
But here’s what I told them.
First, I clarified my number,
I explained how some days it was a six,
but many days it was as high as seven or eight, depending on my mood and level of doubt.
I then explained how I am naturally a doubter,
and the disciple I relate with most is “doubting Thomas.”
But, the remarkable thing about Christianity is that it’s not the strength of our faith that matters,
but the object of our faith.
I then shared the following illustration.
Imagine you are on a high cliff and you lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you as you fall is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and it is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainty that the branch can support you, but you don’t actually reach out and grab it, you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out and grab it anyway, you will be saved. Why? It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. This means you don’t have to wait for all doubts and fears to go away to take hold of Christ. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to banish all misgivings in order to meet God. That would turn your faith into one more way to be your own Savior. Working on the quality and purity of your commitment would become a way to merit salvation and put God in your debt. It is not the depth and purity of your heart but the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf that saves us.
In the story, The Life of Pi,
the narrator explains how we all run on the legs of reason only so far and then we jump.
And we don’t have a choice about it
we all put our faith in something even if we don’t realize it.
So the question is not “will you jump?”
but “which worldview will you jump to?”
The reality is, if you are considering faith in Christ, it begins with that first step.
Martin Luther King Jr. once advised,
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
And yes, taking that first step of faith requires repentance—there is no way around this.
You cannot embrace Christ without embracing who He is and what He says.
This means rejecting other non-Christian beliefs and placing your faith and trust in God,
while walking in relationship with Him.
It means believing that Christ is who He says He is
and placing your trust in Him, not yourself, your good works, or even your religion to save you.
This is what it means to be a Christian.
In the book of Psalms, the psalmist invites us, saying:
Psalm 34:8
8 Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!
So how do we do this?
How do we taste and see that the Lord is good?
Where do we start?
I would recommend starting by reading the words of Jesus recorded in the book of Mark.
For myself and many other Christians,
there is a kind of majestic beauty that almost jumps off the pages that causes our heart to scream,
“This is everything I was looking for!”
In Jesus we find what beauty, art, and great music were whispering to us all along.
and this astounding beauty is what drew the disciples in and caused them to say,
“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us?”
At the start of this class, and in the book,
I said there were three reasons why I believed the Christian narrative:
the philosophical, the historical, and the experiential,
but that the last was the least influential for me.
However, by the time I finished writing the book, I sort of changed my mind.
Because the last reason offers something entirely different from the others:
it offers the existential answer to the longing of our heart.
It offers deeply moving explanatory power!
Which is found in Jesus and no other.
This is why I’ve come to believe that Jesus is what our hearts yearn for,
as He alone is capable of filling the God-shaped void in our heart that continually throbs.
So… is your heart aching?
If so, turn to Jesus, and your heart will be satisfied beyond what you ever dared to hope.
Discussion Questions:
