Friday, April 1, 2016

What Would Conince You God Doesn't Exist?

Atheist Greta Christina wrote about 6 thing that would convince her to believe in God. Here they are:

  1. An Unambiguous Message – Writing in the sky with letters 100 feet high saying “I Am God, I Exist, Here Is What I Want You To Do”
  2. Accurate Prophecies in Sacred Texts
  3. Accurate Science in Religious Texts
  4. The One Successful Religion – The believers in one religion having better lives than those in all other religions.
  5. Inexplicably Accurate Information Gained During Near-Death or Other Supposedly Psychic Experiences

I don’t see six there either. Perhaps she expects God to know what number six is. But here’s the thing, I don’t think she would believe it if writing appeared in the sky. I’ve seen billboards that were signed “God”, but I didn’t assume God had written the message. I assumed some human wrote it. As for accurate prophecies and accurate science in religious texts, the Bible has been shown many times to have accurate prophecies and to mention scientific concepts that were accurate though well beyond the science of the time when it was written. Are Christians going to have lives that are better in Greta Christina’s eyes? Not if Christianity is true, we won’t. And the stuff with near-death experiences: Jesus said that if people wouldn’t believe Moses and the Prophets, they wouldn’t believe someone who came back from the dead.

The world is filled with evidence of God. When I took a biology class in college, the professor was quite atheist, but I saw God’s handiwork in everything he taught us. Our cells are tiny, but every one of them carries a program that is more complex than any computer program ever created. It is more likely that the words “I Am God, I Exist, Here is what I want you to do” would appear in the sky by chance than for our DNA to have appeared by chance.

But Greta asks a question. What evidence would convince you that your belief was mistake? Here are the things I came up with:

  1. The Body of Jesus – If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then my faith is in the wrong person.
  2. … - There’s no point in mentioning anything else. Without Jesus, there is no hope.