God & Miracles or Atheism? Creation or Evolution?
The problem with writing something like this is that if an atheist or an evolutionist sees or is given this article, there is a strong possibility they will disregard it after reading only a few lines or even just seeing the title. It’s a shame that people claiming to be knowledgable, refuse to hear the whole case before making a judgment. So I do challenge my reader not to judge until you have heard the whole matter, as wise King Solomon said.
When I became an Evangelical Christian, from a nominal Catholic background, I was put into a discipleship program and was soon taught Christian Apologetics. I became quite successful at debating and arguing to point out and to prove that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; that the Bible was true, and Jesus fulfilled Biblical prophecy. Ten years later, I received what is known as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit and came into an experience and relationship with God that I had only previously read about.
For the skeptics, and there are many of them, I want to tell you that not only have I experienced miracles in meetings with healings and deliverances that would be very hard to explain away, but also strange things have happened that are impossible to explain away by natural causes. I’m just going to mention two.
Around three or four years ago gemstones began to appear in our house. We don’t know where they came from or what they were about. We had heard that other Christians had experienced the same phenomena. The gemstones came in different sizes, so we put them in a box. When we looked at them several days later, two different ones had multiplied and now we had two different sets with identical gemstones. Some of those gemstones also increased in size. The last time this kind of thing happened was about two years ago.
I was upstairs at my desk, and our secretary had come up from our downstairs office to assist Kathie at her desk which is opposite mine. I had to go downstairs to the main office to get a ream of paper for my printer which took less than 30 seconds. When I returned I noticed that on my desk there were about nine scattered gem chips of different colors. My secretary was still helping Kathie at her desk. I immediately asked who had been to my desk and put them there. They knew nothing about it. We still have the gems today. But no others have shown up since that time.
In our upstairs office we have a small TV which we watch the news occasionally while we are working. One day the remote was missing and we searched everywhere for several days. It had now been missing for about three weeks. Kathie had gone out of town and I was home alone, so I decided I would clean and vacuum our small office in the hope of finding it. I vacuumed the carpet, crawled under the desks, picking up paper clips, pens etc. I cleaned the top of the desks and finished the vacuuming; still no remote. As I was taking the vacuum out through the office door I felt to look back into the office and right there on Kathie’s desk where we always kept it, was the remote.
Please, skeptics who don’t believe in anything supernatural, explain to me what happened and don’t give me that dumb answer, you just mislaid it. The only answer I can think of is that God wanted us to take a rest from watching all the bad news that comes from the world everyday on TV and concentrate more about His Gospel which is Greek for good news. Angelic activity is quite common in our house and the Bible says that Angels are called to minister to God’s children. So if you try to explain this away with natural causes, it’s been said that a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.
I have come to the conclusion that it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a believer in God. There have been few times in my life when I have tried to become an unbeliever, but it took too much of a leap of faith to do it. Many atheists say that those who believe in God are simple and needy, but history shows us that belief or unbelief in God is not really based on intellect or lack of it, but on something deeper. Granted there are intellectual atheists, but also there are many ignorant simple atheists as well. Also there are many intellectual religious people and also many ignorant ones as well.
My old pastor Dr. D.M Lloyd-Jones believed the Bible to be true from cover to cover, yet he was a great intellectual, from a family of intellectuals. He was a medical doctor and in 1921 assisted the Royal Physician, Sir Thomas Horder and eventually was inline to become King of England’s personal physician, but turned it down to become an evangelical preacher and teacher. He became a member of the Royal College of Physicians. Although he never became the King’s physician, he did for almost 30 years, pastor the congregation at Westminster Chapel in Buckingham Gate; just around the corner from Buckingham Palace the Royal Family’s residence. He was also a close friend of the great Christian writer, thinker, theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer who ran a ministry in Switzerland called La’Abri Community for intellectuals. Lloyd–Jones’ wife was also a medical doctor and his brother was a high court judge, Justice Vincent Lloyd-Jones.
Many of Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writings have been published. One booklet by him is quite significant. “Truth Unchanged Unchanging.” This was especially important as it exposed the flaws of “situational ethics” which is rampant in our modern society.
The modernist says that truth is relative. What may be truth to you; is not truth to me. Or what may be true for you, is not true for me. Truth is relative to each person and there is no such thing as absolute truth. If there is no such thing as absolutes then we have a problem. God is absolute to the believers and irrelevant to the unbelievers.
Just because one doesn’t believe in God or a Creator, doesn’t mean or prove He doesn’t exist. The existence of God doesn’t depend on how many believe in Him. It’s convenient to think that God exists for those simple religious people, but He doesn’t for the modern informed man, so everyone is happy with what they believe; which is the essence of situational ethics. But if something is true, it’s true because it’s true. Nothing can change it. You only have to go the mathematics to understand truth. 2 + 2=4. One can decide that 2+2=3 and argue until they are blue in the face, but it can never be 3. It’s impossible for 2=2 to become 3. The laws of gravity are constant. They don’t change every morning. It’s not a hit and miss thing. Laws need a law giver.
There have been many nominal believers that say they lost their faith in God when World War 2 started. Many Jews became atheists after the Holocaust, which is understandable. And yet many atheists became Christians or believers in God, because of the Holocaust and World War 2, such as C.S. Lewis, who authored “Mere Christianity,” as well as the Narnia books. It depends which way you look at things. I know one thing for sure, that there is joy and peace in believing, but fear and depression in doubt.
It seems that in the evolution camp there are different denominations like in the Christian camp. It’s seems to be that most of the top scientists (which includes some Christians) in their evolutionary beliefs subscribe to what they term “Intelligent Design,” which could be another word for God or creator. Because many of the Universities and Scientific Institutions have been high-jacked by atheists, many of the top scientists keep a low profile on their beliefs to keep their jobs, funding, and positions. A number have been de-funded or fired for believing in “Intelligent Design,” which doesn’t seem a very intelligent thing for the atheists to do.
What I don’t understand is how intelligent atheists use their intelligence to attempt to prove that there is no such thing as intelligence. They say life just happened over millions of years. Chaos reigned for millions of years and somehow order came about through evolution. The Bible says that “the world was without form and void of life and darkness was upon the face of the deep,” so that would go along with the atheistic viewpoint. But then God spoke order into existence. “No!” says the atheist, “there was no plan or purpose it just happened, but not suddenly, it took millions and millions of years to evolve. It came about by chance, the wonders of evolution? Is evolution then a God or should it be the wonders of creation?”
In some ways I’m a simple man. When I walk down a street and see a building, I don’t say, “I wonder how long that took to evolve?” I say, “Who’s the builder?” When I look at the watch on my wrist I don’t say, “I wonder how long it took to evolve?” I say, “Who’s the maker?” I understand their position as saying, if it were possible for me to live that long, I could take watch parts and throw them like a dice on the ground or in the air repeatedly for twelve million years and eventually they would become a watch, But first I would have to throw dirt or matter, like a dice in space, in the air, or on the ground, millions of times for one watch part to be made. I would love to know the odds of that happening, because it would take a lot of believing that I personally don’t have. If everything came together by chance evolution, without design or purpose, then we would not be arguing about anything, because our arguments would by futile and serve no purpose, for purpose wouldn’t exist.
If what atheists propose is correct, then their brains and my brains just evolved mysteriously into order, logic and purpose, assuming that there really is such a thing, as order, logic and purpose; or right and wrong for that matter. Perhaps they believe like Hitler did, “the survival of the fittest and the survival of the master race.” If there are laws in nature, then who was the lawgiver?
Ben Stein is an American actor, writer, lawyer, and commentator on political and economic issues. Ben Stein’s 2008 investigative DVD, “Expelled. No Intelligence Allowed,” is an eye opening exposure of the atheistic agenda in play in many of the Universities and Scientific Establishments both in America and Europe. Ben interviews many from both sides, including atheist, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Sadly, Christopher Hawkins recently prematurely died of cancer, believed to be caused by excessive drinking and smoking.
Dawkins is an English ethnologist, evolutionary biologist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. He is a strong campaigner for getting rid of what he terms as religion and superstition which he believes has been responsible for all the major ills of the world. When he was pushed by Ben Stein on proving his atheistic position, he floundered and pretty much said that he couldn’t explain how it all began, because what happened was possibly a miracle. Also when he was interviewed on TV by Bill O’Reilly, on the O’Reilly Factor, he was taken to task again.
Below is a review of “Expelled No Intelligence Allowed.”
If anyone actually watched Expelled, they’d see that it’s not “thinly disguised creationism” but rather about the freedom to challenge entrenched views. Certain sectors are always taking the church to task for supposedly limiting Galileo’s freedom of inquiry and speech (in a vastly distorted account of what actually happened). Hello! Exactly the same thing is happening now, although they seem rather more silent when the shoe is on the other foot. Ben Stein is merely trying to restore the freedoms of speech and inquiry guaranteed in the US constitution to the realm of academia and the hugely controlled “Big Science” of public science foundations and those funded by philanthropic grants, including the Smithsonian Institute, National academy of Science, and the National Science Foundation.
It’s funny that with all the scientific academic jargon relative to evolution they still can’t answer the simple fundamental question as to the origin of life. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” As I read on a church billboard recently “God made the chicken. He doesn’t lay eggs.” Or for those thinkers, answer this if you can. “What came first, the dinosaur/crocodile or the egg?”
So my point is that one’s position of being a believer or an unbeliever goes far more than merely reason and intellect. It can be because of blind prejudice, a bad experience, becoming disillusioned, because of seeing the hypocrisy of religion, a terrible personal tragedy, or disappointment; or being self satisfied and seeing no foreseeable need in their lives. Some may feel that those who believe are superstitious and immature, because they can’t face life without a crutch. And that’s what religion is to them, just a crutch. So condescendingly they say, “If it makes you happy, go for it, but it’s not for me.” The more militant ones operate in a kind of negative evangelism to win disciples to their side in order close down the voices of believers and stop the gospel from being preached. They have been affective in many schools and universities, in government and in the public market place. “Christmas” is now “Holiday.” “Easter” is “Spring Break,” Bibles are banned in schools; prayer is forbidden, except for Muslims. Cities can no longer put up nativity scenes. Funny how Halloween hasn’t been banned, after all it is religious.
I remember meeting an unbeliever who told me that no one had ever been able to prove or convince him that there was a God. I asked him to let me try. He replied that I couldn’t, because, it wasn’t possible to convince him. I asked him to give me the opportunity to discuss it. He declined again and as he walked off he said, “There you are, I knew that no one could convince me that there is a God.” That’s what I call blind prejudice.
So what about the agnostics? Most of the nominal religious people are really agnostics. They aren’t really sure about the existence of God so they just give lip service to their religion. They see it as an insurance policy, but usually don’t bother, or forget to pay the premiums. They attend their churches or synagogues, or mosques, on special occasions to keep the feasts and holydays. Many don’t even bother to do that as they don’t practice any religion, but are still not sure if there is a God. I guess you could call these the true agnostics.
Really the division is not between religious and non religious, but between spiritual and non-spiritual or (secular). To define this, people that are spiritual in the true sense live longer, happier, peaceful and more fulfilled lives than those who are not spiritual; this is a proven fact. Many non-spiritual people will strongly disagree, but they are wrong, because they are totally ignorant of the spiritual life, which is obvious. They only know and believe in what they can see and feel with their senses. They judge everything by their own thinking and reasoning. If something doesn’t make sense to them, or they have never experienced it, then they reject it. If someone testifies that a supernatural event or a miracle happened in their life, they immediately reject it as nonsense, lies, or superstition.
See how the great intellectual Paul put it, “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1.Cor.2:14).
Most religious people really fall into that same category, because they are linked up with the worldly religious systems. Many are taught that there were miracles in the Bible, but today God no longer works miracles or supernaturally heals people, because we have doctors and scientists and now He uses them. Although they may have a veneer of spiritually, they are more affected by the worldly ways, than the ways of God’s Holy Spirit. This is where churches want to be accepted by the worldly society so they also practice worldly ways. For them is doesn’t really work in the spiritual sense and not that well in the religious realm.
I guess when push comes to shove, and I have to choose between the arguments of some or my unbelieving friends or relatives whether God exists or not, I have to see how they match up to Jesus Christ. If I side with the unbeliever, than I have to say, “Jesus Christ was either a myth, a disillusioned, demented, crazy man; a liar; a false prophet; or a pathetic idealist.”
But He turned his world upside down; or perhaps the right way up. What fallen man has made with His teaching through the years is another matter, but He was who he said He was, the Savior of the World. The great intellectual Paul put it this way.
“For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For the Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (1.Cor.1:21-25)
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah put in well.
“He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. Yet who of his generation protested? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was punished. He was assigned a grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin. He will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors. (Isaiah 53:3-12)
I’m not a betting man, but if I have to choose between putting my trust in Jesus, or in an unbelieving atheist position, I’ll choose Jesus Christ every time. One could say that if I’m wrong I’ve wasted a lifetime, but if I’m right the unbelievers have wasted an eternity. Actually becoming a Christian is not living a hard, difficult, somber, religious life; following rules and regulations and lacking any joy and fun. It’s a wonderful exciting, energizing, life-giving experience.
Jesus said, “The thief does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come that you might have life and that more abundantly.” (John.10:10)
We know that hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives transformed; being delivered from drugs, crime, murder, rape, etc. through meeting Jesus Christ and receiving His power to forgive sin and deliver sinners. They now have a relationship with God, knowing that they are His sons and daughters and He is their heavenly Father. It’s not that a Christian is a better or more worthy person than a non-believer, it’s just that they have a better sacrifice. I would much rather stand before God having Jesus pleading my case as He paid the price for my sins, rather than not accepting Christ’s love and forgiveness and have to pay for my own sins.
As the song goes,
“I owed a debt I could not pay,
He paid a price He did not owe,
I needed someone to wash my sins away
And now I sing a brand new song, Amazing Grace
Christ Jesus paid the debt that I could never pay.”
Although I’m sure that there are good people and citizens that are confirmed atheists who don’t go around killing, stealing, raping, etc. But they don’t seem to be able to set many people free and give them hope for this life, let alone eternity. All they can do is sympathize, with those in trouble, perhaps give them a stiff drink, or some money, or a hand-up, but Jesus delivered the oppressed, healed the sick, and set the captives free, and His true followers can do the same, so which one would you chose, Jesus or the atheist?
David Walters.
Questions? Ask David!