Tentpegs

A man asked me to help him deal with an argument tossed at him on a message board. That’s what we’ll do for question 184. Remember to send in questions to tentpegsquestion@yahoo.com and I’ll get to them when I can… unless I have already addressed them. I really need to go through and categorize and index each reply but I have a few other things to do!

The atheist said this “We are all atheists. I just believe in one less god than you do. You don’t believe in Zeus, Lodi, Thor, Venus, Vishnu or any of the other – literally – millions of gods out there. We don’t either. We just go one god further than you do. If you were intellectually honest, you would, too.”

This argument shows up in the works of all of the New Atheists including Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the like. It is the kind of argument that makes sense as long as you aren’t thinking much. Or at all.

Is someone who only uses one brand of soap — rejecting all others — doing so cavalierly or might they have reasons? When you want to buy a car, you do your research and check for prices, reliability, dealer network, and style. Eventually, you reject all but one car. When we look at all those gods we, too, do our research. THAT is why we reject the gods we do. If there had been evidence for the existence of those gods, we would have climbed on board… but there wasn’t.

When we read our Bible, we see checkable facts on almost every page. Some of them deal with science, linguistics, sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, or geography. If the Bible says it is “up” from this place to that… it is “up.” If it says Pontus Pilate was the governor of Judea… he was (even though that was disputed until the 1950s when decisive evidence came to light that the Bible was correct). If it said there was a guy named David… there was (and evidence for his life is just coming to light from archaeology). When it says a man named Cyrus would arise and overthrow one kingdom and replace it with another… it happened.

When the Bible makes statements about science, they don’t contradict facts we know about science. They often go against theories, but theories constantly change and are sometimes discarded so that doesn’t concern us. Facts is Facts as Pogo used to say, and the Bible doesn’t make scientific errors.

The more we know about quantum physics, the more creation makes sense. It doesn’t make myths about suns being produced from dragons make sense. Other scriptures are full of absurdities or are just devoid of checkable data. The Bible checks out.

Atheists often refuse to check out the evidence. While we read their books, they don’t read ours (or, if they do, they read only the books written by fringe Christians). When I speak to atheists, I often list the books I’ve read over the last few months. They are astonished at the amount (I read a lot) and the fact that almost all of them are authored by atheists or agnostics. Then, I ask them what books written by believers they have read in the last few months. In over twenty years of asking that question, I have had about five people (out of thousands) who had read a book that disagreed with them. (NOTE: I didn’t let them use the Bible because I found that most of them haven’t really read it since they were a kid and were forced to go to church. Since they discarded their faith, they only dip into it to get salacious bits they can ridicule. That isn’t the same as “reading” in my view)

I have been to the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Carnegie, the Cleveland Museum, etc. I ask them if they have ever been to a creation seminar or museum. I have never gotten a raised hand.

The reason we have discarded all those other gods is because we looked at the evidence and those gods just didn’t measure up. The reason we didn’t reject Jehovah is because the evidence for Him and His book is quite impressive. We are honest and will look at all evidence. Sadly, that is not true for most atheists — though there are exceptions. The late Stephen Jay Gould was an avowed atheist but, refreshingly, he was very open about his biases. He openly said that should he find evidence for God and creation, he would discard it because it wasn’t “science” regardless of how compelling it might be. I respect that level of honesty, but I am appalled by that level of bigotry.