Smoke & Mirrors
- Mike Gunn
- Nov 30, 2004
- Series: Other
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I love atheists and skeptics. I really do! They are above board in their rejection of God, while many "religious" folk simply mask their own insidious rejection by attending church and spouting "Christianese." Even better, atheists and skeptics talk about God and the Bible more often than most "believers" do at Bible studies. And by embodying everything the Bible says about non-belief, they prove to me every day that God exists!
Let me explain. Atheists tend to argue against a god they have not only rejected, but one whom they have ontologically concocted. What do I mean by that? I mean that their arguments tend to follow the reductionist formula, "If there is a God, why doesn’t He do...?" Why doesn't God (an infinite, eternal being) act the way that I (a finite, mortal creature) think he should act? After all, I've got all the world’s answers wrapped up in my 10 lb. brain, and if God doesn't fit my "proven" ideas about him, he can't exist! Right?
I recently came across an article on the Freedom From Religion Foundation website that illustrates the approach. The article is written by a former Baptist firefighter, and its essence is found in the writer’s question: "If Jesus is really God, then he knows that I used to believe, and he also knows that today I am a doubting Thomas, a doubting Peter, a doubting Saul. If Jesus is really God, then why can't he prove his divine reality by performing one little 'miracle'?"
It's the classic atheist question, accompanied by the equally classic presumption that those who don't believe in the Bible are experts at understanding and interpreting it.
So not unlike so many of us who preach from our churches' pulpits on Sundays, the author resorts to biblical proof-texts to support his own claim that "resurrections seem to have been a fairly common occurrence in 1st century Palestine (and not limited to just Bible heroes)," which simply is not true. As a matter of fact, most of Jesus' miracles were performed before very few people, who were then usually told not to let anyone know (as in Mark 3:12 or Mark 7:36).
And even in Jesus’ time men disbelieved despite His miracles (Matthew 11:20-23; 13:58; John 7:5; 12:37), which indicates that skepticism did not originate with the "Age of Reason." If we assume that everything we can know must pass through a preconceived empirical grid, then knowing anything beyond our experience is impossible -- and we’re simply left to trade proof-texts. Stalemate.
But more to the meat of the matter, the firefighter points out that Jesus failed to cure all the sick and feed all the hungry. This, he claims, would be like a firefighter failing to respond to suffering victims -- a comparison which simply cannot be logically made.
In a later, post-9/11 article on the website, our firefighter further writes, "So why is it, then, with so many billions of prayers being said year-in and year-out by millions of Christians all over the world, we have never seen a 'miracle' come in the form of even one resurrection from the dead? I have seen many children die tragically in my profession and do you know what? They are all still dead."
The skeptic has created a god in the image of a firefighter, and then judges said god by the same concocted and finite standard. Is it possible that there is a bigger picture than our own limited view, and we simply don’t always get it? I suspect that we rarely understand the interconnectedness of events that relate to the "choices" that God makes. Supposedly, Galileo and Copernicus long ago proved that we are not the center of the universe -- and if that's true, then
Jesus doesn't exist to grant every prayer mankind makes. The firefighter would apparently prefer it if God set up a prayer e-mail like
Jim Carrey did in Bruce Almighty, responding "Yes to All" simply because we very wise and good humans need proof that God exists.
The irony here is that the skeptic firefighter is actually named Bruce! Maybe he, like Jim Carrey, could be God for a day, week or year. Doesn't everyone want to be God? We all want to be the guy with power, and play Monday-morning quarterback. "Man, if I were God, I'd..." That would be great, I guess, unless of course someone less intelligent and charming than me (you know, a guy like Charles Manson) became God.
Still, even after begging God for a miracle, our Bruce continues his almighty rant by indicating that any miracle short of his own standard just won't do. "The reason nonbelievers don't recognize these miracles," Bruce says he is often told by Christians, "is because we are 'just too arrogant and too blind to see them.' Isn't it interesting, though, that these so-called 'miracles' always seem to come in the form of naturally occurring phenomena, or riding on the coattails of human exertion and teamwork?"
He relates in this same article that finding people alive in the rubble of tragic events like 9/11 is not so much a miracle as a product of probability. From where I sit, Bruce doesn’t miss miracles because he is "too arrogant and too blind to see them." He misses them simply because, like so many of us, there's just too much smoke on the brain.
Still, such skepticism challenges me to stop using the word "miracle" to describe last-minute comebacks by my favorite football team (see Jenn Wright’s article, The Problem of Miracles). And it also reminds me that it's no easier today than it was in Solomon's or Job's time to lift my closed-ended worldview long enough to reveal a world governed by a powerful God working incessantly toward His will and not my own.
Contributed by Pastor Mike Gunn from Harambee Church. An Acts 29 Church planted in South Seattle.
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