Ad Veritas: Follow the evidence
It amazes me that there are so many people out there who genuinely believe there is no God. What other explanation is there for anything to exist?
My family had a great opportunity this weekend to listen to Kyle Butt of Apologetics Press discuss Christian Evidences in a series of four lessons spanning from Saturday night to Sunday morning at the Camden Church of Christ.
Kyle laid out in simple terms that the world is confused about the word “faith” as it can have several definitions depending on the context. Some use faith to describe believing strongly in something while not having any real evidence to back the belief up (Leap of Faith). In other contexts, faith is used to describe the way someone lives in their day to day actions (being faithful to your spouse). It is this second type of faith that the Bible requires from believers, not the former. Hopefully there can be no confusion that these are two clearly distinct uses for the word “faith.” No one would accuse someone who says he is faithful to his wife of believing that he has a wife but can’t prove that she is real. It would be equally absurd to assume that someone who, having a wife, and is unfaithful, believes that his wife isn’t real because his faith requires evidence.
Unfortunately, these separate definitions have been blended in many atheistic contexts to obscure the meaning of faith. When a believer says he has faith, this is assumed to mean he believes in God without evidence.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Evidence for a creator can be found anywhere you look. It takes much more “faith” - in the sense of believing something in absence of evidence - to believe in any other origin story for the universe that doesn’t include a designer. But that is exactly what atheists have set out to do, and have come away from their investigation with many ludicrous ideas.
To illustrate the idea of trying to do forensic analysis on an issue with preconceived constraints on what you can and can’t consider as possibilities, Kyle gave a powerful illustration of a person trying to solve a particular mystery. I’ll paraphrase the illustration here.
In this story a person is tasked with explaining how an apple came to have what appeared to be a bite taken out of it. The one rule was that he wasn’t allowed to say that any person had anything to do with it.
The investigator, initially ignoring the rules and taking a more scientific approach, went to the house where the apple was found. He asked the owner of the house if he recognized the apple. He did. The investigator then asked if he had taken a bite out of the apple. He claimed that he did. To confirm the confession, the investigator examined dental records to match the bite pattern, then did DNA sampling, which matched the man in question. He then observed some fingerprints on the apple and matched them with the fingerprints of the person.
Feeling confident in his conclusion, the investigator presented his findings to his friends, and concluded with the statement that they could be fairly certain that this person had taken a bite out of the apple and thrown it aside.
He was then informed that he had cheated on his assignment, since he wasn’t allowed to consider a person as the possibility for the bite.
Not wanting to be labeled as a radical person who believed humans bite apples, the investigator went back to his work, this time looking “closer” at all the evidence. He noticed that the apple tree where the apple originated had some groves in the trunk, and, if the wind had blown a certain direction and with a certain force at the moment the apple fell, it could have blown it against the tree trunk and the grooves in the trunk could have made the grooves that looked like a bite pattern.
As for the DNA, the investigator noticed that there were some worms and snails in the yard and began to research their DNA. He hypothesized that maybe a worm and snail were both going after the apple and somehow their DNA was mixed in such a way and there was some static electricity from the rubbing of the tree trunk that released into the snail and worm at just the right time that their combined DNA was altered to shockingly resemble that of a human.
He wrote the fingerprints off as a random arrangement of grass leaves that the apple rolled over. As for the human that claimed he bit the apple, this was the easiest part of the whole process. He just said the human in the house didn’t exist.
The investigators' friends wholly accepted this explanation and began to publish it everywhere. Sure, there were some skeptics, but they were black balled and labeled as radicals.
This illustration shows just how crazy things can get when you begin an investigative process with a preconceived idea that what the evidence clearly shows just can’t be the real explanation. This is what happens when atheists investigate the origin of our universe, of life on Earth, and of people. While the evidence clearly steers in one direction, leaders of the atheistic movement have chosen to “walk by faith, not by sight.”
I haven’t even begun to share here what some of that evidence is. We may visit that another time. But I’ve led with this concept before presenting the evidence because I believe that an honest person, armed with the scientific method and an open mind, will have no trouble discovering the evidence himself. It's not hidden, and since the beginning it can be clearly seen. (Rom. 1:20)
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me at daniel@richardsonmediagroup.net.
