Friends, We don't often focus on how to bring non-Christians into the wider fold on this Forum. Can we have some ideas about tackling modern Atheism, please? This is so important, given the rising number of people who have been trapped into logical fallacies by Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. Videos like this are a good example of what we're up against: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODetOE6cbbc God, for most people today, is the ferocious bearded old man in the sky. This is what they mock and deny. Can we not say: "I mock and deny that God too"? How do you personally address an atheist? Do you ever bother?
Today I was thinking a bit about atheism and how we tackle it as Christians... Discovered that a lot of the times when we want to aboard people who do not know Christ we take them as people rejecting God or the Deity idea in general but often times we see these people turning to Buddhism and New Age and all sort of pagan things more than actually taking the stand of atheism as no god. You will hear talks about supreme power and such things and connections with nature and such more often than you will see people fiercely defending the idea that nothing of the sort exists at all. Of course the all-there-is-no- god people are real and they exist but I think they are not the majority as we often address it... Maybe bringing back the sense of wonder will help? That God is actually still working wonders ...
You are right, dear Incense. One of the Wonders we must bring back is the conviction that God is currently - even at this moment - upholding every atom, galaxy, and life-form in the Cosmos. He didn't just set the watch going and leave. The Majesty of God is lost upon atheists, because we have failed in the last 200-300 years. Our "Enlightenment" has mocked God, making Him the bearded old man in the clouds with a white robe. The only Divine Being who can wear a robe is the Lord Jesus - but that's because He took our flesh, for all time to come! We have to get back to this, or else atheists will just see the mockery. These poor people are trapped in Postmodernism. Modernism at least says "show it to my five senses and I will believe it", but Postmodernism says that there is nothing to believe: no absolute truth, only conjectures and theories made up by men to take and hold Power. How do we refute such a sad theory?
I'll get more onto this topic as time permits.(Baby sitting in 20 minutes) But as a little helper one of the best things you can do is read a book called "Unchristian" by David Kinnaman. It's written by a Christian who works for a christian market research organisation and they did a study of non believers (20-40 years old) attitudes to Christianity. I found it a breath of fresh air in the world of Christian writing. It pertains to America but possibly has wider applications to other countries. Another handy hint "street witnessing" is the least effective and most off putting way of getting your message across.
Street-corner gospelling was one of the things that most irritated me when I was an atheist, AnglicanAgnostic. Such people have made the name of Jesus into a clown-like word: a thing to be shouted with senseless emotion, along with "getting saved". It all comes across as silly fanatical rubbish.
Thank you for asking. The witness of former atheists is very important in this day and age, where Atheism is the assumed-logical position of rational, clear-minded people. I always loved history. Around 2008 I was going through my usual cycle of Ancient in Spring, Medieval in Summer, Renaissance in Autumn, and Modern in Winter. Having been particularly interested in the Roman Empire that year, I studied the history of Rome up through the dark ages & middle ages. One name that came to my attention - which I'd never heard before - was Thomas Aquinas. I listened to a lecture off the internet about his thought, and was immediately cut to the quick. His "five reasons" for God's existence were revolutionary, and I dimly realized that in my atheism I had never really thought critically, as he had. I realized I was a "faithful atheist", and he a "thinking Christian" - impossible! In 2009 I met a very intelligent Christian who showed me a book called "The Being and Attributes of God" by Samuel Clarke, an English logician from the 1720s. Any objections I had to the idea of an omnipotent, eternal, infinite Reality were decimated. His argument was principally this: the Cosmos is made up of matter & energy, but matter & energy do not uphold and sustain themselves of their own power, yet they do exist; therefore, there must be a Being which is not matter nor energy, which is Self-Extant, and which gives being to all matter & energy. The question "who created this Creator" was not relevant, because, being immaterial, this Being lacks all quality of "Createdness". The Being simply "Is Itself" - the Necessary Being, giving existence to that which is contingent and passing : in other words, "I AM". The notions of eternity & infinity are very big in Clarke's argument, and subsequently whenever I have doubts about God, I always return to this. The Universe, existing as it does, must have 1. always-been, or 2. at some point must not have been. Were the Universe The Eternal, Necessary Being that has always existed, we should expect that it experiences no change or corruption, because eternity is absolute & uniform. Were the Universe eternal, it would never have reached a point where such a dramatic thing as the Big Bang even happened. The Universe is evolving, expanding, and moving - which automatically disqualifies it from the titles of Eternal and Infinite. Multiverses merely push the question back. The only other option is that Physical Reality was not extant at some point, and must've come into being by the power of some non-physical Cause other than itself. It cannot have caused itself before it existed; that is purely illogical. We have to push back the endless line of contingency and dependency to a Being which "created existence". If the one we call God is created, He's simply not God - and the Creator of that creator is the true God - but the line must stop somewhere, because if it did not, there would not be Any Thing at all. In short, before Aquinas & Clarke I trusted in my own critical thinking & logic, but was dumb as an ox. It was all pure arrogance & presumption. This one humbling moment was, I trust, the first thing that prepared me to receive the Gospel (of man's sinfulness, need for a Saviour, etc.) later on. As to the Lord Jesus, it was a much slower process. I was pretty much convinced of the existence of a God by mid-late 2009. The process of believing the Gospel could only begin once I knew that God exists. All of the Lord's claims are nonsense without God. The primary facts were these: 1. There are a greater number of manuscripts of the Life of Christ only 30-40 years after His death, than of any manuscripts about Alexander the Great, Plato, or Josephus 300-600 years after their respective deaths. We believe those men existed and did what they did with such scanty evidence, and so the only reason to disbelieve Jesus' existence (who has earlier and more consistent evidence of His existence than most historical figures) is pure bias. 2. The Gospel writers, and the Old Testament writers, consistently trash themselves by reporting their sins, their ignorance, and their faults. They do not boast their own glory, perfection, or goodness. It was certainly no work of hubris or fanciful imagination. Israel was God's Chosen, and yet one doesn't get the sense that they just made their own history up to glorify themselves. 3. The NT writers believed things that no one who was "constrained by his culture" would have believed. As Jews, they would have had to believe in giving up and going to live a life of quietism with the Essenes, or become radical Zealots, or simply compromise with Rome, like Herod. No one believed in conquering by dying. No one expected a single resurrection of one man before the General Resurrection at the end of time. It's all so unexpected, unreal, and completely powerful. In the end, with all these facts, I had to make a leap of faith. Despite rocky patches and stormy moments, I've never found it completely possible to deny the existence, divinity, manhood, death, and resurrection of this man Jesus. Maybe I'm too materialist or rationalist about all this, and not Faith-ful enough. Former atheists often have this problem. Sorry for the length of the post.
Thank you so much for this intriguing post! May I ask, how did you come to the Anglican expression of the faith?
No sir; in fact, I have never even heard of him. This was something I learned from someone else. Maybe that other person got it from Bruce. Type, without spaces: [ quote = (username) ] QUOTE [ / quote ] i.e. [ quote = Consular ] QUOTE [ / quote]
Atheists have to hear it: Ward, Polkinghorne, McGrath, and so many others: belief in God is merely the consequence of logical & even scientific thought. I'd rather stay on the basic, broad truth of Atheism -> Deism in this thread. Many people are already confused & unsure enough about how to deal with aggressive atheists. It won't do to turn this into another thread about a specific form of Christianity. Far too many Christian apologists only defend "Religion", with debates entitled "Is Religion Good for Society?" and such. I don't believe in "Religion", nor do I want people to be "religious" - I want people to know the Truth, and to be set free by it. Simply because Christianity is "a religion" does not imply that we must defend all "Religion". Muslims are religious, but I believe Islam is wrong. I'd rather defend a belief in God firstly, for atheists to see and hear, and then move onward to the higher truth.
How true! And I think the more we show that Christianity is life, every detail in life, the easier we make for people to see the difference between what Christ does to our lives vs what other religions claim. A God who will speak to you vs gods you need to reach and so on...
That's right, Incense! Christ our God is our Life, not "one religion among many". Almost all the Christian philosophers in the modern age have been hemmed in and pushed against the wall of defending only "Religion". A small number defend the Resurrection of the Lord. For some reason the others feel compelled to defend all "believers" as having Faith. I do not understand where this reluctance to defend the Lord comes from. I've seen quite a few lectures where prominent scientist-Christians speak of the Lord or of our Faith, but it's always in private meetings with other Christians. Have we become too insular, afraid of defending specific faith in the Holy Trinity? Are only the "God of the Philosophers" and basic "Religion" acceptable? While it is good to see these scientists defending "a god", it seems to end there. He might as well be the distant watchmaker who set the mechanism and left us be... I personally cannot speak of my "atheism -> God" movement without adding my "God -> Christ" movement. Without the hope of Christ, God is meaningless.
Very well. But if you decide to share how you became Anglican, please point me to the place. You can PM me if you wish.
If this is so then Christianity fails to be a faith based religion. And becomes merely a provable fact, like the sine rule. Ps I'm reading McGraths "Rise and decline of Atheism" at the moment.(May have the title a bit wrong, at work at the moment)
That's the very reason it's so intriguing and such a likely candidate to be true, my friend. I don't think you have "faith" properly defined. Faith is not simply believing something out of sheer obstinate self-will despite lack of evidence. I don't have faith that God exists; I am logically convinced that there must be one God, by the nature of the Universe, causality, and reality itself. Once I know that God must exist, the faith bit is in believing that God is good, loving, all-mighty, holy, and Wisdom itself. On the same issue, I need to be convinced that Jesus even existed before I can have faith in Him as the Lord of the Cosmos. Whoever defines "Faith" as "belief without proof", or "belief for belief's sake" is approaching it wrongly, I think. That's precisely why I believe it. I firmly believe that something must have a logical basis of truth and fact. 99% of Christian claims about the life of Christ are historically or logically provable. Faith comes into it when there is a test: loneliness, darkness, tragedy, etc., and also when there is a time of hope: expectation, need, and goals. "Believing there is a God" is not faith - that's just common sense; "Believing that God will do what He promises, regardless of how bleak things seem" - ah, there is faith!
I wish it was so easy to truly speak as it is to type. As for the topic at hand: I find atheists tend to be - ironically - moralist in their outlook. They won't really care about philosophical or theological arguments, but when they see Christians being meek, humble, forgiving, and inexplicably-frustratingly kind to others; that is when it "clicks" within them. That's what happened to me. Stories like that of this man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Willems - these are the things which first moved me to consider good, evil, truth, falsehood, beauty, and reality. Perhaps we need to live Christ first, then talk about Him. That's what the world sees. John 13:35 & 15:13 may be of first importance.
Fascinating story. Indeed. By their fuits ye shall know them. Christians are to bear fruit and shine forth the glory of their redeemer. Everything else follows suit.
That's a good point, An army chaplain told me once how he was talking to a group of atheist/agnostic soldiers and they were talking about Christ.and all had this idea of Jesus meek and mild, long hair,, kissing babies etc etc. Such a Jesus didn't appeal to them. And they were shocked when the chaplain told them he didn't believe in such a Jesus either. So he set up a group bible study to show only from the gospels who Jesus was, getting rid of this false image society has built up. and by the end several wanted to know more and one wanted to join the Anglican church. I think this backs up your point about it not always being about philosophical argument, but introducing them to Jesus as He is