Believing and not believing
by Jack Seay April 12, 1998 - Home Page
Believing in God is hard. There are unanswered moral inconsistancies in my mind. I say in my mind, because there may not be actual ones in the Universe, but only in my perception and/or interpretation of the Universe. Believing there is no God is hard because if you take the viewpoint that you know God doesn't exist because you haven't found Him, have you checked every nook and cranny of the Universe? If you found the boundary of the Universe (like a wall), what's on the other side of that wall? You would have to know God wasn't there. If space goes on infinitely in an infinite number of directions, the only way you could know what's in every place of that infinite space would be if you had an infinite mind. Then you would be God. Or perhaps God is hiding inside a quark somewhere. And if God is outside the Universe or not physical, then what? So it would be impossible to, with any intellectual integrity, to say you know there is no God, on the basis of empirical observation.
Most people who believe there is no God, do so because of the moral inconsistancies they know of. William Evans in his book "Ethics" gives the argument for extreme or radical freedom as an answer to that (recheck title and author of this). The other argument is to say God causes everything to happen, even all human choices. This would make God directly responsible for all atrocities, sins, and evils in history. This has become increasingly difficult to believe, especially during this century, although other centuries have had horrible wars and tortures also.
Is it easy to believe nothing? No. There seems to be this Universe thing out there. Where did it come from? How did it get there? What will happen to it? Is it just a dream? Where did the dream come from? Why does it exist? Dreams don't have consistant cause and effect. It's no use not believing in cause and effect. You can say you don't believe it all you want as you pull the trigger on a gun to your head, your belief won't prevent the bullet from entering your brain with tragic consequences. The biggest obstacle I have found to believing in God is the seeming "infinite" responsibility we have in deciding our own eternal destiny, and being involved in the decisions of others, whether or not they hear the Gospel, and how clearly. If you could prove empirically that there is no God, you would prove that you are God, therefore you would not have proved there is no God. Only God could have the infinite mind to prove He doesn't exist. Francis Schaeffer and Oz Guiness have argued in their books concerning the inadequacies of all non-Christian religions. So it's not possible to prove empirically that God doesn't exist.
The Bible itself demands that we be rational, therefore there cannot be a Christianity where you say, "don't ask questions, just believe". That is not Christianity, because it contradicts the Bible, that which Christians believe is the Word of God. Since we as Christians must be rational, hell could not be a place of eternal torment, because if that was the case, and if God has any compassion at all, He would not have created a Universe, knowing that would be the consequence. Imagine pouring liquid sulphur all over yourself and lighting yourself on fire. Now imagine the burning and pain going on forever. Now imagine that being the fate of the vast majority of people forever. Knowing that, God would not have created Man, or even the Universe. How could we ever enjoy heaven forever, knowing that most people were suffering torments in hell forever, knowing that some of them, many of them, were there partly because we didn't give them the Gospel? At least the horrors ot the concentration camps ended. The burning and tortures didn't last forever. I'm not belittling the horrors, just saying that the traditional view of hell is infinitely more horrible than any conceivable horrors here on earth. And the horrors that have occurred and are still occuring on earth are very horrible indeed.
But, I hear many people asking, doesn't the Bible teach that Hell is a place of eternal suffering? Yes, it does. And it also teaches it is the end, annihilation, destruction. It teaches both. For that not to be a contradiction, one must be literal and the other figurative language. Which seems most consistant with the teachings of the Bible taken as a whole? I leave that for you to study with a concordance.
A related question is: did God command genocide in the Old Testament? For an examination of this question, see: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qamorite.html,
Nothing is easy to believe in, but believing in nothing isn't easy either.