Evidence of God - Part 2

In my last post I discussed the idea that if there is evidence of God, or evidence of anything for that matter, it is always interpreted and understood according to the knowledge and beliefs you currently hold. When the Christian and the atheist both look at something like the fossil record and see it as consistent with their belief that God does or doesn’t exist, it’s not the case that one of the two is being dishonest with themselves or stubbornly ignoring the evidence. Both really do see the same thing as consistent with their existing beliefs. But today I want to address what I have heard most atheists actually say in one context or another… “What about undeniable evidence?” When we qualify the word “evidence” with “undeniable”, we essentially acknowledge the fact that evidence can be interpreted one way or another, but that some evidence simply cannot be interpreted any other way than in support of one view to the exclusion of the other. And of course, just because we use this qualification doesn’t mean that the evidence in question cannot, in fact, be interpreted to fit either one’s view, but we’re expressing that at least to us we cannot see how it can be interpreted to support the other’s view. And we think that any attempt to interpret it that way will be dishonestly twisting it in some way that makes no logical sense.

So when an atheist asks for evidence of God, they usually mean “undeniable evidence”, and for them, as has been my experience, this would be in the form of a miracle. They want to see something that can only be explained as an act of God. And it was literally just yesterday that I saw one atheist on Tik Tok say these exact words; “I want evidence. Just a simple matter of God opening up the sky and saying ‘Hello, I’m here.’” So I wonder to myself… What if God created the universe and the world we live in out of nothing, and that world were still here for us to observe, as evidence that this had happened? Wouldn’t that be evidence? Or what if God appeared in a burning bush that was not consumed by the flames, and then freed the slaves in a land called Egypt by tormenting their owners with plagues, and then parting an entire sea so they could flee from their slave owners, and this were all written down as evidence that it had occurred? Or what if a man who claimed to be the Son of God proved that He was indeed by healing the sick by just speaking a command, and he raised the dead, and he walked on water? And what if God opened up the skies and called down “This is my Son”? And what if that man raised himself from the dead, and all these things were written down as evidence that they had occurred? Well, we have these things. And not only do we have the written record, but the existence of the church itself, which would not have become a body of believers at all if they were unable to verify that these things regarding Jesus had happened. What the atheists ask for, namely a miracle, has already happened. But they need to witness one first hand in order to believe. Why? Because they think they can trust their own senses, while at the same time accusing those who claim to have seen miracles unable to trust their own senses. Again, alluding to something I said in my previous post, neither atheist nor Christian can simply ignore someone else’s claim to have witnessed a miracle, whether the claim is made by those who wrote the Bible, or by someone living today in some church somewhere. We both need to decide what we believe about this claim; whether this miracle is evidence of God or of some delusion or whatever else. And for those who don’t know much about Christianity, it’s simply not the case that all Christians will simply believe any and every claim of a miracle. We, too, are suspicious of any such claim - or at least we should be (1 John 4:1). So in this way, even a miracle of God is not going to be “undeniable” to all. Jesus did miracles precisely to prove that He was who He said He was. He was providing evidence. Even so there were those at that time who would interpret these things some other way. Some, for example, claimed that Jesus did these things by the power of demonic forces. (Luke 11:15). Or we hear modern day critics claim that the stories of Jesus’ miracles are essentially figures of speech.

I have relayed this story before, but now I’ll tell it in this different context. One morning I was late for work because my alarm didn’t go off. A few days later it was Saturday, and on Saturday I get to sleep in. But instead I was awoken by birds chirping at my window. And I remember thinking, jokingly, “God, you could have sent these birds the other day when my alarm didn’t go off! Why today?” It was an offhand remark, but then I started to think about it a little… my wife would have woken me, seeing my alarm hadn’t gone off for work, so why didn’t God when He saw me still lying there at 7:30am? But imagine it… you forget to set your alarm one day and are woken by birds at your window. A week later you forget again and you’re woken by birds at your window. The next night you think “I’m not going to bother setting my alarm, God will just wake me with the birds tomorrow…” And what kind of person are we becoming now? We’re like a spoiled child. I envisaged stepping outside at 6:30am and seeing flocks of birds all flying down to sit in front of the windows of all the Christians in the street! None of the Christians bothered with alarm clocks anymore. And what else didn’t they bother with? Perhaps they didn’t bother putting fuel in their cars because “God loves them so much that He lets their cars run on air”. Perhaps you can see my point now? You can’t decide what God should or shouldn’t do based on some idea that being lazy is something God should let us be. Consider how food simply grows on trees. The degree to which we have to labour for it is good for us. But you can imagine a world where food might not be so easy to come by and the analogy, instead of being about birds waking us at the right time each morning, might be “If God loved us He would simply make food grow on the trees so we could just go out and pick it.” If a miracle were to become commonplace, like the birds, it would no longer be a miracle, would it? We don’t see fruit growing on trees as a miracle or as evidence of God. But if birds flocked outside windows people would eventually say “Well, birds just seem to like gathering outside of windows after around 6:30am. Biologists suggest that it has to do with the reflection warming their bodies.” Or some such “natural” explanation. But the world we live in already testifies to the miracle of Creation. At the end of the day, it still remains that all evidence can potentially be explained away.

Perhaps Matt Dillahunty, a well known atheist apologist, acknowledges this? Someone else has told me that he has said “But God would know what it would take to convince me.” Emphasis on “me”. I haven’t seen Matt Dillahunty’s original words and I don’t know how they were said in context, but this person was saying that God would know what each individual person will respond to, so why doesn’t He prove Himself to each of us in “our way”? Well, there’s a lot to be said in response to this, but I think the important thing to recognize is that God values faith. I find that as soon as I say this, atheists tend to block their ears and kind of say “Ok, conversation over!” Any mention of “believing by faith” is immediately rejected by them. But how can it be any other way? Let’s consider this. Growing up in the church I learned a lot about what God was like. But when, as a 28 year old man, I actually read my Bible for the first time in my life, I started in the book of Job. There I read about a God who made Job, who was basically an innocent man, suffer. And I thought “Wow… this is not the God I thought I knew!” And I’m not saying the pastor of the church deliberately deceived me or anything. But I remember thinking, at that point, “It looks like there’s a lot I have to learn about who God is, so I’d better get reading!” This is faith. I decided not to trust anything I thought I knew about God and to learn “from scratch” who He truly was. What I did know about God was that if He exists, knowledge of Him would be found in the Bible, and that faith is all the faith God needed. Faith is then put to the test. Your faith is tested and proved. If I had carried on and found that God wasn’t to be found in the Bible, I would be an atheist today. But how can you know God any other way? Can you learn everything there is to know about God before deciding, “Ok, now I believe in you.”? No, your story will be the same as mine if you try to do that - you’ll have started with no knowledge and along the way you’ll have come to know with certainty that He exists.

Many will say “But I was once a Christian. I read my Bible to learn of God and I didn’t find proof of him there.” It’s true that many who once professed to be Christians later reject what they once believed and profess instead to be atheists. So to be clear, I did not mean to say that if you read your Bible you will find proof of God there. The fact that many people read their Bible and don’t find God there is evidence of that. I hear many former Christians say that the reason they left Christianity is because the Bible appeared, to them, to be inconsistent or contradictory. But the fact that many people read their Bible and do find God there is likewise evidence that God can be found in the Bible. For me, for example, I am quite amazed at how people can see any inconsistency at all in the Scriptures. And so we’re left with the fact that Christian and atheist will both see the same world and the same Scriptures but come to different conclusions. And while I’ve thought a lot about why this happens, each of us are individuals and no one answer will apply to all. But God does deal with each person individually, and each person deals with God in their own way too. What is certain is that there is no one who does not deal with God at all, because all are faced with evidence of God. How we reconcile that evidence in our own minds will be part of each person’s unique story.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

Evidence of God - Part 1

 “Show me evidence that your God exists”, is what I hear most atheists ask me. But what will they consider to be evidence? It is clear to me that all evidence is interpreted by those who perceive it. To me the entire world around me is overwhelming evidence of God. I interpret the world as being the work of God the Creator. To the atheist this same evidence is perceived but interpreted differently. They see the world around us as the result of a process of evolution. So asking for evidence and then being able to explain the evidence provided according to your own worldview isn’t really proof that Christians are wrong.

Consider now that the existence of Christianity itself is evidence of something. That’s all we can say about it… that it’s evidence of something. And this precisely drives home my point. The Christian claims that it’s evidence of God, but they can’t call that proof. The atheist claims that it’s evidence of “mass delusion”, or however they might explain it, but they can’t then call that proof. It’s evidence of something, and what it’s evidence of is up to each one’s interpretation of that evidence. When we come to a conclusion about it, it will be through our own logical reasoning, and our own logical reasoning is entirely under the influence of the worldview we already have. In trying to interpret any piece of evidence we pose hypotheses to ourselves and we accept or reject these hypotheses based on what agrees or disagrees with what we already know and believe. When we struggle to make something agree with what we know and believe, that’s when we start to consider making changes to what we have known and believed for so many years. But this is done only when we’re at our wits end trying to understand and accommodate some new piece of evidence.

Let me illustrate this further. I’ve used the existence of Christianity itself as an example. It is evidence of something. But so is the existence of the Muslim religion. Or the Hindu religion. Or even apart from religion, there are many people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, or to have seen ghosts. All of these bodies of people are making claims about what they believe to be true. They are evidence that the claims they make may, in fact, be true. And for each of these claims, the primary one is that their god exists, (or aliens, or whatever). If that claim is false then the rest of their claims are also false. So atheists ask things like “Why do you believe in Jesus and not any of the other 3000 gods that people claim exist?” Again, we as Christians interpret this evidence based on the world view we currently hold. Since our God has said that there is no other God apart from Him, we don’t even bother to investigate the claims made by other religions because we already reject their primary claim that there is a god that exists apart from our god. But this is no different to atheists. They don’t bother to even investigate the claims made by any of the religions because, according to their existing world view, they can immediately reject the possibility of any god’s existence. And if you ask anyone why they don’t believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they should probably answer in that case that there is no evidence for such a thing; namely that there is no body of believers which make the claim that it truly exists.

When Christians are confronted with the evidence of other gods ("evidence" as I’m calling it - namely that there are bodies of believers in other gods), we are like anyone else. We must interpret that evidence. Some interpret it as those gods in fact having a true existence, but that they are demonic in nature. Others interpret it perhaps as many atheists would, and say that they are simply mythologies made by man, and that believing those mythologies as fact has filled some psychological need that exists in all people. Again it illustrates my point. We all interpret evidence according to our own worldview. And the same will go for claims about aliens or ghosts or whatever else. Neither Christian nor atheist can simply ignore these things. One way or the other we must all decide what we believe about them. So where does this leave us? Hopefully it leaves us seeing each other as equals. But also it helps us realize that the atheist can’t simply say “I’m not making any claims about god.” They are; namely that god does not exist. They are forced to make a claim about god because they are faced with evidence for god (the existence of religion itself) which they must interpret one way or the other.

And so the more correct question to ask a Christian, instead of “Show me evidence of God”, is “Give me good reason to believe in God.” This, then, allows us to show our interpretation of the evidence we see, and show our reasoning for interpreting it the way we do. The same can be afforded to the atheist; they can show us evidence of evolution, for example, but what they are really showing us is their interpretation of such evidence (the fossil record, for example). And Christians don’t simply ignore these evidences. Indeed, we cannot. What we reject, rather, is the interpretation of these evidences, and we have a different interpretation according to our own worldview. Christians, likewise, are better to ask “give me good reason to believe in evolution”, and not simply “show me evidence of evolution.” A request for “good reason to believe” will involve not only the evidence but the interpretation of the evidence. But it’s important to remember that there is always that element of interpretation according to one’s existing worldview.

At this point we haven’t said anything about which worldview is right or wrong, but that’s not what this post is about. There are atheists and Christians who are so sure of their worldview that they may never change. And there are atheists and Christians who have doubts about their own worldview and may be swayed to the other side. Most of the time people are simply content and function well with their current worldview and have no motivation to uproot all of their beliefs to see if another is actually true. I often find from both atheists and Christians alike this appeal to “just do more research” or to “think more critically”... and the thought there, really, is that the other person simply hasn’t thought their worldview through hard enough, because if they did they would surely come to the same conclusions as me! This is an error for anyone, on either side of the debate. One’s own thoughts will always be led by first interpreting information to agree with what they already believe. To ask someone to “do more research” is to first ask the person to gather more information, as the more information they have the more chance they have of finding something which they cannot accommodate into their own worldview. This is certainly good for anyone to do, and when information cannot be accommodated into one’s existing worldview, they may begin to change their worldview. But firstly any new information will be understood as it aligns with what we already believe. So then we ask them to “think critically”, which is to ask them to play the hypothetical of “if I didn’t believe what I currently believe, and instead believed what atheists believe, would this information make more sense?” This doesn’t really work, however, because that hypothetical is “just a game”. Thinking critically is a great idea; it perhaps helps us understand the other side’s perspective. But it won’t change our own view because when we “played the hypothetical” we were pretending to believe what the other believes. And this is different, incidentally, to an example where a seminary lecturer was teaching one doctrine and in my mind I’m thinking “No, I don’t think that’s right, because I don’t think it agrees with this or that Bible verse.” Thinking critically isn’t simply disagreeing with what you’re being taught. Again, the taught doctrine was being accepted or rejected by what I already knew and believed.

So what’s the point of all this, then? I think what really prompted me to write this is that it answers a whole range of objections I’ve seen made by atheists. I’ve alluded to some of these already; the question of why we should believe in the god we do and not one of the many others - it is, in fact, the very same reason the atheist believes in none. Then there's the demand for evidence as opposed to good reason. This fails to recognize that evidence will only count if it cannot be interpreted in a way that agrees with your worldview. And the appeal to thinking critically instead of “believing blindly”. This fails to understand that critical thinking is not an escape from one’s own biases. Anyone who says “I just want to believe what’s true” fails to realize that so much of what we conclude is true is based on what we have conformed to our existing worldview. And even the idea that atheism is logical and reasonable as opposed to faith… Faith is not believing something despite a lack of evidence. We all have evidence and we all have our logic and reasons for our interpretation of that evidence. Faith isn’t apart from that. Faith is trusting and relying on what you believe to be true. If you believe there is one god then by faith you trust that all other claims about another god are somehow false, even if you haven’t figured out yet in exactly what way each of them are false. And the atheist is no different - they, like us, have their worldview which creates certain expectations of what counts as evidence for god, and it’s essentially by faith in that belief that they are convinced that whatever claims are made by all of these 3000 odd religions will be false (however many there actually are in the world), and won’t produce the evidence they’re expecting to find of god. They don’t need to investigate each and every one of these religions because they are already convinced that they will be false. Faith in God may be a little more than that; we’re talking not only about faith in our own beliefs, but in relation to God we’re talking about faith in a person; faith in the character of God - that God will deal with us in the manner that the person He has revealed Himself to be would deal with us. When we experience that He does, it confirms our beliefs and strengthens our faith in those beliefs. This is what I meant when I once explained to an atheist that “faith becomes knowledge”. At that point I completely lost them precisely because they didn’t understand this fundamental idea. Knowing God starts with information about God (the words of the Bible) and our interpretation of that information (or evidence) as we build our theology and worldview around it. We have faith that what we believe is true, and when through experience we see that it is true, faith becomes knowledge.


Simon Peter replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." Matthew 16:16-17