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)