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| Feedback 2002 | |
John Lennon II?From Allan Chamberlin from Curran, Ontario, Canada, who gave permission for his full name to be published. In his letter, printed below, he makes points that Christians will often encounter, i.e. that we can’t know for sure, all religions are basically equal, we should be open–minded and tolerant, etc. His letter is reprinted (indented red text), with point-by-point responses by Dr Jonathan Sarfati, showing that such typical claims are often self–refuting, and can be made only by ignorance or closed-minded rejection of the unique claims of Jesus Christ.
This would depend on what you mean. If you mean ‘religion’ in the broad sense meaning a world view that attempts to answer ultimate questions about life and the universe, then everyone has a religion of a sort. For example, advocates of Humanism and Communism and Nazism can be every bit as ‘religious’ as any TV caricature of fundamentalists. But if you mean an absence of theistic religion, we can imagine only too well. We have already seen the appalling human rights violations in atheistic Communist countries such as China, Cuba and the former Soviet Bloc countries.
This is called agnosticism, and is itself a positive claim about God—i.e. that He is a mystery. But how can you know that God is unknowable?
This is also nothing new. But you might like to consider, just for the moment for the purpose of the argument, that God has indeed created us and therefore owns us, and has told us how He wants people to honor Him. Then the most ‘open-minded’ belief would be that we have a moral obligation to do as He requires. It would be closed minded and arrogant to decide to go one’s own way. The ‘patron saint’ of such ecumenical thinking is Cain. Genesis 4 reveals that while Abel honored God in God’s way, by a blood sacrifice (as revealed by the blood sacrifice of Genesis 3:14, and expanded on in later parts of Scripture—Hebrews 9:22, ‘without shedding of blood is no forgiveness’), and God was pleased. But Cain decided to approach God with a bloodless offering, and God was not pleased. Then Cain compounded his error by becoming the first murderer.
Why? This in itself presupposes an absolute moral value, i.e. that converting others to our way is wrong. In your case it rebounds on yourself, since your letter is trying to convert us to your way, i.e. that there is no way.
On what grounds do you call them ‘good’? And how so, when they contradict each other on such ‘minor’ things as the nature of God, man’s destiny, and how to be saved (if applicable)?
Under a worldview founded upon evolution from goo to you via the zoo, why is this a problem?
Rather, the problem arises when one tries to invoke absolute moral laws without an absolute moral Lawgiver. It’s precisely because the rules are made by our Creator that they can transcend human opinion. What is the alternative, if we are simply rearranged pond scum? How do you derive the concepts of right and wrong from random mutations plus natural selection? Our moral sense would really be just the result of motions of atoms in the brain that happened to confer some survival advantage.
But the Christian claim is not that we can reach up to meet God face to face, but rather that He has reached down to meet us face to face. Christians believe that Jesus Christ ‘is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature’ (Hebrews 1:3), and that Jesus said, ‘He who has seen Me has seen the Father’ (John 14:9) and was right to claim this. More on this shortly.
This is an assertion, which frankly doesn’t seem very ‘open-minded’ to the possibility that God is a real Being.
So are you denying that minds exist? Actually, the leading philosopher (modal logician) and Christian, Alvin Plantinga argued cogently that the evidence for God is just as good as the evidence for other minds; and conversely, if there isn’t any evidence for God, then there is also no evidence that other minds exist—see God and Other Minds, Cornell University Press, repr. 1990.
As the gifted writer and Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton (1864–1936) pointed out, an open mind is like an open mouth—only good when it has something of substance to chomp into. And it’s our experience that those who talk about open minds the most are the most oblivious to their own biases (we all have them)—in your case, a bias towards agnosticism. OK, what about the possibility that Jesus Christ really said what the Gospels claim He said, and that He was speaking the truth? In particular, that He claimed to be God and said, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’ (John 14:6). The options are either acceptance or rejection. Are you ‘open-minded’ enough to believe what He said? Or are you actually, despite what you claim, telling us that He (Jesus) was wrong or was wrongly reported. Someone as open–minded as you claim to be should work through the following logic (from my article Loving God With All Your Mind: Logic and Creation, after C.S. Lewis’s famous Trilemma argument): The reports of what Christ said are either true or false. 1) If the reports are false, the reporters either knew they were false or they did not. 1a) If they knew they were false, they were liars—but who would die for what they know is a lie? 1b) If they did not know, then it is a big problem to explain how legends could accumulate around a historical figure in such a short time. 2) If the reports are true, then Jesus was either speaking falsely or truly. 2a) If Jesus spoke falsely He either knew it or he did not. 2ai) If He knew, He was a liar. 2aii) If He knew not, then He was a lunatic, since a claim to be God is the most absurd claim a mere creature can make. 2b) If Jesus spoke truly, then He really is God.
But you are saying that we are ‘in error’ for believing that Christ is the only way to God, and that you are ‘right’ to believe in religious relativism!
Rather, a rejection of God has led to by far the worst atrocities in history. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) said in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Without God, everything is permissible; crime is inevitable.’ The deaths under the evolution-based Communist and Nazi ideologies only last century, e.g. the Holocaust and the purges of Stalin and Mao, outweigh the grand total of all deaths in ‘religious’ wars throughout all preceding centuries. Also, those committing atrocities in the name of Christ were inconsistent with His teachings, while Communist and Nazi atrocities were consistent with those ideologies. It’s no accident that the Communist régimes persecuted Christianity and recently rediscovered documents show that Nazis planned to exterminate Christianity.
The responsibility is to believe in the correct God.
But which ‘God’? Even the demons believe in one God, and tremble (James 2:19)
But you’ve just defined him as a ‘concept’ and even your claim that he’s undefinable is itself a definition.
Again, you seem to have had a pretty good go at trying to explain this! But the solution is that God has chosen to explain Himself in the Bible and given ample reasons why the Bible should be trusted (see Q&A: Bible). Are you ‘open–minded’ enough to consider these?
Respectfully, |
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