Dear Atheist…
Dear Atheist, I actually have a great deal of respect for you. You have the guts to take a stand against the status quo of religion, the will to think freely, the intelligence to test reality empirically and the passion to fight for your rights to pursue truth. No joke…this is note a mockery or a trick. I respect you for all these things. In all seriousness and with all due respect, the greatest attribute I admire in an atheist is your faith.
I think agnosticism is kind of a cop out. This world view rightfully looks at the failure of religion coupled with the folly and true terror that humanity has brought upon itself in the name of religion and concludes that they don’t know how a God could allow such a thing. They look at the vast universe with all of its unanswered questions and conclude that there is no way we can know for sure what, who or even if there is a God. You, however, take a stand and sometimes even fight for your beliefs. With all the questions that cannot be answered empirically about the vast universe we live in, you choose to believe by faith that they will be answered to favor your world view.
You at least question what you believe. There are many people who believe, as I do, in God…that he revealed himself in history, with skin on, through a human named Jesus and that Jesus really is the Son of God…our Lord and Savior. However, while there are many who believe in Jesus, there are also many who have no idea why they believe and they become more superstitious than the pagans who sacrificed humans in ancient times. I know that sounds harsh…but it is true. To be fair, I would have to say that the Atheist faith does suffer from the same religious tendencies.
You have your moderates and your zealots just like any other religion. There have been some powerful movements in history that have done terrible things in the name of atheism. It would seem that this belief system has the same potential for ignorance and cruelty as any other belief system on the planet. Please don’t take offense to my labeling Atheism as a religion and writing that it has the same potential for evil as other religions on the planet. I don’t want anyone to condem the entire Christian faith based on the stupidity of some and I won’t condem your entire belief system based on the stupidity of some either. The bottom line here is that, in my opinion, you simply have more faith than I do. There are 3164.7 million chemical nucleotide bases in the human genome that are sequenced in just the right way to make my body look and work the way it does.
Let’s just take a look at one part of this body, the eye ball. Am I to believe that by some chance outcome of chaos theory, the eye ball is the result of a simpler life form on earth being stimulated by light? Am I to believe by chance I have two eye balls with circular pupils? If by some form of natural selection, we, as humans, have evolved to be so superior, why don’t we have 4 eyes? Why don’t we have eyes all around our head? I know…I am being an idiot right? It sure would have been helpful for hunting and gathering to see better all around.
There are other creatures on our planet that have more eyes or physical configurations to see better. Yet mammals seem to have specific eye configurations. Even the people who study the one reptile that I know of with a partial third eye can only speculate about how evolution may have played a role in its existence.
The fact is, none of us really knows with absolute certainty how we got here. To this date, I remain unconvinced that any human or group of humans has discovered all that can be discovered in our universe. We haven’t even discovered all the forms life on our own planet.
You can shout all you want that God is dead, but you can’t prove it anymore than I can personally prove that He exists. We can all hide behind science. We can all hide behind religion. We can all shout from opposing mountain tops that “God is dead” or “God is Alive.” We can call each other foolish for not excepting one believe or another. We can even kill each other over our convictions as to what we believe to be “absolutely true.”
Whichever way we choose to speculate according to our own world view. It all comes down to a question of faith. With all the complex interactions that have occurred over thousands or millions of years to make plant and animal life function the way it does on our planet alone, I simply don’t have the faith to believe that all the billions of nucleotide sequences that are in play at this moment are the result of random chaos or coincidence. I could mix all the chemicals and components that are required to make the LCD screen of a tablet computer in a bowl for a billion years and I don’t believe that I will ever have a working display without applying purpose, intentionality and intelligence to the equation.
With all due respect, and I do mean this sincerely; it would add no joy or satisfaction to my life to attempt to belittle, patronize or insult your intelligence as a fellow human being. I am not here to judge. If God is real and based on my observations of science and life, I believe that He is, He doesn’t need me to defend Him. He alone is the judge of our actions toward him and toward each other. However, that said, it is my view that it simply takes more faith to believe in Atheism than it takes to believe in God.
So, my dear Atheist..Perhaps in a future post I will explore the question, if there is a God, Would the real God please stand up? For now, I think I have written enough. Not that I would be so pompous to think that I have “won you over” and convinced you to believe in God. I don’t even want to start a debate. There are many people smarter than I am who can debate these issues; you are probably one of them.
My only hope here is that you might consider that your world view requires faith just like my world view requires faith. If you can consider that idea than perhaps the door is open to many other considerations with regard to where we choose to place our faith and even how we can help our world with our one and only life.
Respectfully, mgold