Don’t look now —you might see the balloon of atheism imploding on its own sharp point of random chance.
Perhaps you’ve chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you’re in a hotel, maybe you’ve decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you’ll wear today. You haven’t. You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your “will” had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them. The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion. -USA Today
What seems to have lost in the mad dash for atheism is that atheism is a reductionist system.
What does this mean? In atheism, all things must, eventually, be reduced to a single thing, the one unifying theory of the universe. Once you make God “the god of the gaps,” then everything supernatural goes into the gaps with God, to be squeezed into nothing.
There is no god in atheism to even take your freedom —instead, there is chance.
You don’t really enjoy eating, it’s just chance. You don’t fear death, it’s just chance. You don’t really believe in God, it’s just chance. You don’t really believe in science, it’s just chance.
Chance is the most capricious god you can imagine. There is no sacrifice, obedience, faith, or lifestyle that will satisfy the anger or elicit the love of random chance. Atheism’s god is more unpredictable than Allah, without the soul of Yahweh, and without the goal of Bhudda. Chance just is.
While it is true that God has the capacity to concern Himself with every detail of our lives, only the very silly would think His priority is who wins football games. Fortunately, that is not actually what the poll showed.
The media’s treating this as a poll on whether people think God is helping Tebow to win, but the way the actual question was phrased is subtly different. Direct quote: “Do you believe that any of Tim Tebow’s success can be attributed to divine intervention?” (Emphasis mine.) Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s a much easier question for a believer, no? Everyone’s “success” is, supposedly, attributable to providence to some degree. God gives you certain talents, you put them to use, you make something of yourself, voila, you’ve succeeded — even if you don’t win the Super Bowl. Which is not to say there aren’t Christians out there who think God’s actually picking favorites on Sunday afternoon. Said one Colorado pastor to TMZ last month, “It’s not luck. Luck isn’t winning 6 games in a row. It’s favor. God’s favor.” That was published on December 15; the Broncos lost three in a row starting the following Sunday.(from here)
God’s favor? To win football games? Well, there are Christians who believe in something some call the prosperity gospel (or theology). Does that Colorado pastor, Pastor Wayne Hanson of Summit Church in Castle Rock, CO, believe in such a thing (See God’s Will for Provision in their Statement of Faith.)? Perhaps. Nonetheless, Jesus and His Apostles set an example, and they did not collect riches. Instead, they served.
Eve was given a direct commandment, and she disobeyed it. Simple and straightforward. Or is it?
For instance, why shouldn’t they eat of this tree? The commandment seems so arbitrary, doesn’t it? If the commandment is truly arbitrary, then God can be painted as capricious, simply commanding things to test obedience. Does this fit our picture of God? It doesn’t fit mine. How can we resolve this?
Contrary to popular myth, the commandment about the tree wasn’t the only commandment God gave Adam.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” -Genesis 1:28
Somehow, eating the tree relates to the proper care and control of the Earth in some way —to put it in more modern terms, use and misuse of the resources God has given. The commandment is not arbitrary; God designed the Earth for a purpose (a final end), and he designed man to fit within the overall purpose in a particular way. These commandments can almost be described as an explanation of God’s purpose, and a path on which man must stay to make that end come about.
This is more than simple disobedience, it is a breaking of trust within a relationship. To put it in stronger terms, Eve’s sin wasn’t in eating some unknown fruit, it was in breaking a trusting relationship between creator and creature.
This puts an entirely new spin on the idea of obedience and disobedience, original sin, and the need for salvation.
Christians often think about sin, avoiding sin, what sin does in their lives, etc. But we rarely think about the process of sin —how does temptation work? In this series of posts on reading Genesis 3:17 I’m going to talk about four different possible ways to see the process of Eve’s acceptance of Satan’s invitation to sin: obedience/disobedience, challenge to God, need/fulfillment, and the dialectic process.
According to the current narrative in the Middle East, King David didn’t ever exist, and Israel wasn’t really ever a nation. There has always been a “nation of Palestine,” and the current nation of Israel is just an occupation of land that has always belonged to someone else.
But there is this little set of problems along the way…
There is a gas that is crucial to the operation of almost all modern organizations, from government through research through health care through education. It [...]
In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India’s Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers [...]
Don’t look now —you might see the balloon of atheism imploding on its own sharp point of random chance.
Perhaps you’ve chosen to read this essay after scanning other articles on this website. Or, if you’re in a hotel, maybe you’ve decided what to order for breakfast, or what clothes you’ll wear today. You haven’t. You may feel like you’ve made choices, but in reality your decision to read this piece, and whether to have eggs or pancakes, was determined long before you were aware of it — perhaps even before you woke up today. And your “will” had no part in that decision. So it is with all of our other choices: not one of them results from a free and conscious decision on our part. There is no freedom of choice, no free will. And those New Year’s resolutions you made? You had no choice about making them, and you’ll have no choice about whether you keep them. The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they’re finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion. -USA Today
