An Atheist Asks…..?

Recently a friend of mine was approached with a few questions from an atheist. I did what I could to answer some of those questions and I thought I would post them here on this website for others to learn from. The atheist’s comments are in black, my comments are in red.

 

For Christians, logic and rationality are employed only selectively. For example, on Sunday, Christians across the globe will celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. Perhaps it never occurred to them that it is scientifically impossible for a corpse that has been dead for dozens of hours to come back to life. How could billions of people possibly believe something that is so egregiously ludicrous? The answer? It is in the Bible.

Billions of people believe in evolution. Does that make evolution ludicrous?

 

If there was a God and he wanted to validate Himself to the world don’t you think that He might use something that would be “impossible”? If He (Jesus) was resurrected from the dead, don’t you think it would be a miracle? Wouldn’t this help to validate His deity as He claimed, if it is true?

For Christians, the Bible offers absolute truth, and mustn’t ever be questioned. The Bible is the crutch upon which Christians lean when they declare their belief in Noah’s Ark, Adam and Eve, creationism, miracles and all other such nonsense.

That is quite an assumption of ALL Christians! Are there not any Christians who can articulate their faith in respect to science, physics, and the natural laws of the universe? Surely you haven’t spoken to all Christians to make such a broad sweeping statement. Have you?

Indeed, for Christians, the Bible is so powerful that it invalidates scientific studies. In the past couple of weeks, two major breakthroughs have been achieved with respect to evolution. If you haven’t already, be sure to read this article and this one.{Link not included}

Should I believe this article? Why? It seems that you are doing the same thing that you accuse Christians of doing. You are reading a document and believing what it or its authors have to say. That sounds like faith to me.

Moses wrote the Torah (first 5 books of the Bible) and some how managed to write about his own death in Deuteronomy 34. Both of these arguments could basically be considered to fall into the realm of “internal validity” – does the book itself provide support for its claims? Internal contradictions would indicate that it does not. This is also the primary basis of criticism of Thomas Paine’s early works on the Bible.

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Moses has been traditionally recognized as the author of Deuteronomy, since the book itself testifies that Moses wrote it (Deu 1:1,5; 31:9,22,24). Both the Old Testament (1 Kings 2:3; 8:53; 2 Kings 14:6; 18:12) and the New Testament (Acts 3:22,23; Romans 10:19) support the claim of Mosaic authorship. While Deuteronomy 32:48 – 34:12 was added after Moses’ death (probably by Joshua), the rest of the book came from Moses’ hand just before his death in 1405 BC.

 

And also, the bible says that god created everything, yet never states how god came about, now if i take the typical christian response that "god created himself" (No, God did not create Himself) i have to argue, matter cannot be created nor destroyed,(Yes, that is the first law of thermodynamics. So how did the first atom of matter come into existence? Is matter eternal? How can something that does not exist bring itself into existence if it does not have a nature, and without a nature it cannot have any attributes therefore it cannot perform any actions like bringing itself into existence. Correct?) and that no matter how "almighty" you may be, you can't create yourself from nothing, as there is nothing to start creation.

Yes, are you willing to be consistent with that worldview when it comes to the existence of the Universe? Something cannot come from nothing, can it?

The answer is simple.  Nothing brought him into existence.  He has always existed.  He is the uncaused cause.  Think about it.  You cannot have an infinite regression of causes.  It’s like having an infinite line of dominos falling one after another.  If you go back infinitely in time to try and find the first domino that started it all, you’d never find it because you’d have to cross an infinite amount of time to get to it which is impossible to do.  This would also mean that there you can’t have an infinite regression of causes.  Furthermore, this would mean there would never be a first cause.  If there is no first cause, then there can’t be a second, or a third, and so on and you wouldn’t have any of them falling at all.  But since they are falling, there had to be a first cause, that itself was uncaused that started the whole thing moving at a specific time in the past.  So too with the universe.  It was caused to exist at a specific point in time.  The uncaused cause is God, who decided to create the universe and who, as the Bible says in Psalm 90:2, “is from everlasting to everlasting.”

This is just a quick glimpse into some of his comments and questions. I will be posting some of his Bible “contradictions” in the next coming days. God bless!