Ask a Pastor Column

Q:  ”Even if we assume that one particular religion is true, doesn’t the existence of many religions at least prove that mankind likes to make up religious stories, and that people have a tendency to believe them? How do you know yours isn’t one of those?”

A:  This question was asked by an antagonistic atheist during a college presentation and forwarded to our column by believers. The first thing I would like to point out is that every belief system in the world (including atheism) claims to be exclusively true. The atheist who asked this question believes his own truth claims are uniquely true and exclusively able to explain reality.

The stories he believes and presents concerning reality (the belief that nothing suddenly exploded into everything, the idea that complex organic systems could blindly and randomly assemble themselves, etc.) are just as prone to the questions he has leveled at Christianity.

How do we know that a gullible human race hasn’t been fed a pack of lies concerning the big bang and spontaneous generation? How does this man know that what he believes isn’t just another blind attempt on the part of the human race to explain the unexplainable?

He believes his stories are distinct from all other truth claims of the world, and so do we. The question is: whose belief system holds up best under scrutiny?

Let’s explore the answer to this question by examining various creation-origin accounts. Ancient mythologies present highly poetic, irrational and confusing explanations for the origin of the universe.

The ancient Greeks thought the world arose through a conflict between gods and titans; they said the gods came from the titans but had no explanation for where the titans came from! A Native American tribal myth states the earth came into being on the back of a gigantic turtle swimming in a cosmic sea.

Atheists also have various stories that try to explain why there is something rather than nothing. But they all dance around the fundamental fact that everything that begins must have been caused. Space and time have a beginning, so they must have been caused by something-someone who exists outside of space and time, is personal, willful and extremely powerful. Atheists resist this logical conclusion because it obviously points them in a direction they don’t want to go! 

In contrast to these stories, Genesis 1 presents a clear and sensible narrative. The complexity of life and the universe is explained by its direct creation at the hands of an omniscient creator, the process laid out in Genesis (planning, execution, evaluation) is remarkably similar to the one used by modern engineers to develop complex systems. After examining the evidence for both sides, I personally became convinced the perspective taught in Scripture is the most rational perspective of reality available.

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