• Home
  • About This Blog
  • Contact Me
  • Subscribe
  • Comment Policy

Attempts at Honesty

Reflections on the interplay of the Bible and Culture

  • Westminster Shorter Catechism Series
  • Sermon on the Mount Series
Home Quotation Roy Abraham Varghese on the “New Atheism”

Roy Abraham Varghese on the “New Atheism”

Posted on September 13, 2014 Written by Mark McIntyre 1 Comment


There is a GodAt the foundation of the “new atheism” is the belief that there is no God, no eternal and infinite Source of all that exists. This is the key belief that needs to be established in order for most of the other arguments to work. Int is my contention here that the “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Lewis Wolpert, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, not only fail to make a case for this belief, but ignore the very phenomena that are particularly relevant to the question of whether God exists.

As I see it, five phenomena are evident in our immediate experience that can only be explained in terms of the existence of God. These are, first, the rationality implicit in all our experience of the physical world; second, life, the capacity to act autonomously; third, consciousness, the ability to be aware; fourth, conceptual thought, the power of articulating and understanding meaningful symbols such as are embedded in lanuage; and fifth, the human self, the “center” of consciousness, thought, and action.

Three things should be said about these phenomena and their application to the existence of God. First, we are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence. In my view, such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as “proofs” whose formal validity determines whether there is a God. Rather, each of the five phenomena adduced here, int heir own way, presuppose the existence of an infinite, eternal Mind. God is the condition that underlies all that is self-evident in our experience. Second, as should be ovbious from the previous point, we are not talking about probabilities and hypotheses, but about encounters with fundamental realities that cannot be denied without self-contradiction. In other words, we don’t apply probability theorems to certain sets of data, but consider the far more basic question of how it is possible to evaluate data at all. Equally, it is not a matter of deducing God from the existence of certain complex phenomena. Rather, God’s existence is presupposed by all phenomena. Third, atheists, new and old, have coplained that there is no evidence for God’s existence, and some theists have responded that our free will can be preserved only if suce evidence is non-coercive. The approach taken here is that we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.

Roy Abraham Varghese in There is a God – How the world’s most notorius atheist changed his mind.

I am reminded of the Apostle Paul’s words in Romans 1:18 where he informs us that the problem of those who don’t believe is not a lack of evidence, but the suppression of it.


Filed Under: Quotation Tagged With: atheism, atheist, Flew, God

About Mark McIntyre

A follower of Jesus Christ who shares observations about how Scripture should impact the church and the world. Mark is the original author and editor of Attempts at Honesty.

Follow Attempts at Honesty

Honesty in your Inbox

DNA

There is a gene for that

I recently heard an author say that there is a gene that causes people to be bad or good. What is the basis and what are the implications of such a belief?

Build Stone Wall

What you build and how you build it matters to God

With 60% of young people walking away from the church, we must evaluate the foundation on which we build and how well we build upon it. The eternal destiny of the next generation is at stake and we cannot afford to continue with such a high failure rate. We must do better.

Myopia

The Antidote for Fear, Grumbling and Myopia

The Bible presents life as it really is. Scripture stories are about people who do the same stupid things that I find myself doing. I am encouraged by this. In Exodus 17 we have the Nation of Israel in the desert and in need of water. This is a real need, especially in an arid […]

Apathy and Ignorance in the Church

Tony Campolo is famous (infamous?) for the following statement: “I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a sh–. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact that I […]

School Prayer

Thoughts on Prayer inspired by C. S. Lewis

The desperate posts in the great battle often are given to those whose faith is strong enough to weather seemingly unanswered prayer. So says C. S. Lewis in the essay on which this post is based.

Post Series

  • Westminster Shorter Catechism Series
  • Sermon on the Mount Series

Categories

Archives

Blogger Grid
Follow me on Blogarama

Copyright © 2022 · Focus Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in