Go back to Part 1

Continuing with the last three of Marilyn’s “Six Reasons to Believe in God.” Her first three reasons were all variations of the God-as-designer argument - deceptively compelling until you stop and really thinkg about them for a moment (or two). Will her final three reasons shift the tide in God’s favor? I wish I could tell you yes, but, I am afraid it gets even worse from here…

4. To state with certainty that there is no God, a person has to ignore the passion of an enormously vast number of people who are convinced that there is a God.

This is not to say that if enough people believe something it is therefore true…There is a much larger issue. Throughout history, billions of people in the world have attested to their firm, core convictions about God’s existence — arrived at from their subjective, personal relationship with God. Millions today could give detailed account of their experience with God. They would point to answered prayer and specific, amazing ways God has met their needs, and guided them through important personal decisions. They would offer, not only a description of their beliefs, but detailed reports of God’s actions in their lives. Many are sure that a loving God exists and has shown himself to be faithful to them. If you are a skeptic, can you say with certainty: “I am absolutely right and they all are wrong about God”?

At least Marilyn for a fleeting moment seems to recognize the fallacy of appealing to the number of believers as evidence of the truth of that belief (the smart sounding latin phrase is argumentum ad populum). However, one must be careful to remember that, in science at least, a consensus among a majority of experts is strong reason to take that claim seriously. In either case, however, it is not the number of people that believe something that ultimately matters but, rather, the actual evidence.

Marilyn gives her readers nothing more than some non-specific examples of subjective experiences that believers in God apparently claim to have. None of this is evidence for anything other than some believers have convinced themselves in their belief. When prayer is subjected to controlled scientific experiments it fails to give any statistical meaningful results, leaving believers to continue counting their hits and ignoring their misses.

As a skeptic, I do not need to say with certainty that “I am absolutely right and they all are wrong about God.” All that I have to say is, “I don’t know if I am right but I am not convinced by any of their evidence.”

5. We know God exists because he pursues us. He is constantly initiating and seeking for us to come to him.

I tried in vain in the paragraphs that follow to find any explaination as to how Marilyn actually knows that God “pursues” us (whatever that means). Presumably, if God is God, He can do anything He wants, and the thought of such a being pursuing us strikes me as a bit odd. Instead, this is what Marilyn offers her readers, based on her own experience:

I didn’t realize that the reason the topic of God weighed so heavily on my mind, was because God was pressing the issue…It was as if I couldn’t escape thinking about the possibility of God…It might be that the underlying reason atheists are bothered by people believing in God is because God is actively pursuing them.

You are free to read the rest, but that is the jist of it. I couldn’t stop thinking about God (or maybe worrying about God’s existence), therefore He must exist! This is about as pathetic an intellectual cop-out as any that I have seen. I suppose God just happens to pursue individuals who can’t stand not having all of the answers laid out in front of them.

6. Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God pursuing us.

God has other revlelations? How does Marilyn know that the Bible is God’s revelation? Let’s see if she clues us in:

Why Jesus? Look throughout the major world religions and you’ll find that Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius and Moses all identified themselves as teachers or prophets. None of them ever claimed to be equal to God. Surprisingly, Jesus did. That is what sets Jesus apart from all the others. He said God exists and you’re looking at him. Though he talked about his Father in heaven, it was not from the position of separation, but of very close union, unique to all humankind. Jesus said that anyone who had seen Him had seen the Father, anyone who believed in him, believed in the Father.

He said, “I am the light of the world, he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” He claimed attributes belonging only to God: to be able to forgive people of their sin, free them from habits of sin, give people a more abundant life and give them eternal life in heaven. Unlike other teachers who focused people on their words, Jesus pointed people to himself. He did not say, “follow my words and you will find truth.” He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but through me.”

We normally consider a person who claims to be God insane or at least deeply troubled. Marilyn wants to grant Jesus an exception here. Why? Why should we believe what He alledgedly claimed to be? She provides two quotations from the gospel of John, but the gospel of John is recognized by most biblical scholars to be a late and unreliable composition. Why should we believe that the author of John is accurately quoting Jesus rather than using Jesus as a mouthpiece to expouse his own theological views? Where in the earlier gospels - Mark, Matthew, and Luke - does Jesus claim to be a God? How about Mark 15.34, where Jesus says, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” Is he talking about himself?

Marilyn attempts to answer some of these questions by giving reasons to believe that Jesus was, in fact, divine:

What proof did Jesus give for claiming to be divine? He did what people can’t do. Jesus performed miracles. He healed people…blind, crippled, deaf, even raised a couple of people from the dead. He had power over objects…created food out of thin air, enough to feed crowds of several thousand people. He performed miracles over nature…walked on top of a lake, commanding a raging storm to stop for some friends. People everywhere followed Jesus, because he constantly met their needs, doing the miraculous. He said if you do not want to believe what I’m telling you, you should at least believe in me based on the miracles you’re seeing.

Even if we grant all of this - is there anything here that a devil in disguise could not accomplish? But we don’t need to grant any of this. The gospels must be shown to be reliable, not simply assumed to be.

Marilyn’s reasons either fall flat or raise more questions than they appear to answer. They certainly shouldn’t compell any thinking person into believing that “a loving God does exist and can be known in an intimate, personal way.”