OK. Clear enough. You are saying that is incorrect to describe atheists as knowing of God’s existence but refusing to acknowledge it.
So you are rejecting a very common belief among many Young Earth Creationists. (Many YECs even claim that the Theory of Evolution was invented to help support that overt denial of God’s existence.)
In regards to the worship of graven images and idolatry.
Money meets the criteria.
It has a graven image of man on its face and it is most certainly worshipped by millions of people all over the world.
Some folks will lie, steal, and kill for money.
Anything in life that takes all our focus, time, and devotion is in and of itself an act of worship. We worship celebrities, we worship ourselves and we worship ideologies that endanger and destroy the planet.
Humanism is idolatry. The misguided belief is that Human beings are the greatest thing since sliced wonderbread. let’s pat ourselves on the back in congratulation for all we’ve supposedly accomplished.
It’s like a bad joke told in poor taste and I simply don’t see the humour in it. But I’m truly just the millennial poster child for everything that has ever gone wrong in our society over the past 75 years.
Welcome, Vincent. Good to have you here. As the post you replied to is 6 years old, you may not get a lot of response, but who knows if someone wants to revive it. We look forward to hearing from you on the forum, and getting to know you better, and am intrigued by your poster child comment! (Perhaps as I consider myself the poster child for the result of misguided teachings of the church over 60 years… but I am in recovery.)
In Bible study two weeks ago I talked about science being a stumbling block for a lot of believers and saying how it’s a significant cause on why young believers leave the church. I was essentially scoffed at. I was told people who don’t believe in God are running from God as they don’t want to change their lives. I’m guessing the basis behind this view is this verse and a few others.
Vinnie
This is made clear by v 21 when it says “they knew God” – indeed it is possibly narrowed.
I second that.
And in 22ff he is describing the culture that the Christians in Rome could see around them, an extension of the Mediterranean milieu where Rome honored all the gods of the peoples they ruled.
I think that comes from people who have always been in the church and can’t conceive of living outside the faith. It’s a sort of ingrained self-righteousness.
Since atheists are mentioned in the title I thought I would chime in as the friendly neighborhood atheist. I would predict that most of what I have to say is common ground.
All atheists have heard versions of what is discussed in this thread, and it is usually a bit of an eye roller. At the same time, I cringe when I hear fellow atheists claim that believers don’t actually believe what they claim. My eyes roll equally for both. Each of our groups of fellow travelers contain individuals that we don’t always agree with.
One of our most basic social contracts is that we assume people are telling the truth about their beliefs (until proven otherwise). I absolutely believe Christians on this forum when they say they have a deeply held faith in God that is important to them, and I also think that belief is sincere. All us atheists ask for is the same consideration which is given to us by many, many Christians.
As to the argument itself, what I usually do is to ask people to apply the same question to themselves with respect to other religions. If the Koran said that people were without excuse for not believing the Koran was the word of the True Creator, would that convince them to convert to Islam? Are all Christians holding a secret belief that the Koran is true and just pretending otherwise? Of course not, right?
We all hit a wall where we fail to understand why other people can’t believe in things that we see so clearly. It’s just part of the human condition. We have all taken different paths through life and have ended up in different places, or the same places in many cases. We can still disagree and have different beliefs while also respecting each other and assuming the best of each other.
Well put. Belief is a strange thing. You really cannot will yourself to believe something that is not tangible. You believe your wife loves you despite her critical comments on your driving and work ethic. You believe you love her despite not liking her on occasion. I believe in Jesus despite my doubts on how fantastic the whole story is. I tend to side with Enns that doubt in a normal and in some ways a positive thing, and certainty can be quite destructive and, yes, sinful. (Hope I am not mis-representing him there, as it has been a while since I read his books.)
As you state, T, we have taken different paths, and it is interesting to think of why we believe as we do. I fall back on some of Jonathan Haidt’s ideas on tribalism and perhaps inborn tendencies. Hum. Perhaps Calvin was right, some are pre-destined to believe. He just did not know it was driven by genetics.
From my perspective, as someone who reluctantly agreed with God that I deserve to go to hell, I’m certain judgement day will reveal many secret thoughts and convictions that were secretly stuffed away by many many people who think they don’t deserve to go to hell.
Romans 1 is an interpretive challenge for me as I believe there are sincere atheists in the world, but I don’t believe they will be without excuse in the end, and neither do I believe their story will not be without any unexpected twists on the way.
God is so in the business of turning the world upside down, that is also what Romans 1 is saying.
Or as I often put it, you can’t make yourself believe in something you don’t believe in. It’s the darndest thing.
Atheists also believe in intangible and subjective things. We are humans too. We believe in the beauty of art, the love we feel towards family, and the absolutely wonderful richness of a well made smoky scotch whisky (despite what others say). It would be an absolute tragedy for a human not to embrace their emotional and subjective self. For some that includes religious belief, and I celebrate it.
Sometimes I think we get stuck in this scoreboard mentality where we count up all of the people on “our side”. There should only be one tally, those who are happy in their life and who are living the life they want to live.
Billy Graham answered this question the same:
People who deny that God exists may give several reasons for their unbelief. For example, they may say they reject God because they can’t understand why He doesn’t do something about all the evil in the world. Or they may say they’re turned off by the hypocrisy of Christians they’ve known.
But the real reason most deny God’s existence can be summarized in one word: pride. They want to run their own lives, and they don’t want anyone—especially God—to interfere with the way they’re living. They want to be in control of everything they do, and they know that if they were to believe in God, they’d have to change their lifestyle. Instead of living by their own list of what’s right and wrong, they’d have to take seriously God’s moral standards.
I honestly think this is the stock or standard Christian response. I doubt it applies to all unbelievers but I must admit, it certainly applies to a great deal of people. There is some truth to it. I think there is a little bit of Jonah in a lot or all of us. We hide in the garden like Adam. At least in my neck of the woods, a life of service, self-sacrifice and sobriety is a tough sell in hedonistic America.
Vinnie
All too frequently. I think that Graham’s point about pride is the reason here, too: too many are prideful about being Christians so they automatically aim to degrade everyone else.
Probably in most of America.
A Lutheran priest-theologian I knew once expounded on the difference between certainty and certitude, the former being an unwarranted confidence in one’s self, the latter being trust placed in someone deemed worthy of that trust. In that paradigm certainty can definitely be sinful.
Does Romans 1:18-21 deny the existence of “true atheists?”
No.
To understand the Bible in such a way would cause me to immediately dispose of it as total garbage. Such a claim plainly and completely contradicts my personal experience of reality.
Nowhere in this passage does it speak about the existence of God.
On the contrary, what is made known in “what has been made” is described otherwise.
No the people who have no excuse, are those who ignore what can be seen in the created world to insist on things about God which are contrary to what God is showing us to be the case in everything He sends us from the earth, and sky, and even in our own bodies.
Nowhere in this passage does it speak of people who see no reason to believe in the existence of any God.
On the contrary, the people of whom this speaks are described otherwise.
If we are to make free and interpret this passage so loosely and contrary to the actual words (as is suggested in the title of this thread) then I would feel free to interpret the passage as… speaking of anti-science creationists who have ignored everything God tells us in the earth, sky, and our own biology in order to build a fantasy image of God of their own to worship – one which caters to the fantasy world they have constructed to make them and their religion the center of not only the universe but all existence. I think this is closer to what the text says… but honesty is better, and so the truth is that this passage is speaking of neither atheists nor of anti-evolution creationists.
If someone takes that verse to mean that nature makes it clear there is a good then they are misunderstanding that verse. There is nothing anywhere in nature to prove anything supernatural exists and that incudes any god. No one has proof of God. What they have is
Or like me. Despite there being no concrete evidence that disproves any alternative, and choose to illogically concede to accepting that fact, still choose to have faith.
Christians are just as likely to live an average age as anyone else. Christians face the same amount of suffering and death as anyone else. Christians are just as likely to be poor or rich as anyone else. Christians are just as likely to be in the same exact positions of life that others of their race, social status and age are in as someone who belongs to another faith or has no faith at all.
If something helps your faith it’s not really important if it’s real or not. Does not matter if you choose to see magic in something that also has a natural explanation or regardless of its probability.
It’s sort of like this.
If I said yesterday a met a stranger walking and they said they felt really pain in their knees and I felt God put it on my heart to pray for them. To get out of my comfort zone and rock the boat stepping out into the water (metaphorically) and so I did and we prayed together and they suddenly started smiling and crying and said they feel better. They’ve not felt this absence of pain in years y’all may believe it. Some might think it’s a miracle. Some might think it’s a placebo. Some may not believe it at all.
But if I said yesterday God turned me invisible and allowed me to float magically to China in a few minutes and placed me there to pray for the same thing probably none of yall would believe it.
I think the emphasis on existence misses the point. I’ve always felt the nearness of something more which I’ve described as real, dynamic and important. It is only recently that I’ve come to see “God” as the placeholder name for what that is which has had the longest running, most extensive use. To say much more is almost invariably to say too much and will likely miss the mark.
But starting with a linguistic representation for God which is thought to define Him is wrong headed. Using an intermediary such as the Bible as a means of making the representation authoritative just compounds the problem. Perhaps in early times choosing a common representation for this ‘something more’ was the glue needed to unite a tribe or nation. Now that glue is appropriated by any charlatan or would be dictator to glue ‘the people’ to himself. Maybe it is better to put the glue on a shelf out of reach and learn to cope with the ineffable nature of the divine. The pursuit of certainty creates only idols and what the sacred really is simply isn’t up to us to decide.
Then you just have a thousand religions springing up.
Those former atheists and agnostics in our informal intelligent design club in university rationally decided that if there is indeed a Designer then the next step is to look for communication from that Designer, on the premise that a Designer would want to communicate with its creatures designed with intelligence. The logical place to look for such communication is in literature that claims to be revelation from said Designer since only then is there any objective standard for knowing what the Designer has attempted to say. That is glue not for tying people together but for setting down concepts for people to follow along with to understand the Designer.
Additionally, contrary to what Vinnie said, I think it’s a bit crazy to just say it’s pride and a desire to lead their own life. It would be like if I said that about Odin. That if you reject the teachings of Odin, it’s because of pride.
I’ve always liked the way Ricky Gervais joked that we are all atheists. The only difference is that atheists don’t believe in 4,000 gods and Christians don’t believe in 3,999 of them.
Atheists also don’t just live their own life. They also have a multitude of things guiding their life like humanism, societal norms and pressures , and science. They don’t just drive 100mph down a school zone at 730am because they most likely don’t want to get tickets, hit kids or end up on the news. So everyone has all kinds of things guiding their life.
Plus I also think about society. I don’t know what first century Rome was like. I don’t know if there was liberalism fighting for the rights of minorities then. Most of what I read seems to be centered around the powerful really abusing the weak. There was ritualistic sex where kids were abused publicly , and other men, as signs of power. Not done secretly, but publicly and part of the culture. There was slaves being pitted against each other in arenas killing one another just for entertainment like many go to football stadiums today to watch games.
Nowadays it often seems like activism is fighting for the same causes that first century Christians were. Protection for the marginalized and poor. In to tired to think straight to be honest. It’s 2am here and I’m about to head into work after 3 hours of sleep and Thursday I got off at 11pm. My schedule has been flipping around like crazy last few weeks. Come mid Jan it will balance back out. I don’t enjoy working 10 days in a row at 11am-11pm then off two days and suddenly working 2am to 2pm. My sleeping habits can’t change that fast.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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