Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Its not that easy...

Something I've been noticing a lot over the past few months is when people use arguments that make you wonder a little and then jump to the conclusion that it disproves the existence of God. For example I recently saw on a forum where an atheist found a description of the earth in the Bible that was written by an author who did not have a very scientific view of the earth (because the Bible was written a long time ago). He concluded that because of this the Bible was not written by God and that there was no God.

Did you notice how he jumped to the conclusion that God does not exist so quickly? That wouldn't even hold up in a freshman philosophy class. In this case they found a spot where man inserted his own theories about the earth. Now we know better and we realize that was a faulty viewpoint. But God should have known better all along. So why did he use archaic mythology in the description? Because God didn't write the Bible. That point could certainly be argued but to say that God doesn't exist is a non sequitur. When people find contradictions in the Bible or when they find a verse they misinterpret for lack of knowledge and they say that God does not exist is a huge logical fallacy.

Rather than saying that God does not exist we should realize only that our previous notion of him does not exist. Dr. Weatherhead stresses this point in his writing. I think it is a very important point. To limit God to whatever idea we have of him is dangerous. Because if that idea is disrupted by a new thought or another idea then our "God", that we have created in an attempt to understand, is disproved. I think that is probably (and many people will disagree with me) the reason why many people are atheists. Because their idea of God was fallacious and they did the intelligent thing and abandoned the idea. Unfortunately they did not innovate their beliefs and ideas about God afterwards.

It is not so easy to disprove whatever the true idea of God is. There is probably no human on this earth who entirely realizes what God is truly like. But if we did we would have no need to search for answers then would we?

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