Tag Archives: God

The Fear of Death

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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The other night some friends and I went out and watched Titanic 3D. My girlfriend loves the movie. I thought the movie was well-written, well-directed, well-acted, and totally depressing.

It was depressing to watch all those people dying toward the end of the movie and it really made me wonder what I would be feeling if I was in their situation. I mean think about it. What would be going through your mind if you knew death was imminent? Would you pray to whatever God you believe in? Would that provide peace for you? Would you be able to die without that mental anguish that I envision?

In one scene, there is a minister praying and the people around him are reaching out to him, touching him, and holding onto him as the Titanic sinks. In that moment I felt the comfort those people were getting from that. If I was in that situation I might even be reaching out to the minister, despite my lack of belief in God.

Death is feared. I think that when a person contemplates imminent death, the emotional response is so powerful that it can completely overwhelm any rational output of the mind. A powerfully emotional movie like the Titanic allows some of us to experience in a small way what imminent death might feel like. After watching the movie I realized that even a rational mind like my own could be overwhelmed by the emotions and trigger a deathbed conversion.

I remember hearing, as an argument against atheism, the stories of atheists that suddenly convert to Christianity on their death beds. As the stories go, the atheists mock God until almost the very end when they suddenly start praying to him and begging for forgiveness.

Those stories are at most anecdotes, and many are no more than myths (particularly the one about Darwin). It wouldn’t surprise me, however, if that kind of thing actually happened on a regular basis. I imagine myself on my deathbed and I think there’s a chance that even I might do something like that. I think it will take a lot of courage to face death without falling into the wishful thinking of Christianity.

However, I disagree that this is evidence for the existence of God, as many Christians would like to claim, or proof that all atheists know deep down that there really is a God. Quite the contrary. The only thing that deathbed conversions are evidence for, is fear of death.

Religion provides an answer for one very powerful metaphysical question – what happens when we die? Christianity, for one, gives you the belief that you’re immortal in a sense. Being an atheist, I believe technology is our only hope for immortality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the the deathbed conversion was found to be more likely among atheists that left religion than among atheists that have never been religious. The claim that deathbed conversions are caused by ‘all atheists know deep down that there really is a God’ could be tested statistically. If those atheists that left religion had deathbed conversions at a rate significantly higher than those atheists that were never religious, it could be evidence that deathbed conversions are caused in part by a person’s previous religious experiences rather than something that all atheists know deep down.

To end this post on a lighter note I will close with a deathbed story about Voltaire – the famous philosopher. When asked by a priest to renounce Satan and turn to God, Voltaire allegedly said, “Now is no time to be making new enemies.“

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Atheists are Ignorant

15 Sunday Apr 2012

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Atheists are an ignorant bunch.

Atheists don’t know for sure how life began on Earth. They hypothesize a number of ideas such as abiogenesis – the idea that life sprang from an inorganic primordial soup and panspermia – the idea that life was brought here from another place in the universe. Christians know exactly where life comes from – God created it.

Atheists don’t know for sure how long the universe will last. Some think it will end in a Big Crunch at some unknown point in the distant future. Others think it will end in a Big Bounce, again at some point in the distant future. Christians know that the end is near and that it will be caused by God’s hands.

Atheists aren’t sure where the universe came from although many suggest that it came from nothing. Christians know exactly where the universe came from – God created it.

Atheists aren’t sure why there is something rather than nothing. Christians know that it’s God’s plan for there to be something rather than nothing.

Atheists don’t know the answer to, “Why are we here?” and some of them will go as far as claiming the question is meaningless because it anthropomorphizes a natural process. Christians know exactly why we are here – we are here to prepare ourselves for the afterlife.

Atheists know very few of the answers to the big questions in life. Christians know almost all of them.

Atheists may be ignorant but at least they’re not delusional.

Free Will versus God’s Omnipotence

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in The Questioning

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Growing up Amish I was taught that God was omnipotent (all-powerful). I was taught that God had the power to make anything happen and that he did – everything from making a leaf fall from a tree to deciding that it was time for someone to die. I grew up believing that God did not start the universe and then sit back as it unfolded, but rather, that he fully controlled every event.

But as I became an older child, things didn’t make quite as much sense anymore. If God made everything happen then why did I sometimes do bad things? I knew that God didn’t want me to do bad things but still I believed that he controlled it. Also, when somebody died, everyone in the community would say “Well, it was his time to go.” Everyone believed that God had chosen that day as the day for that person to die. Then we heard about a suicide in some other community. Everyone was so sad. Everyone knew that the person would go to hell – suicide was the worst possible thing to do because it was defying God’s will of when you must die, and it leaves no time to repent afterwards.

Wait a minute!

This might have been the very first time that I recognized a logical contradiction. On the one hand, God was omnipotent but on the other hand God didn’t seem able to control the desires of man.

So I asked my Dad about it and I talked to my Mom about it. Their consensus was that God is omnipotent except when it comes to the free will of man. Of course they didn’t use the term “free will”. Either they had never heard about it or they wanted to simplify things for me.

After a lot of thinking, this made sense to me. After all, God made us in his image. It made perfect sense that he “made” us but that he couldn’t fully control us. We were left to decide some things for ourselves and to pay the consequences for any bad choices that we made.

It didn’t take long for the nagging thoughts to return. If God was omnipotent why did he choose to give us free will when he made us? Wouldn’t it be more fair if he made us like the animals – with no free will? Why did he choose to give us a characteristic that would end up causing so much pain when he could just as well have done everything but give us free will?

This time when I asked for help with my questions, I couldn’t find anyone to help. For my parents, and even for the Amish preacher I asked, my questions were apparently too deep for them.

So of course they defaulted to an explanation that goes something like this; “I don’t know the answer to that but you know, the Bible tells us that God’s ways are so mysterious. Maybe we’re not meant to understand all these things.”

That wasn’t good enough for me. If God didn’t want me to understand things, he wouldn’t have given me a questioning mind.

So of course, I developed elaborate rationalizations. I had always believed that the purpose of life was to get to heaven. Upon wondering why God even made a heaven and why he wants humans in it, I decided that he probably got very lonely and just wants some company. At this point I decided that God had free will and that he wanted to socialize with other minds that have free will and by giving us free will, he had to relinquish some of his omnipotence. Therefore, we have choices and we have pain and suffering.

Sometimes I suspected that we were an experiment orchestrated by God. I imagined him up there in heaven taking notes as he watched his experiment unfold. I even went as far as imagining that it would be like me looking curiously down upon an anthill and watching the ignorant ants go about their lives. Whenever I couldn’t understand some facet of God I would imagine once again the ants on that anthill. I imagined that God’s intellectual superiority was like the difference in intelligence between humans and ants. Of course the ants had no hope of understanding even the smallest fact about us humans. In much the same way it made sense that we humans don’t have a hope of fully understanding the smallest fact about God.

In retrospect, I still suffer a little from a variation of the question, “Is there free will or is God omnipotent?” This variation is, “Is there free will or is there determinism?” But that’s a question to tackle on some other day.