“My God is obvious”

By Arron Bergeron

Basic Beliefs

It is true; God does not seem so obvious to some. Still, for many, God is quite obvious. This amounts to what is called intuitional belief. It is just as rational a claim as saying “I am hungry”, or “I think Tom is sad”. These are beliefs that can be possibly true or possibly false. Maybe I am not hungry, and maybe Tom truly isn’t sad. That is not the point. While I may possibly be in error, the beliefs are completely subject to me. As long as they are at least possibly true, they are rational beliefs, and as long as a belief is still rational, alone it amounts to an acceptable reason to believe. It is not, however, equally acceptable as a proof for the veracity of a belief.

Permit me to repeat myself. If God is completely obvious to me, while it is logically possible I am wrong, it is also logically possible I am right. The immediately important point is that I am the holder of the belief, and no one has access to the belief but me. If God does not seem obvious to someone else perhaps there is a sound explanation why; perhaps his or her cognitive faculties are damaged. No matter the circumstances, it is equally impossible it can be evidence against God any more than it could be evidence for God. As long as belief is subject to the believer, it is not accessible to the skeptic, and so the skeptic can never say, in this case for example, God is not obvious to me. It is completely possible God exists even if not so obviously to the skeptic. The believer who makes the claim God is obvious is being rational. It is even fully possible that it is true. In actuality, it is an excellent reason for believing so long as God exists. However, it isn’t a good argument or proof for God. Herein lies the difference, knowing is not showing.

Let’s turn this back to the skeptic, a claim that God is not so obvious is also perfectly reasonable. God in all likelihood is not obvious to some, but to move beyond that and assert the non-existence of God moves into the sphere of the irrational. It does not follow that because God is not obvious He therefore does not exist. At best, the only available move the skeptic could make is to agnosticism.

I am simply trying to point out one simple truth; using the tagline “God is obvious” or “God is not obvious” is a perfectly acceptable reason for belief, but it pits one belief against another in horizontal tension. The only way to escape this and make any headway in the discussion is to move off this subjective playing field, and into the arena of rational argumentation.

With this simple foundation laid, I think it’s prudent to ask how it is, based upon evolutionary presuppositions, that the skeptic can claim to believe anything. If all life is reduced to molecules in motion, then every thought and belief is nothing more than the direct byproduct of chemical reactions in the brain. Following the cues of ardent atheists today, we are merely dancing to the tune of our DNA¹. The mind is not fit truth²; that is to say the mind was not at all adapted to apprehend truth, but is adapted for survival. It is not my immediate and direct focus, but this deserves serious consideration. In a material world where we are our brains, can it truly be said there are true beliefs? Modern science today can’t even imagine that it could happen, never mind how it could happen. An affirmation of the possibility of true beliefs will fit nicely on theistic foundations, but not on the framework of atheism.

The Numbers Game

Guy Harrison writes

“Why is it, for example, that the ‘obvious’ god of more than one billion Muslims is unrecognizable to the five billion non-Muslims who are alive today? About five-sixths of the human population do not think he is really there. Nothing is more obvious to Christians than Jesus. So why do more than four billion people not believe he is a god? Some one billion Hindus think their gods are obviously real. But five billion of their fellow humans do not see it that way.”³

Harrison continues on to posit that more than seven hundred fifty million atheists worldwide don’t see God as obvious at all. The proposed fact that the god/gods of individual faith systems is/are not so obvious should apparently cast doubt on whether or not God actually exists. I get the picture in my head of the magician playing the shell game, asking which cup has the ball under it, only to find out in the end there was no ball after all. Is this really a fair assessment of the situation? Should we be greatly concerned as Christian theists? Absolutely not! I see at first glance two glaring errors in this argument.

First, it has to be recognized that the characteristics of something are never to be confused with the existence of the thing. It’s like arguing with a colorblind man about the chair in the middle of the room. If I see it as honey brown and he sees it as light green, how does it logically follow that we ought to doubt there is a chair? It might even be possible both of us are wrong, but it doesn’t disprove the reality of the chair. It simply does not make any sense to suggest God does not exist because theists of different stripes define Him differently. This mistake copied from atheist to atheist, and then repeated again is very common in my experience.

Secondly, it must be clearly articulated to the atheists that on the larger statistical scale, granting the statistics are correct, there are seven hundred fifty million purported atheists against the remaining world population of more than six billion who still see God as obvious. The same statistics paint a completely different picture when cast in this light. Add that to my first problem with this argument, that it is in the description where we differ, and it could stand to reason statistically that God more probably exists than not. Add that again to the fact God could possibly exist even if He is not obvious to some, and where does this argumentation lead us? Simply stated, statistical data always needs to be interpreted. I am merely trying to show the data can easily be reinterpreted to support theism much more readily and consistently.

Ultimately this numbers game is an appeal to consensus. Consensus, as history reveals, has often erred on the side of what is wrong rather than what is right. Consider the shift in discovering we live in a heliocentric solar system as an example. Consensus is not an adequate measure for truthfulness. In this case it is an indicator of what people believe about reality. I personally think the best one can do from these statistics is to show that religious belief is an unavoidable characteristic of human nature. Man, so it seems, is hungry for some sense of transcendence and meaning in life. If rightly interpreted as such, we need to ask why that is.

Focusing on specific aspects of religious belief, mainly a priori higher principles to which one can dedicate their lives and service for personal meaning and fulfillment, then atheists and religionists share this character trait in full measure. Remember that any talk of God, in affirmation or denial of Him, is strictly under the umbrella of religious talk. It is the same as the two doctors disputing the presence or absence of cancer cells in a patient. That debate is purely biology. The public and outspoken face of atheism today, I believe, is the outworking of mans unavoidable bent toward the religious. Man needs a cause, a purpose, something he can perceive as bigger then himself to which he can dedicate himself. This describes what Christian theists call worship. This is exactly what the atheist is doing in championing his cause against God. Looked at in this light, the atheist is showing what Christians know to be true; man was created to worship. It’s simply that the atheist has misplaced worship of the One who is worthy, with himself who ultimately is not.

Science can`t answer everything

I have elsewhere commented on the deification of science by atheists and skeptics. Science is not omniscient. Science simply cannot account for everything as some spokesmen for atheism assert⁴. At the least science cannot account for itself. It also cannot account for numbers, it must assume them. It cannot account for value judgments in beauty or ethics. That is to name a few.

This sets the stage for explaining another fatal flaw in the thinking of Harrison.

“The ability of modern scientists to detect and observe objects and phenomenon both near and far is astonishing. Scientists are able to study viruses, molecules, atoms, even parts of atoms. Scientists are able to see far beyond our solar system and our galaxy. They can even see back in time with deep space imaging. But despite all of these abilities, no one has ever had any success at discovering so much as the slightest trace of a god. After all this searching, listening, and looking, we still have nothing but weak arguments and unreliable eye witness accounts to support the existence of gods.”⁵

If God is obvious, why then do these “elite scientists”  have trouble detecting God? Ignoring the impossibly subjective “elite⁶” moniker, the response to this is quite simple. Not everything can be accounted for scientifically. I've already listed off four examples. If they cannot detect a god, it is because their lenses are clouded by a ridiculous presupposition. I’ll explain further…

God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being. He is unlimited. That, in part, is to say He is not limited by spatial dimensions. God is not extended through space. This is not an illogical belief. Ideas like equality and justice, numbers, love… none of these are extended in space. We believe in them, assume them, and even take them for granted on a daily basis, scientists included.

Furthermore, reason itself must be more than merely the result of chemical reactions in the brain. That would serve to completely invalidate thought. By extension, this also eliminates the possibility of passing valid judgments about the truthfulness of propositions. For reason to be valid it must assume consciousness, it must assume a mind that transcends the material reality of the brain, and it must assume there are minds outside my own with which I am debating. Where do these minds come from? How do we explain their origins? Minds are not necessary but contingent; there is no natural law we can point to which necessitates them, yet here we are. If thought is to be validated, it depends on an anchor point which is qualitatively greater than the mind of man. The non-rational does not qualify to fit this bill. That is why Christian theists posit a super rational mind as the anchor point for the number of contingent minds we are discussing.

Even further still, what of the self-evident reality of the laws of logic, “something” else science cannot account for. Harrison must assume these laws in order to tell me I am wrong for being a believer. He must employ these immaterial laws in order to meaningfully communicate his faith in science. These laws make no sense if built upon an evolutionary account of our origins. They are strange furniture indeed unless we accept immaterial realities exist. These laws are above the heads of every mind, even those attempting to evade or deny them. In order for every finite mind to be so thoroughly subjugated to these laws, the source of these laws also must be qualitatively greater than us.

If scientists expect empirical evidence for everything, it is in blatant denial of the state of the reality they take for granted each day. How can such thinking ever be able to discover God? It cannot even make enough sense of what it does observe.

In conclusion, intuitive belief is reasonable. However, in order to obey scripture and engage in the task of giving a defense for the hope we have⁷, we need to move beyond this. We need to engage with something more. Not forgetting, we cannot allow ourselves to get pulled into arenas where the rules of engagement are nonsense. We must pull the debate into arenas where the light is brightest, and all weapons sanctioned by scripture and reason are allowed their full freedom of use.

Notes and references

1. Richard Dawkins. “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Basic Books, 1995, pg. 133.

2. Steven Pinker. “Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.” As quoted by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’ Leary in “The Spiritual Brain”, Harper Perennial, 2007, pg. 122

3. “Believing”, pg. 18

4. For example; “My own faith, my scientific faith, is that there is nothing that the scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate.” Peter Atkins; On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence. Oxford university press, 2011, pg. 104

5. Believing”, pg. 21

6. Ibid. "Elite" scientists is a complete misnomer and red herring often used by atheists and proponents of the evolution story. The term is without substantiation, and often wholly based upon the scientist's affirmation evolution. Go to www.answersingenesis.org to read a list of some elite scientists who deny the evolution story.

7. 1 Peter 3:15