It's Not That I Hope There Is No God! I Don't Want There To Be A God.

Some of you may know that I recently started down the road toward another degree and a lot of the courses will be about philosophy, logic, and dead guys. As I spent more time with these things (I'm not spending time with dead guys, though), I've come to the conclusion that not being a Christian is illogical.

Now, lots of people disagree with me on this point. But then that doesn't necessarily make me wrong. Popularity doesn't establish rightness... just look at skinny jeans. No, in order to prove that I'm wrong about that someone would have to provide some evidence to demonstrate that it is a sound application of logic to entirely deny God's existence and to deny the fact that Jesus was God's son and that Jesus lived and died and rose again from the dead.

A lot of people, even people that share the same faith as me, would say that such things cannot be proven and that they are simply to be addressed with faith. I agree, but only a smidgen. People believe things day in and day out without consciously thinking, "I'm choosing to believe this or that." Are they nuts? No, they are not, because they have evidence that supports what they think and it is logical, based on that evidence, to believe what they believe.

So it is with belief in theism in general and Christianity in specific. My faith is in God through Jesus Christ. My faith is on evidence that such belief is logical. My daughter and I have a disagreement over whether fairies are real. I don't think it's logical to believe in them. There are many other things that I don't believe in because they don't have substantial evidence to demonstrate the truth of them (like the existence of aliens, for example - no evidence...anywhere).

Anyway, great books have already been written on these subjects so I won't write one here. But here's an interesting quote along the lines of the topic:

“I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind …. This is a somewhat ridiculous situation …. [I]t is just as irrational to be influenced in one’s beliefs by the hope that God does not exist as by the hope that God does exist.”

--- Prof. Thomas Nagel, NYU; "The Last Word"