GYC 2010: No Turning Back

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

An Intelligent Faith: An Adventist Apologist's Adventure

Clifford Goldstein

Why Do I Believe in God?

This message was presented at the GYC 2010 No Turning Back Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

For other resources like this, visit us online at GYCweb.org.

Now the title of my sermon, my talk is you know, why do I believe in God?

And I admit that's kind of a strange topic you'd think for someone...

Oh my goodness I got that racket over there I'm gonna have to stand over here because that's very distracting.

The title of my sermon is, Why Do I Believe in God?

And you'd think that would be kind of a strange topic coming for someone who's been an Adventist for 30 years and next year I'll be at the GC 28 years which will be literally half my life I'll have been there.

And yet at the same time maybe it's not so strange because maybe once in a while it's good to take a look at the foundation principles at the core of what you believe and why you believe it and make any adjustments along the way if you need to change.

And I suppose in 1 sense too, I put this talk together as kind of a defense against spiritual or even intellectual complacency.

We don't wanna take our beliefs for granted, we don't wanna take our faith for granted, and we don't wanna take our relationship with God for granted as well.

We need to think through what we believe.

We need to think through what we believe, not for only our own good, but then maybe to fulfill the admonition we read in Peter, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and be ready always to give an answer to everyone that asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.

And that's what I want to do with this talk if nothing else is just simply help give an answer for the hope that is in us.

Now the title isn't why do I believe in Jesus or why do I believe in the second coming.

No I want to even get more basic than that.

Those elements really are what you need faith for.

You need, I should say, you need revelation for.

And though I'm not denying that you don't need faith to believe in God, I'm arguing that there are very powerful and logical reasons for faith in God.

In fact, I would argue and argue even strenuously, which I'm gonna try to do here, that logic and reason is by far, by far more on the side of those who believe in God than it is for those who don't.

I believe the logic and reason works much stronger in our direction for belief in God and And that's what I want to talk about are some of those basic reasons for this belief.

I don't happen to be a very big great C.S.

And I do think Screwtape Letters is absolutely 1 of the most for a that's not quote inspired as we understand inspiration that is a powerful powerful book if you've never read Screwtape Letters you ought to read the screw I mean I get the goose bumps sometimes when I just think of that book and how powerful that book is.

I've never read any of the, outside of mere Christianity and screw tape letters, a little things here and there I've read.

But if there is a good book called Surprise by Joy which tells his own conversion experience.

And I remember in this book he talked about the fact that he was teaching at Oxford and he talked about they were probably, I can't remember all the details, but they were probably I think sitting in the teacher's lounge and this is when he was still an agnostic or an atheist, and he talked about a friend of his.

Yeah, I don't have any slides or anything, so.

Anyway, he was talking to this guy, and he called him the hard-boiled-est of all the atheists I ever knew.

The cynics of cynics, the toughest of toughs, when it came to faith.

So obviously we're dealing with a hard-nosed atheist.

I mean, you got a lot of them coming out of England these days.

But anyway, they're sitting in the teacher's lounge and the fellow says to him something like this, well, you know, C.S.

Old Chap, there really is a lot of powerful evidence for the historicity of the Gospels.

And then the guy just dropped the subject.

It was almost as if the guy said to him, well you know C.S.

Old chap I was sitting last night eating and a flying saucer came down in my backyard and scooped up my dog Rover and took him away pass the salt you know just drop the subject well C.S.

Lewis he understood the implications of what that man was saying.

I mean if the Gospels were historically accurate, that is what they say really happened, then miracles occurred Because the Gospels are filled with miracles particularly the resurrection of Jesus And if you had all these miracles if you had these supernatural things occurring Then his own atheistic materialistic worldview He knew had to be wrong I mean if you have a worldview which says divine miracles, supernatural miracles cannot occur and yet they do occur, you know, then what happens to your worldview that says they can't occur?

Now I'm using this account not as an introduction to an apologetic on the Gospels but as an account as an introduction to what has represented from antiquity basically 2 overarching worldviews.

2 grand overarching metaphysics if you want to, that might not be the best word because I think 1 of them would deny that.

But First there's the materialistic atheistic worldview which goes back as far back to ancient Greece.

Hey atheism and all this stuff it didn't start with Richard Dawkins and the new that's why they call them the new atheists.

You could find this way back in ancient Greece right up through today where it's most likely loudly proclaimed by what they call the new atheists.

No God, no Creator were purely chance creations of what some ancient Greek philosopher 400 years 300 years before Christ called the atoms, atoms and the void.

Okay, that's all we are, atoms and the void.

Okay, you've got that 1 view, the atheistic secular worldview, which is somewhat dominant in many of the academies today in secular America.

And then you've got the second overarching view, you know, belief in some type of supernatural being or beings.

You know, from Zoroaster's Ahura Mazda to Voltaire's Deism.

Voltaire was not an atheist, he was a deist.

Voltaire once said every watch has to have a watchmaker.

So you've got, you know, anything from Zoroasterism to Voltaire's Deism, up through Calvinistic predestination and on and on and on and everything in between as well.

Now, either worldview, this is important, Lewis knew negated the other.

I mean if the atheistic worldview was true then the other worldview was false.

If the other worldview is true, then the atheistic worldview was false.

Either there was a God or there wasn't a God, or there's supernatural being or beings or not.

And my talk is my title, unsubtly suggests is I take the latter obviously belief in God.

Well let's get a little more fundamental.

Why is there anything at all to believe in?

Why is there even a subjective consciousness like myself to believe in anything?

Or to get as basic as you can, I like there was a philosopher in the 1600s his name was Godfrey Wilhelm Leibniz and he was a contemporary of Newton and he and Newton got in a big fight over who first invented the calculus?

Can you imagine you know they both about invented calculus and inventing it I mean but anyway Leibniz asked a question that I think gets to the bottom line of Everything and here's about as basic broad of a question as I think you could ask.

Leibniz asked the question, why is there something instead of nothing?

I mean, if you try to get lower than that or broader than that, I don't know.

You know, the bottom line, why is there something instead of nothing?

Because apparently there is something, you know, there is something here.

And I think, you know, the answer must be found in 1 of those 2 overarching world views that we just talked about 1 version or another of them you know either the universe existed through natural or through supernatural origins if the latter if it came through the latter through something supernatural through God creator God or gods or whatever then the universe was made by a being or beings greater than it or prior to it.

Because there's a basic law, only something greater than something could make it.

Okay only something greater than whatever.

Only something greater that could make it.

So if the universe was made by something, it would be pretty awesome, pretty powerful.

Ivan’s Children

I don't know how many of you have ever read Theodore Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov.

I don't think these Russians write any short books.

Anybody here register out of curiosity if you've read it?

Well, he deals in this book with a lot of themes about God and the meaning of life and death and just questions that I guess everybody has.

And there's 1 scene in this novel which basically it's 2 guys in a restaurant talking.

And Dostoevsky's the only writer I know who can go on for 200 pages having 2 guys talking and pull it off and hold you enthralled.

1 of them's a monk and the other one's kind of a socialist, a skeptic, an atheist.

And they're having a discussion about the existence of God.

And of course the monk is arguing for the existence of God the atheist is you know the socialist is arguing against it and at 1 point the socialist Ivan Karama's office his name he tells a story, whether it's true or not, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter.

There's probably is and there's enough horrific stuff out there anyway.

He told about a surf and a surf boy who lived on some Russian land owner's estate.

And the boy threw a rock and injured the paw of the estate owner's favorite dog.

And the state owner had the child taken out, had everybody out there in front of his mother, had the child stripped naked, and then told the child to run and as the boy ran and he set the dogs on him and then just ripped the boy apart in front of his mother.

Now Ivan's reason for telling that story and the story about how the Turks in Bulgaria threw Slavic children up in the air and then caught him on the ends of their bayonets or he told a story about someone passed some parents who locked their five-year-old daughter in a cold basement and made her eat excrement you know and on and on he brought a number of these horrible stories was to ultimately ask the question how could these stories and all these other horrible evils ever be justified even at the end of time When a divine harmony is to be restored when all the insufferable questions are to be resolved When God's ways are to forever be vindicated before men and angels And I want to read you a quote from Ivan Karamazov from the book.

Ivan says this, in this whole context, I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer.

I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for.

But then there are the children and what am I to do about them?

For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I've taken only the children because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear.

Listen, if all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have the children to do with it?

Though few can express the words with the grace and power that Dostoevsky sculpted into Ivan Karamazov's mouth, who hasn't felt the same question at some point grind at your soul especially those of us who believe in a loving God the children, what am I to do about them?

It's really not a problem for an atheist.

If you don't believe in God, I'm not saying atheists don't fret over those things and aren't pained by those things, but they don't present the kind of philosophical challenge that they do to theists.

Children being ripped apart by hunting dogs by God's babies Bayoneted this is just what it means to live in an absurd Godless universe that was created purely by chance Okay, it's not a problem.

It's a problem for them in the sense that bothers them, but it doesn't first present a philosophical problem For those who believe in a loving God a loving all-powerful God This isn't any new in the third century before Christ Fell on a Epicurus asked this question, is God willing to prevent evil but not able?

That's the gist of the question as I said.

Now there are many logical arguments for the existence of God that was what my whole last talk was about I don't want to go through them all again but very quickly you've got you've got you know the Moral argument where does morality come from if there's not a God as I use an example before I used say the Nazis won the war and Convinced everybody in the world that it was okay anybody with 1 Jewish grandparent should be murdered If morality is a purely human construct, and everybody believed that, then how could it be wrong?

If morality is something we humans create alone, and everybody believes, hey, the Nazis were right, and anybody with 1 Jewish grandparent ought to have been murdered, then ultimately it had to be right because if humans create morality, well if you're not comfortable with that, which a lot of people aren't, then that for many people that's a powerful argument for a transcendent morality, a morality from above.

And where else would that come from but from God?

Then there's the cosmological argument, which I talked about.

I mean, ultimately, in the end, either nothing created the universe or God created the universe.

I'm not going to go through the whole thing now but nothing is the only thing that doesn't need an explanation prior to it and an eternal God doesn't need an explanation prior to it.

So you've got either nothing created the universe Or God and I think Logically God is a lot more logical than saying nothing created the universe then you got the argument from design Incredible design I made the point that's kind of ironic that the more complexity science finds in life, the less logical and less feasible becomes their explanation for the origins of that, because they say it all occurred by chance.

Yet some people just, in fact, 1 of the century's greatest scientists argued that space aliens came and seeded life on Earth because there's no way it could have risen by chance in the estimated number of years of the universe.

And again, even if you believe in space aliens, that doesn't solve the question of where did the space aliens come from so my point at all this is I'm not going to repeat I don't feel like going through all that again I just went through it for an hour there are a lot of rational logical reasons for believing in God But none of these arguments in and of themselves proves the existence of God.

They're good as far as they go, which I guess which isn't far enough I guess as everyone would believe, But no matter how good or logical the evidence, and as I said in my last talk I believe the evidence and the logic and reason for it exists, the evidence for God is much more logical and reasonable than for atheism, But no matter how good the moral argument is, the theological argument, the cosmological argument, either together or separately you put them all together, none of them answers, even begins to answer Ivan Karamazov's question, the children, what am I to do about them?

However logical and reasonable those proofs are, those arguments are, they're no more logical and reasonable than the question, how could the God, how could the God of the moral, teleological, and cosmological argument be all loving and all powerful while evil exists?

I think this is inevitably the most logical and reasonable question asked in any world where faith in God coexists with eight-year-olds being ripped to shreds by hunting dogs.

As 1 philosopher put it, if God is perfectly loving, he must wish to abolish evil.

If he is all-powerful, he must be able to abolish evil but evil exists therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.

I mean who here hasn't wrestled with this?

I still even now after all these years wrestle with it.

Who believes in God doesn't wrestle with this?

If God is all-powerful and could do all things, why is there evil?

Unless though you start to understand ultimately what omnipotence means.

And this idea of omnipotence doesn't necessarily mean everything that we think it does.

Omnipotence can't do what is logically impossible.

Can omnipotence create a triangle that has 4 sides?

Can God create a triangle that has 4 sides?

No, because the moment it has 4 sides it's no longer a triangle.

Can omnipotence create a circle with 4 right angles?

Can God create a circle that's got 4 right angles?

Because the moment it's got 4 right angles it's no longer a circle.

No, because the moment it's 5 it's no longer 2 plus 2.

Can omnipotence create a love that is forced?

I'd say no because the moment that love is forced it's no longer love.

Just as a triangle, To be a triangle must have 3 sides.

It's like when a proton meets an anti-proton.

Love by its very definition as love must be freely given otherwise it's something other than love.

Love to be love has to be free or it's not love.

Without freedom love is as impossible as a Euclidean plane without breath or with.

God can create obedience without freedom.

He can create compliance without freedom, but not love.

God can force every creature in the universe to fear Him.

He can force every creature in the universe to worship Him.

He can force every creature in the universe to obey Him.

He cannot force a single creature in the universe to love him.

Because the moment God forces love, it's no more love.

Called by Name

Father, again I just thank you for the privilege of being here.

And I just Thank you for the way you led in my life, and I pray that your spirit will be here, and whatever anybody needs to take away from this talk, that your spirit will impress upon them the changes, if needed, that need to be made.

And As I give this to you, help me to never forget how you've led.

Even though I was raised in a Jewish home, I was raised in a very secular, very secular Jewish environment.

And it was really, in many ways, very postmodern.

You know that word is thrown around a lot and it's not necessarily all bad postmodernism but I don't want to hear that.

But the essence of how I was raised and what I was taught was that there is no absolute truth.

You could believe what you want and that's your truth.

And you could believe what you want and that's yours.

And it didn't matter if logically they were in contradiction to each other because there was no sort of overarching transcendent place where you could stand and ultimately judge.

There was, you know, if you heard 1 of my earlier talks about morality, where morality came from, it was Truth was just a human construct.

It wasn't any kind of overarching kind of thing at all.

I believed it, accepted it, was kind of an adamant purveyor of that view.

Now, I was always at the same time somewhat of a seeker and had an interest in philosophy and was young.

And I can remember I was about 21 years old and I was sitting in a pizza parlor at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

And I was sitting in this pizza parlor, I'm eating a pizza and drinking, I'd say, you know, a non-adventist beverage.

And I'm reading this philosopher, his name is Spinoza.

Now if I can think of anybody who I absolutely disagree with this about every single thing the man said it would be Spinoza now But at the time he said something in that book that changed my life right in that pizza parlor just like that.

I mean anybody looking just would have seen some guy sitting there eating a pizza but my life changed and the essence of what he said was in order to live the most perfect life upon the earth you needed to find out the reason why you were here, and then live your life accordingly.

Well for some reason those words sort of just went into my mind almost like a lobotomy, a prefrontal lobe lobotomy just went right in and all those neurons all those brain cells where I had all over this relativism that I had been you know educated on and raised on accepted it was almost like they just stuck this shiv in and just wiped it out and at that moment it just hit me hey there was a pizza sitting on the table in front of me okay now you could have taken a thousand different people and they could have had a thousand different explanations or beliefs for how the pizza got there.

Maybe they thought the god Marduk created the pizza.

Maybe they thought aliens came down and dropped it in a flying saucer.

Maybe they thought it evolved out of the ground.

There could have been a thousand different people with a thousand different views on the pizza.

Views that they would have died for, or views they maybe would have killed for.

And maybe every single last 1 of those views were wrong.

You could add a million people with a million views, and maybe every view was wrong.

But it wouldn't change the fact that there was the pizza sitting on the table and somewhere out there somewhere in out there in the universe there was an explanation for the pizza for how the pizza got there why it got there and that explanation for the pizza whatever it was would have been the truth about the pizza, even if nobody knew what that truth was.

It just suddenly hit me there had to have been an explanation for the pizza.

And that explanation was the truth about the pizza.

It had to exist because the pizza was there.

And then at that moment I just stepped back and suddenly realized it hit me hey I mean I exist there's a world here there's a universe here and at that moment it hit me just as there had to have been an explanation for the pizza.

And whatever that explanation was, that was how the pizza got here.

I suddenly realized that somewhere out there, there had to be an explanation for the universe for life for human existence I mean there was something there and the same way something had to explain the pizza something had to Explain the universe and existence and consciousness and that explanation whatever it was would be the truth You know as with the capital T, and it just suddenly hit me at 21 Wow truth exists And I mean you might think to yourself.

Oh, you know it took me 21 to come to that Mickey Mouse could have told you that But I'm telling you the way I was raised the way I was educated everything in my life worked against me coming to that conclusion.

And I'll never forget, I mean, I just walked out of that pizza parlor.

My life changed because it suddenly hit me that truth with a capital T had to exist.

And again, it was just such a revelation to me to think that because I thought wow wow I mean that was just and and and for some reason I can I can still remember this moment I remember I was walking through the streets it was Gainesville Florida and it was dark and I'm walking to the streets of Gainesville and I felt it I mean I felt it so strongly I to the second still remember I felt this pain in my chest?

And I remember thinking to myself, if it were humanly possible, because I realized this absolute certainty that I had at that moment that truth had to exist.

I mean, boom, that was just as about as, use a fancy word, apodectic, that was just about as unconvertible of a truth that you could come to.

That didn't automatically deductively mean that I could know what that truth was.

See, even on my sudden realization, no question that truth had to exist, didn't automatically mean that I could know what it was, and I realized that.

But I can still remember, I was 21, walking through the streets, and I just felt this burning sensation, it was almost painful thinking to myself if it were humanly possible, because as I said I realized it might not be possible, but I thought if I could know this truth, I thought to myself I wanted to know it, I didn't care where it led me what it cost me what I had to give up what I had to suffer if I could know truth.

I wanted to know it No matter what I can still remember that day You know and I wasn't thinking anything religion just the sudden realization that truth had to exist It just put this thing in me.

I wanted to know it no matter what And All I know is of all the different paths I could have gone on All the different ways I could have gone in Gainesville, Florida had everything I went through my marks stage for a while and they had these gurus and I and did the Eastern thing for a little while and the philosophical thing and all this.

Of all the different ways I could have gone, all the different paths I could have gone, and all of them out there, just because there's an awful lot, all I know is about 3 years later, I ended up becoming a seventh-day Adventist.

And that's remarkable for a lot of reasons, a lot.

Believe me, you don't know the half of it.

But first of all, in my life, growing up, I knew 1 Adventist my whole life.

I knew 1 Adventist, and we used to smoke pot together.

You know, this actually has a happy ending.

You gotta go 25 years later to get to that happy ending and we probably won't have a time to get into that But anyway, I only knew 1 Adventist growth as I said we used to get stoned and The other thing too in my life.

There were 2 kinds of people I used to hate I used to hate Christians and I'm not kidding too, I mean it.

I was so into eating meat, I realized I was so carnivorous.

I was so carnivorous that, you know, I would meet vegetarians.

I remember 1 time I was in Russia and I was eating with some girl.

She was a vegetarian and I just started mocking her and almost brought her to tears.

Series

An Intelligent Faith: An Adventist Apologist's Adventure

Ivan’s Children

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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