Is there a God ?

From time to time I hear people say that the New Testament has been significantly changed since it was first written, so we cannot have any confidence in we are reading. Who knows if it is an accurate reflection of what the original authors wrote?

Eminent scholar Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus suggests “how radically the text has been altered over the years”.

Is the situation really as ‘bad’ as that? What are the facts? I have spent some time checking the matter out.

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Atheists sometimes characterise christians as people who believe in myths and magic, based on faith, which is the opposite of reason.

I think this can be shown to generally be a mis-characterisation (see Is faith the opposite of reason? and Science, faith and certainty). But what if the tables were turned?

What if many atheists were starting to think irrationally and develop their own mythical beliefs?

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I came across another story of an apparently miraculous healing the other day. But can I believe it really happened and it was really a miracle?

How can we avoid both naive gullibility and closed-minded scepticism? Does it really matter?

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I have come across on the internet many atheists who were once christians. With church attendance dropping in most western countries, it may seem like changes in belief are all one way. But statistics show otherwise – that there are almost as many people changing from atheism to belief in God as are going the other way (see note 1).

Australian writer and musician RJ Stove is one of those who converted from atheism to christianity.

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Many modern atheists oppose the teaching of religion to children. Richard Dawkins has famously said that teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. In 2004 he wrote: “Isn’t it a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?”. And in 2012 he said: “We need to protect children from being indoctrinated.”.

But what if belief was their natural state? Some interesting studies suggest this is the case.

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The Cosmological argument attempts to show that God exists by considering what caused the universe. The universe couldn’t cause itself to exist, the argument says, nor could it exist for no reason, so an external agent must have caused it. And what else could that external agent be than God?

Despite various attempts to refute the argument, it remains a strong one, not least because of its basic common sense. But some atheists have argued that quantum physics shows that the universe could indeed have arisen out of nothing.

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Over the past two centuries, historical scholars have argued over what we can know about Jesus. Virtually all scholars (regardless of religion) now agree Jesus was a real person whose life followed the general outline in the gospels. However enthusiastic amateurs are still promoting the idea that Jesus didn’t exist. Books have been published and a thousand internet arguments launched, with little response from the scholars, who regard the Jesus myth as refuted. Now an eminent scholar has assessed the Jesus myth.

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It is almost a truism that atheists in western countries have ‘come out of the closet’, and are now enthusiastically pressing christians and other believers to recognise that their faith is unjustifiable. So what are the arguments they mostly use to support this conclusion?

Over the past 6 tears, I have engaged in discussions with hundreds of atheists, and have heard the same arguments many times. Here are some of the most common.

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Easter’s coming soon, and if you live in the west as I do, you’ll probably be eating your share of easter eggs. But what if the eggs came from cocoa grown using child labour, that is effectively slave labour?

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Former atheist Anthony Flew called it “the best attested miracle claim in history”. But can we really believe Jesus was raised from death? Is the evidence strong enough to support this belief? What was actually going on in Jerusalem back then?

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When we think about the question of “Is there a God?”, I guess we mostly think of arguments for and against. How did the universe get here if it wasn’t created? Does the suffering in the world prove there is no God? But there is another way to look at it.

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Spam is ubiquitous on the internet. Offer an email address or a comment box and a spambot will attempt to make use of it. If you can’t beat them, at least find some humour!

Recent spam comments on this blog (which don’t make it through) have been on behalf of a bewildering variety of commercial interests, including: beanbag chairs, laptop batteries, a pizza store, lawn mower reviews (yes!), search engine optimisation and money-lenders. Does any of this produce a result for them???

Lately, I’m finding the comments they post are more sophisticated, as they try to sound like a genuine comment. But sometimes the artificial intelligence goes awry. My favourite was a comment on my post on Peter Singer and infanticide:

I want to talk about this page with my children.

I’m sure they felt comforted!

I’m always interested in people’s stories, and I’m always on the lookout for ways in which God may make himself known to us. So I have done some research on people having visions of Jesus – whether there are credible stories, and what they tell us.

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It has been known for years that, contrary to what we may be led to believe by our culture and advertising, money and possessions do not make people happy (unless they are very poor), and real happiness and satisfaction in life come from good and loving relationships, meaningful work (voluntary is even better than paid) and living for a cause greater than oneself.

And the confirmation keeps on coming.

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I came across this the other day, on The official blog of University of Missouri Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, & Agnostics

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In a recent talk, Richard Dawkins spoke about education, atheism and intelligence. His comments are interesting.

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Christians and other theists sometimes argue for God’s existence based on facts about the universe that science cannot explain, or has not yet explained. But non-believers sometimes accuse these arguments of being fallacious, because they use ‘God of the Gaps’ reasoning.

Is this a problem?

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A week or two back I posted on scientist Jerry Coyne’s discussion of free will (Jerry Coyne: why we don’t have free will) I have just come across a discussion of Coyne’s views on former academic philosopher Bill Vallicella’s blog, Maverick Philosopher. It’s pretty strongly critical, but worth reading.

One of the enjoyable things about writing a blog is the things you learn when researching a topic. I have read a little on the big bang and the fundamental laws that underpin our universe and I agree with the suggestion that the universe didn’t get the way it is by chance.

But in preparing this post, I came across two new things that have made me feel this is a very strong argument for the existence of God.

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Jerry Coyne is a Professor of biology at the University of Chicago, probably best known for his book Why evolution is true.

In a recent column in USA Today, he presents the case for the unpalatable reality that our apparent ability to freely make choices is in fact an illusion.

The column raises some interesting issues.

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