The Question of God

We saw in Friday’s study that human beings are guilty of “moral insanity.” Though they know there is a God, they refuse to honor Him as God. And though they know that God imposes standards of right and wrong on His creation, they refuse to follow those standards. They do what they know they should not do, suppressing the truth about God and behaving as if He did not exist. “Moral insanity” is surely an apt description for such ridiculous behavior. But we want to go beyond describing the behavior to understanding it. Why do men naturally act this way? To help us find answers, we will spend the next four days working through concepts from Dr. R.C. Sproul’s “Renewing Your Mind” teaching series The Psychology of Atheism.

Atheists, of course, are those who deny the existence of God—precisely the kind of people Paul has been describing in Romans 1. As we have seen, Paul asserts that atheism is not a viable belief option, for human beings know from creation that there is a God. So what possible reason could atheists have for rejecting God’s existence? Setting Paul’s assertions aside for the moment, we can point to four possible reasons that people of outstanding intellectual credentials might come to the conclusion that God is not there. First, their epistemology may be at fault. Epistemology is the science of how we know what we know. A rationalist would say that the reasoning of the mind requires the idea of a First Cause, but an empiricist, who accepts only what his senses can detect, would say that God does not exist because He cannot be seen, touched, heard, etc. Second, they may be committing formal errors. In other words, there may be mistakes in their reasoning process; even the most brilliant scholars sometimes blunder in their thinking. Third, they may be committing factual errors. These are mistakes of observation; they may be basing their conclusions on faulty data. Fourth, they may be guilty of prejudice or bias. In other words, they may not want to believe the evidence that confronts them.

Atheists charge that Christians have a bias—they are weak-minded people who desperately need a God as a psychological crutch, so they ignore the “evidence” of His non-existence. But are atheists free of bias when it comes to the issue of the existence of God? We will explore that question in our next few studies.