“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god…”

There is a popular atheist quote that has circulated around the net quite a lot. It says,

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” –Stephen F Roberts

I have to admit it is actually pretty slick and catchy…but in the end it just doesn’t reflect well on the atheist’s “all or nothing” reasoning. It seems to imply that all claims to the divine lack consistency and coherency and therefore all differing views can be rejected and subsumed under the same reason. This is very trivial thinking and has little merit. Increasing the range of different, contradictory answers to the actual square root of 144 would not mean that all answers must therefore be wrong, but rather only one can be right. Moreover people believe in polytheism as a worldview for different reasons than people believe in the Christian God. Therefore to reject both would require different reasons. Arguments used against a belief in Hercules, Zeus, Shiva or the tooth fairy cannot be used effectively against the Christian concept of God. There’s really no parallel when the evidence is brought into consideration. I have good reasons for rejecting the ancient Greek pantheon of gods on the grounds that none qualify for the philosophical understanding of what God must be. God—by definition—must be a timeless, spaceless, uncaused, immaterial, self-energizing being of immense power. Hercules nor Santa Clause fit that description. For example you can’t have an infinite regress of events leading backwards into the past. Leading scientific models of the universe agree that the universe began to exist a finite time ago (probably 15 billion years ago if Big Bang cosmology is correct)—and therefore the universe must have a cause. Moreover scientists agree that the origin of the universe is when all space, time, matter and energy came into existence. That means prior to the beginning of the universe there was no existing matter, time, space or energy—i.e. there was nothing. The fact is the cause of the universe MUST be a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, self-energizing entity of immense power. A very apt depiction of the Christian’s view of God! The Big Bang is the greatest evidence for God’s existence simply on scientific grounds—it is creation! To see this developed and successfully argued for in multiple debates against the world’s leading atheists at Harvard, Yale, Oxford visit this site: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=audio_visuals#debates

About StriderMTB

Hi, I'm Matt. "Strider" from Lord of the Rings is my favorite literary character of all time and for various reasons I write under the pseudonym "StriderMTB. As my blog suggests I seek to live out both the excitement and tension of a Christian walk with Christ in the 3rd world context of Asia. I started my blog as an unmarried man who was blessed to oversee an orphanage of amazing children in South-East Asia. As of 2022, I am a happily married man to an amazing missionary wife serving together on the mission field. I hate lima beans and love to pour milk over my ice-cream. I try to stay active in both reading and writing and this blog is a smattering of my many thoughts. I see the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it and lived to be the only hope for a broken world and an apathetic church.
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