Intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it

Stephen Fry is an actor, writer and television presenter. His face and fruity voice will be familiar to most.

Fry is a homosexual. He also claims to be an atheist. He has been in the news several times lately: first, because he "married" a young male writer and comedian; secondly because of his remarks in a television programme about the meaning of life. He was asked what he would say when he was confronted by God.

"I'd say bone cancer in children? What's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world to which there is so much misery that is not our fault. It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. . . That's what I would say. . . The God that created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac. . . utterly selfish."

The arrogance of the man is staggering.

He has been voted the most intelligent man on television, which goes to show that faith in God does not depend on intelligence, or lack of it. Rather, it depends on an attitude of heart. "Unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 18:3).

Objections to the existence of God by atheists are not intellectual in origin, but moral. People don't believe not because they can't believe, but because they won't believe. Like the men in the parable: "We will not have this man to reign over us" (Luke 9:14). When there's a clash between faith in God and lifestyle, some find it easier to pretend that God doesn't exist.

God made the world perfect, but He gave man free will. Man chose to sin, and through sin came misery, sickness and sorrow. But God didn't leave man in the mess he had made. He came into the world in the form of His Son, lived a perfect life, then suffered unto death that we might be freely forgiven. We didn't ask for it, we didn't deserve it, but He did it anyway. Amazing love. Amazing grace.

One can only hope that Stephen Fry finds repentance. Having found forgiveness ourselves, could we deny another the same experience?
           

A few facts and figures

The Christmas and New Year holiday seems to be time for quizzes and things. So let's have a quiz.

Here's the first question. How big is the universe? Well, consider.There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. (There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies.) The average distance of each star from its nearest neighbour is 37 trillion miles. If you were to travel through space at five miles a second, travelling 37 trillion miles would take you more than 200,000 years.

God, who created the universe, is greater than it all. (If God exists, why doesn't He reveal Himself? He has revealed Himself. He has revealed Himself, for instance, in creation. Perhaps God wants people to choose to follow Him. There is all the evidence that people need.)

How big are you and I? There are more than seven billion of us on earth at this time. Tiny specks in a vast universe. But each of us fearfully and wonderfully made. And each one of us infinitely precious.

So precious that when we went adrift, God was willing to give His own Son. Our righteousness was no longer good enough, so God allowed His Son to die so we could share His righteousness. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. If we decide to believe on Him as our Lord and Caviour.

The choice is ours.
 

Mr Pickles takes the helm

After the resignation of Baroness Warsi as faith minister, Prime Minister David Cameron has handed her role to Eric Pickles, who will fill the faith brief in addition to his job as Communities Secretary.

A couple of years ago, after the National Secular Society obtained a High Court decision banning councils having prayers to open council meetings, Mr Pickles fast-tracked laws to override the decision. "The Government recognises and respects the role that faith communities play in our society," he said.

He complained in a speech last year: "In recent years long-standing British liberties of freedom of religion have been undermined by the intolerance of aggressive secularism."

And in April this year he told the Conservative Forum: "I've stopped an attempt by militant atheists to ban councils having prayers at the start of meetings if they wish. Heaven forbid. We're a Christian nation. We have an established church. Get over it. And don't impose your politically correct intolerance on others."

He explained: "The Government has backed British values. And we've stopped Whitehall appeasing extremism of any sort. Be it the EDL, be it extreme Islamists or be it thuggish far-left, they're all as bad as each other."

Says the New Statesman: "Eric Pickles's appointment as Faith Minister is bad news for secularists."

And in a blog post about the appointment, Stephen Evans, campaign manager for the National Secular Society, asks: "Rather than a 'minister for faith,' perhaps we need a minister for freedom of belief?"

Critics complain that Baroness Warsi produced nothing but words. So will Eric Pickles do a better job as faith minister?

Time will tell.

But if his appointment causes the secular humanists to draw in their horns a little, that can't be a bad thing, can it?
   

Evidence of the existence of God

Norman Geisler has written or co-written more than 70 books. He has spoken in every state in the US and in 25 other countries.

Once he was taking part in a public debate with an atheist. Geisler asked the atheist this question: "If there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing at all?"

●  The Bible says (in Psa 19:1) The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows his handiwork. The sun, moon and stars are His handiwork. He made them and put them in place.

●  If we are just animals, how come every man has a conscience and an innate awareness of right and wrong. Who put them there?

●  The Bible says (in Heb 11:1) that faith is the evidence of things not seen. It is evidence of things that exist, not things that don't exist. If what you have is evidence of things that don't exist, then what you have is not faith. Faith is God-given.

●  The way to God is Jesus. He said I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.  He also said The one who comes to me I will by no means cast out. If you want to know the truth, why not ask Him to reveal Himself to you? If you are serious, He will do it. If it's not true, nothing will happen. What have you got to lose?
 

Five reasons for believing God exists

William Lane Craig, one of the best known Christian apologists, gives five reasons for believing in the existence of God:

First, God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.  Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

Second, God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life.  That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range.  There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature's laws and the desperate manoeuvres needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

Third, God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

Fourth, God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  Historians have reached something of consensus that the historical Jesus thought that in Himself God’s Kingdom had broken into human history, and He carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as evidence of that fact.  Moreover, most historical scholars agree that after His crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by a group of female disciples, that various individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after His death, and that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection despite their every predisposition to the contrary. I can think of no better explanation of these facts than the one the original disciples gave: God raised Jesus from the dead.

Fifth, God can be personally known and experienced.  The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Down through history Christians have found through Jesus a personal acquaintance with God that has transformed their lives.

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

Something to think about as we enter a new year.

A sad story of Christian England

Many Christians do not realise the depths of ignorance of the Bible in Britain today.

A new poll by Pew Research shows that 73 per cent of Americans believe in the virgin birth (including 97 per cent of white evangelicals, 94 per cent of black Protestants, 88 per cent of white Catholics, 81 per cent of Hispanic Catholics and 70 per cent of mainline Protestants).

By contrast, about a third of British people believe in the virgin birth.

According to a YouGov poll, only 17 per cent of Britons believe in a personal God, compared with 41 per cent in 1957. Twenty-three per cent are agnostic (compared with 16 per cent in 1967), and atheists are up from six per cent to 28 per cent. Only 27 per cent believed that Jesus was the Son of God (71 per cent in 1957).

But even that is not as bad as the figures in a new ComRes poll. Twelve per cent of Londoners think the Bible features Father Christmas. And one in 10 young people aged from 25 to 34 thinks Father Christmas makes an appearance in the biblical account of the nativity.

Can you believe it? 

 God is a good God, full of grace and mercy; a personal God, willing to reveal Himself to all who seek Him. There is nothing to be compared to a personal knowledge of Him.

Christians down, Muslims up

In the 2001 Census, 71.7% of people in England and Wales called themselves Christians. By 2011, according  to newly published figures from the 2011 Census, the figure was down by 13 per cent to 59.3% (a total of 33.2 million). There may be a drop in the number of people who were not practising Christians but identified themselves as Christians for traditional reasons.

Islam, with 2.7 million adherents, was up from three per cent to 4.8%.

Seven per cent of people did not answer the question on religion. Some 14 million ticked the box which said "no religion," double the figure in 2001.

The number of people who identified themselves as Jedi Knights had dropped by more than 50 per cent, but they still ranked as the seventh most popular faith. Among the "other faiths" were 1,893 adherents of Satanism, 1,276 of witchcraft, 541 of animism, 184 Thelemites and 124 Confucianists.

The Church of England said the death of Christian England had been greatly exaggerated. Some 253 Anglican churches had closed over the past decade, while 1,000 new congregations had been started.

"Doubtless campaigning atheist organisations will attempt to minimise the significance of the majority figures for faith and Christianity. In fact, these figures draw attention to the free ride that has been given to these bodies whose total membership would barely fill half of Old Trafford. For instance there are an estimated 28,000 members of British Humanist Association - the same membership as Union of Catholic Mothers, whilst the National Secular Society has an estimated 5,000 - the same as the British Sausage Appreciation Society."

Einstein, intellect and little children

I was reading the other day that Einstein's "God letter" is going up for sale.

On January 3, 1954, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to philosopher Erik Gutkind in which he said that "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this."

The letter, bought by its present owner from Bloomsbury Auctions in London in 2008 for $404,000, is going on eBay with an opening bid of $3 million. A representative of the agency handling the sale said it could fetch double or triple that amount.

Mind you, you don't just get the letter. For that amount of money, they throw in the envelope as well.

Einstein once believed the universe had always existed. The discovery of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning was, he said, "irritating." In his later years, he evidently had not discovered a personal relationship with the Cause behind the beginning.

Jesus said: "Unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt 18:3).

So here we have Einstein, whose intellect was perhaps a barrier to a personal faith; someone who is going to spend a fortune for a letter doubting the existence of a personal God; and some people like little children who can have fellowship with their Heavenly Father at no cost to themselves.

It cost something, of course, to make it possible. It cost the Son of God a life of rejection, the torment He suffered after His arrest, the agony and shame of  crucifixion and the loss of fellowship with His Father for the first time ever as He hung on the cross.

The other day, I was talking to an old lady about Christ's sacrifice. "He didn't have to do all that," she said. Indeed He didn't. What caused Him to do all that was love.

Love is something you can't reduce to a mathematical formula. But it's real, so real, nevertheless.

How can I prove the existence of God?

The atheist says there is no God. But he can't prove it. And where the atheist really comes unstuck is when he can't explain how the entire universe came into existence out of nothing.

The agnostic concedes that there may be a God, but suggests that it's impossible to know for sure.

Is it possible to prove the existence of God?

Yes, it is. A preacher named Peter Grant has a good way of illustrating this.*

Suppose you decide to go to the office to see if your boss is in. You see his car in the car park. You ask his secretary if he's in. "Yes he is," she says. "I've just been talking to him." You see the light underneath his office door. As you get nearer, you hear what sounds like his voice talking to someone on the telephone. All this would be good grounds for concluding your boss is in his office.

But there's one more thing you could do. You could open the door and meet your boss face to face. At that point, the other things would still be valid, but would become secondary, because now you've met him face to face.

If you want to find out if God is real, you can consider stories of answered prayer; hear evidence of changed lives; read others' testimonies; study examples of fulfilled prophecy. All these things would be valid. But there's something more you can do. You can have something more personal than that.

Jesus said "unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." "Born of water" is evidently a Hebrew expression for natural birth. In other words, if you want to enter the kingdom of God, it's not enough to be born naturally, you also need to have a spiritual birth. Jesus called it being "born again."

Don't laugh. Don't mock. Don't jeer. That would be allowing your prejudice to make the decision without putting it to the test.

Repent of your sins. (We're all sinners. We've all done things we shouldn't have done and not done things we should have done.)

Tell Jesus you're sorry for the things you've done. Tell Him if He's alive and He's who He says He is you will yield Him your life and follow Him. Ask Him into your life. 

As He comes in He'll do a work in your life by His Spirit. You will enter into a personal relationship, and you will know that you know that you know that you know that God is real.

Jesus said "The one who comes to me I will by no means cast out." He keeps His promises.

* Described by Lee Strobel in The Case for Faith. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2000, p85.