Is God a Delusion? (Psalm 46 )
Billy Milton - January 27, 2008
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I don’t know about you but I get the feeling that Christianity is under a sustained attack just now. I don’t mean in a subtle way like lack of support for marriages or Sunday sport or anything like that, I actually mean a head on, straight challenge to the core of what we believe. I’m thinking of books and movies like Dan Brown’s, The Da Vinci Code where the death and burial of Jesus are dismissed and a supposed liaison with Mary Magdalene is suggested as being a fact. Or the more recent Philip Pullman, Golden Compass trilogy, written by an atheist who has stated that he wants to wipe out Christianity. His books and movies are quite definitely anti-Christian and we need to be careful with our children’s minds here. But I suppose the most open attack has come from Professor Richard Dawkins with his best selling book, ‘The God Delusion’ where he states early on in the book, ‘If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.’
Brown, Pullman and Dawkins are not the first to want to wipe out Christianity and they won’t be the last. But they are going to fail, just as many have failed in the past. I am 100% confident of that. David Hume, the 18th c. Scottish philosopher and atheist, predicted that the Bible would soon be looked upon as a discredited relic; shortly after his death his house in Edinburgh became the headquarters of the Edinburgh Bible Society. The 18th century French philosopher Voltaire is reputed to have said that the Bible would be extinct by 1850; soon after his death his house and his printing press in Geneva were taken over by the Swiss Bible Society. Prophecy was clearly not their strong suit!
The other week there I was walking through the park with Swizzle my Jack Russell Terrier when a lady came towards us with a Great Dane. For some strange reason Swizzle decided she could have this monster sized dog and with hackles up made a lunge. I pulled her back and walked on aware that the Great Dane’s owner was kind of laughing at me. Within months of the fall of communism the Russian churches were overflowing and the same happened in Roumania. Trying to wipe out God is like a Jack Russell having a go at, not just a Great Dane, but a Tyrannosaurus Rex! It is not going to happen!
So whilst we might feel like things are bad today we need to bear in mind – it was always thus. And yet here we stand, and here we will go on standing for as long as God spares us.
So let’s address the question of whether or not we as Christians are delusional to keep believing in God. The dictionary defines ‘delusion’ as ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.’ Does that define you or the people that you know in the church… or might that define those who reject the existence of God? I would suggest that it might.
I borrowed this book (The God Delusion) from the library last week – I don’t wish to add to Dawkins’s wealth by buying it – and I was quite disturbed by the depth of his contempt for Christians. If you read this book you need to get used to being belittled by Dawkins. That said, the book was published in 2006 and it has sold well over 500,000 copies to date. It has spent many weeks high up in the best seller charts but one reviewer wrote about the book’s “smug tone” and “occasionally sloppy logic” and accuses Dawkins of “shirking the intellectual hard work.” I would agree with that assessment and just point out that Dawkins, whilst being the professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and a very gifted orator and writer in his own field, is not a theologian …and it shows.
This morning, I want to take a brief look at Psalm 46 and compare and contrast it with ‘The God Delusion’ and we’ll see if we can’t reassure you that God is no delusion. So, lets keep our Bibles open at Psalm 46 and see first of all what the Psalmist said about God. He wrote:
v1-2 “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,…”
I’ve lost count of the number of suffering, and sometimes frightened, people that I’ve sat beside and read this Psalm to. It invariably brings a very real comfort. No matter what the particular situation is, millions of Christians over thousands of years have found out that God can be trusted. He is our refuge and strength; he is our ever-present help in times of trouble. Of course, Dawkins and his supporters would simply dismiss this ‘presence of God’ as just wishful thinking or a delusion. Just sentimental feelings. But, d’you know, to dismiss the experience of millions of Christians throughout thousands of years strikes me as arrogance. When someone is dying they don’t cry out, “Get me a scientist!”
If you belong to God, the psalmist says, God is ever present with you and His help is a promise we can depend on. Don’t allow the writings of an atheist to rob you of that comfort.
In chapter 3 of his book, Dawkins states what he calls “The God Hypothesis.” - there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. [p. 31] But then he also contributes an alternative hypothesis: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. What he’s saying here is - if there is a God, He is not the creator of all things nor even the prime cause. In other words – God himself evolved and is just part of a process.
In his next chapter, Dawkins examines the classic “Arguments for God’s Existence,” which I’m not going to repeat this morning, and proceeds to ridicule the time honoured proofs for God. I’ll let Alistair McGrath respond to that (McGrath is Dawkins’ fellow professor at Oxford University). He comments, “While his book is written with rhetorical passion and power, the stridency of its assertions merely masks tired, weak and recycled arguments.” [The Dawkins Delusion, p. 12]
For example, Dawkins describes faith as “belief without evidence, …unsupported and insupportable, … in the teeth of evidence” (p. 199). He writes that ‘Christianity teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. (p. 306). Again, this is at best a broad exaggeration and I hope no-one here believes that their faith, or their children’s faith, is beyond questioning. I firmly believe that our faith will stand up to the most rigorous of questioning… as long as you have an open mind which, I have to say, Dawkins does not appear to have.
About the God revealed in the Old Testament, Dawkins writes: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control- freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. [p. 31] That’s the God you believe in, right? I don’t think so. Again Dawkins displays a breathtaking lack of understanding of the God of the Old Testament before whom he will one day stand. To simply spout out the crude caricatures, prejudicial stereotypes and blatant misrepresentations now being aggressively peddled by atheist fundamentalists. (McGrath [p. 31] ) is unacceptable. In an email to Dawkins and one other prominent atheist, McGrath has this to say: What we need is not knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues - neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas - it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard [Dawkins] claims - [quoted in McGrath, pp. 49-50]
Let’s continue with Psalm 46 In verse 4 the psalmist describes Jerusalem under siege but then goes on to assure us in v5, “God is within her, she will not fall.” Nothing has changed. Throughout the centuries, and especially in our own day, there are those who want to destroy the Jews, and Christians as well. With such sustained and life-threatening attacks why not just give up and accept that God, if he’s there, doesn’t help?
Well, listen to this! McGrath observes: Far from dying out, belief in God has rebounded and seems set to exercise still greater influence in both the public and private spheres. … Might the unexpected resurgence of religion persuade many that atheism itself is fatally flawed as a worldview? [ibid.]
One of Dawkins repeated refrains is that religion is the cause of most of this worlds wars and suffering. I can see a degree of justification for saying that but I could, I think, with equal justification say that lack of religion is also responsible for much of the trouble in this world. Hitler and Stalin were both atheists and none of the leaders of the Chinese communist party were religious nor was Pol Pot of Cambodia and between then these few people are responsible for 10’s of millions of the inhumane killings of the 20th century.
Also, it must be said, God would probably agree with Dawkins that religion is futile – what this world needs is not more religion but a living faith in the living God. This world would be transformed if that happened. No, in contrast to what Dawkins says, the psalmist portrays God as the bearer of peace: v9 “It is he who makes war to cease in all the world; he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire. ”
Finally, let me draw to a close by quoting v10, “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”
Dawkins spends a lot of time knocking down the standard proofs for the existence of God and his arguments are powerful because there is a sense in which God cannot be proved. However, as we’ve said already, there is very strong evidence for God’s existence… if you approach it with an open mind. This week at our house group we agreed that to be able to prove God 100% would remove the need for faith, and that would be wrong since the Bible says, “without faith it is impossible to please God.” (Heb 11:6) So whilst this might disappoint the scientists amongst us, we cannot dispense with faith in our dealings with God but, and this is a glorious ‘but’, we can ‘know’ God in a different way from that which Dawkins is happy with. God is not known in the test-tube or Petri dish (although he can be glimpsed there). Nor can he viewed through the lens of a telescope or microscope (although he can be glimpsed there). Nor is God known in frenetic activity; nor in attending church or a multitude of other perceived ways of doing Christianity. If you want to know God then you need to take time to ‘be still’, spend time seeking him in the quiet places, meditating upon his word.
Those who are prepared to enter into this discipline will be able to say with absolute certainty, ”The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our stronghold.” And that’s not a delusion!