Evidence Equals Force
There seems to be this disconnect for many Christians. I have come across it multiple times. When asked why God doesn’t present evidence for his existence, I often hear Christians tell me that God gave us Free Will. I don’t really see how that addresses the problem but it seems that many Christians equate evidence with forced worship.
The view is that God loves us and so he wants us to love him out of a free choice. So I ask, how can I love a God if I have no evidence for the existence of such a being? How does presenting evidence of his existence impede on human’s free choice to worship him or not? If anything, it makes the choice more informed and therefore more meaningful.
This is where I often tell the Christian believer that even if I knew that the God of the Bible existed, I still wouldn’t worship such a being. While I couldn’t consider myself an atheist any longer, I certainly would not be a Christian.
This often blows their mind. But the point of this is not to astonish them in this way, but rather to get them to acknowledge that there is no challenge to free will if God were to have given us all knowledge or at least strong evidence for his existence. We would still have free will to accept and worship him or not.
So why aren’t we all born with absolute knowledge of God? Here Christians sometimes argue that we are, be just don’t know it. Well, if we know it but we don’t know it then we don’t really know it, do we? Duh! These are the word games Christians often try to play in order to get around the obvious problem that they are asking us to make an uninformed choice. This goes beyond free will and faith and into willful ignorance.
Related articles
- More Evidence for Jesus Than for Me? (dangeroustalk.net)
- You’re Not Worthy of The Evidence (dangeroustalk.net)
- The Problem of Divine Hiddenness (foxholeatheism.com)
- Magical Thinking: a religious deconversion (Atheism/Agnosticism) (renetaxian.wordpress.com)
Filed under: Alternative Worldview, anti-intellectualism, conversation, faith, free will, ignorance, Religious Manipulation
