David Ancell / Friday, April 19, 2013 / Comment(1)
A mother of two teenagers posted this article on CNN on why she wants to raise her children without God. I read some time ago and felt that God was asking me to respond. Yeah, I’m really late with this one, but here we go. In a nutshell, this is why my wife and I will raise our son, and any future children, to know God.
The reason why I want our kids to know God can be summed up very succinctly – because he exists and is deserving of all of our love. As philosopher Peter Kreeft has said, “There is only one reason to believe anything – because it is true.” I’ve never understood why some atheists call themselves “freethinkers.” When I hear that old “think for yourself” line, it seems to me that the person is saying that “It doesn’t matter if what you think about is true or not as long as you came up with it yourself.” As for me, give me the truth.
The mother who wrote the article calls God an “inconsistent and illogical legend.” Well, imagine if I told you that this article was the result of a power surge at the data center where my site was hosted. No one would take me seriously. However, some people will take seriously anyone who thinks that the universe, with all its order and complexity, was the result of random explosions and chemical reactions. One might argue that the randomness took place over billions of years, but even then, there are way too many “chance” events that needed to happen for the universe to be a random series of events.
Even if one won’t be easily convinced that there is a God, one might consider that there is really nothing to gain by not believing. This is also known as Pascal’s Wager. If I die believing in God when he doesn’t exist, I’m never going to know. If I die refusing to accept a God who does exist, I’ve got major problems. Atheism is simply a losing proposition. Knowing God allows us to know that we are here for a purpose, and that we have hope that we are not just here for a while, for no reason, only to cease to exist.
Now, the mother I’m responding to has also made some arguments from the problem of evil (and why the innocent suffer). I’ll address those in another post.