Delzell, pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Papillion, Nebraska, said:
Atheists choose to limit themselves to only one cosmological option. They hitch their wagon to the wild fantasy that everything came from nothing. This foolish belief creates an irrational worldview. But unlike Christianity, which is an evidence-base faith, atheism has a religious-like devotion to the absurd belief that nothing created something.
Let me rewrite this paragraph for readers:
Christians choose to limit themselves to only one cosmological option. They hitch their wagon to the wild fantasy that everything came from a mythical deity. This foolish belief creates an irrational worldview. But unlike atheism/humanism, which is an evidence-base faith, Christianity has a religious-like devotion to the absurd belief that a mythical triune deity created everything.
Delzell went on to say:
Atheists should actually be afraid of ‘nothing.’ That is to say, atheists should fear the faulty assumption that nothing produced space, time, matter and energy at the beginning. This blind faith is rooted in a preposterous make-believe theory, without a shred of scientific evidence to support its impossible conclusion.
….
Lee Strobel posted in 2017: “To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn’t have that much faith.”
If an atheist follows the evidence, he or she can meet “the only true God” (John 17:3). But when atheists dig in their heels and continue trusting in their illogical ideology, they remain spiritually blind. Sadly, man with his free will can choose to close his mind to the truth he was created to understand and accept.
When an atheist faces a family crisis, he has nothing to rely upon for spiritual comfort. When atheists become disillusioned with life, there is nothing substantive to pull them out of the pit of discouragement. And when atheists stand before Jesus Christ on Judgment Day, they will have nothing good to say about why they rejected God.
A callous heart prevents a person from experiencing the appropriate fear of paying the penalty for his sins in Hell. Many atheists laugh off the notion of an actual place called “Hell,” but their laughing is tragically misguided and uniformed.
I wrote, “The man who refuses to trust God is a man who assumes he can trust his own opinions. And so he looks for ways to shore up his weak position, and to convince himself that his perceptions are in perfect alignment with the visible and invisible realities of the universe.”
If you are staking your soul on the idea that everything came from nothing, you need to wake up and snap out of your spiritual stupor. God created you with a body, soul and spirit. (see 1 Thessalonians 5:23) And it is impossible to extinguish your immortal soul.
Therefore, you would be wise to get on board with the Creator’s design for your life. If you place your faith in Jesus, God will wash away your sins. But if you refuse to adopt the fear of the Lord, you will remain on a path that leads away from God throughout eternity.
Bruce Gerencser, 68, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 47 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Belief in gods originated in the earliest days that mankind began to reason, and it continues to this day, albeit in ways regarded as more nuanced and refined. The belief stems ultimately from our inability to answer the questions as to why we are here, why is there something rather than nothing, and how do we confront the reality that is our death. We don’t know the answers to these questions so we invented religion, but unfortunately for religion mankind started questioning the underlying logic of the answers, whilst science found it could answer many of the more fundamental beliefs, such as where thunder and lightning and volcanoes come from.
Of course the very most basic questions still can’t be answered, but it may well be that the questions don’t make sense. Science is digging ever deeper into the nature of reality, which becomes more strange than we could ever have thought as it does. There’s the role of the observer in quantum physics, whereby the charge of a particle isn’t determined until it’s observed (giving rise to the hugely misunderstood Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment). Or entanglement, where multiple particles are quantum linked even when they are separated by massive distances that couldn’t be possible in Einstein’s physics. How many pastors (or Lee Strobel) know and understand the Planck Constant or Planck Time? All of which contributes to our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe that no amount of religious belief can hope to match.
Ultimately the question of ‘how could we come from nothing’ is actually based on an unsupported assertion. We don’t know that there is any such state as ‘nothing’, it’s just that intuitively it seems that’s how it should be: before everything nothing. The trouble is where we see things being what we regard as ‘created’, for example a watch or a house, they aren’t being created in the way that believers think the universe was created, in that we take existing material and reshape it. Were gods involved in the process things surely would have been simpler, as the people who wrote the bible clearly thought.
My cosmology is that I do not know how the cosmos arose. I’m willing to admit that I do not know.
Yes, big bang cosmology is interesting. But I do not find it complete enough to settle the questions.
Back in my Christian days, I did not believe that the Genesis account settled the questions. That seemed more like story telling.
You are right. Pastor Delzell doesn’t know much about atheists. And perhaps he doesn’t know much about Christians either. There are diverse views about origins held by atheists and by Christians.