Monday, March 9, 2009

From Making Moral Choices, p.12, Oswin Craton:
It sometimes comes as a surprise to many Christians to be told that God can be proved. A number of us regrettably have surrendered valuable ground to the modern skeptics by refusing to defend our belief in God from a rational standpoint. This has been due largely to our erroneous ideas about the word “proof.” Having recognized that we cannot take a skeptic to a given place and allow him to see God with his own eyes, we somehow have concluded that God must lie beyond the realm of objective validity and must be accepted only on the basis of unsubstantiated faith.

The fact is there is overwhelming evidence pointing to the reality of God’s existence. While it is not our purpose in this treatise to examine these evidences in detail, it is hoped that we may encourage Christians who have been confused on this point to pursue further study. (An excellent online site devoted to Christian apologetics is www.DoesGodExist.org where one can find a wealth of information and many free books and video- and audiotapes.) God can be proved as adequately as anything can be, and we must not ignore the evidence or minimize the strength of our faith position.

Of course, even with all the evidence we may muster, many people will still reject God or will remain skeptical. This frequently results from an individual’s demanding absolute proof of God’s existence, as though existing evidences are not enough. It is true that God cannot be proved absolutely — but then neither can anything else. One cannot present absolute proof about anything, not even well-established scientific facts. These things may be proved with certainty, but not with absoluteness. As Blaise Pascal once said, “Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow, and that we shall die?” These notions are accepted as fact, and reasonably so, but they cannot be proved in the sense of absolute proof. But they are not, as God often is, rejected on that account. It is interesting to wonder with Trueblood why so many people “demand of religious truth a level of certainty which is not demanded of scientific truth.”

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