The following small group studies have been prepared to guide you in discussion of our series on "Tough Questions".

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Imagine there's no heaven,
It's easy if you try,
No hell below us,
Above us only sky,
Imagine all the people
living for today...

“I do not believe in God. My mind finds no grounds on which to build up a reasonable faith. My heart revolts against the spectre of an Almighty Indifference to the pain of sentient beings. My conscience rebels against the injustice, the cruelty, the inequality, which surround me on every side. But I believe in Man. In man’s redeeming power; in man’s remoulding energy; in mans approaching triumph, through knowledge, love and work.”

Questions

“More consequences for life and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from any other basic question”

There are many real things outside the scope of verification by the scientific method. The scientific method is useful only with measurable, material things. No one has ever seen three feet of love or two pounds of justice, but one would be foolish indeed to deny their reality. To insist that God be proved by the scientific method is like insisting that a telephone be used to measure radioactivity.

Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee.

Proof is only applicable to very rarefied areas of philosophy and mathematics…. For the most part we are driven to acting on good evidence, without the luxury of proof. There is good evidence of the link between cause and effect. There is good evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. There is good reason to believe that I am the same man as I was ten years ago. There is good reason to believe my mother loves me and is not just fattening me up for the moment when she will pop arsenic in my tea. And there is good reason to believe in God. Very good reason. Not conculsive proof but very good reason just the same….I believe it is much harder to reject the existence of a supreme being than accept it.

The soul of religions is one, but it is encased in a multitude of forms…. Truth is the exclusive property of no single scripture…. I cannot ascribe exclusive divinity to Jesus. He is as divine as Krishna or Rama or Mohammed or Zoroaster.

Jesus was only a messenger of Allah…. Far is it removed from His transcendent majesty that He should have a son.

My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right…. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong and (God) said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me….” He again forbade me to join with any of them.

Questions

It is important to appreciate that a cultural issue is often linked in with this debate: it is implied that to defend Christianity is to belittle non Christian religions, which is unacceptable in a multi-cultural society… the multicultural agenda demands that religions should not be permitted to make truth-claims, to avoid the dangers of imperialism and triumphalism. Indeed there seems to be a widespread perception that the rejection of religious pluralism entails intolerance, or unacceptable claims to exclusivity. In effect, the liberal political agenda dictates that all religions should be treated on an equal footing. It is but a small step from this political judgement to the theological declaration that all religions are the same. But is there any reason for progressing from the entireley laudable and acceptable demand that we should respect religions other than our own, to the more radical demand that we regard them all as the same, or as equally valid manifestations of some eternal or ‘spiritual’ dimension to life?

Christianity stands out from all other faiths. It maintains that the living God has come to share our human situation, died an agonizing death in which He took responsibility for human wickedness and broke the last barrier, death, on the first Easter day, with incalculable consequences for his followers, and the whole world. No other faith claims anything like that. Christianity may be wrong, but nobody with his head screwed on can claim that it is just the same as other religions! No, whether we like it or not, we have to admit that all religions are not the same.

Since the heart of God’s revelation of himself is the figure of Jesus Christ, and since the heart of the Christian story of salvation is the career of Jesus Christ, Christian apologetics – like everything else in the Christian religion, from worship to mission, from prayer to almsgiving – rightly focuses on Jesus Christ. The heart of the Christian religion is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and it is this to which apologists hope to point their neighbours. Whenever we can, therefore, we aim to focus on Jesus Christ: not on Christian metaphysics, or Christian morals, or Christian church membership – although each of these can help the case as Christ is truly known through them.

We don’t talk about the Christian religion, furthermore as a means to something else; social cohesion, perhaps, or moral uplift, or personal sanctification. People should become Christians primarily because they want to follow Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). Christianity can be judged as beneficial in this or that way, yes, but Christianity matters fundamentally because it is true. And it is true – in a way no other religion is – precisely as it puts Jesus Christ at its center where he belongs.

“belief is the spring of action, and right belief the spring of right action. We cannot escape into “sincerity”. Sincerity is absolutely essential but by itself, absolutely insufficient. We would never apply that argument to any other area of life: it is madness to apply it to religion.

[1] Don’t All Religions Lead to God?, Gary Poole, Zondervan. 2003.

Study 3: Why is there so much suffering in the world?

If disasters are compatible with the “goodness” of God, what could possibly qualify as contrary evidence? The “goodness of God, it seems, is compatible with any state of affairs. While we evaluate a man with reference to his actions, we are not similarly permitted to judge God. God is immune from the judgment of evil as a matter of principle.”

George Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God.

Christians say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well let me tell you this; I’m actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer; it’s a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that’s just the logic Christians use in their discussions of evil.

Quentin Smith, Two ways to defend atheism.

Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascists and Mr. Winston Churchill?

Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Christian

According to the Bible when the Israelites wandered in the desert for forty years, God fed them by making food fall regularly from the sky (Ex16:4). During the 1980's, several million Ethiopian Christians died slowly and painfully from starvation due to a prolonged drought. God had then the opportunity to make food fall from the sky, as the Bible claims he did in the past, in order to prove his existence, his power and his love. Buddhists would say that God did not manifest his presence because he does not exist.

A.L. de Silva, Beyond Belief: A Buddhist critique of Christianity.

Questions

In your personal experience is the question “Why does God allow Evil and Suffering?” an intellectual question or a pastoral question? Why else might a person ask it?
Why do you think God created a cosmos in which some agents are free to commit evil?
Discuss the idea that “Everybody’s belief system has to come to terms with suffering”. (Think about how your non-Christian friends have come to terms it;how members of other religions and with different world views come to terms with it.)
David Hume, the philosopher, made the observation that it is clear that since our world is not the best of all possible worlds, and since if God exists he should have been able to make a world much better than this, God could not exist.

How would you respond to this claim?
“The theist does not have to claim that our present world is the best of all possible worlds, but it is the best way to the best possible world!” (Geisler).

What does the author mean?
“The key thing is not how you explain suffering, but how you cope with it”. Discuss.
If God is all powerful, and God is a God of love, how do you explain natural disasters?
How does the life, death and resurrection of Jesus help you to understand how God views suffering and evil?
What do Romans 8:20-22 and Revelation 21:1-4 have to teach us about the relationship between suffering and future hope.

“Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrong. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?”

Old Testament, Habakkuk 1:13

On my travels overseas I have noticed a striking difference in the wording of prayers. Christians in affluent countries tend to pray, “Lord, take this trial away from us!” I have heard prisoners, persecuted Christians, and some who live in the very poor countries pray instead, “Lord, give us the strength to bear this trial…. Paradoxically, difficult times may help nourish faith and strengthen bonds”.

Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God

Study 4: Hasn't Science disproved Christianity?

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.

"Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not."
— Richard Dawkins, River out of Questions

Questions

The great secret weapon of science is its recourse to experimental testing, but once one leaves science to enter the realm of the personal, testing has to give way to trusting as the means of gaining true knowledge. We know that in our relations with each other – if you are always setting little traps to see if I am your friend, you will destroy the possibility of friendship between us. Even more is that true of our relationship with the transpersonal reality of God. The world that science on its own describes is a cold, abstracted lunar landscape, with many interesting objects in it but devoid of persons. If we are to think adequately about the rich and many-layered world in which we live, science could never be enough to give us that full understanding that it is the instinctive desire of the scientist to attain. Ask a scientist, as a scientist, to tell you all that he or she can about music. They will reply that it is neural response to vibrations in the air. That, of course is true, but hardly the whole story. The mystery of music slips through the wide meshes of the net with which science trawls experience. The insistent deeper questions of value and purpose that science brackets out are issues that religion certainly addresses. It could never be made redundant by science’s advance in other areas of human understanding.

Although the popular impression of the monolithic hostility of Christianity towards the natural sciences still prevails amongst what I shall reluctantly – but I fear entirely accurately – designate the more unreflective members of both communities, and many outside them, it is fair to suggest that there has been a fundamental shift in our understanding of the question at issue over the past thirty years, making a real dialogue between the disciplines both possible and potentially fruitful. For a start there has been a realization of the radical difference between ‘science’ and ‘scientific materialism’. The former is a discipline, a way of investigating the structure of the physical world. The latter is a world-view, which seeks to reduce everything to the level of observables, and which – by definition – excludes God.

[1] Richard Dawkins has been nicknamed “Darwin’s Rotweiller”. He is an outspoken atheist and has published many popular science books available widely. Some of his more well known titles include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, River out of Eden: A Darwinian view of life, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, and A Devil’s Chaplain. If you or your friends have read (and struggled) with books by Richard Dawkins you may be interested in reading Alister McGrath’s excellent new book, Dawkins God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life. McGrath, who is a prolific Christian writer and theologian, has recently been appointed as the head of Oxford xxx school. (McGrath has a PhD in Molecular Biophysics).

Study 5: What happens to people who don't hear about Jesus?

Excerpt from an Interview with Anne Lamott

“I think Jesus is divine love manifest on earth, as it comes through the community of Christians.” He’s like the “beautiful Jewish uncle” who says, “Well, I can show you the way.”

“Only Jesus has come to me, and I experience God’s love in an immediate and personal way through his companionship,” she says. Those in other countries and cultures “feel Divine Love come to them through more local teachings, through other expressions of that love.”

The idea of everyone enjoying God for eternity appeals to me—as I’m sure it does to God—yet it’s hard to reconcile with verses such as John 3:16 and Jesus’ assertion that “no one comes to the Father except through me.” On the other hand, Lamott’s tenderness toward people resembles that of the Shepherd who went looking after one stray sheep.

“Some people have been too starving, attacked, hated, or full of hate to experience God’s love,” she says. “Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost—his or her wildest, most messed-up children—the way you’d ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall. A 5-year-old girl or her mother in the mountains of Afghanistan, a junkie in L.A., Mother Teresa, you, me, children in Gaza—God created us all and loves us and brings us home, into what may be the first shalom we have ever had the chance to experience.”

Read the excerpt from Christianity Today on the first page of todays study. How do you respond to Lamott’s understanding of God’s grace through Jesus Christ being unconditional, whether people accept it or not?
Christian belief in the uniqueness of the Incarnation relies on the belief that God originally revealed himself in full only to Israel. The more one learns about world history the more it stretches the bounds of credibility to believe that God, the creative source of the entire universe and all who dwell here, chose to fully reveal himself only to the tiny nation of Israel, effectively ignoring the peoples of India, China, Egypt, etc. (not to mention indigenous tribes everywhere), all of whom were seeking the Divine just as surely as were the Israelis. It is extremely difficult to believe that the creator of the cosmos has a "favorite" people.

How would you respond to a statement like this?
Read Psalms 19:1-4a; Romans 1:18-23; Acts 14:16-17; and Acts 17:22-31.
Theologians sometimes say that God has two books through which he reveals himself: nature and the Bible. These verses would seem to concur that God does not just provide for all humanity through the natural order, but God also reveals himself through the created world. But what can be known of God through creation? Is it sufficient for salvation? Or does this natural knowledge of God merely condemn human beings outside Christ but not save them? Do humans have a natural desire for God that leads them to seek him? If so, is this also a way in which God is present to people outside Christ?
The Old Testament heroes of faith had little knowledge of Jesus yet found God's mercy. Jesus described Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as feasting in the kingdom of heaven (Mt 8:11) while heaven itself is described as being at Abraham's side (Lk 16:23). Christ's sacrificial death on the cross hundreds of years later seems to have acted retrospectively for them (Rom 3:25, Heb 9:15).

Is it not possible then for others who have not heard of Jesus to respond to the knowledge of God they do have in the way those heroes did?
Exclusivists say that no one who has not accepted the salvation provided by God through Christ can be saved. Universalists say that God’s grace is so great that all creatures will be eventually saved. Inclusivists say that Jesus is the only way to salvation, but God will save some who haven’t consciously accepted Jesus.

What is the missionary implication of each of these options? If you take the exclusivist position, for example, what does this mean for the mandate to share the gospel with the whole world? What motivation drives the missionary mandate for each option (for example, escape from hell, finding peace with God and others in this life, something else)?
Read Acts 10:34-35 and Hebrews 11:6.

Some people wonder whether there is any point in taking the gospel to those who haven’t heard it if some of them will be saved anyway. This suggests a reductionist view of the gospel, that it is only good news for the next life and not the present life. But the story about Peter and Cornelius suggests another model. Cornelius was a god-fearing man who apparently lived a moral life. God honored Cornelius’ piety and morality, even though prior to Peter’s visit, Cornelius didn’t know about Jesus and the gospel.

Still, there was something missing, a reality toward which Cornelius’ God-fearing ways pointed but which could only be fulfilled in knowing Jesus. But what if Cornelius had died without ever hearing the gospel? Would his fear of God and the fact that he lived an acceptable life to God have been sufficient for his salvation? Is it possible that such persons might be saved through Jesus’ atoning work, not apart from it, even if they’ve never heard the gospel or accepted it knowingly? Why or why not?