At one time, I was going to lunch with a very intelligent man who was a devout Atheist. Early on in our relationship, this man claimed that he was raised to only believe in what was observable and testable. He took nothing by faith.
I will admit that my worldview depends in part on faith. First, is faith in the Bible. While I have supportive evidence for the faithful transmission of the words of Bible over millennia, I still need to have some faith that this is so. I also must have faith that the authors recorded information given to them by God and did so faithfully. I have some objective evidence that this is true, but it is largely faith.
I also must have faith that the being who inspired the Bible is not a manipulative liar. God is not a euphemism for an ancient, advanced culture that was manipulating human beings. God is who the Bible says He is. I also must believe that God is truthful by nature. His promises are something I can trust in. I can build my life on them.
Is that too much faith? It is pretty easy to overlook the massive amounts of faith one has to have to hold any alternative worldview, including an atheistic “scientific” worldview.
First you must believe that the scientific method is unbiased. There is a ton of evidence that it is not. Science relies on funding and funding demands results. So, there is a great personal motive to create results where there are none. Getting drugs approved, securing funding to go to Mars to look for life, building expensive colliders, achieving academic tenure, and so on. It is rarely unbiased.
Connected with the idea of being unbiased is the idea of science not being dogmatic. Peer reviews are there to sniff out bad or biased results. Many times, they do. But certain views, though wrong, can be unmovable orthodoxies that silence dissenting viewpoints quickly and without cause.
Another item of faith is that science is always helpful rather than harmful to the world. Don’t get me wrong, investigating how God’s creation works has produced many benefits for which we owe our comfort and possibly our lives. But is it always good? Atomic research ended WWII, but has left us with the legacy of the Cold War and the possibility the civilization could be destroyed in 24 hours. Genetic research could heal disease and produce superior crops or create devastating biological weapons or break-away invasive forms of life that threaten the world. Artificial Intelligence could improve how we work, increase outputs, create new medicines; it might also render democracy untenable through misinformation, manipulate people to destroy each other, or do so on its own. Early scientific discovery was relatively benign and usually an improvement of the human condition, but now we are stepping into far more serious stuff.
Then there are specifics that undergird the evolutionary theory. One must have faith that the process can even get started. Even simple life is complex life that is loaded with information in the DNA that chance couldn’t produce. Even if you ignore getting started, the premise that small changes can eventually add up to large changes is not supported, it is an item of faith. The fossil record is more reasonably explained as modification of kinds of creatures, not evolution from just one simple form of life.
In many ways a person is expected to have faith that science will eventually figure out a reasonable proof for such things. That is the veil that false theories can always hide behind if one is not willing to say that this is impossible, and the best explanation of the evidence is that God exists.
There are many others, like a fine-tuned universe for life on Earth. Atheists work hard to explain it away. People invested in denying God believe the theories, however ridiculous, because they want the outcome not because they objectively believe only what can be proven.
If you would like to read more about this topic, I would like to recommend the book, Believing Is Seeing. It was written by Michael Guillen, PhD, a professor and former ABC News Science editor.
Giving Christ 