Purpose Driven Blog

Wem, Atomic, et al,

Atomic Chimp states,
>>"Dan, You don't have to give up your belief in a god, just admit that your BS doesn't work."

By work do you mean to give an account and a reason of the hope that is in me? Because, hopefully, I have done that.

Wem adds,
>>"Agreed. Presupposition fails to convince, and it leads to fatal inconsistencies for its adherents' worldviews."

Well that is not the purpose and you're wrong. As you have been told before, my argument is not intended to be convincing, I am merely commanded to speak the truth, 'convincing' is out of my hands. As for the perceived fatal inconsistencies, I will quote Van Til in a minute for that.


>>"I don't care whether Dan believes in God or not - it's his insistence in using patently dishonest rhetoric in the place of conversation/discussion that keeps me coming back."

So then it is working! It takes a wolf to catch a wolf, after all. All joking aside, I hope and wish you will stick around and engage to continually keep God on your mind, in hopes that God will miraculously change you soon. A repentant Atheist would be a miracle indeed. I want to be a witness to that, and to celebrate with you. I do fear for you, and I want to keep you "in the game" and not completely give in to sin.

I wish desperately that everyone, that I have known here for years now, knows what is at stake as you all do, and that I am here for you to help if it ever becomes a true search. I certainly do not want to get in the way, if that is even possible, but I do want to be fighting for you and with you, to see you saved. I want to see success and I do want a win, granted, but its not a win for myself and my family, its for you and yours. I want to celebrate the glory of God, working in you...all of you. I patiently wait for that glorious day when God pulls one of you, all of you, from that fire, and you all are willingly seeking Him, and I will be jumping up and down celebrating your salvation. When that day comes, it will not be anything that was done on my part at all, although I want to be there when it does happen. Everyone loves a good party.

The byproduct of all of this is that I have learned quite a bit myself. I have also met some very smart people who are foolishly throwing away something great, themselves!  Its frustrating that I cannot prevent it from happening. Atheists are merely a car crash just waiting to happen. Everyone can't help themselves from watching a car crash.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the playful banter over the years even though the stakes are too high to laugh at. We find time though. Admittedly, I love being stood up and silenced. Like I have said, a move to truth is a move towards God.

Here is a great thought, I seek to be shut down,... by God. In that, there will be a day that I cannot continue and will have to close the doors on this blog. On that day there will be no need for "Debunking Atheists". The job will be complete. Until then...

As Van Til poetically said, "Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer Who is back of them. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all, and I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them.

And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some "difficulties" with respect to belief in God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God Whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and Whose ways are higher than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no reason in anything. No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all.

So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-Conditioner, life is Chaos.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy." (emphasis added)