Debating God's existence

At the recently held Jaipur Literature Festival there were lot of discussions centering around gods, thanks to the Satanic Verses penned by Salman Rushdie. There were also atheists present, the chief among them being the author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.

The fact that two million copies of his best selling work has been sold by January 2010 doesn't any way affect the existence of God. Intellectuals may go on debating about evolution and creation, about intelligent design and the 'Big Bang' but in our amazing existence it would need much more faith to be an atheist than to be a believer. It is indeed a far more difficult task to establish that there is no creator.

For various reasons religion has earned a bad name. Man has killed in the name of religion and continues to commit horrors defending and opposing God. All these will not make any difference to the Truth. The existence of God is to be experienced rather than debated intellectually. But the Bible puts it with all simplicity when it declares that God hides from the wise what He reveals to the babes.

Marx, Nietzsche and Freud were among other atheists who relied on their own resources rather than on God. Near the end of their lives they were all bitter and lonely menâ€"like several other atheists. Richard Wurmbrand has written in detail about some of the known atheists of history.

He had also pondered over issues like 'Does God exist? Does He love man? Does He care to intervene in human situations ?' and came out with a book titled Proofs of God's Existence.

"Believers do not consider God a kind of insurance agent offering to them guarantees against the troubles of life. Rather, He offers the challenge to initiate them in love and self sacrifice. He is neither a panacea against every evil nor a solver of all problems," he wrote after spending nearly 14 years in a Rumanian prison. During that period when he underwent persecution for his faith, he never saw a Bible or any other book. He had forgotten how to write. Because of the great hunger, doping and tortures, he had forgotten the scripture.

Yet the books he had written on his experiences have a spiritual depth that is amazing. Any atheist, reading his books, will be moved to tears of repentance for ignoring the massive evidence of God's love in the midst of seeming tragedies. His best revelations for the unbeliever is contained in his Proofs Of God's Existence.

Wurmbrand, who was an atheist to begin with, was introduced to the Christian faith by an illiterate carpenter and he became such a fierce defender of the faith that the then dictator of Rumania sent him to jail for nearly 14 years. Of these, three years were spent in solitary confinement, when he was not allowed to see anyone other than his guards. Throughout his jail sentence, he was subjected to medieval tortures. Testifying before the U S Internal Security sub committee, he bared his body above the waist to show them the dozen of his communist-inflicted scars.

He writes that he is not surprised there are atheists. In the twentieth century millions have been burnt in furnaces, gassed and killed in concentration camps of different political regimes, some of which proclaimed themselves Christian. In the circumstances, it is difficult to believe in a God both almighty and good. If he is almighty, why did he not prevent the atrocities? If he is good, why did he create a world of such cruelty?

A man baptized in the name of Christ, gave the order to drop the first atomic bomb. There are many divergent denominations, each claiming to have the truth. They are united in only one point; not to practise the all-embracing love for others. Furthermore in the minds of the multitudes religion is tied up with superstition, backwardness, or strange dogmas. Atheism is the effect of these as well as many other causes. We could not expect otherwise; it is only logical that many should be atheists.

But then he led the battle against the atheism of the Communists and wrote an answer to the Communists' Bible, titled, Atheist's Handbook, which was first issued in Moscow in 1961. It was the collective work of specialists summarizing atheistic creeds in 700 pages.
Wurmbrand's answer also took the form of a book, The Answer to the Atheist's Handbook. His books and the underground church had played a great role in the overthrow of the autocratic regime in Romania.

"The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19: 1) one reads in the Bible. What does this means in terms of science's discoveries? A Moody video, The Milky Way and Beyond, mentions the following facts. In one second, our sun emits more energy than man has been able to create since Adam and Eve. Our sun is only an average-size star. One star, the Pistol Star, produces 1 million times the energy of the sun and has 100 times its mass. Our sun and entire solar system are just a pinpoint, or small speck, in our Milky Way galaxy. Quasars, at the extreme edge of the known universe, some 1,000 times brighter than our Milky Way galaxy, emit as much energy every second as our sun does in 10 million years. There are perhaps 200 billion stars just in our galaxy. If our galaxy was the size of the North American continent, our solar system would only be the size of a tea cup.

While estimates continue to rise, our galaxy is just one of more than 125 billion galaxies in the universe, many of which are comprised of 200 billion or more stars. Can the "Big Bang " explain all these? In nature, in the skies and in the human mind there are things which are beyond the explanations of science. As against the contention of some that it is unscientific to believe in God in this age of science, we have one of the greatest of scientists (Albert Einstein) taking the side of religion and affirming: "the individual feels the vanity of human desires and purposes as well as the majesty and wonderful order which reveal themselves in nature and in the world of thought." And science dare not contradict religion because of all disciplines, it knows how little it knows.
After furnishing his arguments for faith in God, he exposes the why there we can not rule out the emptiness of atheism. "Atheism is boredom of a most corrosive type. Its child is despair; its grandchildren are drunkenness and suicide."

Men who believe in God have gone to strange lands and strange tribes to raise the savages out of their ignorance and squalor and ennoble them. Is it imaginable that one might go to stone age cannibals and tell them that God does not exist and therefore they must reform their lives and live as noble, radiant humans?

When all is said and done, no one has an invincible reason to believe that God does not exist. In fact there are numerous proofs for his existence and perhaps none for His non-existence. Atheists need more blind faith than believers.

All books written by Rev Wurmbrand are marked by spiritual depth and conviction. And the proofs he provides in this book can not be brushed aside by any atheist. They are evidences which demand a verdictâ€"a verdict in favour of faith, so that doubting Thomas' s would cry out: "My Lord and my God!''