Last week, we looked at
three possible reasons why people do not believe in God:
- Lack of information
Some people have only ever been taught evolution and have never heard the compelling evidence for the existence of God. When they finally do hear it, they believe the truth.
- Lack of conviction about truth
Many people today believe that they can choose who God is. That is, they believe that both your idea about God and my different idea about God can both be true. This is rationally impossible, but many people believe it nevertheless.
- Lack of desire
Many people simply do not want to believe in God because they don’t want to be accountable to Him, and therefore they disbelieve in Him in spite of evidence to the contrary.
But the roots of unbelief can be even more complex than that. For example, in his book,
Reflections on the Existence of God, Richard Simmons has suggested related reasons why people might not believe in God.
Willful blindness in the sciences
In the book, Simmons has an essay on “Willful Blindness in the Sciences.” He quotes Robert Jastrow, one of the most prominent astronomers in the last century, saying that when evidence uncovered by science itself leads to something the scientist doesn’t want to believe, “
We become irritated, we pretend the conflict does not exist, or we paper it over with meaningless phrases.”
Quite an admission!
Even Einstein admitted that when he was working on the theory of General Relativity, he began to realize that if it was true, it meant that the universe was not eternal, but had a beginning. He didn’t like that conclusion, so he fudged his calculations so that it did not appear to be true.
He later owned up to what he had done, admitting that he was allowing his beliefs to shape the evidence of his research. He concluded that the key to being a great scientist is to follow the evidence of the truth, wherever it leads you.
Again, quite an admission!
The problem of pride
Simmons invests another essay on the problem of pride, telling the story of a man he was counseling who confessed, “I do believe in God, and I believe what you have told me is true. However, I’m going to pass. Being a Christian might negatively impact my social life in my career.”
He also related the story of renowned psychologist Dr. Paul Vitz, who also confessed, “The major reason for me wanting to become an atheist was that I desired to be accepted by the powerful and influential psychologists in my field.”
He quotes journalist David Brooks of the New York Times who said, “The hard part of intellectual life is separating what is true from what will get you liked.”
Then, Scripture tells the story that after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, a miracle so powerful it is hard to imagine how someone would not believe after witnessing it, some wanted to believe but did not because they were fearful of getting kicked out of the local synagogue. John 12:43 says,
“For they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God.”
It would be hard to estimate how many people have refused to believe in God because they fear what other people would think about them if they did.
The Defective Father Theory
Finally, Simmons details a host of renowned atheists whose father was either absent or was a powerfully negative influence in their lives. Simmons admits that this is just a theory, but that it seems to be validated by some very good research.
He ends by wondering how many atheists in the world have adopted their unbelief because of nonrational psychological factors, and not from the evidence for the existence of God.
A misplaced belief in the true source of happiness
But there is even a further reason why people might not believe in God.
In his book,
Desiring God, John Piper espouses what he calls, “Christian hedonism,” which is the idea that a person will believe and follow whatever he thinks will give him the greatest happiness in life.
Piper suggests that God created us with a powerful desire to be happy in order to draw us to Himself, the true source of happiness. He suggests that God created us to be deeply motivated to desire our happiness, and that it is not wrong to want to be happy. But God also created us so that only He could satisfy that deep longing. So, Christians should not deny their desire for happiness, and instead should feed it, but must go to the only true source of happiness for fulfillment – the Lord.
Christian Hedonism teaches that true Christian joy is not the denial of happiness, but the consummation of happiness… in God.
Piper also observes in another book that this desire to be happy is so powerful that it cannot be denied; it can only be channeled.
“We must fight fire with fire. The fire of lust's pleasures must be fought with the fire of God’s pleasures. If we try to fight the fire of lust with prohibitions and threats alone – even the terrible warnings of Jesus – we will fail. We must fight it with a massive promise of superior happiness. We must swallow up the little flicker of lust's pleasures with the conflagration of holy satisfaction.” (Battling Unbelief, p. 143)
I remember when, many years ago, this basic idea occurred to me:
everything God asks of us, He does so to give something good to us and keep some harm from us.
So, the shortest distance between us and the happiness we long for is total obedience to Christ.
The realization that what I most longed for – to be truly happy – was found not outside God, but
with God, was a watershed moment in my life, giving me a greater capacity to turn from sin and follow the Lord than I had before.
I believe some people refuse to believe in God because they are convinced they will be happier without Him. This is similar to the problem of pride, but a little broader than merely fear of what others will think.
Incomplete assumptions
Finally, I believe some people do not believe in God because they do not think their assumptions all the way out to their logical conclusions.
For example, if someone were tempted to reject God simply because they were concerned about what others might think about them at the time, but then took that thought all the way out to the end - that by rejecting God, they would spend eternity in hell, separated from God - it would surely motivate some to choose God for the long term pleasure rather than reject Him because of short term pain.
Conclusion
This brief, informal survey of possible reasons why some people do not believe in God, is not complete, but it tells us that unbelief is not simple. There might be many different reasons why different people do not believe.
That can guide us, as Christians, when we share our faith, to be on the lookout for
why the person we are sharing with might not believe in God. If they are given solid reasons to believe, but still do not, we can be alert to offer other thoughts that might keep their consideration alive.
For example, if we get the idea that they don’t believe in absolute truth and that their God can be different from my God, and that is okay… we might give the example of the puzzle, to help them see that truth is not changed by what we believe.
Or, if they had a bad experience with their father, or perhaps another Christian or church, we can help them see that we cannot hold God responsible for another human’s being a bad example of true Christianity.
Or, if they reject God for temporal reasons (they fear what others will think of them if they do, or they don’t want to give up pleasures that seem more valuable to them then God, we can steer their thinking to see that eternal rewards more than offset temporal sacrifice.
In summary, if we understand that unbelief has many causes, it may alert us to say things in the course of conversations that might encourage deeper investigation and eventually help someone make a decision for God.
Perhaps we fear we will not be able to remember all these possibilities at the time. Nevertheless, we can always pray for God's guidance and that He will open their eyes to the truth. In the end, it is not we, with our clever arguments, who lead people to Christ, but the Holy Spirit, whom we can trust to do His work, even through us imperfect vessels.
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