The Real Reason God Won't Show Overwhelming Proof - FAS2602

Speaker A Can science really disprove God? Today, we're exposing the biggest myths from famous atheist scientists like Carl Sagan, who claim Christianity and science cannot coexist. Get ready as we reveal the fatal flaws in scientism and uncover powerful evidence for faith that science alone cannot explain. Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Casey Vacurcher. Joining me to discuss this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, John. Speaker B Hello, Casey. Speaker A Dr. John has written a book, the Big Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be drawing on insights from this book. So, John, in your book, it mentions Carl Sagan's challenge that God should prove his existence through physical evidence, like letting a burning cross appear in the sky. And many atheist scientists make similar demands today. So why do you think this approach fundamentally misunderstands the nature of God and the proper limits of scientific inquiry? Speaker B Right, okay, so it is a very, very common question, and it's not a new one by any means. If we look at the Bible account of the crucifixion of Christ, the high priests and the educated people at the time said, if you really are God, come down from the cross and then we will believe in you. So why didn't Jesus do that? And people would say, well, he obviously wasn' you know, the, the Messiah. But it's. This raised a very, very interesting thing. And I think there's a couple of things just quickly before I jump in and fully answer why, you know, God doesn't put a blazing cross in the sky or something like that to prove that he exists is let's just a lot of people really don't understand the historical nature of the Bible. The evidence for that it is a true account. The witnesses, the number of copies of the different sort of texts that were available that were all collaborating one another. Now, one of the things that we have, of course, is a record of what Jesus said on the cross in reply to that question. So the people asked him, if you truly are the Son of God, come down from the cross. Right. And just at that time, Jesus called out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And people thought, okay, well, you know, he's. He's calling on, you know, God or someone to help him, you know, But Jesus was saying the first few verses of Psalm 22 or Psalm 19, it might be, which actually, I think it is Psalm 22 or one of those ones in that area there, which describes in detail the crucifixion. Yes, that was written by David, you know, a thousand years earlier. Or more. More than that? Oh, yeah, about a thousand years earlier or more 1200 earlier, whatever the time is. But that was an ancient document that they had, and it described, it predicted the death of the Messiah. How it would happen would describe the scene described, in fact, that people would be calling out and mocking him at that time. So in effect, and this really is brilliant, if Jesus had have come down from the cross and saved himself, he couldn't have actually taken our place in the coming judgment. Now, a lot of people don't believe in the judgment. That doesn't mean that it doesn't occur, though. And there's a lot of logical arguments that there must be a judgment for all the bad things that have happened on earth because God didn't intend that. And that's another area that I address later or we address later in this book. So God offered a solution to this. Now, I know this sounds a lot of people very religious, but we need to understand that this is a very important scenario that is coming here. That essentially because everybody's done bad things, we're all condemned to the judgment of death. And Jesus came. God came as himself to take our place and say, I'm offering you a chance to be fully forgiven if you choose this. And that's why he couldn't come down. But Jesus in actual fact, answered that question by saying, hang on, you guys, what you're seeing in front of your eyes now was predicted by an inspired passage that was given to David over a thousand years before to warn you about this, this particular time. All right, now let's go back to the. To the question. So in actual fact, he provided for them evidence to believe. Now we come back to this, this compelling thing. If, if God performed this miraculous cross in the sign or whatever, right? Whatever Carl Sagan wants, and I think he asked for a flaming cross to appear in the sky. The evidence is very compelling. Is that going to change our behavior? So when we look around the world, when we look at the history of the world, you know, history of Europe is a history of warfare. It doesn't matter where you go. You look at Chinese history, you look at American Indian history, people have always fought, people have always killed one another, robbed one another. The strong has taken advantage of the weak and so forth, okay? It's the story of mankind. And mixed up with this have been good people as well, right? There have been people that have chosen, they want to do the right thing. They have made a choice. Some people made a choice to do good things. Some people have made a choice to do bad things. If the evidence that God was real and there's a judgment was so overwhelming, then everybody would be compelled. But would that really change their heart? This is the thing, I think. And so the issue is that God has put out evidence there. And he showed that evidence, for example, in the life of Christ. He showed that evidence down through the history of the Bible. And a lot of people of, you know, Herbert Butterfield, who's professor of history at Oxford University, wrote a very, very detailed book called Christianity and History, where he looks at this evidence, he looks at the evidence of God's overruling in history to maintain the knowledge of God. Because when you again, look down through history, there are so many efforts to actually totally wipe out any knowledge of a creator God. People have become very polytheistic, had, you know, other ideas and so forth. So what we have is a situation where God, if it would be overwhelming, everybody would say, oh, there's a God. But people are doing it out of fear. They're not doing it out of a changed heart. And Jesus came and described the kingdom that God originally set up. The Edenic kingdom was a place where there was no evil, there was no wrongdoing. We know that the Bible account is that Satan came in the form of a snake and attempted Eve to disobey God. And the original statement that Satan made was that God was a liar. That was the original Satan. Therefore she didn't have to believe the command not to eat the tree of life. So this is a very interesting philosophical position that the original attack on humans was that God is a liar. And that led, of course, to disobedience and all the consequence. So God wants to recreate the situation where he has people that believe in him and trust him. And so that's why the belief in God. God provides a certain amount of evidence, but there is also a certain amount of faith. It has to be a choice that we want to align ourselves with a good God, a God whose kingdom is described by the Ten Commandments, or as Jesus summed it up, love God and love your neighbor. So this is. And God has provided a whole lot of evidence down through history, provided the prophecies that were written down for people, inspired individual people at that time. And so often when people say, you know, oh, you know, there's, you know, one of the big claims is, well, there's not enough evidence. God did provide a lot of evidence. He provided the resurrection. Now a lot of people doubt and say, well, yeah, what's the evidence of the resurrection? It's medically impossible, you know, when people are dead. And Romans were professional people at killing people. They knew how to do their job properly. Those guys, you know, if they didn't do the job properly, they themselves were killed. So there was no doubt that Jesus was probably dead. Dead, right. He'd been through a horrific experience afterwards. So many people saw him. He taught afterwards, he showed his pierced hands and so forth. He taught afterwards. But then also later he talked to people. He was publicly physically translated to heaven. And those people became the people that then told everyone God was real. God actually did come. And that led to the rise and spread of Christianity then through the Roman world. And from then on, and those people did it under threat of death. Virtually all of them were killed. John, I think Liv was about the only one that survived. Not even then. They attempted to kill him, but he survived. All the others were killed for giving that testimony that God is real. So this is evidence today, we in quantum physics and this sort of thing, we have a whole lot of things and predictions in quantum physics that we take for real and yet we haven't really got very good data on them. If we look at the term of non locality, you know, interactions that occur faster than the speed of light, for example, we're all based on the Einstein, Podolsky, Rose and thought experiment, which was later verified by Elaine Aspect's actual experiments in the laboratory and so forth. Well, that's based on one guy's observations. I don't think many people have repeated Alain's aspect. We have the testimony of many of the, of those early people and they wrote their testimonies down, you know, Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and others that gave their testimonies preserved. This is real. So the evidence is real. It's real. Seeing, observable evidence that people saw. Speaker A Yeah. So what I hear you saying, obviously we described a whole lot of evidence that God has provided. And yet we have people, and especially atheists and people coming from, you know, scientism kind of perspective, wanting immediate tangible in the face evidence now because somehow that might help them believe, but that isn't actually what may help them because they're coming from the premise that they don't want to believe that God exists. Speaker B Exactly. Speaker A So God has given evidence like lots and lots of evidence out there, so that people who are looking for it, if they want to find it, they can find it. But it's not necessarily in the realm of the tangible, the empirical. He has given it in spiritual and other sort of ways. Prophecy, personal experience, testimonies, all of these things which you've mentioned, and so that people with that open mind can find it. Essentially, that's what we've got. We've got God giving evidence that way. Plus that's outside of merely the empirical realm of evidence. That's pretty much something. Speaker B There is actually another side to this, and that is that the Bible makes a promise that if we truly believe that Jesus was God and that God raised him from the dead and choose God's kingdom, we want to be a good person, we want to be with God. We believe in Jesus teachings to love God and to love our fellow man. That's the sort of person we want to be. God makes a promise that he will change us through the importing of what he says is part of him, that he gives us part of us in the Holy Spirit. And there was a prominent atheist philosopher. I just can't think of his name off the top of my head right now. But what he said was that the role Christianity has made in Africa is huge, right? It's Christianity has had such a positive effect in Africa that could not achieve because Christianity changed people's hearts and that greatly reduced the fighting the crime and everything. It was the change in heart. And he said, I don't believe in God, but I can see that Christianity has made the change. Now, what he overlooked was that Christianity also involves a supernatural miracle as well that is observed. And that's what many Christians testify. Now, when the people strongly espouse scientism and so forth, what a lot of the time you find they won't consider this evidence. They said they won't consider it because in their worldview there is no evidence. There can't be evidence. And so again, this is their faith position. Their faith position is there can't be evidence. Therefore I'm not going to look at it. I'm not going to even waste my time considering it. Whereas in actual fact, if we take the empirical position, there's a whole lot of evidence. And that's what people like John Lennox in his books points out, gunning for God, this sort of thing against the flow, God's undertaker. He provides a whole lot of evidence. But again, he writes, the people won't look at it. So, you know, we have people like brilliant mathematicians and philosophers like John Lennox and other people that are riding in the space and saying there's heaps of evidence there, but it's up to the person to actually be prepared to look at that evidence. Speaker A And the evidence isn't necessarily what they're looking for or expecting because they're just saying, I won't believe it unless I see it. But what they're wanting to see is what they are dictating they want to see not necessarily all the evidence that has already been provided. That is what they're discounting. Speaker B That's right. You've summed it up beautifully. Speaker A So thank you so much for bringing that point out and making that clear. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or known someone who has? What helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments. Your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers. Thanks for joining us.