Biblical Apologetics: Debunking Atheism

I will start this article by a quote from Claudia Pavonis which says, “How is it that a man borne from nature, can use his intelligence to somehow come to the conclusion that the nature he is borne from, is unintelligent? This is the very definition of an oxymoron.” and a quote from Isaac Newton which says, "In the absence of all other evidence, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence." As these quotes suggest, the evidence for God, Creation and Intelligent Design is so obvious that denying it will reduce one's worldview to absurdity; my main goal in this article is to quickly demonstrate that God must exist in order for a naturalist/atheist to conclude that He doesn't; therefore, atheism/naturalism is a self-refuting worldview or position to argue from. In other words, atheism is a worldview that self-destructs, very much like Islam does, as I showed in my previous article. Atheists like to make it look like that they are somehow on a neutral ground and encourage theists to get on their airplane in order to argue for the existence of God, and many theists fall for this trap; as a result, no matter how they argue, they will end up in the unbelievers' destination. But the real neutral ground is where both parties of the debate acknowledge the existence of God, otherwise, no one can make knowledge claims or prove anything as I will demonstrate in my article.

It's quite obvious that in order to reason or reach a certain conclusion about something, first we need to have the ability to reason; this ability is usually referred to as 'intelligence' or 'intelligibility'. If nature is all there is, and there is no intelligent design behind it, then logically speaking, our thoughts must be bound to the laws of nature, and we can't possess libertarian free will, let alone intelligence or the ability to reason. As a result, our thoughts and convictions are just as valuable as the chemical reactions that we see elsewhere in the nature! Put it another way, if there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter; if this is true, then the difference between my thoughts and an atheist's thoughts corresponds to shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically; this means that you do not hold to atheism because it's true, or the neutral position to argue from, but rather from a series of chemical reactions in your brain that you cannot control or change; it's just natural for you to fizz that way and for me to fizz this way. As the famous saying says, life would become a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and signifying nothing. This is why the majority of people believe that there's a God and there's more to life than meets the eye, and their reaction to atheism is, "But, without God everything becomes meaningless?" Maybe they can't articulate themselves well enough to demonstrate why without God everything becomes meaningless, but they intuitively get it. This really isn't that difficult to understand; in fact refusing to understand this would require a great amount of effort, both intellectually and emotionally which I don't think would be healthy at all. Most atheists that I have talked to are either willing to acknowledge the truth of what I'm saying, or are unwilling to even have a debate about their epistemology or foundation of knowledge and truth or have gone too far in suppressing the truth that are willing to even deny the existence of truth and absolute knowledge and claim relativism, yet go on and make knowledge claims, and seem to be unable to recognise the clear contradiction that lies at the very foundation of their worldview; interestingly enough, their reaction is very similar to Muslims' reaction, after you demonstrate to them why their position is self-refuting and how their worldview self-destructs, they will either get angry and walk out on you, or will keep trying to change the subject. And of course it's understandable; people usually feel threatened by a sound argument that seems to have the potential to change their mind about something they don't want to change their mind about, so they choose to ignore it and refuse to think or talk about it; this is the very definition of cognitive dissonance.

Now atheists might turn around and say, “This is a strawman definition of Atheism. Atheism is not a worldview. It's just a lack of belief in God, gods or the supernatural, because there's no evidence for them, and your argument for the existence of God is from ignorance; you're saying I don't know, therefore God. It's just another god-of-the-gaps argument formed differently. You're also trying to shift the burden of proof. How typical...” This would be a huge strawman, and a very dishonest response or reaction to what I'm trying to demonstrate, but I will still try to address it. First of all, it doesn't matter how you define atheism; an atheist is living his life according to a “belief” that there is no God; it's how they view the world, which makes it a worldview. They might say that their worldview allows for God to exist and they're open to the evidence, but that's not true because they interpret the evidence based on their atheistic presuppositions which is always going to lead them back to atheism. Also, I'm not arguing from ignorance at all; I'm arguing for the impossibility of the contrary, to demonstrate that atheism is a worldview that self-destructs. In order for an atheist to refute what I'm saying, they need to demonstrate how their current worldview can account for intelligence or intelligibility; they can't do that and they know it. In fact, they're the ones arguing from ignorance by assuming and presupposing things that can never be justified according to their worldview; if you squeeze them hard enough and try to reduce their logic, you will see that their epistemology or their foundation for knowledge is based on a bunch of question-begging assumptions that can never be justified according to how they view the world. Finally, this is not shifting the burden of proof in any shape or form; burden of proof presupposes truth, and a way of knowing the truth or proving it, which requires intelligibility at the very least; something that cannot exist in an atheistic worldview. Now if you're an atheist and you understand this argument, then you have no choice but to abandon your current worldview and start looking into deistic or theistic worldviews with the belief that God or some form of the supernatural is not only real, but is a necessary precondition for intelligibility, otherwise even your ability to reason would be suspect, and you have no reason to trust your cognitive faculties in order to seek the truth.

Another common way that atheists try to get around this type of apologetics which is usually identified as presuppositional apologetics, in case you'd like to learn more about it, is that they will say something like this: "Okay, fine. I can't account for logic, intelligibility or rationality, but neither can YOU! I can't know the truth, but neither can YOU!" This is the tu-quoque fallacy; in other words, by doing so they're cutting their own feet, and basically admitting that debating is pointless because there's no such a thing as truth(which itself is a truth claim) or that if there is a truth, we can't know it(which is yet another truth claim) and they're most likely not going to see the contradictory claims that they're making unless you point them out. Other than the fact that by doing so, they're committing a logical fallacy, and refuting themselves over and over again, they have to be intellectually dishonest to say that an all-knowing Creator cannot reveal the truth to us such that we can know the truth and that appealing to an omniscient God doesn't rescue us from viciously circular reasoning that uses question-begging assumptions based on blind faith, as its bedrock and foundation for seeking knowledge and truth.

To recap, it's very easy to get the atheists to admit that according to their worldview, morality is subjective; in fact, most of them, if not all of them, already admit that. With a little bit of more effort, we can help them see that according to their worldview everything is subjective and a matter of opinion and no one can prove anything. Psalm 14:1 says, "The fool has said in his heart: 'There is no God.'" and Proverbs 18:2 says, "Fools find no pleasure in understanding but only delight in airing their own opinions." and finally Proverbs 26:4-5 tell us how to answer the fool, which is basically what I'm trying to do here; instead of allowing the conversation to continue based on our opinions, I try to demonstrate the folly of denying God. There's really nothing left to add here. I'd like to finish my article with this great video made by David Wood, from acts17 apologetics. His argument is for atheists who try to justify their reasoning by appealing to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, random mutation and natural selection. It goes something like this: “Many atheists believe that argumentation can prove that God doesn't exist. But if Naturalism is true, human reasoning ability is unreliable on a fundamental level and can't prove anything, let alone theological or metaphysical claims. Hence, Naturalism is self-refuting, for it undermines any confidence we might have in our ability to defend it. If we are to trust our reasoning ability, it must be grounded in something other than random mutation and natural selection. Theism offers such a foundation.”

Biblical Apologetics: Debunking Islam

What about Islam? What about the Quran? How do you know Muslims aren't right, and you're not going to their Hell? You've probably heard these questions from skeptics, haven't you? It's mostly a reaction to Pascal's Wager. For those of you who don't know what Pascal's Wager is, it's a weak argument used by some Christians which says to unbelievers that if they're right, no one will know, but if Christians are right, then the unbelievers will lose big time. The reason this argument is weak is because Christianity is not the only religion that claims to be the only way to God, or is it? What about Islam? Perhaps Islam is the only world religion that humanity is facing today which strictly preaches that Islam is the only way and those who reject it, will go to Hell. In this post of mine I am going to demolish the legitimacy of Islam such that by the end of my post any rational person would become absolutely convinced  that Islam is a self-refuting religion that has to steal from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures in order to make its case. Notice carefully how I won't use the promotion of violence in the Quran or Hadith as a leverage against Islam; something that is very common among Christians and non-Christians who oppose Islam. Appeals to the violence of Islam in an apologetic context is a variant of the argumentum ad baculum fallacy. Simply because a religion promotes violence, it doesn't mean that it isn't true; in other words, just because you don't like something, it doesn't necessarily mean it's false; to conclude that therefore it's false, is a non-sequitur.

Before I continue, perhaps it would be best to address the question “Is Allah the same God that Jews and Christians worship?” This is a very tricky question and the answer isn't really as black and white as many people would want it to be. Perhaps the short answer is yes, Allah is the same God. In fact, Allah is just a generic Arabic term which is even used by Arab Christians to refer to God. It's kind of like “God” in English. But what about the famous Islamic saying which we even see on Islamic flags like ISIS or Saudi Arabia that states “There is no God but Allah?” It looks like there is a more generic term for "God" in Arabic other than Allah which is “Elah” in this famous Islamic oath. That's correct, and I personally think "Allah" is a specific name other than just a generic word for God and it's derived from Aramaic which is the language that today's modern Arabic comes from, and there are people who say that it used to be the name of the "moon god" in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam was founded. To cut the long story short, if we get too technical, the answer is no, Allah is not the same God that Jews and Christians worship, neither is it a generic term for "God" in Arabic and I believe that Arab Christians have been deceived by their language when it comes to this word. But if we get rid of all these deep technical analysis, I think we can at least agree that Allah of the Quran claims to be the same God that Jews and Christians worship and therefore, it's logical to grant the fact that Muslims “think” they worship the same Abrahamic God that Jews and Christians worship and even if we grant that they worship the same God, it doesn't mean they are saved, because according to the Gospel, worshiping God isn't going to save us from our sins, in fact true worship is a privilege by which we can enter into God's rest or presence, but that's a different topic.

Now every logical person would agree that if this is the case, and Allah of the Quran claims to be the same God that Jews and Christians worship, then Quran should be compatible and reconcilable with both the Jewish and Christian Holy Scriptures. The obvious reason for this is the fact that new revelations are fulfillments of old revelations. We see this in Christianity, the New Testament or the Gospel so as to speak, is the fulfillment of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, also known as "Tanakh". In other words, Christianity doesn't claim that the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible has changed or is corrupted because that would undermine Christianity; instead, Christians use the Hebrew Bible to prove that the Gospel is not only the fulfillment of what was promised by God in the Hebrew Bible, but also a new revelation from God. Now the question is "Does Islam follow in the same footsteps of Christianity or the basic logic of how revelation from God is supposed to work?" The answer is "No. It does not." The teachings in the Quran have clear and irreconcilable contradictions with what we see in both the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, so much so that Muslims today have to claim that the Bible has been tampered with; a claim that not only violates the very basic laws of logic and common sense, but also undermines Islam and the Quran, and proves to any rational person that Islam is a self-refuting religion which makes it a fraud regardless of whether the Bible is true or not.

But it gets even more interesting than that. There are clear verses in the Quran that  are advocating the inspiration, preservation, and authority of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Allah even goes on and commands Muhammad to let the Christians judge the Quran by what Allah has revealed to them in the Gospel, and in one place Allah even goes further and commands Muhammad to go and ask the people of the book(Jews and Christians) if he doubts whether the new revelations are from God or not! It almost blows the mind of anyone who studies this from outside away and raises the massive question of how on earth can then we have more than a billion Muslims in the world? The answer is simple. The majority of Muslims haven't even read their own book, let alone the Bible. Unfortunately the same thing might be true about most Christians; in other words, we're living in a world where the majority of people are blindly following the crowds. But what about those who lead in Islam? Those who have studied these issues and still go on and preach Islam, and promote the Quran? Can't they see this clear and massive contradiction which lies on the very basis and foundation of their worldview? The answer is cognitive dissonance; the majority of people would rather die than think, and there are some who think they think, while they don't really think deep enough, especially about the foundation of their worldview. Now one might raise an objection to my reasoning here and accuse me of using a double standard by saying something like “What about you yourself? Can't you see the clear contradictions in the Bible? Can't you see how the God of the Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament?” These objections would be valid only if Christians had claimed that the Hebrew Bible has been tampered with, and then they went on picking and choosing what they wanted like what Muslim apologists do with the Bible, in order to prove the New Testament. But that's not what Christians claim or do at all. For every single “alleged” contradiction in the Bible, whether in the New Testament or the Old Testament or between them, there is at least one answer or explanation; you just need to learn how to Google. People who usually raise objections like this haven't studied these issues. They are no different than the majority of Muslims. They are just following the crowds and as a result they repeat the same mistakes that the people who lead them are making. What about their leaders? Haven't they studied these issues? Why would they go on and spread misinformation like the leaders of Muslims do? The answer is cognitive dissonance again. The popular leaders of atheism or skepticism in this world think they think, but they don't really think deep enough about the foundation of their worldview. I will get into Atheism, Naturalism, Deism, Pluralism and Skepticism  in separate articles and will try to demonstrate the folly of denying God and Intelligent Design, and will also address some of the dilemmas of Deism and Pluralism.

To recap, the Quran affirms the inspiration, preservation, and authority of the Judeo-Christian scriptures (including the Torah and the Gospel). Yet the Quran contradicts the Judeo-Christian scriptures on fundamental doctrines(e.g., Jesus' death, resurrection, and deity). By affirming scriptures that contradict Islam, the Quran self-destructs. I'd like to recommend the following video by David Wood, one of my favourite Christian apologists of the century. David was raised atheist and has a great testimony which I would totally recommend you to watch it on his YouTube channel; he also has great materials with regards to debunking Atheism and Islam, and his website is Www.AnsweringMuslims.Com

My Background & Testimony

Everybody has a story. Everybody is on a journey. Everybody is seeking the ultimate truth. Everybody is looking for the ultimate purpose of life. I wasn't exempt either, until I finally found what I was looking for. Where do I start? It's kind of a long story and the last thing that I want to do is to bore my readers with the details, so without further ado, let's get straight to the point.

I'm Persian by descent, from Tehran, the capital of Iran. I was born and raised in a devout Muslim family; the Shiite sect of Islam to be specific. The name that my parents chose for me was the name of the founder of Islam—Mohammad; like everybody else, I learned and practiced Islam and at the time, it seemed like the only legitimate religion in the world, mainly because of how people are indoctrinated by the mainstream media, schools, and lack of free-speech; almost all Islamic states in the world are pretty isolated. I could never completely believe in everything that was written in the Koran. I always had philosophical and theological questions that were left unanswered. I remember how the idea of eternal conscious torment was always something I could never grasp; I could never understand how and why God would send people to a place called Hell, instead of punishing them and killing them. I couldn't see how the traditional Hell that even the majority of Christians seem to believe in, would be a just punishment.

Apart from my questions, I always found following the Sharia to be almost impossible, and I found myself guilty of breaking it over and over again but I didn't give up until I moved to Australia to study. When I arrived in Australia, I gradually broke more rules and within a year, I decided to completely let go of Islam and become a Deist. In case you don't know what Deism means, it's a belief that there is most definitely a God/Creator, but that all religions are man-made and untrustworthy. I felt pretty comfortable with that position and I made all sorts of friends; deep down I still knew what's right and wrong, and I would still find myself doing what's wrong. And feeling guilty before God is a very unpleasant feeling as you all know, no matter how much you suppress the truth, there will be a time when you can't suppress it anymore and the convictions can sometimes be crippling. In my conversations with God, I would often try to point the finger at God and ask Him, why did You create me or why do You let me live or why don't You just finish me because I feel like I can't be who You want me to be; You expect too much from me! Anyways, I graduated from university, found a job and I was waiting for my permanent visa, when a movie about the Bible caught my attention and I decided to watch it. I have to admit, the movie touched me spontaneously; it was as if God was speaking to me through this movie. At the time of watching the movie, I had a lot of convictions in my heart, not for breaking the Sharia, but for breaking the very basic laws of morality that I believed was written in my conscience, and I was also going through a physical injury that was getting worse and worse; the movie broke me down into tears. All of a sudden, I was madly in love with this Jesus, and I knew he was different than anyone else in history. But that's not enough, is it? Surely, I need to do some research and find out how much of this movie is based on historical facts? What can I really know about this Jesus? The idea of Jesus being called the Son of God was very troubling to me, perhaps because of how I was raised and taught strictly in the Koran that it's blasphemous to associate a partner with God, or call Jesus the Son of God. But other than that, the idea of God having a Son would go against almost everything I believed about God and His unity.

So I started to do some extensive research. I watched a couple of debates and after the second one, it was almost as clear as day that Islam is wrong on so many levels that it just doesn't make sense. It has to steal from the Bible which it considers to have changed over time in order to make its case; whether Bible has changed or not, Muslim apologists seemed to be dishonest in the debates when they were trying to make a case for Islam by taking certain verses in the Bible out of context. It wasn't enough, I read parts of the Bible and the words got through me and I became confused as hell. On the one hand, Islam seemed to be a cult, on the other hand something was holding me back and I thought to myself if Islam is a cult, then perhaps all religions are nothing more than cults or perhaps there's no God at all? As soon as the thought of atheism came up, a voice was yelling through my conscience, as if I'm talking to myself, saying you know that God is real, regardless of what any religion says, you can't deny Him, and I was talking to God saying, “God I can't say you don't exist”, and among all the people in history who have claimed to be sent from You, I'm having a hard time to say Jesus was a phoney, so please help me God, I can't know what the truth is, I'm lost and words can't explain how desperate I am, and how certain I am that I cannot know the truth unless You somehow reveal it to me. Immediately after this little conversation with God I stopped crying, as something really peaceful took over and somehow told me that Jesus is the way, and I immediately decided to follow Him. I know, my decision may have been hasty because I hadn't even read the whole Bible yet, but I went along with my intuitions  because the peaceful experience of God's presence was real, it was like nothing I had ever experienced in my whole life. That night when I slept, I probably had the weirdest dream in my life. I was getting beat up by an evil character who was threatening me to come back to Islam or he will kill me, and I was crying and yelling at him that I have made my decision, and that there's no way I'm going back to Islam again! I woke up and after that, I haven't had a single nightmare ever, up to this very day; it was like a demon left me or something. But of course things got cruel again, mainly intellectually and emotionally because I ran into good arguments against Christianity, each of which would slap me with new waves of crippling doubts, but every time I would pray to God about it, I would hear Him assure me of the truth of Christianity.

I experienced the presence of God over and over, again and again. I have to tell you, if you have never entered into God's rest, when you do, you will know that this is what you've been looking for your entire life, because there's nothing like it. Words can't explain it, however I'm sure some of you who are reading my testimony have experienced it too, but to the rest of you, if I wanted to give you an analogy of how good and comforting and peaceful God's presence is, maybe I can compare it the best pleasure of this world known as climax/orgasm, and then claim that this peace is almost about a million times better, if not more! But of course these are all subjective experiences, and we are living in a world with lots of lies and deceptions and we need to be able to objectively defend our faith, so I still kept getting slapped by arguments against Christianity. I have to be honest with you, the arguments that atheists were putting forward used to really shake my faith on the surface, but deep down I knew they're wrong and I was crying out for help, to the point that I thought it's impossible to intellectually defend my faith and I was giving up, little knowing that God was putting me in those circumstances so that I would learn how to best approach them in the future.

Anyhow, my physical injury got worse and I had to quit my job, I went through a really rough patch with lots of gains and subjective experiences, but I also lost it and got mad at God like Job did! I was diagnosed with Trigeminal Neuralgia, which is classified as a “suicide disease”, mainly because pain killers don't help much; the problem of evil in this world hit me hard, and I was so mad at God for allowing so much suffering, and said things to Him which I'm not going to repeat here. God confronted me like He confronted Job, I was at the edge of committing suicide but I couldn't do it because of what God revealed to me. He first showed me how my parents would feel if I commit suicide, it was horrible. I couldn't do it to my parents; He then showed me that pain wouldn't go away if I kill myself, it would still continue in Hell until I pay for all my sins against God, and vanish into non-existent but because I won't know when exactly my punishment will end, it will literally feel like I'm in Hell forever, at least from my perspective. Then He said to me the choice is mine; life or death? I chose to live, even though I was still angry at God. He then encouraged me to grow through my pain, instead of just going through it. He could have instantly healed me, but then I wouldn't have gained so much from the pain I went through so I thank Him for that. In this moment, I am writing my testimony and I'm still not 100% pain-free, but I'm doing loads better, and will hopefully start work soon. This whole experience finished in a good way, I finally understood what the book of Job in the Bible is trying to tell us; I might write a separate article about that.

I have had other subjective experiences which I didn't share, because I believe subjective experiences don't have a lot of fans. I mean they're really good for the individuals themselves, but I don't think they would be considered valuable to others, especially skeptics. Hopefully, God willing, I will be writing more on how I tend to objectively and intellectually defend my faith against popular worldviews, depending on what I have learned so far. I know that we are all learning, and there is no room for complacency here, but I think I have learned enough to easily, quickly and briefly defend my faith against today's popular worldviews.