No God? No Way! (eBook)

The Hill

(Fig. 1 – Hathaway, C.)

That hill I mentioned a few sentences ago is real. Here it is (Fig. 1).

This hill serves as our first (and will be the last) destination on our adventure. Many a battle have been fought on hills not unlike this one. And so what are we doing here? What is our battle? And, more importantly, is it worth our time and effort? The battle we must take on here is one that is often overlooked. We fight for a proper acknowledgement of God’s general revelation, the fact that all of creation points straight back to him.

Of course, Satan has taken it upon himself to persuade the world into thinking the exact opposite. He wants us to believe that all the evidence points away from a designer and toward everything just getting here randomly on its own. Why? He knows the ramifications of such a belief. If our world and universe got here on its own over billions of years, then there was no real Adam and Eve. And if there was no real Adam and Eve, there was no real Fall. And if there was no Fall, then God’s special revelation, the gospel message of salvation through Christ, is invalid. Those first few chapters of Genesis provide the foundation upon which the gospel stands. Without them, it falls to pieces.

Atheist author Richard Bozarth says, “Evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God.… And if Jesus was not the redeemer who dies for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.”7 And he’s absolutely right. Even if folks don’t go through that exact logic in their heads on their journey away from Christianity, they are smart enough to realize that if you can’t trust the very beginning of the Bible, its very foundation, there is little reason to trust the rest of it. The old, evil foe has focused much energy on this deception, and I’m not expecting you to just take my word for it. Let’s see what the studies say.

Pew Research Center did a study in 2015 that looked at young people who used to attend church but have since stopped and now identify as atheist or agnostic.8 Pew asked these individuals what caused them to leave the Church. Fifty percent left due to a “lack of belief” because of “science, lack of evidence, logic, common sense.” Ouch. For reference, the next highest percentage was 20% who left because they “opposed organized religion in general.”

Barna Research Group did their own study in 2018 and asked 13 to 18-year-old kids what the biggest barriers are to being a Christian.9 Thirty-nine percent responded that they “believe science refutes too much of the Bible” or “I don’t believe in fairy tales.” Again, these answers together represented the highest percentage. They also asked these kids what their most negative perception about the Church was. By now you can probably guess the number one answer. “The Church seems to reject much of what science tells us about the world.”

This is no side issue, folks. This is the issue. Satan is a master of deception, and no one can dispute the results of his strategy. Go out and preach Christ crucified. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus died for the sins of mankind. Yes, the Holy Spirit will work amazing things through you and bring people to Christ, but a growing number will just look at you with a demeaning stare. They are “smart” enough to know that science disproves the Bible and discerning enough to realize that, if that’s true, Christianity is a hollow, baseless religion just like the thousands of other religions and belief systems that are out there. If our holy book is wrong from the very beginning, why even bother looking at the rest of it?

The fact is that if we choose to ignore this battlefield or not fully engage in it, then we do so at the expense of our Lord’s kingdom. As the Apostle Paul says, we ought to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor 10:5).10 Any attempt by our enemy to preemptively harden the hearts of our young people with deceptive science must be dealt with seriously and effectively.

I want to keep going with a few more studies because they also help us figure out how to deal with this challenge. Author Larry Taunton did his own study in 2013 and published the results in his book Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity.11 As in the other studies, the kids polled had previously attended church and were now atheist. Here though, Taunton didn’t just ask them why they stopped believing but when. The story you typically hear today is that kids do just fine going to church with their families while they are living at home, and then it’s this big shock that they’ve lost their faith and stopped worshipping after they head off to college. The scapegoat usually ends up being their evil, anti-Christian professors; however, Taunton found it was the ages of 14 to 17 that were the most decisive in the lives of these kids. That’s late middle school through high school! He also found that the internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism and that they actually respected pastors who took the Bible and its history seriously. Betsy Cooper followed this up in 2016 with a study that concluded 79% of young adults who are religiously unaffiliated made that choice in their adolescent and teen years.12 And Ken Ham even found back in 2009 that some church youth are already lost in their hearts and minds as far back as elementary school!13

The message is clear. Our kids who fall away do so much earlier than we think. And just because they go with us to church does not mean that they are really engaged in their faith or buying into what they hear each Sunday.

Now the results of those studies are pretty sobering, but let me share the results of a survey done by the organization Creation Ministries International. In 2016 they went around conducting interviews with college students at various campuses and found “unequivocally that the majority of young people who were not exposed to creation teaching in their youth now embrace evolution and no longer attend church.14 Yet, every student we spoke to who was equipped with answers as a young person still retains their Christian convictions, in spite of the evolutionary teaching they received in higher education. Better still, every single student we spoke to who affirmed biblical creation still attends church regularly [emphasis added].”

What else is there to say? Our kids need to be exposed to a substantive defense of biblical creation, and the sooner the better! We must not shrink away from this. I strongly believe that, at worst, we should have good answers ready for these kids and, at best, their questions should be answered before they even ask them. Such topics should proactively be discussed within youth groups and Bible studies. The research plainly shows that a huge percentage of our kids will fall away from the Church because it doesn’t jibe with accepted science. Eternal souls hang in the balance, my friends!

Remember when you were a teenager? That period of time between just having fun as a kid and being mature enough to actually be comfortable in your own skin? That in-between time span is rife with worry, self-doubt, and self-consciousness, and, having been a high school teacher for 13 years now, I can tell you that some of the most outwardly confident kids harbor the most intense self-doubt. Many church-going young people just aren’t comfortable asking their pastor questions on the big bang and evolution. Of course there are exceptions. Some kids will overcome their inner awkwardness and ask their pastor what the deal is, but I daresay that for every exception there are at least nine who get their answers elsewhere.

And where do you suppose the other nine turn for these answers? The same place you probably look for answers to questions these days. Google. And what do you suppose Google says? I was curious about this over the summer, so I typed in a few questions and took screenshots of the answers I got (Fig. 2 and 3).

(Fig. 2 and 3 – Hathaway, C.)

That first one really got me. I couldn’t even finish the sentence before the book Why Evolution Is True came up! Now let’s not allow the significance of this to escape us. What is the underlying message our young people get when they see this? Google is basically telling them, “Look, we know where you’re going with this. Of course evolution is true; just check out this sophisticated book by a world-renowned doctor of biology.” The point is that when kids use their phones to get answers to these questions, they will always get naturalistic results similar to those in the screenshots I took.

Further, note how when I asked, “How old is the earth?” I didn’t even have to press the search button before the “answer” popped up. And, once again, look at what’s happening subliminally here. See how all these “answers” appear so sure of themselves? They all look so...