What assumptions?

What might be the erroneous assumptions we have swallowed with our cultural atmosphere, specifically in the West? There’s a very good book entitled, “The lies we are told and the truth we must hold”. It is written by Dr. Sharon James, and deals with several false notions that are current in the Western mind-set these days. She pin-points these false assumptions, the very first of which is the unsuspected cause of a lot of our existential confusion … “There is no God and there is no absolute morality”.

I will come back to the issue of morality in due time, but what I want to emphasise for the moment is that aspect of our secular worldview that has been invading our intellectual space now for quite some time – the odd affirmation that there is no God. Why is this odd? Well, because to affirm as a truth that there is no God (that is, no ultimate almighty Creator who is both powerful and personal) one would need to make an exhaustive examination of the entire universe, both that which is in the visible and in the invisible realms, to have been able to come up validly with the conclusion that there is no God. The Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first to trip around the world in space, came back to earth claiming that since he had seen no God “up there”, then there is no God. It is all proud stupidity! Of course there may well be a God – we’ll come back to that later too.

What I want to bring out here is that if this atheistic assumption is taken as truth, it will affect a number of other ideas that we assume to be true. To take just one example, can there be any purpose in the existence of the world and the universe and humankind if there is no divine intelligence and power behind the creation of this extraordinary living space we all enjoy? That is a question worth pondering. Does not our hopelessness and meaninglessness come in fact from having adopted such an atheistic assumption? And let us remember that atheism is a belief system (as Professor Alister McGrath, a former atheist, informs us). In fact it is a belief system with no evidence! Not a helpful assumption therefore, to say the least.

Clive Every-Clayton