GN Commentary: November 17, 2008 - Why believe in a god?

If there is no God, who decides what's good and what's bad? Can we all decide for ourselves individually? How would we go about figuring out what "good" is? What if your definition clashes with and even interferes with mine; then what do we do?

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Video Transcript

Have you seen the current add sponsored by the militant atheist group the American Humanist Association? It's financing a $40,000 publicity campaign on Washington DC public transportation.

The ad shows Santa Clause saying: "Why believe in a god, just be good for goodness sake."

The claim is that there is no God, but that we can just decide to be good without Him. Well, can we do that?

If there is no God, who decides what's good and what's bad? Can we all decide for ourselves individually? How would we go about figuring out what "good" is?  What if your definition clashes with and even interferes with mine; then what do we do?

Have you ever experienced that what seems good at one point sometimes turns out to be anything but good later on? Have you ever had to give the excuse: "it seemed like a good idea at the time"?

The problem is, we can't always see into the future to know what the results will be of what we think and do. We can't figure out what is good in the final analysis.

Wisdom coming to us from 3000 years ago underscores the problem, and the solution. "Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, But the Lord weighs the hearts" (Proverbs 21:2).

No one gets up in the morning and says, "Today I'm going to make a horribly destructive decision that will harm many other people and ruin the rest of my life." Yet, every day in the news we see and hear about people who do just that. And it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Bible tells us that in the beginning Adam and Eve were given the choice of believing and obeying what God told them, or of eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating that fruit represented the choice not to believe God, but to decide for themselves, what was good and what was evil. Human history is the tragic story of their descendants trying to figure it out, apart from God, and never getting it right.

Yes, we can muddle around trying to figure out for ourselves what is good and what isn't, and if we do, we'll pay the painful price of our pride. Thankfully there's another choice: we can listen to our Creator, who made us, and who can see the end-results of our ways of thinking and living. He tells us what's good and what's not, what will be good now, and forever.

We know what the members of the American Humanist Association think of God. Can we know what God think of them? Actually, we can!  The Bible puts it very simply "Fools say to themselves, there is no God." (Psalm 14:1).

For GN Magazine, I'm Joel Meeker.