Disbelief

When Galileo introduced the telescope as a tool to peer into the galaxies, his contemporaries did not believe him. Scoffing, they refused to even look through the device. Galileo sat alone with his telescope. He was the sole observer of the vastness of the cosmos. A single witness of galaxies beyond anything anyone had seen or imagined. Galileo had the stars to himself.

Undermining Aristotle’s previous explanations of the universe, Galileo published his own findings based on what he’d seen through the telescope. He painted a picture for the entire world through words, a display of the heavens scratched across bound pages. He wrote about mountains and craters on the moon, spots upon the sun, satellites orbiting Jupiter, and multitudes of stars never known to exist.

These were monumental discoveries that would shape future space explorations, but they fell on ears refusing to hear and eyes refusing to see. Galileo’s peers mocked him and his toy. Strictly adhering to Aristotle’s descriptions of the universe, they refused to believe anything contrary to what they had held to for so long.

The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81% who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup's trend. Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. Gallup's May 2022 Values and Beliefs poll finds 17% of Americans saying they do not believe in God.

Gallup first asked this question in 1944, repeating it again in 1947 and twice each in the 1950s and 1960s. In those latter four surveys, a consistent 98% said they believed in God. When Gallup asked the question nearly five decades later, in 2011, 92% of Americans said they believed in God.

A subsequent survey in 2013 found belief in God dipping below 90% to 87%, roughly where it stood in three subsequent updates between 2014 and 2017 before this year's drop to 81%.

The groups with the largest declines are liberals (62%), young adults (68%), and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%), reflecting that religiosity is a major determinant of political divisions in the US.

The bottom line is that fewer Americans today, than five years ago, believe in God, and the percentage is down even more from the 1950s and 1960s when almost all Americans did. Still, the vast majority of Americans believe in God. And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership, and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

Author Anne Bokma left her fundamentalist Christian church in her 20s. She recently spent a full year investigating and experimenting with numerous forms of popular New Age spirituality, from yoga to witchcraft, magic mushrooms to death cafés.

Bokma recalls the time in her early 30s when she prayed really hard. She was eight months pregnant and in the hospital experiencing premature labor pains. A nurse waved the ultrasound wand over her belly and after many minutes of trying, could not detect a heartbeat. A doctor was called as Bokma and her husband started to panic. The doctor also could not find a heartbeat. Bokma immediately began “bargaining, begging and beseeching” God. She didn’t really believe in a supernatural entity who personally intervenes, “but this did not stop me from crying out for mercy in my hour of need.”

Bokma tells the rest of the story, showing that her prayer was never really sincere:

When all hope seems lost, praying means you’re at least doing something. After searching in vain for another couple of minutes, the doctor … picked up the cord attached to the ultrasound machine and dangled it in front of our eyes. It hadn’t been plugged in. Our baby was alive, though not because of divine intervention. This made me think about what Mark Twain must have meant when he said: “Under the circumstances, swearing seems more apt than prayer.” Some might have called this incident a miracle. We called her Ruby.

A 20-year-old woman with cerebral palsy was pronounced dead by paramedics, and placed in a body bag. Three hours later, she was found alive. The ordeal started when Timesha Beauchamp was found by several relatives with pale lips and difficulty breathing, and called 911. When paramedics with the Fire Department arrived, they found her unresponsive and not breathing, according to family attorney Geoffrey Fieger.

After paramedics pronounced her dead, however, Timesha’s godmother, who works as a registered nurse, told the medics that she detected a faint pulse. Fieger said, “They told her the movements were involuntary. It did not change their opinion as to the fact that they felt she was dead … [but] when the body bag was opened and they were getting ready to embalm the body, Timesha's eyes were open and she was breathing.”

Fire Chief Johnny L. Menifee released a statement corroborating many of these details. "They checked multiple pulse points on the patient." He expressed disappointment that his medics missed the signs. Menifee said of the first responders, "They feel terrible that this happened. They can't imagine how this possibly happened. They're emotionally upset that this happened … and rightfully so.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Even in situations that appear hopeless, there is always a possibility for a miracle. Don't stop believing just because experts tell you it's impossible.

Dallas Willard writes:

As a child I lived in an area of southern Missouri where electricity was available only in the form of lightning. We had more of that than we could use. But in my senior year of high school the Rural Electrification Administration extended its lines into the area where we lived, and electrical power became available to households and farms.

When those lines came by our farm, a very different way of living presented itself. Our relationships to fundamental aspects of life—daylight and dark, clean and dirty, work and leisure, preparing food and preserving it—could then be vastly changed for the better. But we still had to believe in the electricity and its arrangements, understand them, and take the practical steps involved in relying on it.

You may think the comparison rather crude, and in some respects it is. But it will help us to understand Jesus’ basic message about the kingdom of the heavens if we pause to reflect on those farmers who, in effect, heard the message: “Repent, for electricity is at hand.” Repent, or turn from their kerosene lamps and lanterns, their iceboxes and cellars, their scrubboards and rug beaters, their woman-powered sewing machines and their radios with dry-cell batteries.

The power that could make their lives far better was right there near them where, by making relatively simple arrangements, they could utilize it. Strangely, a few did not accept it. They did not “enter the kingdom of electricity.” Some just didn’t want to change. Others could not afford it, or so they thought.

When Portland police contacted a woman named Amanda to tell her that they found her previously stolen ID, Amanda wasn’t entirely convinced. According to police sources, an officer first tried to contact her via phone, then sent a text when the call was unsuccessful. Her response? “There is no way a cop has my cell phone number. Nice try you creep.”

But Officer Fullington, while impressed with her incredulity, was undeterred. He sent a selfie standing in full uniform in front of his official police vehicle, holding the ID card in question. She responded with a laughing/crying emoji, saying she would call after she gets off work. Police say people in Amanda’s situation are right to be skeptical, because scammers have been known to impersonate officers, even sometimes with actual officer names inside a spoofed caller-ID system.

Potential Preaching Angles: Skepticism is only helpful if it leads us to follow through and find the truth. God can handle our doubts; our challenge is to open up to receive the truth where we find it.

In 2009, Marilyn Sewell, the retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Oregon, interviewed Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the time. Unitarians do not believe in the Trinity or hell or a literal resurrection. Hitchens was an atheist and didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Hitchens died of cancer in December 2011 but at the time of the interview he was riding a wave of popularity from his best-selling book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

This interview is especially interesting because it’s between a very popular atheist and a liberal minister. At one point in the interview the liberal minister asked Hitchens if her Christianity was any different in his opinion:

Marilyn Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Christopher Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Preaching Angles: Although an atheist, Christopher Hitchens recognized that the resurrection, atonement, and other theological beliefs are necessary to conservative Christianity. Hitchens and Sewell also demonstrate a postmodern disbelief or denial of the resurrection.

A long-simmering debate continues over how American society should commemorate the Christmas holiday. A Pew Research Center survey finds that most U.S. adults believe the religious aspects of Christmas are emphasized less now than in the past—even as relatively few Americans are bothered by this trend. In addition, a declining majority says religious displays such as nativity scenes should be allowed on government property. And compared with five years ago, a growing share of Americans say it does not matter to them how they are greeted in stores and businesses during the holiday season—whether with “merry Christmas” or a less-religious greeting like “happy holidays.”

The most seismic change captured by the survey, from a theological standpoint, may be the declining number of people who said they believed the biblical story of Christmas accurately reflected historical events.

The survey asked respondents about their belief in four parts of the biblical Christmas story: that an angel heralded the birth of Jesus; that it was a virgin birth; that wise men were guided to baby Jesus by a star; and that he was placed in a manger.

Only 57 percent of Americans believe in all four, down from 65 percent in 2014. There were two factors that contributed to the trend, researchers said. One was that atheists and the religiously unaffiliated appeared even less likely now than in the past to believe the story of Jesus’ birth. The second was “a small but significant decline” of roughly 5 percent “in the share of Christians who believe in the Christmas narrative contained in the Bible.”

A man returned to his native country to find that the authorities no longer believed in his existence upon this mortal plane. Constantin Reliu returned to Romania after a 20-year-stay in Turkey to find that the Romanian government, at his wife's urging, had previously declared him deceased.

Unable to corroborate any details with his wife, the Associated Press conducted a phone interview with Reliu from his residence in Barlad. "I am a living ghost. I am officially dead, although I'm alive. I have no income, and because I am dead, I cannot do anything."

Reliu explained that in the early nineties, he left to work in Turkey. Upon returning and discovering his wife's infidelity, he decided to leave again for good—or so he thought. In December of 2017, Reliu was detained by Turkish officials for having outdated residency documents, and was deported back to Romania in January where he discovered that authorities believed him already to be dead.

Border agents subjected Reliu to six hours of testing and questioning, asking him topographical questions about his hometown and measuring the contours of his face compared to old passport photos. They finally released him after their investigation was satisfied.

Officials in Barlad, however, were not as accommodating. Citing his delay as a clerical error, they denied his request to overturn the death certificate on the basis of it being too late.

Potential Preaching Angles: 1) Even when presented with evidence, people have a hard time believing the truth. Innocent people suffer when others fail to take responsibility for their mistakes. 2) This story also illustrates a wonderful truth for Christians-we are also legally dead but alive. Since we died in Christ, sin and death have no power over us.

In his book “Unbelievable” Justin Brierley asks:

Were the disciples just hallucinating that they saw the resurrected Jesus? Hallucinations do sometimes occur when people lose loved ones. The people most likely to experience a grief hallucination are senior adults grieving the loss of a spouse. Approximately 50 percent do, often believing they hear or sense the person with them. However, only 7 percent of all senior adults grieving the loss of a loved one experience a visual hallucination of that person. It's also worth noting that people don't experience the same hallucinations—most psychologists agree that mass hallucinations don't occur.

In contrast, 100 per cent of the disciples experienced what they believed were visual appearances of Jesus. That's a far greater percentage than can be supported by hallucination research completed during the past century. Those who propose a "hallucination theory" also generally assume the disciples must have had a powerful psychological incentive to see Jesus come back to life. However, the disciples had no pre-existing expectation of a rising Messiah-figure. Jesus' resurrection was unexpected and out of keeping with their Jewish theological expectations. The Gospels repeatedly mention the skepticism of the disciples.

Former Maryland poet laureate Lucille Clifton wrote a poem in which she pictures herself trying to keep her eyes closed, ignoring the truth. But then she finishes the poem with a voice telling her, "You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking."

Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch film director, screenwriter, and film producer (Robocop, Total Recall, Show Girls), was once asked about his short but intense encounter with Christianity. He replied:

My then-future wife Martine got pregnant in 1966, and we didn't want a child at the time. I was just starting my film career, and the prospect of an unplanned child might force me to abandon film at least temporarily. To a large degree, it was disturbing: during that period, I had a sense that I was losing my mind … My response was to become a member of a Pentecostal church, for a month. It was an existential need. This wasn't common in Holland in the '60s.

When asked what made him leave the church, Verhoeven said that a medical doctor provided a purely rational explanation for his experience. "[My encounter] with Christianity had an enormous impact on me," he said. But he also admitted that he made a conscious decision to renounce that experience. He said he had "to close the doors of perception" to the "subconscious elements" in his brain.

In other words, he couldn't deny the power of his encounter with supernatural reality—possibly with Christ or the Holy Spirit—but he chose to reject it. Christian author Rod Dreher had this to say about Verhoeven's explanation:

One cannot know … what was going through [his] head in those days, but it's not hard to imagine that a man who wishes to arrange his girlfriend's abortion to help save his film career would [want] to dismiss the possibility that he had [met] the living God, and instead had suffered from temporary insanity. [But] the key thing here is the role of Verhoeven's will in deciding what is real and what is not. He is up front about his choice to suppress that experience … What he is not up front about, maybe not even with himself, is his choice to deny the possibility that what he encountered in that [church] was objectively real. This too was a choice.

On an episode of Saturday Night Live, the comedian Louis C.K. shared his beliefs about the impossibility of atheism:

I'm not religious. I don't know if there is a god. That's all I can say honestly. I don't know. Some people can say that they know there isn't a god. That's a weird thing you can say you know. "There's no god." "Are you sure?" "Yea, there's no god." "How do you know?" "Because I didn't see him."

"But how do you know? There's a vast universe. You can see for about 100 yards when there's not a building in the way. How can you possibly know? Did you look everywhere? Did you look in the downstairs bathroom?" "No, I haven't seen him yet." "Well, I haven't seen [the film] 12 Years as a Slave yet, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist."

In his book River out of Eden, renowned scientist and leading atheist Richard Dawkins recalls a bus crash in England that claimed the lives of several children. A London newspaper asked a priest to explain why God would allow such a thing to happen. The priest replied, "The simple answer is that we do not know why there should be a God who lets these awful things happen. But the horror of the crash, to a Christian, confirms the fact that we live in a world of real values: positive and negative. If the universe was just electrons, there would be no problem of evil or suffering." When Dawkins read those words, he scoffed. He writes:

On the contrary, if the universe were just electrons and selfish genes…blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

In his book Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, William Lane Craig observes how difficult it is for an atheist to live with the logical conclusions of his or her beliefs:

Unable to live in an impersonal universe in which everything is the product of blind chance, atheists sometimes begin to ascribe personality and motives to the physical processes themselves… For example, the brilliant Russian physicists Zeldovich and Novikov, in contemplating the properties of the universe, ask, why did "Nature" choose to create this sort of universe instead of another? "Nature" has obviously become a sort of God-substitute, filling the role and function of God. Francis Crick, halfway through his book The Origin of the Genetic Code, begins to spell nature with a capital N and elsewhere speaks of natural selection as being "clever" and as "thinking" what it will do. Sir Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. For Carl Sagan the "Cosmos," which he always spelled with a capital letter, obviously fills the role of a God-substitute. Though these men profess not to believe in God, they smuggle in a God-substitute through the back door because they cannot bear to live in a universe in which everything is the chance result of impersonal forces.

Albert Einstein wrote things that suggested he had some sort of belief in God, but he also wrote of his own unbelief. James Randerson says:

Einstein penned [a] letter on January 3, 1954, to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since.

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

Einstein, who was Jewish and who declined an offer to be the state of Israel's second president, also rejected the idea that the Jews are God's favoured people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

In a Best Life magazine article entitled "My Argument With God," Ricky Gervais, creator of the TV show The Office, wrote about his personal journey "from Jesus-loving Christian to fun-loving infidel in one afternoon."

When Ricky was about 8-years-old, he was drawing the Crucifixion as part of his Bible-studies homework. His 19-year-old brother and personal hero, Bob, came over to him and asked why Ricky still believed in God. As soon as the question was asked, Ricky's mom panicked. She said Bob's name in such a tone as to hush him.

Ricky writes:

Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong, it didn't matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

He goes on to conclude:

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my newfound atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. Not a world by design, but one by chance.

Author Stephen Dunn reported the reaction of two agnostic parents struggling with whether to send their little girl to the local vacation Bible school. They said:

Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief to a child, only wonderful stories, and we didn't have a story nearly as good. Evolution is devoid of heroes. You can't say to your child, "Evolution loves you." The story stinks of extinction, and nothing exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have a wonderful story for my child.

In his book Ghost Soldiers, Hampton Sides tells the story of a dramatic mission during World War II. On January 28th, 1945, 121 hand-selected Army Rangers slipped behind enemy lines in the Philippines in an attempt to rescue 513 American and British POW's who had spent three years in a hellish prison camp near the city of Cabanatuan.

Sides describes the first effects of liberation as chaos and fear. The prisoners were too mentally brittle to understand what was taking place. Some even scurried away from their liberators.

One particular prisoner, Bert Bank, refused to budge, even when a Ranger walked right up to him and tugged his arm.

"C'mon, we're here to save you," he said. "Run for the gate."

Bank still would not move. The Ranger looked into his eyes and saw they were vacant, registering nothing.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked. "Don't you want to be free?"

A smile formed on Bank's lips as the meaning of the words became clear, and he reached up to the outstretched hand of the Ranger.

The Rangers searched all the barracks for additional prisoners, then shouted, "The Americans are leaving. Is there anybody here?" Hearing no answer, they left.

But there was one more POW—, Edwin Rose. Edwin had been on latrine duty and somehow missed all the shooting and explosions. When he wandered back to his barracks, he failed to notice the room was empty and lay down on his straw mat and fell asleep. Edwin had missed the liberation. But there was a reason why. Edwin was deaf.

Four Americans died in the rescue; two Rangers in the firefight and two prisoners who perished for reasons of poor health. The freed prisoners marched 25 miles and boarded their ship home. With each step, their stunned disbelief gave way to soaring optimism. Even Edwin Rose made it. He finally woke up and realized liberation had come.