During the times when I was wrestling on my head whether to commit myself to the biblical God or not, I began to look into what others thought about the Christian God.
Most people around me did not believe in the biblical Creator. Although believing in the existence of an unseen and yet almighty creator was ridiculous to them, most of them did not really have a solid argument against the claim of God’s existence. My father once brought up an issue about death. Although his claim did not directly contradict the existence of God, I thought that was a good example of a typical “argument” against the basic belief of the Christian faith.
My father spoke in Cantonese. The translation of what he said about death could be: “People die like lights go out”, or “A man dies the way a lamp goes out”, or “Life ends the same way as light off”.
Was it true? When a person died, everything was simply gone. Nothing was left.
I had to admit that the claim “sounded” very true. When a person died, he or she would not respond to anything. Closing the eyes, nothing bothered him or her anymore. I thought emotionally we also liked to believe that claim. As the light went out, all was finished, and pain and suffering were gone.
However, did we really have any prove about the claim? Did someone come back to life after death and told us that “Oh, really, nothing is there”? Even though it looked right, and we wanted it to be right, that did not prove that it was right!
It seemed to me that many people thought the idea of the existence of God was very silly, but most of the times they made claims, not prove, of the non-existence of God. They might say, “That’s silly”, “That’s impossible”, or “Only the ignorant people believe”. However, they rarely showed evidence or made arguments to prove the non-existence of God. Could they?
I did think that there was one reasonable argument against the existence of God, that went by the name of “The Problem of Evil”.
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