* * * * * * * * * * * *
". . . The Christian religion offers the only hope of developing that unselfish character for which this old world is starving and dying. Therefore, instead of throwing overboard religion we must work for better understanding of . . . [Jesus], must undertake to interpret His teaching more faithfully, and to live it out more effecitvely in our lives. . . . Our freedoms are all in one bundle. If people interested in religious freedom stand by until economic freedom is gone and political freedom is gone they will next find religious freedom disappearing too and it will be too late to do much about it. When Hitler had etablished his grip on the political and economic life of Germany it did little good then to die for religious freedom. Likewise when Stalin established political and economic control of Poland, it did little good for people then to die for religious freedom, although in both countries some did. Today we should all stand in one solid phalanx to fight the battle for all of our freedoms on the front line where there is every hope of winning, rather than waiting to fight for religious freedom alone on the last line where there is every chance of losing it."
Dr. George S. Benson
Harding College Lectures (1951)
pp. 148-49
* * * * * * * * * * * *
"The roots of our convictions concerning the dignity of the individual are religious, whether we recognize it or not. There are non-religious individuals who have been so influenced by religion that they continue to cling to certain of its values long after they have denied the validity of all religion. The man of no faith is the child of centuries of faith. But it is still true that in our society the roots of our conviction of the sacredness of human personality are religious.
. . . [I]t is religion which gives to human personality sacrednes. 'Where nothing is sacred nothing is safe.' . . .
In coming to this country, our forefathers put morality, religion, and freedom first. They did not even put economic security first. And yet, these material things have been added unto us.
We should recognize our need for God, and not for just his matieral gifts."
Dr. James D. Bales
Harding College Lectures (1951)
p.136
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"There are three points of doctrine the belief of which forms the foundation of all morality. The first is the existence of God; the second is the immortality of the human soul; and the third is a future state of rewards and punishments. Suppose it possible for a man to disbelieve either of these three articles of faith and that man will have no conscience, he will have no other law than that of the tiger or the shark. The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy."
John Quincy Adams
Letters of John Quincy Adams to His Son on the Bible and Its Teachings
Auburn: Alden, 1850 pp. 22-23
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GOD IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Senator Robert C. Byrd
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
ABOLISHING GUILT
There are those who maintain that the sense of guilt is terrible and useless, and that at all cost it must be abolished. It is true, of course, that the sense of guilt does demoralize a man if he continues to feel it keenly and over a long period of time. He should not continue in this condition, but should get rid of it through seeking and finding forgiveness. The sense of guilt should lead one to repentance and to a change of life. And one of the wonderful things about the Christian religion is that it offers to man cleansing from sin and thus releasing from the accusing cry of a guilty conscience.
Not all, however, seek release in this way. There are some who seek it in a denial of the fact of sin. In so doing they forget that the capacity for guilt is one of the things which makes man man. To abolish every possibility of the feeling of guilt one must abolish all standards and all feeling of obligation and conscience. For as long as standards exist, and men feel obliged to live up to them, and as long as some fall below these standards, there is the possibility of the feeling of guilt. And since some one will always fall, sooner or later, below any standard, to get rid of the feeling of guilt—-without acknowledging one's sin—means that one must abolish all standards. Then, of course, civilization would be impossible.
Samuel Butler, the atheist, felt in his life continually the struggle between “a sense of sin and a conviction that there was no sin. Sin more than anything oppressed him. He struggled against it, but it remained a shadow on his face. The men he envied were those with no burden of sin upon them; the life he wanted to live was one in which the question of sin did not arise. Finding that he could not shake off sin, he tried emasculating, formularizing it, and fleeing from it as he had flown from Langer. It was no good” (qtd. in Muggeridge 21). One of the reasons that he abandoned the Christian faith was that he “wanted to free himself from a sense of sin, to be able to sin gracefully and heartily . . .” (p. 56).
This is the desire of many people, so they seek to abolish the sense of sin by abolishing standards and moral obligations. In so doing they are kicking against the pricks and making themselves less than human; but still without finding satisfaction, for a human being does not find lasting satisfaction in being less than a human being. Muggeridge later wrote, about
Butler
’s account of a certain friendship with Pauli, that “The impression it creates is of a damned soul, of someone utterly forlorn and bewildered and alone” (91).
Works Cited:
Muggeridge, Malcolm. The Earnest Atheist: A Study of Samuel Butler.
New York
: Putnam’s Sons, 1937.
The Thinking Christian
Ed. James D. Bales
Searcy
,
AR
Vol. 1. 2 (Oct-Dec 1948) p. 30
* * * * * * * * * *
WHO DESIGNED THE DESIGNER?
Percy B. Shelly, the English poet, once wrote a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism, which, however, A. M. D. Hughes said should be called The Uncertainty of Deism (66). Shelley was not an atheist. After he was expelled from Oxford for writing this pamphlet "he wrote to someone . . . complaining bitterly of the excessive penalty for what he had written as 'amusement on a rainy day' [he had published and scattered the pamphlet], and 'carried perhaps a little too far some of the arguments of Locke.' He had been classed with 'wretches, the bane of society' whose openly professed atheism was the last effusion of depravity' and a menace to all virtue and happiness" (71).
Shelley’s argument was against “a creative deity,” but “the hypothesis of a pervading spirit co-eternal with the universe remains unshaken,” he said (68, cf. 244). This was in 1811 (63). In 1814 he published A Refutation of Deism in which, among other things, he raised such questions as who designed the Designer. This was intended to refute Paley's argument from design. The implication being that the argument from design is fallacious because one can always ask who designed the designer. The same attitude is taken sometimes toward the argument from the First Cause. One can always ask who caused the first cause, and “why put on a cause of causes?”(243). [Note: For a modern example of this question see H. S. Jennings, The Universe and Life.
New York
: Yale UP, 1933, pp. 63-65. He was Henry Walters Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Laboratory of The John Hopkins University.]
There are two fallacies in his line of argument. First, everyone must grant that something has always existed, that it is, in other words, self-existent, uncaused. This self-existence is the cause of the world and life. Our world did not always exist and neither did human life always exist. There must have been something in the beginning which caused the world and life. For if there was nothing to begin with there would be nothing to end with, for out of nothing comes nothing. So even the materialist must grant that something has always existed, that something was self-existent, uncaused. He affirms that it was matter, but on the point that it was something, that something had to always exist, the materialist has no argument with the theist. The only issue is as to the nature of the original cause. A cause to be a cause must be adequate. It is irrational to believe, it is contrary to all the scientific evidence which we have, that matter gave birth to life; that from that which had no consciousness, thought, or morality, came consciousness, thought, and morality. Since natural means and human life did not place life on this globe—scientists grant that the earth has not always been habitable, and that as far as scientific research goes life comes only from life—something supernatural and superhuman must have placed it here. That Power or Cause is certainly more than human but it could not be less than human.
Second, the question as to who designed the Designer is absurd because all must grant that something has always existed and is the cause of all the order in the world (for examples of order see Lawrence T. Henderson’s The Fitness of the Environment). Thus when it is shown how great that source of order must be, it is irrational to ask what is the source of that source, for all must grant that something has always existed and that the present order and life have not always existed.
This may be illustrated from everyday life. You see a house which you greatly admire and you ask who is the architect and who designed the furniture. Jones and Smith, is the answer. Do you then ask: Who “architected” the architect, and who designed the designer of the furniture? (that is, unless one plans to go on and make an argument for the existence of God). The designer of the house is greater than the house, and we would not be satisfied with the answer that the house designed itself, or that some thing designed it, but we are satisfied when we get back to a person. We realize that a person is a cause adequate to explain the house. But we are satisfied with nothing less than a person. Just so, although the mind is satisfied with nothing less than God, it is satisfied with God.
Works Cited:
Hughes, A. M. D. The Nascent Mind of Shelley.
Oxford
: Clarendon, 1947.
The Thinking Christian
Ed. James D. Bales
Searcy
,
AR
Vol. 1. 2 (Oct-Dec 1948) p. 28-29
* * * * * * * * * *
"The greatest battle of our age is the one now being fought by two invisible armies, as they struggle to dominate the minds of men. The one army we may rightly call SUPERNATURALISM; the other, with equal acuracy, we shall designate NATURALISM. . . . For nineteen hundred years the Christian Church has uninterruptedly declared that it was bearing testimony to supernatural truths, and that it rested on a historical foundation of supernatural events. . . . If these are given up, the supernaturalness of the Christian faith is simultaneously abandoned. . . . That naturalism is increasingly the conviction of leaders of thought and action in the western world, as a whole, no one can deny. Our books of science almost invariably make no mention of God. Our histories, when they speak of the age of Christ, never recognize anything miraculous in His life and work. Our philosophers today are, for the most part, decidedly naturalistic. So, we grieve to say, are many of our professors of Divinity."
Wilbur M. Smith
The Supernaturalness of Christ: Can We Still Believe in It?
Boston: Wilde, 1944 (vii-viii)
* * * * * * * * * *
A VEILED ATTACK ON RELIGION
In
England
during the days of Hume freedom of discussion was circumscribed by “certain agreed limitations—that there should be no advocacy of atheism and no direct challenge to the supreme claims of the Christian Faith” (Smith 50). “Hume’s methods of meeting these conformist requirements vary with each of his chief works; but in the main they are those of Pierre Bayle—namely, to maintain that there is no surer method of rendering religion doubtful than to subject it to the tests of reason and evidence, and at the same time to speak of it as resting solely on revelation” (53).
Some theologians have even been convinced that all tests of reason and evidence are inapplicable to the Christian faith, and that it must be accepted on faith alone. This type of justification for faith may enable a person, who is brought up in a religious faith, to retain his faith even when he thinks that it cannot in any way be justified in the light of reason and evidence. It will not, however, make a believer out of any unbeliever. Furthermore, a casual reading of the New Testament is enough to show that Christ and the apostles were convinced that reason and evidence are related to faith in Christ. And he who says, or implies, that they were wrong about it and still professes to be a believer in Christ, has—to say the least—been grossly inconsistent or utterly unaware of the New Testament presentation of the basis of Christian faith.
Works Cited:
Smith, Norman Kemp, ed. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
Oxford : Clarendon,
1935.
The Thinking Christian
Ed. James D. Bales
Searcy
,
AR
Vol. 1. 2 (Oct-Dec 1948) p. 31
* * * * * * * * * *
"Our chief aim is to send every boy and girl home at night with a tender conscience, a great respect for right and duty. To teach a boy how to live a hundred years and train him to be an intellectual giant without this conscience culture is to curse the world and him."
J.N. Armstrong
Founding President
Harding University
Searcy AR
* * * * * * * * * *
". . .I was reminded of the differences between the challenges which my class of '32 had to meet and the problems that confront today's college students.
While we spent our college years in the midst of a severe depression . . . as students, you prepare to step forward into a world enduring another economic crisis, which I hope and pray my Administration can resolve. But I believe that our Nation is in the grip of another crisis that is ultimately far more serious -- an era of moral decline.
Through every public medium available, our young people are bombarded daily with assaults on the fundamental values which shaped and sustained this Nation. It is difficult to turn on a radio or television, read a newspaper, magazine or popular book, or see a movie in a neighborhood theater and not find an attack on the ethics and moral values we have been taught to cherish. . . .
Great courage is needed to live a Christian life in today's society. We know that only God can give us the courage and the guidance we so badly need. . . .
. . .We must always remember that we are created in God's image, that we will never be abandoned if we seek our solace and optimism in trust and in prayer. . . ."
Ronald Reagan
The Intellectuals Speak Out about God (xvii-xviii)
Ed. Roy Abraham Varghese
Chicago: Regnery, 1984
