Challenges to Faith

Journal 5

The three main challenges to faith are atheism, scientism, and dehumanization. Only roughly 2% of Americans are positives atheists or people who make a deliberate decision not to believe in God. But, many more are practical atheists, people who generally believe in God only when it is convenient. The two most famous atheists were Friedrich Nietz-sche and Thomas Hobbes. Nietz-sche’s main beliefs were: life is what you make it, the strong minded will be followed by the masses, humans will eventually evolve into a super race if we have the courage to reject God, and nihilism. Hobbes’s main beliefs were: people don’t have a meaning because everything is already decided, humans aren’t capable of genuine selflessness and therefore humanity wont amount to much, the universe can be understood by the rational mind. Both Nietz-sche and Hobbes also believed that morality is relative. Ignatius combats their arguments that God does not exist with his own well thought out theories. Scientism is the belief that science is the only legitimate source of truth. This therefore combats faith because in some cases faith is the truth we are looking for. In some cases science doesn’t have an answer or at least a good one and that can be where faith comes in. (though faith is much more that just answering the questions that science cannot answer) Faith is also challenged by dehumanization. Sometimes our good morals and values are combated in society especially in advertising and the media. With this dehumanization all around us and in some cases exposed to us at an early age, we have to fight against these ideas and have a stronger faith from the beginning.

The three stages of the history relationship between science and faith: The first stage is unreflective unity. Science and philosophy and theology used to be all part of the same thing. People used to be more concerned with investigating nature using reason rather than distinguishing between faith and science. The second stage is reflective disunity. This was the time of the Renaissance and the Dark Ages and especially the Enlightenment. It was a time where rapid advances in science and mathematics developed a type of rationalism where theology couldn’t be the answer to a problem. The third stage is reflective unity. This is the time that started after the Enlightenment and continues today. Existentialism caused a movement of faith and science back toward each other as science started to realize that they couldn’t answer the deepest questions of human existence, the why?

Secular Humanism: This is a philosophy that says that society can perfect itself on its own, without God. Those who have believed in this ended up rejecting original sin and everything else that implied that humans have inescapable weaknesses. They ended up rejecting heaven and miracles and a personal God.

Existentialism: This is a philosophy that says that the subjective questions (those which concern a person directly) are the most important. Objective questions really aren’t all that important or life changing. However, subjective questions like immortality and the meaning of life can turn someone’s world upside down.



http://www.chestercc.gov.uk/main.asp?page=1619

What value to a place on my family? On my friends? On the gifts that God has given me?

I have learned the difference between a positive atheist and a practical atheist. I can strive to not place myself in the category of practical atheists. I need to see God in all things and not just act like a Christian when it is convenient or when there is something in it for me.

Compiled by Dave Emnett

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