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5. Is man basically good?
But I
think man is basically good, not sinful.
The question is simply whether man sins at all. Do you do everything you know
you ought, and nothing you know you ought not? Have you never done anything
wrong in all your life? Have you never lied, cheated, stolen, coveted what
belonged to someone else, or hated someone?
Okay, I sin.
This is where we go back to the importance of Jesus in how God is dealing with
evil. You see, God is dealing with evil by saving men from it, using it to make
them better (by giving them opportunities to develop virtues that could not
exist without evil), and making them triumph over it through Jesus. By Jesus'
death and resurrection from the dead, God conquered evil, even though He did not
annihilate it. This is how, as the early Christian writer Paul of Tarsus put it,
God was able to "be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus"
(Romans 3:26). God was just, in that He punished evil, thus satisfying the
demands of justice against sin; and He justified those who had faith in Jesus.
How? By putting the punishment on Jesus, who voluntarily took our place, and by
crediting Jesus' goodness to our accounts. RETURN TO QUESTION PAGE
I'm
following you I guess, but all of this is getting pretty confusing just now.
What about those who are agnostics, atheists, or humanists?
You already know atheism is wrong, since we've proved the universe must have a
Creator and Designer. Besides, someone can only be an atheist who says that in
all existence, there is no such thing as God. Only someone omniscient‑like
God‑could know that. So an atheist, if he realized what he was claiming, would
be claiming to be God!
We've already seen that atheism and agnosticism are false. For those who have
gone through the reasoning you and I have gone through together, neither is an
option. You've already acknowledged God's existence, and so you're neither an
agnostic nor an atheist. For you to declare yourself one now would be for you to
ignore everything you just discovered, and that wouldn't be intellectually
honest.
Fine. But what about those who haven't gone through that reasoning? What's
wrong with their being agnostics?
Nothing. It's how they respond to claims about God that's important. You see,
there are two kinds of agnostics: those who simply say they don't know if God
exists, and those who say no one can know. The second kind is really saying he
knows the minds of all other people and knows what is and is not possible for
them to know. I've never yet met anyone who could support such a claim. The
first kind, to act consistently with his claim not to know whether God exists,
should be open to and interested in arguments others can give him for the
existence of God. Surely one who claims not to know something is wise to listen
to those who claim to know it.
That sounds reasonable.
And humanism?
Originally "humanism" referred to the belief that man and the works of
man‑literature, art, science, music, drama, etc.‑were legitimate subjects of
study. That may seem obvious to us today, but there was a period in the history
of the western world, at least, when most people thought the only proper
subjects of study were those connected with God and His works‑religion,
essentially. Originally "humanism" simply reminded us that it was okay to study
things outside religion, and for that we are thankful.
But there is another sense in which people call themselves humanists. They claim
that man is totally self‑sufficient, that he can solve all his problems without
God or God's help. Of course man can solve many problems himself. But
Christianity says he cannot solve the problems of sin and of deserving God's
punishment for sin without God's help.
Christianity welcomes the first kind of humanism, but rejects the second because
it leaves the most important Being In all existence out of the picture and
falsely exalts man, claiming he is better than he really is.
RETURN TO QUESTION PAGE
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