LOSING MY RELIGION

In a weekend edition of Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper there is a section dealing with Entertainment, Travel, and Culture, ETC for short. I like to look at the brief book reviews therein.

I noticed that one Paul Williams has written a brief review of LOSING MY RELIGION – Unbelief in Australia by Tom Frame, (in the Sept. 26-27 edition of the Courier Mail’s ETC).

Your guess is as good as mine as to why he does so, but Williams alludes to Chris Hitchens’s God is not Great and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. After this brief digression Williams has the following to say regarding Frame’s book:

“Frame begins with the deeply flawed contention that if he were provided with undeniable proof that God did not exist, he would give up his faith. But that reverses a basic scientific premise of the onus of proof. Empiricists tell us that it is not up to atheists to disprove God’s existence, but rather the religious to supply the proof of existence as it is they who invoke faith.” Thus Williams.

To cut right to the chase: Whereas Frame believes that [the Triune] God is, the atheist believes that [the Triune] God is not. Bottom line: Both Frame and the atheist believe that the evidence supports their contrary positions. Both use the same evidence to prove their contrary positions.

Thus Frame wishes to prove a positive, i.e., that God is. And the atheist wants to prove a negative, ie, that God is not. Where then is the empirical evidence that God is not? How does the atheist make the Triune God vanish? He can huff and puff all he wants, he can hold his breath all he wants, but the same evidence he thinks disproves God’s existence is what actually proves it!

Bottom line: It’s not about evidence. It’s about presuppositions, i.e., worldviews. Whereas Frame presupposes that God is, the atheist presupposes that God is not. Frame can point to creation (space, time, matter) and everything in it, stars, moon, birds, trees, insects, fish, birds, animals, DNA etc, etc, as evidence of his presupposition that God is. He can bring in the human conscience, morals, ethics, laws etc. etc. as evidence that God is. He can bring in the sixty-six books of the Bible.

All the atheist can do is attack all this evidence and claim on Materialistic grounds that this evidence is not permissible. Not permissible to whom? To Materialists such as contemporary atheists! Bottom line: Frame is not a Materialist!

So, Frame is correct where he contends: “that if he were provided with undeniable proof that God did not exist, he would give up his faith.”

Materialism by definition is anti-God who is Spirit. But as Williams says, “The basic scientific premise is the onus of proof.” So, go ahead, prove empirically that God does not exist where all the evidence according to Frame’s worldview says that He does! Therefore the Materialist will have to extend his borders beyond the philosophy of Materialism (i.e., the philosophy in which the presuppostion is that Matter is all that is) to convince Frame!