Dialogue With an Atheist Pt 4

The answer to prayer that I shared with my unbelieving friend was not really the issue. It was an incident in my life that I shared with him. He spurned it, as if I offered that story as slam dunk evidence for God’s existence. There is a difference between scientific certainty (the kind that enables me to safely assume that 2+2=4) and the things I believe. The word, ‘believe’ in itself, denies that kind of certainty. We don’t say “I believe 1 and 1 equals 2.”

I believe that was an answer to prayer. I do not hold it up as slam-dunk proof.

 A Dialogue With an Atheist (Pt 3)

Part 3

First, I must share the story of the lost keys so that you understand how humanly improbable this was. (Our folks at CGC might remember this. I shared it with them the next Sunday). As a Pastor of a downtown church in Toronto, I was given a set of keys along with a solemn warning. Those keys were expensive, and should I lose them, we might have to change locks on several doors, and then outfit all keyholders with a new set of keys, electronic fobs and all. One Friday night, after an evening of fellowship I realized once I arrived at home that I no longer had my church keys. I searched everywhere for them. I was hesitant to pray about this because it seemed too trivial an issue and besides, I don’t deserve an answer to prayer because my prayer life is so inadequate (Is it ever adequate?)

Nevertheless I pray. Sunday morning I arrive at church. Thankfully the music team has arrived first and the doors are open already. Our worship service begins at 9:30. At 10:40 or so, everyone spills out onto the sidewalk for a break. The sidewalk is full of people; tourists going by (we are in the heart of Chinatown) and worshippers mingling. I need to go from one building to another, so I manage to push through the crowd. In the thick of all that, I see a homeless looking old man shuffling through the mass, and as he passes me, I hear him mutter under his breath to no one in particular, “found some keys.” I didn’t pick up what he said until after I entered the building next door, and I pulled up short. Did he just say “found some keys?”

I rushed back outside, and he was still shuffling his way eastward on Dundas, past the thick of the crowd now. I ran to catch up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me. Did you say you found some keys?”

“Yes. Friday night.” Hope sprouted wings. “Where did you find them?”

“Over there”, he said pointing at the bus shelter in front of our church.

“Do you still have them? Can I see them?”

“Sure. But they are at my place.”

So he wasn’t homeless. “Where do you live?” I ask. “Just down this street”

“Would you please get them and bring them to me?” I couldn’t offer to go with him. Our next service was about to start. I was really hoping he would remember to come back.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, he came back and there were my keys.

A man not related to anyone in our church, shuffled by our church, walked through our sidewalk crowd, and would not know who to talk to among the 75-100 people on the sidewalk that day, not having the express purpose of returning the keys and not knowing that they were church keys. I, the loser of the keys just ‘happened’ to be on the sidewalk the exact moment he was walking by, and heard him muttering under his breath.

My friend of course wrote this off as a coincidence. The only smart aleck rejoinder I had in response was “Funny thing, the more I pray, the more coincidences I see.” To which of course, he rolls his eyes and cites a controlled study of an experiment that was done of a prayer team who prayed for a number of patients on a certain ward and did not pray for a different ward. Apparently it made no difference. Rates of improvement were the same. A nice but kinda silly ‘what aboutism’.

Part 4 coming soon…

A Dialogue with an Atheist

Part 2

Please see my previous post about my atheist friend’s question in order to provide context for this post.

Here is the beginning of my response (I cannot remember how I responded to my erstwhile friend). I don’t believe providing answers to troublesome questions of this sort helps very much. Even if they were answered satisfactorily, my buddy would replace the question with 100 others. Often we would move on to other topics to seek common ground.

He first became known to me in the basement of our church where we fed people under the “Out of the Cold” program in downtown Toronto. It was surprising to find someone in that crowd who had read Hitchens, Dennet and Dawkins as well as the Bible. We agreed to meet regularly for coffee and discussions. So my first point is that relationship (and not as a “method” of evangelism either) is far more valuable than a strong philosophical answer.

I loved that man - what there was of him. I say that because as smart as he was, his humanity seemed to have shriveled to the point where he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) appreciate beauty in the arts or anywhere else. Everything could be understood through a syllogism, algorithm or the sciences. He insisted that love was only transactional (all wives were merely prostitutes who exchange their bodies for benefits and all men use them that way) and our friendship felt very one sided to me. Being truly gracious was an illusion. We are gracious because we get rewarded either through the dopamine hit or promise of reward in the future. He was using me to bolster his assumptions about life and worldview and I was aware of that.

One of the great ironies here - At the same time, he wished out loud to me several times that his drug-addicted son would convert to Christianity, because he would see the good that it would be for him. He admitted that Christianity was valuable in that it did change lives for the better; whether it was true or not didn’t matter to him. The son never gave his Dad permission to introduce me to him.

On my next post, I will begin to address the question itself.

A Dialogue With an Atheist

While living in Toronto, an atheist and I would meet once every two weeks for a coffee and a chat. Sometimes the chats were insignificant; other times they were intense. On one occasion we talked about answered prayer. I told him how I had lost my keys and after praying, found them again in a most implausible way. He then shared a story of how his mother had left her purse on a city bus, had prayed about it and at the end of the day, a transit employee called her to let her know her purse had been turned in to the lost and found. He mocked any possibility of this as an answer to prayer and wrote it off (as well as my example) as total coincidence. Furthermore, he held up the fact that the same day that his mama dared to presume that God cared about her purse with its relatively meaningless contents, hundreds of mothers on the other side of the world who also cried out to God lost their babies to starvation. “What kind of God does that” he asked with a flourish, as if he had hit a home run.

Christian, how would you answer?