Backstory I - No Evidence for God, therefore No God

To each of my posts, there is usually a backstory.  I decided to start a series on this blog to give you some background information on what inspired me to write a particular post on my www.sacerdotus.com blog.

My post there, "No Evidence for God, therefore No God" has been extremely popular since its debut on November 13, 2012 (Year of Faith).  The post basically deals with the idea that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (Sagan) and expounds on how faith and reason are related, as C.K. Chesterton wrote:

"Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

The backstory of this post comes from a visit to a parish where the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in a Monstrance.  While I was there praying before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, I noticed a young girl enter who was blind.  The girl entered the large church building walking steadily with only the sound of taps from her 'white cane' as she made her way down the aisle.  This course of events fascinated me because this young girl despite being blind, knew where the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament was.  She genuflected right in line with the monstrance as if she had the vision that would allow her brain to calculate the distance and angles necessary to be in perfect alignment before the monstrance.  No one guided her.  She had only her stick and made here way perfectly to pray.

Sometimes I have problems finding the Tabernacle at churches and I have good vision, so I can't imagine how it must be to only perceive total darkness.  What's remarkable is that despite this, she was able to find Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  Immediately, Helen Keller came to mind along with the words for the blog which is now, " "No Evidence for God, therefore No God."

If this young blind girl was able to find Jesus without her eyes, an atheist can find God even without using his/her senses.  Thank you God and thank you young blind girl for the inspiration!   

 

Atheist Confession II

As an atheist, prayer was always suspect to me.  How can one solve life's problems merely by talking to oneself?  Is this wishful thinking?  These are some of the questions I asked whenever I saw fellow classmates pray before exams, or witnessed Muslims spread out a rug and pray in the middle of a public area.

Atheists claim that prayer does not work.  To them, it is merely superstition.  This is interesting because prayer is the means by which believers "talk" to God and "listen" to God.  I say this is interesting because atheists always demand incontrovertible proof of God's existence.  Logic dictates that if prayer is the means by which believers experience God, then atheists would try it if they were seriously interested in proof.  However, this does not happen.

Prayer is really the only tangible way one can have "proof" of God.  I can prove God via many channels such as theology, philosophy, psychology, physics, biology and so on; however, these proofs will not present a living God as I present myself as a living human being to whoever I am having a discussion with.  We have to "test" for God.

What about the "don't test God" thing? (Luke 4:12)  Well, this is not really a test in the sense of challenging God as Satan was doing with Christ in the desert.  Prayer is the normative manner in which believers communicate with God, therefore, it is logical for an atheist to use this to "test" for God's existence, so to speak.

As an atheist, prayer gave that extra push to what I already discovered via the sciences and reason.  Any atheist who truly wants evidence of God must pray and talk to God.  There is no other way around this.  I had the courage to take that step, so if you are an atheist and are reading this, you can as well.