Calling on Poggin

Most people who arrive at the decision to reject God’s existence are reacting against Religion not God. They have discovered the not so hidden fact that all religion is ultimately man-made and empty, and have assumed that since man’s attempts to get to God are flawed, the whole idea of God must be flawed as well.

This is brilliantly illustrated in C. S. Lewis’ book, “The Last Battle.” The basic opening plot of the book is that an ape dresses an ass up like a lion (setting up a false version of the real God of Narnia, Aslan) and is using this fake Aslan to control the whole country. When the fraud is exposed and a group of dwarves are set free with the truth, they immediately extrapolate that if one version of Aslan is false, all versions must be and they reject him altogether.

Of course, in the book, Aslan is real and the Dwarves end up being just as mistaken in their beliefs as any false religion could be.

Religion ends up being a huge part of the argument for God’s existence. Religion’s flaw is that it tries to approach God on man’s terms with man’s rules. So many imitations and attempts at describing the idea of God point to the existence of a real God in the first place. A counterfeit bill does not refute the existence of real money. There has to be real money for the counterfeit to imitate. If you rejected the reality of diamonds because you had seen a cubic zirconia, you would be wrong. While diamonds are rare, they are the basis on which the imitation is modeled.

The real problem for thoughtful people is not, “Is there a God?” but, “if there is one, how does He relate to me?”