In 2016 a Pew Research Center survey received the following reasons Christians abandoned their faith:
Learning about evolution when I went away to college.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
Rational thought makes religion go out the window.
Lack of any sort of scientific or specific evidence of a Creator.
I just realized somewhere along the line that I didn’t really believe it.
I’m doing a lot more learning, studying and kind of making decisions myself rather than listening to someone else.
We will consider these reasons in the next few posts. But first you must realize that one very good reason folks lose their faith is that they never had it to begin with.
It has been said a number of times here that just going to church does not make you a Christian. One must embrace Jesus Christ as their Savior before they can be saved from condemnation.
“He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” John 3:18.
“And this is the testimony: that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God.” 1 John 5:11-13.
“…that you may know that you have eternal life, and that you may continue to believe in the name of the Son of God [Jesus Christ].” Christians, no matter how lazy or slovenly their life has become will always maintain their belief in Jesus Christ.
Granted, there are Christians who have a great tragedy in their life and they walk away from God instead of clinging to Him and to the Scriptures that teach of Him. These poor folks will lose their reward in heaven, but not their place.
“You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe – and tremble!” James 2:19.
Demons are fallen angels, they have seen God with their own eyes, there is no question that they believe in God, but they are lost!
True faith in Jesus Christ, God the Son, is knowing His sacrifice on the cross takes away all our sin bringing us into a personal relationship, in which all Christians are God’s adopted children.
Having said these things let us go on to discuss the first reason for leaving the church, “Learning about evolution when I went away to college.”
What difference did college make? Every grade from kindergarten to high school teaches evolution in some way. Evolution is continually given as fact on nature shows, movies, music videos and in every other opportunity they can take in the media.
In school the teacher may mock you or shut you down for bringing up contrary facts to the theory of evolution. This is not teaching it is indoctrination which is opposed to the purpose of schooling.
College is different in that it is a professor who is teaching the class, and professors are highly trained people who are paid to teach facts.
Problem, professors are a product of lifelong indoctrination in evolution just as much as the students whom they are teaching.
Problem, evolution is taught alone with no opposing views, such as Intelligent Design, nor will the educators allow any conflicting thoughts that will put doubt into the minds of their students.
Ridicule and a closed mind are the only answers a student’s honest questions will receive.
The risks involved in teaching evolution and Intelligent Design together is that when students have both models to examine many will embrace the fact that an intelligent being had to create everything and that evolution is impossible.
The world would not be the mess it is in if evolution had not been taught as a monolithic truth. Children are taught that they have no purpose in life because they are the product of, “time, plus chance, plus the impersonal.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher sums this up best in one sentence.
“A finite point without an infinite reference point is meaningless and absurd.”
Man is finite, without the infinite God life is a joke. What child cannot realize that once they come to believe that they evolved from pond scum?
“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” Jean-Paul Sartre.
The evolutionist must cling to the illusion that they are eternal beings, even though that is impossible if we evolved. This is whistling in the dark!
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good.” Psalm 14:1.
Is pond scum eternal? Are animals eternal? Animals have no concept of eternity, humans do.
“All go to one place: all are from the dust, and all return to dust. Who knows the spirit of the sons of men, which goes upward, and the spirit of the animal, which goes down to the earth?” Ecclesiastes 3:20-21.
We are not animals even though we have similar physiological characteristics. Man is eternal and that does not change.
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11.
We are different from animals too. The Apostle Paul noted this nearly two thousand years ago.
“All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of animals, another of fish, and another of birds.” 1 Corinthians 15:39.
Interestingly enough God brought forth the grass, herbs and other plant life on the third day, He went on to create fish and fowl on the fifth day, and animals and creeping things on the sixth day.
God also created Man on the sixth day. However, this was more personal than the other creatures, and He also put everything on earth in subjection to man.
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’” Genesis 1:26.
Years ago surgeons replaced a little girl’s defective heart with a baboon’s heart, tragically she died (we shall see her in heaven one day). Mankind is similar to animals in many ways, but we are not the same flesh.
Similarities only indicate that men and animals were created by the same beautiful mind.
Evolution robs God of His glory and leaves man with no meaning.
Evolution, demands a link between mankind and animals. But the truth is that this theory should never have gotten out of the water.
Consider the following scenario. While I know there are various theories as to how life began, basically they all come down to the example below.
After eons of time the earth cooled and settled down and in some body of water the ingredients for life drifted together and formed what is called a primordial soup.
This name is intentionally misleading. Soup is mostly organic material, such as meat, potatoes, and carrots.
There is nothing organic in primordial soup, just various elements like, Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Sulfur, any of those named on The Periodic Table of the Elements.
Something happened to this primordial soup, a lightning strike perhaps, and a cell was formed.
Your teacher may have drawn a circle on the board saying this was the cell membrane. Then another smaller circle shaded in saying that this is the nucleus suspended in cytoplasm, simple yes?
It should be mentioned that some bacteria do not have a nucleus but they do have a nuclear area and a strand of DNA. This is simpler yes, but still quite complex.
No, it takes more than three parts for a cell to exist, it must assimilate food, process the food into energy and so on. In fact science does not fully understand the processes that go in a cell nucleus even today.
We shall ignore that and go on. Lightning strikes and a cell is born, yet scientists have not been able to replicate this process and create life under optimum laboratory conditions.
We now have life, one cell living in an inorganic world. What did it eat?
In fact, how did it reproduce, it takes energy to reproduce and that means eating and having the ability to digest and process the food.
Yet, even with all the energy it needs there is no reproduction because every self-replicating cell must have DNA in it.
DNA is kind of like a computer program which makes an inert computer function in the manner the programmer wants it to.
All DNA was programmed by the Master programmer and put in cells to work on its own. However, the evolutionist believes that DNA evolved somehow, perhaps with the life giving lightning strike.
That is okay, somehow this cell eats inorganic material and reproduces and reproduces, and reproduces and… suddenly, without any predators, the cell fills the seas and spills out on the land. Until all of the earth’s oxygen is used up and they die off completely.
Even if these cells resort to cannibalism they would still die off entirely, it would just take longer to completely exhaust the earth’s oxygen supply.
How did this gelatinous mass use up all the oxygen on earth? Simple, there were no plants to process the carbon dioxide from the cells and turn it back into oxygen.
Evolutionists believe that because plant processes are more complex, plants evolved later. This makes perfect sense if you agree with evolution.
Always, always remember this – balance of nature. Nature has a balance, plants give off oxygen, and animals turn it into carbon dioxide which the plants use.
This Oxygen cycle should be called a symbiotic relationship, plants and animals dependent on each other for survival.
Animals are also acidic and plants are base, or alkaline. One cancels out the other so the world does not become too alkaline for life, nor does it become too acidic for life. This is a miraculous balance of nature that could not have happened by evolution.
Acidic, or alkaline, how does that happen in a cell?
When evolutionists describe how the immune system evolved or the eye, they describe logical simple slow actions building up to the finished product.
What they leave out is the chemical process (which must evolve) that enables these slow changes to occur. Even cells which give off acidic chemicals into the air or the earth use a chemical process to break down their food into energy.
Things like enzymes which are proteins are used for the various functions of the cell must be manufactured by the cell, and the number of different proteins varies from several hundred to several thousand in a cell.
In evolution these things would have to evolve individually and present themselves to the cell for its use. These are not one of the 103 elements; they are combinations of elements which might make up an enzyme.
Just as a loaf of bread contains certain ingredients to make it bread and a change of ingredients creates a different kind of bread, or a disaster, so different enzymes have different ingredients, some extremely complex.
The cell cannot live without ingredients to work with which would have had to evolve to support the cell. Once again we must have a balance of nature to support life.
The complexity of life when understood even a little bit shows the hand of God all over it. It is criminal to indoctrinate children with evolution, removing all hope and all joy from their lives.
“But you, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ: how they told you that there would be mockers in the last time who would walk according to their own ungodly lusts. These are sensual persons, who cause divisions, not having the Spirit.” Jude 1:17-19.
This study gives you something to think about, but it is far from exhaustive, there are many Christian books which are much more comprehensive and written by men of science, check them out at your local Christian book store.
A couple of last thoughts before closing:
There are some folks who claim to be Christians who believe in what is called theistic evolution.
These people believe that instead of a lightning strike, or whatever, God gave life to the first cell and walked away to let it evolve on its own, or some variation of this theme.
God Himself denies this when speaking of our mother Eve.
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve [life or living], because she was the mother of all living.” Genesis 3:20.
If you read the first four chapters of Genesis you will see that it was a man and a woman in the Garden of Eden, not a pair of monkeys.
Finally, do you remember the piles of dead cells which filled the seas and flowed over the land and died from lack of oxygen?
They would have been there a long time because bacteria which would not have evolved yet are the main source of decay, although the sun’s rays would tend to break things down eventually.
Balance of nature; never forget that as you research.
“Behold, God is exalted by His power; who teaches like Him? Who has assigned Him His way, or who has said, ‘You have done wrong’? Remember to magnify His work, of which men have sung. Everyone has seen it; man looks on it from afar. Behold, God is great, and we do not know Him; nor can the number of His years be discovered. For He draws up drops of water, which distill as rain from the mist, which the clouds drop down and pour abundantly on man. Indeed, can anyone understand the spreading of clouds, the thunder from His canopy?” Job 36:22-29.
Reasons Not to Believe, Part 1 taken from godisrevealed.com posted on 9-25-18, updated on 9-8-20.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version, copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission, all rights reserved.