Let me ask you an odd
question, “What does an atheist do on Thanksgiving?” I know it sounds like the
beginning to a bad joke, but I’m being serious. The atheist believes that we
are alive on planet earth because of a cosmic accident. They assert that we owe
everything to time + matter + chance and that through the process of evolution
we went from goo to you via the zoo.
The reason I bring this up
is because of a perplexing quote that I came across in Bart Eharman’s book God’s Problem. In
it Ehrman explains that one reason why he no longer believes in God is because
he could not reconcile the concept of an all-loving and omnipotent God with a
world of evil and suffering. However, ousting God from his heart created a
gaping hole in his life.
Ehrman admits that his atheism presents a
dilemma of who to thank: “The problem is this: I have such a fantastic life
that I feel such an overwhelming sense of gratitude for it. I am fortunate
beyond words. But I don’t have anyone to express my gratitude to. This is a
void inside me, a void of wanting someone to thank, and I don’t see any
plausible way of filling it.”[1]
Can it get any more depressing than that? All
those degrees, book deals and academic prestige, yet empty inside as a soap
bubble. In short, you might say that the unbeliever has much to be thankful for, but no one, or no God to be
thankful to. It was G.K. Chesterton
who cleverly remarked, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a
profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.” Interesting—the skeptic
recognizes that life is an incredible gift, yet His worldview denies a Giver.
He feels the need to express gratitude but why?
The Apostle Paul makes an insightful comment
in Romans 1:21 that at the heart of unbelief and rebellion is a spirit of
ingratitude: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became
futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” The humanist
thumps his chest thinking that he is the measure of all things.
Yet, even the ingrate should follow the advice
of a church sign I saw once around the Thanksgiving season which read, “Be
thankful you don’t get what you deserve.”
While no man or woman of faith would
intellectually deny God, we do practically. Practical atheists don’t
necessarily deny God’s existence; they just live as though there is no God.
R.C. Sproul gives this definition, “Practical
atheism appears when we live as if there were no God. The externals continue,
but man becomes the central thrust of devotion as the attention of religious
concern shifts away from man’s devotion to God to man’s devotion to man,
bypassing God.”[2]
When Abraham Lincoln first proposed
Thanksgiving as a national holiday way-back in 1863, he too noticed that often people
are guilty of practicing practical atheism:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest
bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and
prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has
ever grown. But we have forgotten God.
We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and
multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in
the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some
superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too
self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too
proud to pray to the God that made us.”[3] [emphasis
mine]
Are you guilty of grumbling? I am. Have you
forgotten God’s common grace which showers you daily? I have. Do you find
yourself uncontended and wanting more? Me too.
I am reminded of a story about a vendor who
sold bagels for 50 cents each at a street corner food stand. A jogger ran past
and threw a couple of quarters into the bucket but didn’t take a bagel. He did
the same thing every day for months. One day, as the jogger was passing by, the
vendor stopped him. The jogger asked, “You probably want to know why I always
put money in but never take a bagel, don’t you?” “No,” said the vendor. “I just
wanted to tell you that the bagels have gone up to 60 cents.”
Too often, as believers, we treat God with
that same kind of attitude. Not only are we ungrateful for what He’s given
us—but we want more. Somehow we feel that God owes us good health, a
comfortable life, material blessings. Of course, God doesn’t owe us anything,
yet He gives us everything including His Son, “He who did not spare his own Son
but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us
all things?” (Rom. 8:32).
Thanksgiving is a sure-fire antidote to
practical atheism, because it properly turns the focus off us and puts it on God.
Thanksgiving minimizes those thoughts about what we don’t have, by maximizing
our thoughts on what we do have. Like the old song says, “Count your many
blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has
done.”[4] -DM
[1] Bart
Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible
Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question (New York: Harper One, 2008), 128.
[2] R.C.
Sproul, “What Is Practical Atheism?” Ligonier
Ministries. 12 Jan. 2015 <http://www.ligonier.org/blog/
practical-atheism-vs-biblical-christianity/>
[3] Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation 97 –
Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” 30 March 1863, The
American Presidency Project <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=69891>
[4]
Johnson Oatman, Jr. “Count Your Blessings,” 1897.
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