I think the reason that the ‘There’s probably no God’ advert provoked a response from Christians is that, unlike the ‘Islam is peace’ advert, it made a direct statement of ‘probable fact’ which attacks what they believe. I don’t agree with the response (coming back with a ‘There definitely is a God’ advert), as i don’t think attacking back was the right approach, but I can see why they wanted to respond.

I agree with your statement that life is full of surprises and that we should rejoice in that, but i do believe that there are certainties in life, even if not all of them can be proven or explained. At the risk of sounding provocative, how can we be certain that there are no certainties? Aren’t life and death (and taxes!) certainties?

I am a Christian and personally I don’t feel that the ‘probability’ of there being no God shakes my faith at all. For me the fact that i cannot prove it actually strengthens my faith as it says in the Bible that accepting God requires a step of faith, which means that it cannot be proven beforehand.

However, having made that step i feel i can now talk about the existence of God with certainty because i have experienced him. Obviously I can’t prove to anyone else that I have experienced him, but i can encourage them to seek this experience themselves.

If you’ve already made up your mind then fair enough, but if you are genuinely exploring these matters and looking for the truth then i would recommend a book called ‘The Case for Christ’ by Lee Strobel.

Thanks again for the blog and i hope you found my thoughts helpful or at least interesting – I’m no theologian, professor, lecturer or even blogger, just a 19-year-old guy who has experienced the God who changes lives.

All the best,

Jamie

I’ll tell you just what House would about our wife… you’ll find her, you’ll be certain, but until the day you die in each others’ arms; the possibility exists that she’ll cease to be who you want. The odds are against you after all…

None of this matters however, because faith IS, or ISN’T. You can argue close to faith, but it doesn’t have clean margins, and we all have some of it. The best we can hope to do is accept our human condition and move forward on that basis, as philosophical skeptics, trying to enrich the base of human knowledge in the hope that at some point it will allow us to rise above the constraints the faithful would have accept as fate.