For Dawkins, as brilliant a scientist as he is, he believes in a closed universe and so it’s unlikely that he’ll accept any compelling evidence that punctures his system. Even Jesus was aware of how our a priori commitments block us. He famously said, “‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” Why? Because there is more going on in our minds and hearts than just intellectual questions and the pursuit of what happened.

I can imagine Richard Dawkins sitting in the back row at the Areopagus, stern-faced and shaking head, and leading a small chorus of sceptics.
Richard Dawkins is continuing his mission to evangelise people out of Christianity (and religion altogether) and to secure his message of a world without hope. 
Today in a video message, he asks, ‘Do you want to be comforted by a falsehood?’
It’s a good question and an important one. Does anyone want to find consolation in a fabrication? Does anyone want to pour all their hopes into a dead end? For Professor Dawkins death is of course the dead end, with nothing beyond and no light to give hope to either the dead or those who are left behind. 
When your brain decays there is absolutely no reason to suppose your consciousness will continue, so the grounds of plausibility, the balance of plausibility is heavily in favour or there been no survival after death and that is something and that is something we need to live with. It’s not all that horrifying a prospect when you think about it because we think as Mark Twain said, ‘I’ve been dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. 
I suspect that Dawkins’ answer will arouse applause and retweets from fans and devotees, and with a satisfied Amen. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether he’s right or not, his answer isn’t particularly consoling. Dawkins says that he finds solace in the finality of being no more, but I suspect most people including a lot of atheists are not so convinced. Our intellectual commitments (whether theistic or atheistic) come under a sudden assault when death approaches and when a loved one is lowered into the grave. There is a longing for death not to win. There is palpable hope that life may continue and love to beat any final breath. 
Why divorce cognitive processes from heart filled yearnings? Of course, the two can be in conflict and they can also partner together as a harmonious duet, as we find in Christian theism.
Dawkins (and fellow atheists) believes that once our final breath expires and we are buried, the totality of what we were begins to rot and we cease to be. All that is left is the box in the ground holding our biological material and the memories that people have of you. Again, some readers may find that a satisfying end of the story, but most of us don’t. Whether we find it satisfying or not isn’t evidence of what is ultimately true.
The thing about the Christian view of resurrection is not one of lacking commitment to the intellectual process but appreciating that there is more going on. It is not wrong to appeal to deep heart filled longings, for those emotional impulses are part of who we are as human beings. We are more than those heart desires, not less.
I believe, along with Oxford and Cambridge Dons, scientists, poets, plumbers and children, that the Christian explanation of resurrection is both intellectually satisfying and emotionally, psychologically, spiritually liberating and consoling.
Something happened that day just outside Jerusalem that changed the world. Women and men saw something that didn’t compute. The evidence defied their prior assumptions and challenged their emotional state. They saw and heard and touched Jesus raised from the dead. 
Before we line up the Biblical accounts with ancient mythology, we mustn’t assume that resurrection was a commonly held view in the ancient world, for that is not the case. Many ancient religions believed in some kind of life after death, although not all (including many Athenians in the First Century AD).  The Christian notion of resurrection is altogether different 
As Dr Chrisopher Watkin summarises in his new volume, Biblical Critical Theory, 
“The nature of the resurrection is very different to the ancient notion of rising gods known as apotheosis. The bodily nature of resurrection sets the Christian claim apart from other superficially similar narrative patterns in the ancient world. The Romans, for example, were familiar with the idea that a mortal person could undergo an apotheosis to become a god, but apotheoses were spiritual, not bodily, and the deified mortal would not be expected to tread the streets of Jerusalem for forty days before ascending to heaven. Apotheosis was also a privilege reserved for the rich and mighty, not for the common artisan and certainly not for the crucified criminal. Christ’s resurrection was also different from the myths of dying and rising agricultural gods in other pagan religions. N. T. Wright, author of the 740-page The Resurrection of the Son of God insists that “even supposing Jesus’s very Jewish followers knew any traditions like those pagan ones—nobody in those religions ever supposed it actually happened to individual humans.”
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He will rescue some LGBTQ people from the domain of darkness (Colossians 1:13) and qualify them “to share in the inheritance of the saints in Light” (Colossians 1:12). When that happens, and when those who once proudly draped themselves in a rainbow flag are now clothed in the righteousness of Christ, will you be ready to minister to them? To teach, train, and disciple them? To spur them on in their newfound faith? To walk alongside them?

For the past two decades—a relative blip on history’s radar—a new month of celebration has been forcibly entered into our digital calendars, splashed across our screens, and slipped into our common consciousness. That month is the month of June, which LGBTQ advocates have called “Pride Month.”
Now, as the clock prepares to strike midnight each May 31, an angsty mix of emotions sweeps through churches, homes, classrooms, boardrooms, businesses, and government agencies as decisions have to be made about which side of the fence to sit on, how much virtue signaling to engage in, how not to be accused of saying too much (or too little), and how many colors of the rainbow flag should be flown.
In the midst of all the hand-wringing over concerns about being canceled, and the politicking involved in what has become a hot-button issue in our day, a very simple question is often overlooked: what does God think of all of this? What is the Lord of Heaven’s take on the whole idea of “Pride Month”?
This article presents ten truths about God’s perspective on the LGBTQ movement as a whole, and His assessment of our culture’s wholesale devotion of an entire month each year to worship at the altar of “Pride.”
First, God has given us clear directions and prohibitions on a variety of subjects, and related to a variety of sins, in His Word—the Bible.
God has made no mistakes in anything He’s said in His Word. He wasn’t half-in and half-out when He gave us His Word. He didn’t stutter when He gave us His Word. He hasn’t moved on from what He has said in His Word.
On the contrary, God has spoken clearly, directly, and timelessly in His Word. And this means that each of the behaviors, practices, tendencies, predispositions, attractions, and feelings that any of us have—no matter how societally accepted they are or have become—must be held up to the penetrating light of God’s Word.
What God says, goes. What we want, what we feel, what we crave, and what we desire, ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is what God says, what He has said, and how He wants us to live. “O send out Your light and Your truth, let them lead me.” (Psalm 43:3)
Second, God has clearly outlined His design for marriage, sex, and procreation in the Scriptures.
His design is laid out with simplicity and clarity in Genesis 2:24, which says: “a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
That is, a man, a biological male (the only kind of man there is), and a woman, a biological female (the only kind of woman there is), are to be joined together in marriage. They then will grow their family through the addition of children, playing their part in fulfilling God’s mandate to populate the earth (Genesis 1:28), and then their kids will go on to start their own families and do the same.
These God-honoring (not to mention species-preserving) cycles of procreation may not be in keeping with what is being taught on college campuses or through the mainstream media these days, but going back to the first truth mentioned above, ultimately it makes no difference what professor so-and-so or a talking head or Elon Musk thinks. It’s God’s perspective—and His alone—that matters.
Third, God has clearly condemned as sinful any corruptions of His design for sex and gender and marriage.
And contrary to the arguments of those who would like to argue that God was grumpily anti-gay in the Old Testament, but that by Jesus’ day, He had evolved into a more friendly, more LGBTQ-affirming “god,” consider the divinely-inspired words of the Apostle Paul, who wrote the following in the New Testament:
Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.1 Corinthians 6:9-10
Fourth, “there is no partiality with God” (Romans 2:11).
Or as it says in the King James Version, “God is no respecter of persons.”
So, while the sin of homosexuality is, in fact, enumerated as a sin in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, it isnot the only sin listed there. It is not the unforgivable or unpardonable sin.
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We must awake to the coming world without end. We are those who look “not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). People all around us live and die for the seen, the felt, the tasted, the pleasurable, the transient. But God has left you and me here to speak, to reason, to plead with immortal souls that they be reconciled to God.

The world makes its quiet but furious war against death, groping to live forever. Plastic surgery, obsessive fitness, compulsive dieting, pouring billions into scientific research searching for the holy grail of immortality. The author of Hebrews describes the condition as a lifelong slavery to the fear of death (Hebrews 2:15).
Try as we may, Adam’s and Eve’s children cannot shake the ancient nightmare.
[God] drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24)
Humanity, east of Eden, still reaches out in vain for that Tree of Life.
Curing Death
How would the world change overnight if all people everywhere heard that a man had cured death? How many ages would pass celebrating the discovery? But as it stands, these same people bypass the knowledge of a true eternity because it is not the eternity they invented.
God has placed in us a sense that life continues after death: “[God] has put eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Yet most suppress this knowledge of their own immortality. But why?
Because they “did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28) — the God “who inhabits eternity” (Isaiah 57:15). They disavow the truth their hearts would thrill to believe because they do not approve of any eternity with God. Better to steal happy moments from a broken and fleeting mortality, their dead hearts reason, than submerge in an endless existence with the God they disapprove.
Immortal Beings
All men, we know, shall live forever. We trust and love the eternal God, we believe in the resurrection from the dead, we believe Jesus’s promise of eternal life with him. And we know the everlasting fate of the wicked: “These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46).
Eternity exists, we believe, and all men are immortal. The souls we come in contact with at the ballgame, in the restaurant, walking the dog — shall be a million years from now. The mailman, the bus driver, the nosy neighbor — immortal beings. The most decrepit among us shall outlive the galaxy.
Even considering those who have gone before us — the deceased grandfather, the fallen child, the departed spouse — though hidden momentarily from our eyes, we know they are and shall be again. Death, we profess, is the Great Interruption, not the Great End.
Falling Leaf
While we say we believe in undying souls (a truth that the world would go delirious to acknowledge), do we give that momentous reality much thought? Does that eternal weight of glory hold much weight with us? Has it changed your week at all?
How many of us have believed upon eternity, as John Foster lamented, in vain?
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