The Lord does indeed make himself known to those who truly seek him.
Those who cannot be convinced are ultimately, those who don’t want to acknowledge him.
Those who insist they would believe if God showed himself or could be proved in a conventional manner are deceiving themselves, others or both.
His existence will become clear to you if you seek him, wanting to find him.
Not if you spend your life trying to hide him in the camaflougue of your pseudo-empirical objections.
Finding him and obeying him is your need.
Allah will be utterly unaffected by your disbelief, but it could cost you dearly.
William Lane Craig explains this beautifully:
“…there are two types of people with respect to an interest in God. There are travelers and there are balconeers.
The traveler is the person who is struggling along the road of life and is really interested in finding out whether God exists.
The balconeer is someone who just sits back and considers this issue as a theoretical question and isn’t existentially involved in it. These two types of people will approach the arguments for the existence of God with completely different attitudes.
The traveler who is really trying to find out whether God exists will approach the question of God’s existence with a deep humility. He will be eager to find evidences of God’s being. He is searching for God. He wants to discover whether God exists or not. He is like a person who is looking for a lost loved one and who will be eager to find any evidence of that loved one’s presence. That is not to say that he is going to become gullible and just jump at straws. But it is to say that the traveler’s approach to the existence of God will involve an openness and a sincerity to finding him that balconeers often do not.
Balconeers instead will often be indifferent or even hostile to God. They don’t really want to find God at the end of their search.
For example, here is what the philosopher Thomas Nagel has to say:
“I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want a universe like that.”
This kind of a person will approach the arguments for God’s existence with a totally different attitude from that of a traveler. Rather than looking for God, he will be looking for loopholes.
Rather than accept the argument’s conclusion, he will deny at any cost one of the premises rather than deny the conclusion, no matter how implausible the denial of that premise might be. I find that each one of us has inside of us a kind of skeptical dial that we can turn way up high when it comes to conclusions that we don’t like, and we dial it way down low when it comes to our own philosophy and our own views.
And the hypocrisy of many balconeers is that when it comes to God’s existence they dial that skeptical dial up to a degree that would be totally unacceptable to them in any other area of life.
If they were to apply the same sort of skepticism to ordinary life that they apply to arguments for the existence of God, they would scarcely to be able to function. For example, I am astonished at the number of atheists that I have read and know who, rather than admit that God created the universe, will instead assert that the universe just popped into being uncaused out of absolute nothingness.
Now they would never adopt that conclusion in any other area of their life. For example, if they woke up one morning and found a car was sitting in their driveway that hadn’t been there the night before.
Or if ten thousand dollars were found in the bank manager’s briefcase as he left the bank, no one would accept a conclusion, “Oh, well, it just popped into being uncaused out of nothing.” Yet, when it comes to the existence of God, this is the premise that they are willing to accept, rather than embrace the existence of God.
For balconeers, arguments for God’s existence are at best intellectual games. They don’t really hope to or expect to find God at the end of the argument. But obviously, if God exists then we can’t play intellectual games with God. Rather, we have to approach God with a sincerity and a humility and a deep reverence, I think. If we are seekers after truth, if we are travelers along life’s way, then we will approach the arguments for God’s existence sympathetically.
Therefore, I think that the so-called skeptical inquirer is really an oxymoron. Someone who is a genuine inquirer is not skeptical at all. He wants to find the conclusion and find the truth. So when I hear someone who says they are a skeptic or a skeptical inquirer, I think that tells me already something about where their heart is.
If we are really to hope to find God then we must approach these questions with an openness and a sincerity to really finding God at the end of the argument and not try to deny at any cost his existence.”