Further Causes of Disbelief

Many are taught that evolution is an established fact. Anila, for example, was educated in atheistic Albania. “In school, we were taught that to believe in God was naive and backward,” she relates. “I regularly learned wonderful things about plants and organic life, but I attributed everything to evolution, since this made us look as if we were in harmony with scientific thinking.” She admits today that the “proofs that were given had to be accepted blindly.”

A sense of bitterness may pose an obstacle to some. Jehovah’s Witnesses often encounter this attitude when they go from door to door, offering hope from the Bible. Bertil, mentioned earlier, received such a visit from a young Witness. Bertil remembers saying to himself: ‘Poor fanatic. You have come to the wrong place!’ He says: “I let him in and began to vent my indignation concerning God, the Bible, and religion.”

Gus, from Scotland, was troubled by injustice. Initially, he was very argumentative and challenging during discussions with Jehovah’s Witnesses. He asked questions that were reminiscent of those of the Hebrew prophet Habakkuk, who said to God: “Why is it that you make me see what is hurtful, and you keep looking upon mere trouble?”​—Habakkuk 1:3.

God’s seeming indifference to wickedness has also long troubled humans. (Psalm 73:2, 3) Simone de Beauvoir, a French writer, once said: “It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.”

“WHEN I thought about the possibility of a Creator, it made me angry to think that someone might have the power to prevent human suffering but was not prepared to use it!” Thus said one former atheist who lost family members in the Holocaust. He was hardly alone in feeling as he did.

When faced with atrocities, many find it difficult to believe in God, or they seek solace in the idea that God does not exist.