No, there’s no typo in the title. I meant to say “fiend,” not “friend.”

Why? Because James Taylor has got it all wrong when it comes to God. Unbeknownst to him, there is a fiend at work in his work. Many of James Taylor’s songs reveal his strong atheistic views, often poking fun at believers in a Supreme Being. Consider this line from “Up From Your Life”:

So much for your moment of prayer, God’s not at home — there is no there, there.
Lost in the stars, that’s what you are, left here on your own.
You can only hope to live on this earth, this here is it, for all it’s worth.
Nothing else awaits you, no second birth, no starry crown.

James Taylor and millions like him believe that life on earth is it. There is no afterlife. No heaven. No hell. We all just become worm food when it’s all over. So eat, drink, do drugs, have sex and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

So where does this godless attitude ultimately come from? Well, it’s not a “where,” but a “who,”  the fiend behind the atheist’s faith. And just who is that fiend? It’s the Devil himself, a.k.a. Satan. He’s behind the unbelief of James Taylor and others who share his atheistic worldview. 

In addition to his many nefarious misadventures, two of Satan’s jobs are to 1) make you believe that God doesn’t exist and 2) make you believe that Satan doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe in God and/or don’t believe in Satan, you are – ironically –  living proof that Satan’s strategy is working.

For James Taylor – or anyone for that matter – to proclaim with such authority that God doesn’t exist is the height of hubris. Atheists assume they have the intellectual or logical upper hand. But do they?

The British philosopher Antony Flew argued in his article “The Presumption of Atheism” that the default or neutral position for humanity is atheism. Flew argued that it is not on the atheist to disprove God; the burden of proof is on the theist to demonstrate that “belief in God” is reasonable. It is up to the theist to make a positive case for theism. 

So, let’s play this game of proving a positive versus proving a negative, shall we? The atheist says (in the negative) “There is no God,” and the theist says (in the positive) “There is a God.” The two claims seem equal, but they’re not. Let me illustrate. 

Suppose I walk on a football field, stop in my tracks, look down and see a diamond on the ground. I go off the field and tell my unbelieving friend that there’s a diamond on the ground. But he says, “That’s impossible.” Then he goes out onto the field to look for himself. He stops at some point, looks down and sees no diamond. He comes back and says, “I just looked, and there’s diamond on the football field.” Our two views are not equal because I know in the affirmative that there is a diamond. For him to know with absolute certainly that there was no diamond, he would have to scour every inch of that field to disprove me (in the event I was either lying or imagining things). 

The believer doesn’t have to know everything in order to make a positive statement. He only has to know one thing. It takes a great deal to disprove someone’s positive experience. In contrast, the unbeliever has to know everything before having enough credibility to make his negative statement. 

The only way you can make such an absolute statement that God does not exist is if you have combed the entire universe, looked under every rock, galaxy, star, planet, cell, molecule or atom and determined that God was nowhere to be found. You’d literally have to know everything that is knowable (both visible and invisible) to say with 100% certainty that God doesn’t exist. You would have to be omniscient. In other words, you’d have to be God to say God doesn’t exist!

That’s why atheists who say they know God doesn’t exist really should modify their position and become agnostics who realize they can’t know with 100% confidence – they can only admit that they are not sure God exists. Maybe He does, maybe He doesn’t.

Interestingly, many scientists today are becoming believers in God (although they have to keep this quiet or risk being “cancelled” by their peers). Advances in telescopes and other technologies have shown that the universe had a beginning (contrary to the materialist who believes the universe is eternal) and thus a cause outside time, space and matter. Furthermore, advances in microscopes have unveiled the amazing intracacies of the molecular world. Irreducible complexity argues that certain biological systems cannot have evolved through natural selection, as Darwin posited, because life has to have all the essential components from the very start. A basic tenet of science is you can’t make something from nothing, unless, of course, you are God.

If you want to read more about why atheism is unreasonable and indefensible, I highly recommend this article (and others) by my good friend Dr. Frank Turek of CrossExamined.org:  https://crossexamined.org/atheism-lack-belief-god/

Has anyone seen God? Well, according to the Bible, the answer is “yes!” Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is God the Son. He is “Immanuel – God with us.” And His resurrection – which to this day has not been refuted – proves His claim to divinity. 

This same Jesus is the one who called Satan “the father of lies.” And so, James Taylor, I pray that you reject the Kool-Aid Satan — the lying “Fiend” — served you, and that you will instead humble yourself before Jesus and put your faith in Him, not materialism. When you do, you will finally discover without a doubt that “you’ve got a Friend” forever.