Clipped by Nathan Jacobson
(Jun 17, 2007)
A number of recent books making the case against God have hit the best-seller list, most notably Christopher Hitchens'
God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Richard Dawkins'
The God Delusion. If you follow the argument closely, you'll notice that the gravamen of the case against God is their judgment that God, and specifically the Christian God, as he is commonly understood, is not good after all. Now, it is not clear how even if God is an unlikable sort that this precludes his existence or the existence of some other unknown God. Nonetheless, this line of reasoning usually pops up in arguments against theism (cf. the arguments linked in "
Does God Exist?"). And, whatever its status as a logical proof against theism, it is existentially forceful because we meet a God in their arguments that is deserving of their unmistakable disdain. The argument against the goodness of God usually advances on three fronts: 1) God cannot be good because the world is rife with evil and suffering; 2) The God we meet in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, is repugnant to our moral sensibilities; and, 3) Those who claim to follow this God are responsible for epic evils like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the "troubles" in Northern Ireland as well as for more quotidian evils like intolerance, anti-intellectualism, and being bores. While I take Hitchens' and Dawkins' painfully unbalanced tirades to be unhelpful, the basic thrust of their arguments should be, and is in fact, troubling to believers.
LeaderU.com has collected a number of articles wrestling with the first question. Marilyn McCord Adams' well regarded,
Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God also deals honestly and poignantly with this difficult question at greater length. The second concern about the biblical God is largely a theological question.
The attributes of God, including the Goodness of God, are enumerated without much in the way of soul-searching at Grace's Online Library and at
The Christian Courier. As for the third contention, Robert Royal's,
The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West and James Kennedy's
What if Jesus Had Never Been Born consider the impact of Christianity on history. Finally, Christianity Today is featuring
a conversation between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson regarding Hitchens' accusations against God and religion. It is truly a clash of the Titans.
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Dallas Willard
[
Jesus
]
Jesus' good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God's direct knowledge and control ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices. Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.
Source > The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 61. (403 reads)
R Douglas Geivett
If the condition in our universe were not what they are, within a very small margin of flexibility, no life of any kind would be found in this universe. Thus, while the present universe is a fit habitat for human and other life form of life, the initial probability of there being such a universe is quite small. The confluence of so-called "cosmic constants" is improbable enough on the assumption that the universe is uncaused and undesigned; it is even more improbable on the supposition that we owe our existence to Creator who has it in for us. If, on the other hand, our lives are special, and if what makes our lives special has anything to do with the physical condition in which we come to have our lives, then the good of human life depends upon the Creator as well. This is cause for considerable comfort, for it offers an important clue concerning the Creator's good intentions for humans. Our bodies locate us in a physical world of astonishing complexity, apparently ordered by its Creator to the goal our physical well-being.
Source > "Is Jesus the Only Way?" in
Jesus Under Fire, eds. Michael J. Wilkins and JP Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995), 192. (326 reads)
Antony Flew
Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.
Source > The Presumption of Atheism: God, Freedom, and Immortality, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), p. 84. (234 reads)
Victor Hugo (Monseigneur Bienvenu)
[
Spirituality
]
As we have seen, prayer, celebration of the religious offices, alms, consoling the afflicted, the cultivation of a little piece of ground, fraternity, frugality, self-sacrifice, confidence, study, and work, filled up each day of his life. Filled up is exactly the word, and in fact, the bishop's day was full to the brim with good thoughts, good words, and good actions. Nevertheless it was not complete if cold or rainy weather prevented his passing an hour or two in the evening, when the two women had retired, in his garden before going to sleep. It seemed as if it were a sort of rite with him, to prepare himself for sleep by meditating in presence of the great spectacle of the starry firmament. Sometimes at a late hour of the night, if the two women were awake, they would hear him slowly promenading the walks. He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe. He would sit upon a wooden bench leaning against a broken trellis and look at the stars through the irregular outlines of his fruit trees. This quarter of an acre of ground, so poorly cultivated, so cumbered with shed and ruins, was dear to him, and satisfied him. What more was needed by this old man who divided the leisure hours of his life, where had so little leisure, between gardening in the daytime, and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with the sky for a background, enough to enable him to adore God in his most beautiful as well as in his most sublime works? Indeed, is not that all, and what more can be desired? A little garden to walk, and immensity to reflect upon. At his feet something to cultivate and gather; above his head something to study and meditate upon: a few flowers on the earth, and all the stars in the sky.
Source > Les Mis?ɬ©rables, Chapter One (1862) (270 reads)
