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. Whatever its status as a logical proof against theism, the argument 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 it’s almost impossible not to relish Hitchens’ and Dawkins’ turns of phrase, it is hard to get past their exceedingly strident tones. Nonetheless, 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.