Classic: Challenges to the Existence of God

So someone comes along and they say, I don’t — even though you’ve just made a point that sometimes revelation is very, very important in these conversations, absolutely. If I’m having a conversation with for whom someone, the category of revelation doesn’t function as a warrant, then are there ways to draw them into that conversation towards revelation? By the way I talked about the existence of God, that’s one category I want to discuss.

Second category I want to discuss is theodicy and maybe this is the place to transition and pull out of the cash and come back to the arguments later. Here’s the point that I want to make that you’re making based on what you’re saying earlier, Doug and that is if there is no basis for morality, if everything is a process of natural processes in a material world, then where is the case for the theodicy argument that the new Atheist makes?

Nietzsche very clearly understands that if you have no God, you have no basis for objective morality. Now Nietzsche’s willing to bite that bullet. He’s willing to give up objective morality and that’s why he writes a book called Beyond Good and Evil. So for him, the concept of goodness is just as vacuous as the concept of evil. So Nietzsche’s quite clear, there’s strength and there’s weakness.

And I think it’s clear from chapter 42 and the way the book ends, Job gets that point. He says in the end, “I spoke of things too wonderful for me to know.” And I think it’s important to acknowledge up front as Christians, if the question on the table is why in fact does God allow evil? The truth is we don’t know. God has chosen not to tell us and in so far as he has not disclose his reasons, we’re in no position to know what they are but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make some helpful responses.

If the atheist’s response is here, wait a minute I can’t imagine what reason God might have for allowing the world to be as it is, if he is truly all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. That is what’s known in my discipline is as a noseeum argument. The argument is essentially this, “well I can’t see what the reason would be and if I can’t see it, there must not be one.”

Well, those kinds of arguments are good or bad -are judged good or bad on an individual basis in terms of what it is that’s been claimed one can’t see. I mean if I tell you there’s an elephant in my backyard and you look out noseeum argument to the effect that there’s no elephant in Blount’s backyard is a pretty persuasive argument. Why? Because if there were an elephant there, you’d expect to be able to see it. But suppose I told you that there’s a rare species of butterfly that’s very tiny flying around in my backyard, and there’s only one of them. Aand you look out and you don’t happen to see it. Well, does that constitute work for the claim that there’s no such butterfly there? No. That’s a noseeum argument, but it’s a legitimate one. Why? Because the thing we’re talking about isn’t the kind of thing you would necessarily expect to have been able to see from my kitchen.

So the question is this, from the fact that we can’t see if that’s true what God’s arguments are or God’s reason for allowing evil is, does it follow that we should conclude that he doesn’t have one? As far as I know, the reasons that an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good Being might have for allowing evil are not things I necessarily ought to expect to be able to see in the first place.

And the other thing we’ve got to say as Christian theologians, is that –I mean, I like the way Calvin put it when he said we can know that what happens is part of God’s plan for his world, but why he did such and such, we don’t know so we should shut up. The other thing we can say and Calvin would say something like this too is that if God is good and evil exists, then God will one day do something about evil and that we have an eschatological hope that evil and all of its effects will one day be removed. So there is a redemptive work of God and that he is acting redemptively in the fallen world. Now we’re back to [that] there is good in the mist of the evil. That I think needs to be emphasized as well.

The holocaust was a product in which religion — if I can say it this way, was the victim. It took it on the chin in the holocaust because someone was a particular race and held a particular religion, the goal was to wipe them off the face of the earth. And that wasn’t religiously motivated, that was motivated by something else. If we’re going to rank the most horrific things that have happened in our recent memory, certainly the holocaust makes 9/11 pale in comparison. And so, I almost want to reverse the quote in the process. Religion has killed thousands but humanity at its worst has killed tens of thousands.

And what I mean by that is this: Christ’s atoning work in a very obvious sense, it seems to me, involves on doing what Adam has done. What did Adam do in the garden?

First the philosophical arguments related to God. We talked about the picture of design. Dawkins has a famous argument that he’s made that says, well if we’re going to engage in infinite regress, who created the creation, then we’ve got to ask the question that who created God. And we’re stuck in a move going backwards. And he has a chapter in which he works through, you said he’s not a philosopher but at least he presents the various kinds of arguments for the existence of God that have traditionally been put forward, arguments from design and such.

And so I thought what better opportunity than sit back and say, all right what are those arguments? Are they able to do anything for us at all? Are they a waste of time? What does one make of the kinds of arguments that you might make about design, demand a designer, and those kinds of things.

What’s the explanation of this? Well, there’s a principle of confirmation that says if you’re dealing with two different hypothesis, say a theistic hypothesis and atheistic hypothesis. A set of data will favor the hypothesis on which the data is most likely. Well, if you understand that principle, the fine tuning of the argument seems fairly clearly to favor the theistic hypothesis over the atheistic one. Why? Well precisely because it’s not at all surprising that the world would be fine-tuned if there’s a God; whereas, if there is no God and it just happens to be one of infinitely many possible universes that could have existed, well then the fact that we got these results is pretty surprising.

So the very question “Who created God?” is ill-formed, as is the suggestion that somehow there’s a complexity here. I mean the theistic notion of God and I don’t want to necessarily remain with the generic theism, Glenn. I appreciated the point you made earlier. Indeed the Christian conception of God is one according to which the fundamental idea of deity is really rather simple. It’s utter perfection so that God is the one who is utterly perfect —

Darrell Bock: He’s the God of the whole.

So arguments for God’s existence, arguments from design, etcetera are incredibly helpful, but none of them are the means by which people come to faith in God. People come to faith in God because of the miraculous work the Spirit does. And I just feel like that has to be a major part of our component of methodology that this is where we started and it’s not to say we don’t have these conversations, we don’t provide evidence and argue from those perspectives. But I read it in Dawkins and I heard Harris say that same thing. People come to me — Hitchens said the same thing.

People come to me and say why don’t you believe? You ask me to believe in something for which you’ve given me no evidence? But Dawkins said it, I think the best way possible, which you’re asking me to do is to believe to do something that if faith means anything at all, it could only come from the God who I don’t think exists. So if there’s a God, he would have to give me the faith to be able to believe. It’s really hard to state what I believe about saving faith any better than Dawkins do.

And then I think finally, we ought to repudiate with all the passion we have, the kind of harsh dismissive and even cruel things people have said about — these are men and women created in the image of God. They are wrong about some very important things, but they’re not wrong about everything. And these are people that Christ loves, these are people that we should love and to write letters or to go — and to even think, “I hope you burn in hell,” it should bother us that unless God did something for him in the last couple of moments of his life, Christopher Hitchens faces a Christ-less eternity, that should bother us. It bothers me and I have compassion for that man –misguided, yes, mean, yes, but a human being for whom Christ died.

And I think there’s a time and a place to argue the case and to present, but the way we do it is maybe more important than what’s — and then we walk away saying I’m not going to get down and play in your level. I mean, I’m just not going to do it.

There’s this wonderful passage in II Corinthians in which Paul says, we urge you, we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. That’s the core tone that we’re after and even though we’re in situations where there’s confrontation, there’s certainly disagreement about ideas. It could be we’re on opposite ends of the spectrum, however you want to describe it. In the long run, the tone you’re trying to do is you’re actually ultimately trying always to extend a hand to that invitation.

Athenagoras of Athens says in essence, if you want to see our view vindicated, that we Christians are speaking the truth, watch us live, because we will outlive you, we will out-love you. And I think that’s a very important early Christian theme that we may have lost sight of. It’s not about winning arguments, it’s about loving well and in a way that’s compelling.