How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus

So in the case of a child being raped, the free will of the rapist is more important than the free will of the child being raped? That’s just sick.

If God doesn’t exist it doesn’t matter. Either way, the free wills of two individuals–while perhaps of equal value–are exerted in priority of the means and leverage which those respective agents have. The rapist free-will overrides the child because they are stronger and there is no environmental constraint against doing so. Whether from a purely naturalistic perspective or a theistic one, it is an irrelevant point. Why would God be responsible to restrain whatever you arbitrarily conceive as the evil actions of human beings? Christianity is the only religion that gives anything on that question, and the explanation is internally consistent with the full system of the worldview.

Humans rape, murder, rob, and exploit each other in every imaginable way. That is a fact. Only a theistic worldview provides any means of validating that such things are objectively wrong: that they ought not to happen. If you are not a theist, but a naturalistic materialist, then this behavior would be expected as part and parcel with survival of the fittest. If you are a theist, then you are left with exploring the issue of what evil is, why it exists, and what is God doing about it. Christianity answers all of these questions quite directly, consistently, and comprehensively. The real question, which brings us back to the author’s experience, is this: why do atheists–and moreover all people–feel overwhelmingly compelled and operate under the presumption that objective moral values exist if there is no basis to merit such claims?

So if someone comes from an atheistic/naturalistic framework arguing against theism on the basis of moral qualms, that argument rationally invalidates itself.

Why is he obligated to do so? I have yet to hear a decent argument of why God is obliged to do these things that everyone touts he should do.

CD – imagine if you had the power to prevent a rapist from brutally raping a child without any risk to yourself or to anyone else. Would you prevent the rape or would you sit there and do nothing? To be a good person, you would have an obligation to prevent the rape. That is how it is concluded God – if he exists – has an obligation to prevent the rape.

I strongly suggest you watch this video. It will help this make more sense to you.

Evidently, his intervention was ineffective…children still get raped……….

You asked: Why is he obligated to do so? Or why would he?

Because Christians list omnipotent and omnibenevolent as attributes of their god. If those attributes are correct, then he has both the power and the will.

The fact that societies have established moral standards is not evidence of a deity by a long stretch.

Evil and suffering are actually signs of the absence of a benevolent deity.

Thanks Milton. I see the Christian view of God as all knowing, all powerful and all present. Another view of “God’s” role in the “Child rape” scenario is that God suffers with the child, not complicit with the crime but also a victim. The crime or the action is never what was intended in a perfect world.

The Christian God, according to the Christian belief, watched his “son” (a human manifestation of himself?) be mistreated and killed in an horrific manner. But the Christian story does not end there, it ends with good news, victory over evil. The son did not remain dead but was alive and out of the tomb three days later, according to Christian belief.

At this point I am a temporal being, but I look forward to an eternity. My choice is to be with God for an eternity as he intended, with no suffering or pain, or an eternity separated from God.

Thank you for your well thought questions and statements.

Hi Milton, the term “omnibenevolent” has been used a lot but how do we define this? I was just wondering what your definition of “love” is?

Personally, I think that it is quite possible that a person named Jesus existed. There is certainly no definitive proof, but there is anecdotal evidence. For me the question is demonstrating that he was also a deity, or son of a deity (depending on which type Christian you may be).

There are really no eye witnesses, we don’t even know who actually wrote the gospels, and they are written in the third person. The very earliest one was written some thirty years after the supposed crucifiction.

It is also a fact that eye witness testimony is one of the most unreliable forms of testimony. That is why forensics is so important in major criminal trials.

Furthermore, the supposed miracles are at the level of modern day parlor tricks and are unimpressive even if it were possible to demonstrate that they actually happened. If you are a deity trying to leave an impression, you don’t feed a few thousand wirh a few fish, you end hunger worlwide. You don’t turn water into wine at a party, you provide clean safe drinking water for mankind.

Finally, if you are a deity that wishes all mankind to believe, worship, and obey you, your form of communicating that should not be a collection of stories with questionable authorship and internal inconsistencies written in a language that was all but extinct for hundreds of years and is readable by only a fraction of the world’s population unless translated into a myriad of other languages.

Phil, yes, I have read the old and new Testaments several times through. It admittedly has been quite some time, though. When I said the four gospels weren’t written as first person, I was referring to the crucificion and resurrection, specifically. But even if they were written in first person from beginning to end, it would provide questionable evidence at best.
However, even Biblical scholars agree generally that we have no idea who the authors of some of the gospels are and that in some instances, one borrows from the other. So we can’t even be certain of the authorship, with the possible exception of one of them.

If the fact that some people died for what they believed makes the belief true, then it would make Islam true, as well as Hinduism, Bhuddism, and numerous other religions. People die to this day for various religious and political ideologies, that does not establish the truthfulness of their beliefs.

You can Google the accuracy of eyewitness accounts and find ample information demonstrating the questionable value of eyewitness accounts. The guilty go free and the innocent are convicted based on eyewitness accounts. For such a claim as people rising from the grave, far more evidence would be needed to substantiate the claim.

The claim that men broke into an office is a much lower claim than the claim of a man who was a god, or a god’s son rose from the dead, or that a virgin gave birth, etc.
All claims are not equal in terms of weight, and therefore the quantity and quality of evidence needed to support the claims also will vary.

If the only claim was that there was a man with the name of Jesus who lived in the middle east 2 thousand years ago, perhaps the gospels would suffice, because such a claim could easily be true and would carry little importance. But when you throw in the miracles and god claims, the bar is raised substantially.

It is the difference between me telling you there was a car in my garage or telling you there was a magical dragon in my garage.

“Evil and suffering are actually signs of the absence of a benevolent deity.”
I respectfully disagree. Can you have good without evil? Without evil, how do we know what is good?

That’s the point, isn’t it. He doesn’t.

“If you are not a theist, but a naturalistic materialist, then this
behavior would be expected as part and parcel with survival of the
fittest.”
Don’t bring poor Darwin into this. The behaviour is expected, but that doesn’t mean we have to be OK with it. The whole of human civilization and culture fights against natural selection.

We can certainly build a moral framework based on human relations (using the Golden Rule, for example, which antedates Christianity and is common to many cultures) without invoking a deity at all. It isn’t absolute, but then, if there were no humans, there would be no need for one. For example, if another species were dominant, that reproduced by some other means, the concept of rape might be meaningless. It is only a crime in a human society that values autonomy. (We may note in passing that the Abrahamic concept of rape is deeply flawed, treating it as a crime against a man’s [father’s or husband’s] property, and the OT [Deut 22:28-9] and Islam both offer the solution of marrying the rapist!)

“Christianity answers all of these questions quite directly, consistently, and comprehensively.”
Oh really? Christians are very ready to thank God for finding them a parking palce or saving one person in a plane-crash, but not to blame Him for letting the plane-crash – or a tsunami killing hundreds of thousands – happen. There are many evils (relative to humans) that are not human-made, “acts of God”. The story of the miracle of the blind man only underlines the problem: sure, you may say God blinded him “so that the works of God [Jesus restoring his sight] might be displayed in him” but he was still blind till then, and that’s cold comfort for all other blind people.

Yes I read that apologia when I was checking the chapter and verse, and it’s still a disgustingly chauvinist view of the value of women. I notice that you let God make the rule to suit the society (why don’t we still force women to marry their rapists?) but absolve him from any role in setting up such a chauvinist society.

Chapter and verse for the stoning, please. My reading was that he would just have to pay the bride price without getting the bride.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what natural selection is. It doesn’t “entitle” anything, it is/was just the way that life survived, by adapting to different habitats and over aeons producing a diversity that boggles the mind, and showed Darwin the inadequacy of creationism as a theory. (You seem to think it involved constant physical battles between individuals or species, or tribes, or something. Nothing of the sort.)

Human consciousness changes everything. That is why we don’t say the other animals are “immoral”.

And this is not an argument against the existence of God, but of the Christian God specifically. But, again, Christianity specifically deals with this. As for the creation, God created it for the purpose of humanity and human free will. Though what we are discussing here is not an issue of free will, but restraint. Free will is a matter of the ability to make fully autonomous decisions. Restraining those decisions being carried out is another thing altogether. It’s the matter of the assertion of will that is at play here.

I was just making an observation on that matter. I know you are arguing against the true God. How would you like me to demonstrate it? What criteria would you like fulfilled? It would probably be faster for you to just go and read the accounts.

Fair enough. A book I have found to be helpful in these dialogues is “Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism,” by Timothy Keller. I would recommend it to you. I will pray that God will reveal Himself to you on the grounds that are necessary for you.

I will leave you with the words of Jesus on the matter of finding God:

“Keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep searching, and you will find. Keep knocking, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who searches finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. What man among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them—this is the Law and the Prophets.
“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.”

Matthew 7:7-14 (Holman Christian Standard Bible)

If you will concede the possibility that He is there, and if so you would wish to find Him, then He will most surely find you.

(Trying not to re-cover ground that CD has already dealt with)

Milton, your thinking is still fundamentally anthropocentric, and more specifically Milton-centric.

On the justice of suffering:
(1) All humankind is in rebellion (explicit or otherwise) against its creator.
(2) The punishment for this is its natural consequence: God partially gives us what we want – a world where his presence and justice is distant or non-existent.
(3) In this age, God’s justice is partial as a mercy and warning: humans are foolish and evil and whatever they try to do by their own efforts turns to evil – turn back to God.
(4) It is also uneven: some evil and powerful prosper, the weak suffer. This is not a mistake; it too is a lesson in human evil and call to repent.
(5) All this is but a foretaste of what is to come, where evil will be utterly cast out from God’s presence.
(6) Humans, being natively evil and rebellious, can do nothing to escape this final justice except throw themselves of the mercy of God.

Why do hundreds die in natural disasters? Why are children mistreated and slain? You and me and people just like us. Why does God not step in and stop it? He will. But in the meantime he wants us to recognise our utter general culpability and turn to him for mercy. Yet we would rather blame him for giving us exactly what we (corporately) asked for – to rule ourselves and our world in our own way.

Now, there are half a dozen possible objections to this. But if any of them hold, then we are in a worse place – if there is no God who will judge, then there is no justice, no right, no wrong. These are all things we make up to try to make ourselves feel better in a dog-eat-dog world.

As for evidence of God, why do you assume the problem is a lack of evidence? There are none so blind as those who will not see. God doesn’t owe you (or me, or CD, or Sarah, or anyone else) salvation, or evidence, or anything else other than judgement. But he does offer some of us two gifts – the gift of realisation that we need him, and the gift of salvation. For those he gifts with the first, the second follows easily. Perhaps in his mercy and plan he will offer them to you.

“Why doesn’t God deal with me on my terms?” is a condemnation of the asker, not God.

Finally, let me observe that when the Apostles speak in public (in the book of Acts), their ultimate focus in not on the crucifixion of Jesus but on his resurrection. To their thinking, the resurrection of the Christ is the sign that he is King and the judgement of God is coming upon the world (Acts 2:34-40, Acts 17:29-31). The (apparent) reign of ignorance and evil is coming to an end; do not be caught up in its fall. God in his mercy offers you a way back to him.

If I could stop a child from being raped, without any risk to myself or others, would it be immoral for me not to stop it? Yes. In accordance with human conceptions of morality, it would be immoral for me to stand idly by. Is God bound by human conceptions of morality? Of course not, no more than a parent is bound by what their young/naive child deems fair or just. Why doesn’t God prevent any child rape from taking place? How do you know He doesn’t? A rape that God stopped wouldn’t have happened…so nobody knows about it! 🙂 What if every time our ‘conscience’ convinces us not to do something we know to be wrong, it is (as is preached in the Catholic Church) God’s voice stepping in & telling us “no”? Doesn’t a loving parent sometimes have to step back & allow their child to make wrong, sometimes harmful choices, so that they can learn from their mistakes, with the parent being there to pick up the pieces & love them back to wholeness, when they are ready for that to happen (e.g. a child who is abusing drugs & destroying their bodies & lives)? Don’t many people find the way to heal themselves & their lives only when they have reached absolute rock bottom, & someone has been there to love them back to wholeness? In response to your repeated question, as someone who WAS the child, I tell you, the pain exists only while human notions of worth/shame/blame/violation etc. etc. etc. apply. With God’s unceasing love, value of each life etc. comes complete healing. Did evil break me? Yes, but only until I allowed myself to be loved back to wholeness. The Bible teaches us that demons & evil do exist. When human beings follow their lead, rather than God’s, pain & suffering abound. Yet God’s love is there to heal every hurt for those who are ready to receive it.

Why do children starve to death? Not by God’s hand! There is ample food to provide for every being on Earth. Look into the vast amounts of perfectly good food disposed of every day because of its aesthetics (bananas are a great example!). Why is all of this perfectly good food thrown away? Because consumers in the developed world don’t want to buy oddly-shaped bananas, which would reduce profits if they were put on the shelf & left to rot. Why isn’t this food provided to the starving? Because it is a financial drain to transport this food to the starving, when they cannot pay even a cent towards the cost, significantly impacting profits. Children don’t starve to death throughout the world because God hasn’t provided them food, children starve to death because capitalism ripped food further out of their reach & told them they can have it when they can buy it back!

True, re: wars, etc. Though, again, there is enough food in the capitalist, developed world to provide for those in these situations also; it is just not profitable to do so, & capitalism values profits above humanity (hence all of this food still going in the bin every day, rather than going to the hungry). As far as communism is concerned, it works very well in theory, but every failed example throughout history failed because of human greed in those at the centre (the greed which also causes capitalism to fail!).

No, I’m saying that we are in no greater a position to judge God’s morality than a young child is to judge ours when we say they have to eat their vegetables. As much as we might like to be, or believe that we are, we are not gods, so cannot perceive nor judge His actions (or lack thereof, depending on perception) by our own standards.

Insofar as culpability, you are skirting on the verge of a deep issue that theologians have theorised, debated & pondered for a very long time, & different denominations take different perspectives over, & that is the practical application of God’s plan. Some will suggest that God has planned our every decision before we get to make it, so that would then follow that free will is an illusion & we are actually just puppets, living out a predetermined plot line. The Bible however, says that God knows our every thought before we have them, not that He chose them for us. This shows us that He is so intimately knowledgeable of each one of us, & knows us so thoroughly, that He can predict our decisions/thoughts/feelings with great accuracy, not that He chose it all for us & now we just follow the script that He wrote. Though, as I said, many people have different perspectives on this topic – many of which make not a shred of sense to me! 🙂

To follow the logic that God is culpable for sending people into a world in which He knew the cost of our poor actions would be like saying a knife maker is culpable for designing a kitchen knife that someone used to kill somebody, or a teacher is culpable for setting a test that students would fail, if they chose not to study in preparation. We all have the opportunity to make good choices, or terrible choices. Because God gave us choice doesn’t mean the blame befalls Him – though the Bible does say that our bad choices do bring Him grief, & His passion tells us that He suffers our poor choices with us.

Okay…now I’m not sure whether my communication was abysmal, or if you’re intentionally misinterpreting my intended meaning to serve your own ends. I’m going to assume the former, seeing as I was contending with wrangling three young children whilst trying to communicate my perspective earlier! 🙂
I certainly do not mean to imply that a child is being forced to rock bottom in the aforementioned scenario, rather that the child (not that this only applies to children, rape is abhorrent in any situation) is the innocent victim-by product of a perpetrator’s rock bottom. It is the perpetrator, not the victim, who would be at their worst and lowest (because, let’s be honest, there are not many lower forms of depravity than this).
Obviously, I write as a human being, and my opinions and perspectives are my own, which I have formed based on my own limited understanding and life experiences. I may be dead-wrong, and as I am absolutely no theologian, I stress that my perspectives represent only myself, not my family, my church, my denomination, and certainly not Christianity as a whole. I do have a friend however, who is a very learned woman of God, and a priest. I will send her this link and see if she wishes to answer some of your questions more accurately and concisely than I will ever be able to without years of studying theology! On saying that though, here is my (completely worthless!) opinion on your further questions:
Although you have almost tried to back people into a corner to ‘admit’ that God is “immoral”, it is not going to happen. People with faith in God understand that we are nowhere near being on a level playing field with Him, so will not ever assume to judge His actions, based on our limited understanding. Not only do we have no right, but we are somewhat concerned for the state of our immortal souls! I think this is why you have had so few people directly addressing your questions, as your insistence on receiving a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ seemed like you wished to back people into a corner to concede to your views, when in actual fact, the response is something that is so hard to articulate that it seems too difficult to do so – especially to an outspoken denier.
Christians – in my experience – do not say that human morals are derived from God, but that human morals (and Western law) are derived from God’s laws (i.e. primarily the Ten Commandments, though many of Jesus’ teachings also qualify!). Human moral standards will always differ from God’s laws as we are all sinners, and stray from His plans. We are each tempted, we each question and doubt, and we each place higher value on human concerns and endeavours, and the pursuit of immediate gratification, rather than the things that really matter.
As I said above, I certainly did not mean to imply that a child would go through such an ordeal for any kind of lesson. Their suffering is as a result of the evil afflicting another individual. The act that the perpetrator is committing is their rock bottom, not the victim’s. I do however, believe that we can learn from all suffering that we experience. I know I sure have. I also posit that anyone who truly finds God can find healing of any and all things that they suffer, experience, or – the most unpopular stance – commit. What it boils down to, in my humble opinion, is that any situation, no matter how base, how vile, how debilitating, can be injected with hope and eventual healing through faith; that all hurts can be healed through God.
I do not believe it is impossible for God to cure the wrongs of the world. In fact (read Revelation), He can and will, but it won’t be pretty. The Earth was created with more than enough for everyone, yet the gift to humanity of free will, along with temptation, caused all of this to crumble. To somebody who does not have faith, death is the endgame, so to think of people dying from starvation, after a life (albeit extraordinarily short in far too many cases) of suffering is unconscionable and disgusting – hence your mistrust and hostility towards faith, as God is then to blame for this. What if, to an eternal God – who knows the riches in store for us after this life – that a life of pain and suffering as a result of others’ susceptibility to evil is tantamount to an infant receiving an immunisation? It is impossibly awful whilst it happens, but the effects later will benefit and protect for a lifetime/throughout eternity? When one does not have any faith in anything outside of physical human experience, the ills of life are all that matter; they are the most important and debilitating questions in existence. When one does have faith, the ills of life are infinitely easier to bear. If you imagine the primary purpose of life as an opportunity to experience existence both with and without God, so that when you are faced with an opportunity to choose how to spend your eternity, your choice will be informed by your life experiences, the suffering of a godless world is easier to understand, endure and see through.
Now please, please don’t interpret this as a suggestion that starvation and human suffering is okay, is nothing to be concerned with, or that we shouldn’t concern ourselves with this, or try to fix it etc. I have to distance myself enormously and place this conversation on a hypothetical plane in my mind in order to have this discussion at all, as the reality of suffering and starving children throughout the world causes me significant distress. The fact that there are children in agony due to their lack of food and clean water in parts of the world, whilst people in my own small corner of the globe throw elaborate birthday parties for their dogs, sickens me. The fact that we are so privileged and safe that some will have time off school/work because they are distraught over the death of their pet, whereas elsewhere in the world a mother cannot take time out to mourn her child, lest her remaining children starve, is crushing for me. I feel the pain of these people (especially the mothers, with whom I can most strongly identify), and I try to help in my small ways, through child sponsorship and feeding some of the local poor, when I can. I also thank God every single day for the riches my family can enjoy. I see the good that many Christian and non-Christian organisations do to try to remedy the situations and alleviate the suffering, then I also see the individuals affected by greed who exploit even these organisations (most often from within). In these, I again see lives with and without God. I see that free will and life are gifts given to humanity such that we might experience existence both with and without God, and be able to make our decision at the time of judgement. I see the wide-reaching harm of sin; the enormous suffering brought on ourselves and others for our every transgression, and I ask forgiveness for mine and my family’s. I also look forward to a world that is free from all of this.

Put simply, because He doesn’t intervene in the exercising of free will, which is easily tempted and swayed by evil. He will however, always be there to pick up the pieces and to heal the hurts, as well as to allow good to come from any evil experienced. In my personal experience, my incredible hurts drove me away from the path that I was on to medicine, and instead redirected me to education. In my role as an educator, I have been given the opportunity on a few different occasions to be a tiny piece of the puzzle in helping to heal others’ hurts.

😭 You woke me at 1:00am to ask a question I answered twelve hours ago??

Let me first dodge the question and then answer it…

“If you could stop a child from being raped without any risk to you or others, would it be immoral not to stop it?”

The most important question here is the implicit one – what obligates me to act? What obligates *God* to act?

The Scriptures teach that our human moral sense is broken but nonetheless retains some innate sense of “good”. The Scriptures also provide instruction in “good” actions. Finally, our societies tend to instil ideas of *good* that may or may not track the above. All of the above guide that it is a “good” thing to protect the weak from being exploited by the strong. Thus, to intervene would be to do “good”, and to not intervene would be to fail to do “good”.

That said, to intervene against someone else’s evil to which I am an uninvolved party involves effort and risk. There’s direct personal risk that the oppressor might oppose my intervention. If the oppressor is powerful, I may draw persecution to myself, or even be unjustly blamed for his offence. Society might not support me in viewing the action as evil, and condemn me for “unjustly” intervening (witness persecution of anti-abortion campaigners). I might even be busy doing something else that I don’t wish to sacrifice. From a worldly perspective, there are many reasons why I might not be consider it “immoral” to fail to perform a particular “good” act. Conversely, the more social support I get for intervening, the more likely I am to go out of my way to perform it.

I’m not asking you to morally evaluate these reasons, just acknowledge the complexities from a human perspective.

What about a divine perspective?

Firstly, this is not a new question. Consider Psalm 10, a lament to God that the powerful are getting away with evil. “Why do evil doers prosper?” is a very old question, and one the Scriptures speak to.

Secondly, while we act from a very limited moral and temporal perspective, God does not. Broadly speaking, to turn a blind eye to evil that I could prevent is to condone or even participate in it. But God’s coming from a different place.

If I see one of my enemies mistreating another, am I bound to prevent it? That the strong will mistreat the weak is part of God’s divine judgement on humanity – it is a foretaste of hell, for which both persecutor and persecuted are destined without God’s mercy. Both are objects of God’s righteous wrath, and destined for death. This is the first reckoning.

But there is an alternative reckoning. God will not and cannot overlook evil, or dismiss it cheaply. Instead, Jesus, Son of God, comes to be human, to suffer as a human, to be rejected by humans, to die as a human, and to be judged by God as the innocent ideal human in place of all other rebellious evil humans. When you declare “How can you stand by and watch that happen?”, God points to the death of Jesus (Yeshua / “God Saves”). In that death, he takes the evil done upon himself. Moreover, he takes the evil suffered upon himself also. When the child cries out “how could you let that happen to me”, God points to the cross and says “In the death of my Son, I paid for his sin, and I paid for yours – repent and believe”.

For me to overlook evil is immoral. But God is not overlooking it; he is dealing with it at a level that is almost beyond our comprehension, understanding that our evil to each other is a sign of his judgement on us all, but also having a plan whereby he will not abandon us to our evil but offer salvation, wherein *he* pays the price.

No, that is the response of a man who is truly unaware of his own depravity. I answered your question, and you complain about it because my answer holds you (and I) as guilty as the hypothetical rapist.

We humans have a wonderful moral system. We move a safe distance below the moral behaviour that we are willing to admit to, draw a fuzzy line, and call everything below that line “evil”. Anything above that line ranges from “not too bad” to “good” depending on how we are feeling on the day and how it impacts us.

God has a slightly different system. He starts with his own perfection, compares that to his rebellious, treasonous creation, and withdraws from us because he does not want to destroy us utterly. “There is no-one righteous, not even one / there is no-one who understands / no-one who seeks God. / All have turned away / they have together become worthless / there is no-one who does good / not even one” (Rom 3:10-12 NIV).

Even the very act of thinking of ourselves as “not too bad” is morally offensive to God. “Every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Gen 8:24). We’re not “not too bad”; we’re completely depraved and deluded.

“I think that having another person pay the penalty for your own immorality is a sick concept. If your great grandfather killed someone, would you think it fair that they put you in prison for his transgression?”

Well, many cultures have had some variant on that. Sometimes it’s informal (holding grudges), sometimes more formal.

And yet there’s a truth here. It really is stunningly offensive that God’s Son would take our punishment. Imagine deliberately giving up your life to save the rotting remains of a potato man you crafted when you were 4 years old; it’s hard to tell whether it demonstrates sentiment or just crass folly. But then consider the moral offence, where the righteous is not only punished *for* the guilty, but his execution is carried out *by* the guilty.

Until we grasp just how vast is the moral gulf between us and God, until we can wrap our heads around the moral fact that this world, as corrupt and evil as it is, represents a temporary *mercy* based on what we truly deserve, our moral philosophising is on par with the sounds of bunch of 8 year old boys in a farting competition.

I’m not saying that our day-to-day evil doesn’t matter. It does. But I am saying that, in the scheme of things, our day-to-day evil is not unique – rather, it demonstrates and confirms that we really are cosmically evil.

The good news is that the offence of the cross is also the means of God’s mercy for our salvation.

I’m not using “bible stories”; I’m lifting philosophical arguments from Scripture. I admit that there’s a degree of raw assertion, here. If you have a way of testing these claims that doesn’t itself rely on raw assertion I’m happy to hear it.

Otherwise, I’ll take my philosophical assertions as having greater explanative power than the alternative.

Your responses to 2,3 and 5 carry no weight whatsoever. Either they are using a different moral system, in which case you’ve changed the topic of discussion to your moral system and a Christian moral system is a priori excluded, or you’re trying to tell God that he doesn’t understand his own moral system, which will get you as far as it gets anyone else who tries to argue with the umpire, especially if that umpire is also the rule maker and also all powerful.

4 is cute, but all it proves is that we agree on the base facts of #4. If I say that fairies boil water, and you say that giants blowing bubbles boil water, showing that the water boils proves nothing either way, since we already agree on that.

You’re making the classic two thousand year old mistake – trying to argue the morality of God while denying the total depravity of man. There are two bulletproof solutions to the “problem of evil” – either we deserve it, or evil doesn’t really exist (there are no moral standards). Neither allows for the inherent goodness of mankind (or at least the subset that includes “us”), which is why we desperately seek alternatives despite their philosophical weakness.

Anyway, at this point you’re denying the conclusions not analysing the arguments. If you want to argue for a moral system which will affirm the goodness of man, the floor is yours.

Christians argue that their god values free will above the well being if his creation. My argument was pointing out that such a god evidently places the free will of the offender above that of the victim as well.

Good point

Hugh7, your comment is misplaced. I am an atheist. I was asking questions of the theists.

Milton, an all-powerful god could prevent the rape without impacting anyone’s free will.

Hugh7,
Three objections occur to me:
First, It is not clear that the need for free will on the part perpetrators should supersede the need to prevent unjust suffering on the part of their victims–always, sometimes, or as often as seems to be the case.
Second, according to the Bible, God DOES occasionally intervene in the lives of his creations and thus implicitly deny their free will. He even does this directly when he “hardens Pharaoh’s heart” in the Exodus narrative. Thus, you need to explain why God, in his compassion, doesn’t intervene in all this other cases where atrocities are allowed to continue. “Because free will” just doesn’t cut it, especially if there is no accounting for exceptions.
Third, Believers are constantly praying precisely that God will intervene in the lives of His creations, thus implicitly denying the free will of agents in those cases where prayers are supposedly answered in a positive way. This seems to be to be a case of “kettle logic,” where the assorted premises of the position in question are logically inconsistent with each other. How can you have it both ways?

So you are a deist and not a theist?

Maurice, Tillich, Niebuhr, and Ramsey are hardly “apologetics” in the sense of fundamentalists trying to “prove” the Bible. They were some of the most brilliant theologians of the 19th and 20th century, AND voices of the progressive politics and social reforms of their time.

David, I didn’t say her story wasn’t true, I’m sure she’s a Christian now, and that her path to it was as she said. My point was that she claims she did not enter Sydney University with a need for faith to ground her identity or values, and yet it is clear that she did. However, while “exploring theologians” is a way to get more knowledge about the bible, I could argue that she didn’t explore the Islamic or Jewish scholars who have other things to say about their own texts which equally claim truth about God. By veracity of the Bible, I mean a study of its origins, documentary analysis, internal consistencies (or rather contradictions!), historical verification (Creation, Noah’s Flood, Tower of Babel, the exodus from Egypt, Jesus’ birth, resurrection and ascension, Second Coming, etc), internal ethical inconsistencies (homosexuality, marriage, role of women, use of violence, importance of family, role of the Law, …), authorship (who actually wrote the “Books of Moses”, or the Proverbs – all from Solomon?, or Hebrews – probably not Paul), compilation of the Biblical Canon by church councils hundreds of years after Jesus’ death, just for starters. Maybe she worked through all that and more to convince herself that the Bible can be trusted as God’s infallible Word, and then maybe not?

The link to her faculty profile is at the very bottom, in the details about the author, where you would expect to find such things. On the page is a contact tab, which includes her email address and phone number.

Okay, per your suggestion, I sent the below email to Sarah:

I recently came across an article by you that described how you transitioned from being an atheist to being a believer in the Christian version of god.

A theist challenged me to write to you, so here I am.

Can you tell me the specific reasons you were a self-described atheist?

Can you give me any factually grounded reasons for your conversion to Christianity?

Thank you for your time.

Thanks for the suggestion, CD!!!

CD, I have to give you kudos (what the heck are kudos, anyway?LOL) Most often when i get into a discussion with a theist, it eventually breaks down into either ad hominems or falling back on “it’s just faith”.

Thank you both, CD and Milton, for this discussion. Quite thought-provoking and enlightening.

I sent you a message on Facebook with my email address.

I am interested in what is actually true. Do you think she can demonstrate that the Christian god actually exists? If so, she has succeeded where thousands of years of apologetics have failed. She has not succeeded in doing so within her article.

I did emailed her at your suggestion, CD. You used the word “true” in your previous response. I will leave the definition to you for now.

I can say that all claims are not equal and so all claims do not require the same level of evidence. The claims of a supernatural being are very extraordinary, and therefore call for an extraordinary level of evidence.

Let me give you an example:

If you came to me and simply stated that you had a car in your garage, I would take you at your word. Why? Because i know from personal experience and the experience of millions of others that garages actually exist, and people tend to park cars in them.

But what if you came to me and claimed you had an invisible dragon in your garage? Should i take your word, or should i demand a great deal of hard evidence? I know that nobody has ever produced a single dragon, let alone a fire breathing one. There is nothing on which I might base my belief.

Error #1: The burden of proof falls with theists, and not with atheists.

My response:

The burden of proof always lies with the one making the positive claim. most atheists do not claim there is no god, but rather say they do not feel the evidence supports the claim. I am one of those, and we are in the majority. Yes, I also do not think one actually does, but I am open to sufficient evidence should it every be presented. But the fact that after thousands of years, the proof has not materialized, i do not see that as probable. But I never argue that position because i do not have absolute knowledge. So, in my case, this is erroneous. I do not claim that I know that none exist. Only that i do not believe any exist. For your benefit, remember that distinction in future discussions with atheists. don’t lump them all into one pile.
There is “hard atheism”, which does claim there is no god, and i would agree that this view does carry a burden of proof. So do as i do with theists. The first thing to do is to ask “what do you believe and why do you believe it?”

Error #2: Christian Beliefs are either scientifically-evaluable or non-provable / non-falsifiable

My response:

The claim that there is a god, or that people rose from the grave, are non-falsifiable within scientific protocol. There is no way to scientifically explore these claims. The supernatural, if it exists is outside the realm of scientific exploration because science is the systematic exploration of the natural.. Therefore it is by definition unfalsifiable. What tests would you devise that demonstrate in a repeatable manner that a deity creates things?
i do believe that religious concepts should not get a free ride and not be subject to the same scrutiny as any other idea. If the idea is true, then it will withstand the scrutiny.

Error #3: Extraordinary claims logically require extraordinary evidence.

This is undeniably true. I gave an example in an earlier post. When you postulate the existence of something that is completely outside all natural experience and claim attributes like omniscience, omnipotence, etc. and say it is invisible and undetectable and immeasurable, and exists outside space and time, you burden of proof becomes very heavy indeed. The example about the murder scene is in no way comparable.

Error #4: Religious claims should be held to a higher burden of proof than other claims.

My response:

Nobody has ever claimed this as far as I know. It is a straw-man argument.
Religious claims should be held to the exact same scientifically rigorous standards of proof as anything else of this magnitude. They unfortunately cannot be examined in this manner because the tend to be unfalsifiable.

Hope this helps.