Questions for God (Book Excerpt!)
Posted by Joe E. Holman in Questions for God on Saturday, March 22, 2008
Hello God. It's Joe Holman, your ex-servant with yet another list of questions for you – questions you will, no doubt, add to my extensive list of blasphemies, reproaches, and mortal sins, which will further serve to guarantee my damnation – but a man must have answers, right? None of your representatives here on earth (the scholars and theologians whom you have appointed to make you look logically credible in the eyes of skeptics) can provide me with the answers I seek, so I would like to get them straight from the horse’s mouth, if you don't mind.
As you know, Lord, I am a troubled soul, a rigidly dogmatic and militant atheist, headed straight for the burnt-black depths of the merciless Hell you created. I desperately need your help and salvation, but I need these questions answered before that can ever happen. The first set of questions concerns your existence.
For one, I am confused, oh Lord, about this whole creation scheme. I mean, you are a perfect being, which means you lack nothing, right? So why did you bother creating anything in the first place? I thought a perfect being would have no needs or wants. Apparently that's not true of you since, for some reason, you became discontented with the peacefulness of being alone in the quiet chasm of nonexistence that surrounded you. It was just you – perfect, holy, and lonesome – evidently not knowing what to do with yourself for a googol eons before time began. I think I understand how that could get boring. I mean, you can only create so many angels, galaxies, and diverse kinds of creatures, until eventually, you're bored out of your mind, right? Is this what it was that changed your thinking to suddenly decide to create a big, bustling universe? Let me reiterate: you don't have to be sorry for being bored in your position. Since you are the all-knowing God, no knowledge is hidden from you, which to me, would make for a lot of pronounced boredom.
Somehow, someway, you are made up of three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but you three certainly can't talk to one another since you are all one and share the same knowledge. You can't really talk to the angels or us humans down here either because you know everything we are going to say before we say it. So naturally, you can't ever find any meaningful conversations to get into. That's okay, though. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you shouldn't really want conversation because, as God, you know all things, and no one can give you knowledge that you already have, right? I'm afraid I must raise the same question in regard to praising and worshipping you.
Why do you need praise? Why worship? Why do you need to hear constant flatteries from lesser beings who are beneath you? What do you get out of this? Is worship just another form of a heavenly "high,” some sort of divine masturbation? Well, I suppose your Bible does answer this question for me, at least indirectly; it says you are a jealous God (Exodus 20:5), meaning you long for ceaseless attention and adoration; but jealousy is a bad thing, isn't it? It’s a human flaw. How is this a positive, perfect, and holy attribute of yours? Jealousy always accompanies obsession. If you were human and expressed the same insatiable need for such relentless, self-obsessive, self-glorifying worship, I'd think you had more issues than a newspaper, and can you blame me? I can deal just fine with obsessed, neurotic humans, but an obsessed and neurotic god? That's too much. A god with human frailties is quite a scary thing.
Moving on, in all of eternity's silence before you decided to create this universe, did you ever wonder, even for just a second, how you came to exist? Please tell me, did you create yourself? I don't see how you could have created yourself because that would make you temporal and not eternal, and a thing cannot be its own first cause now, can it? If you didn't create yourself, but existed eternally, then aren't you limited in power because you exist apart from your own approval? I mean, you didn't have any choice but to exist, did you? You must also be powerless to commit suicide because if you did, you would cease to be eternal, no? So it seems fair to say that you are powerless in these regards, a slave to your own existence. I'm only asking because I can't fathom this whole eternal god thing.
Every second grader asks their parents, "Mommy, who created God!" You and the scholars say that you were never created, but that you "always were." Well, forgive me for sounding uncouth, but isn't the phrase "always was" up for grabs? Can't we atheist philosophers just as easily postulate that the matter within the universe has always existed rather than jumping to the idea that some farfetched god has always existed? If that is the case, why should I accept your existence as being eternal and not the universe itself? What logical reason do I have to say that a god "always was" and not just stop and say that "matter always was"? I mean, you have to admit, jumping to a far-out conclusion that a mysterious, spooky deity created everything from nothing is a pretty big leap. I've never seen you, nor had any real experience with you, and so saying "I always was" has no significance and doesn't alleviate my curiosity about the problem of your origins at all. I could be wrong, but doesn't it make actually more sense to explain the origin of the universe on matter that we know exists instead of trying to explain it as the work of some god that we don't know exists?
All the theologians and scholars that believe in you are going out of their way to try to prove your existence to the world. They are taking everything from rocks to wristwatches and saying that since everything shows evidence of design, then there was a "Great Designer" who originally designed all things (that designer being you, of course). Hold on just a minute though, Lord! If this is true, and all design in the universe is evidence of intelligent design, then your designing mind is also complex, and therefore, requires an even greater designer! So your scholars have solved nothing. Help me out here, oh mighty one.
Life is tough for us atheists. Let it be clear that we would worship you, if only we could establish your existence, but here, you really can't blame us—even you must admit that there is no way to tell you apart from a being who doesn't exist. Think about it for a moment: you are omnipotent (all-powerful). You are omnipresent (infinitely present). You are also omniscient (all-knowing), and you are supposedly omni-benevolent (all-good). This is hard to take in. You have absolutely no limits to define your being. In order for earthlings to understand a thing, it must be understood to have limits. I mean, everything we can define, we define because of limits; I am 6'4” and not 6'3” or 6'5”. I have brown hair, and not jet black or blonde hair, and on and on we could go. The same applies to every person, place, and thing in the universe. We comprehend the universe by limits, but since you have no limits, there is therefore no distinction between you and a being who is non-existent, mythical, nonsensical, or completely illogical and untenably incoherent. You defy all logic, all thought, and all perception down to the smallest detail, and then you expect us to accept you as factual (existent) by way of reasoning and logical thinking? This just isn't happening! Please help!
Then I find other logical problems like the omnipotence vs. omniscience dilemma. How can you be infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely powerful at the same time? For example, let's say I am thirsty for either a glass of tea or a chocolate malt. Being an all-knowing deity, you know for sure which of the two I will choose as my beverage; you know that I will choose the chocolate malt. Now let's just say that you choose to exercise your omnipotence and force me to drink the tea instead of the malt; at this point, your two attributes (omniscience and omnipotence) clash; since you foreknew that I would drink the chocolate malt, you are powerless to make me drink the tea, and if you decided to force me to drink the tea anyway, you would be falsifying your own foreknowledge (because despite your foreknowledge, I drank the tea instead of the malt). So it seems to me that you might be a very powerful being, but not infinitely so—in my humble opinion, of course.
This second set of questions is in regard to your setup and planning in the Garden of Eden. First off, where did this talking snake come from (Genesis 3:1-7)? Since you created all things and only things good (2 Chronicles 19:7; James 1:12), from whence came Satan? If Satan always existed as an evil co-deity with you, then you are not omnipotent because in that case, you would not be the only eternal deity. If you created Satan to become evil, then you violated your own word by creating an evil thing, when supposedly, you cannot break or contradict your word (Titus 1:2; John 10:35). If Satan was originally created as an angel and later fell from grace, then why did you create a being that you knew would fall away? Are you not then responsible, at least in part, for his error like a negligent parent would be responsible for injury incurred on a child by leaving a knife in a child's playpen?
Please tell me why you put taboo fruit in your perfect paradise garden when you knew that your beloved primal pair of humans would eat of it and die? I'm confused already, but it gets worse; you created an angel who became the prince of the demons, and one primal couple that you knew would choose to eat the forbidden fruit, and thus, be condemned to death and Hell forever. You knew when you created man that he would fall from grace. You knew that I would become an atheist, yet you allowed all us sinners to live in the first place, knowing that we will one day writhe in agony, with blood-curdling screams, as we forever roast in the inferno of Hell. How could you do this?
I know you've had the freewill idea going for quite a while now, and you've been filling the heads of your mini-crusading, good soldier theologians with it to try and explain why terrible things happen in life, but tell me: is freewill really free? How can you say that we have freewill when we mortals cannot step out of the infinite maze of the cause and effect system which undercuts all human decisions and goals? I can't find a way out of this quandary. Since you know all things, isn't our every action and reaction as obvious to you as our favorite movie script is to us? Even if you somehow choose "not to know" some future events, as a few of your scholars have suggested, this would eliminate you from the role of God, since a God must, by definition, be infinite in all aspects, including foreknowledge. If you were concerned with allowing man freewill in the garden, why couldn't you have simply allowed Adam and Eve to exist without knowing evil—and what they didn't know, they wouldn't have chosen, would they? So freewill was never even an issue. You don't need the presence of evil to have freewill.
This brings up another question. How could Satan fall from grace in a sinless environment? If one must be tempted to sin, and Adam and Eve had to have Satan to sin, then who tempted Satan? If there was no sin in heaven, and yet an angel chose to become evil, what will prevent the same thing from happening to us when we get there? If sin can just "pop up" when and where there is none, what are we to do if we make the wrong choices in heaven, or perhaps succumb to some overwhelming sense of lofty heavenly pride? Maybe this was what happened to Satan? Heaven doesn't sound too comforting now! Forgive me, Lord, for sounding presumptuous. It may be that you really wanted evil there or just allowed it for some higher purpose than a mere pea-brain mortal like myself can understand, but how can that be with an omnipotent being? Beings with infinite power aren’t limited to having to choose between a few limited options. Forgive me for thinking that a perfect being could make a way to create a world where nothing went wrong and everything was to that being’s liking.
Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I thought that perhaps you were unable to eliminate evil, or perhaps you were unwilling to eliminate it, or maybe you were both unwilling and unable? If you are unable to eliminate evil, then you are not all-powerful, and if you are unwilling, then you are wicked. If you are both unable and unwilling, then you are both impotent and wicked. Since you are supposedly both willing and able to vanquish evil, why does evil exist? Questions, questions, but maybe I shouldn't jump the gun. Maybe, for instance, you allowed evil to enter the world to test the faithfulness of our souls? Only problem with this is, you already knew who would pass and who would fail the test without a test of any kind, so it’s all pointless. Maybe you allowed evil to enter into the world to teach us lessons about life, but that doesn't really work either because you are omnipotent and could have taught man every lesson he ever needed to know a thousand different ways. You could even have made souls to be born with this knowledge.
Maybe you allowed evil to dominate the world to show us the love of salvation in the afterlife, but then that's sort of creating a problem to solve it, don't you think? Why not just show us love in the afterlife in the first place? Why bother with this material world business anyway since heaven and spirituality have been the real deal all along? Plus, isn't unleashing an arsenal of evils on a world of unsuspecting, helpless victims, and then promising to make up for it in some illusive afterlife sort of like a deadbeat dad giving his kid a black eye and then promising to take him to Disneyland to make up for it?
Isn't killing your disobedient children with death a little too strict anyway? If you were a father on earth, Child Protective Services and the law would be all over you! Not to mention, I just can't figure out why you created debilitating diseases like Spina Bifida, Caudal Regression Syndrome, Cancer, Diabetes, the Diptheria germ, Muscular Dystrophy, and Scleroderma (to name just a few of the many life-altering, death-causing, sin-cursing diseases and conditions you so gracefully sent our way). I also scratch my head wondering why you included the animal kingdom in mankind’s curse. If indeed we are not animals, why must they suffer and die? They committed no sin. Their kind ate no forbidden fruit. Here's one that's got me all tied up: why did you create animals that prey on one another – fang, tooth, and claw – and why did you create parasites like the tapeworm? If tapeworms could, would you expect them to thank you every time you blessed one with a warm, luscious, human stomach to live in? I am confident that believers will continue to praise you for making the great white shark, but I suspect they will wait until they get to shore first. Is this really the way you wanted things to be?
While we're on the subject of right, I must ask how, Lord, in the realm of morals and ethics, you dictate what is "good" and what is "bad"? Do you do a thing because it is "good," or is a thing "good" because you do it? If I say that you do a thing because it is good, this makes morality higher than and independent of you. In effect, it takes you off the moral necessity market because people can now bypass you and go straight to the morals without any god-belief at all. On the other hand, if I say that a thing is good because you do it, then I face the problem that anything you do I am committed to saying is good, no matter how atrocious that act might be. Such is the case with many of the things in your Holy Bible which seem quite inhumane and downright barbaric—forgive me for being so blunt.
Before we get off this morality point, I must ask if it is true what some learned men say who try to defend your conduct when they say that you are neither moral, nor immoral? If this is true, then are all your commandments arbitrary? Do you tell us not to murder simply on a whim? I mean, come on! If you are neither moral, nor immoral then your morals for us have no basis in fact or principle whatsoever. So they must be just randomly selected guidelines and nothing more, right? If this is not the case, and the morals you give us are based on your divine, higher morality, then we are back to the same question with which we began: do you do a thing because it is "good," or is a thing "good" because you do it?
Why did you order Moses to instruct the people to invade the Midianites' homes and kill every man, woman, child, and animal, to keep alive only the virgin women for those horny, Jewish soldiers (Numbers 31:15-18)? If anyone did this today, they'd be given the lethal injection in no time flat, but evidently you would disagree with such a reaction, and instead, be proud of these uncultured barbarians as you were proud of your servant David. Like you, he murdered anyone who crossed him (2 Samuel 4:12; I Chronicles 20:3), but make no mistake about it; you still hold the world record for the most murders, the 2004 tsunami being a case in point, though you still haven't broken your old record set back in the day of Noah's great flood in which you slaughtered the entire world, humans, plants, animals, and all, except for 8 people (1 Peter 3:20). As far as catastrophes go, it's been a while since September 11, 2001 when you decided to punish America because of the nation’s rampant homosexuality and abortion. I mean, if it hadn't been for that tsunami, people might have started to think that you were softening up! I know that at this point, you are getting ready to send me to be sodomized by a demon on the shores of the Lake of Fire and Brimstone for eternity, but like I said, a man must have answers, right?
I have a question as to the merits of eternal damnation for disbelief. If you damn a person to Hell for not believing in you, how is this a just act, seeing that a person can only believe what they find to be true, and if that person only pretended to believe in you when they didn't, they would be hypocrites—and we know you don't want that sort of service (Matthew 7:1-5)! If, for some twisted, unthinkable, insane, out-of-this-world reason I did want to invent a Hell of my own to put powerless, tattered souls into, it would only be temporary to rehabilitate them, but not so with you! Once there, you never let them out. Why Lord?
Well, Lord, I have a good many other questions I would like to ask, like why you preferred the company of lower life forms, such as reptiles and amphibians, to that of humankind for billions of years before you created us—your prized creation. On a side note, why did you give the gecko the ability to grow new arms and legs, but not us? Also, why did you allow sea turtles to live for 200 years, but we only get to live about 70 nowadays? Do you care more about them than your blessed and best creation, man? Surely not, right?
The last big item I would like to inquire about is atheism. According to the Bible, you condemn me for being an atheist. Regardless of any moral virtue or uprightness of character I might have, you believe that I should burn in a lake of fire for an eternity. This is a very discomforting thought indeed, but let me just come right out and ask: are you an atheist, God? I think you are. You don't pray to anyone at all. You worship no higher authority than yourself. You can only swear by yourself because you can swear by no one greater (Hebrews 6:13). You don't go to church, you haven't confessed Jesus, repented of your sins, or been baptized in Jesus' name. You humble yourself before no one, you are not religious, and you alone say what is right and what is wrong for you. You affirm very plainly in your word that "There is no God besides me" (Isaiah 44:6), thus, leaving no room for the possibility that a higher being than you can exist, and what's more, you punish people with eternal misery for not believing in you as the final authority in the cosmos.
You trample on the fallen, crushing the souls and destinies of your wayward, disobedient children who dared to step out of line. So it seems to me that you are not only an atheist, but a galactic dictator, a super-communist, a tyrannical Father Time, a despot like no other, more vicious, dogmatic, and militant that Stalin could ever have hoped to become in a thousand lifetimes. If I'm an atheist like you are, shouldn't a father be proud when he has a son who is like his father? It sounds like we think alike (well, to a very small extent!) So why, Lord, am I going to burn in Hell forever for being an atheist when you yourself are an atheist? Is this yet another case of "do as I say, not as I do" parenting?
I'm afraid there are other ways in which you show yourself hypocritical. The Bible is said to be a book that condemns abortion and recognizes the sanctity of unborn life, but then you don't have any problem killing the unborn to hurt someone else for ticking you off (2 Samuel 12:14; Hosea 13:16). I think I'm getting a double standard here. Are you really no different from the typical, desperate hostage-taker who will resort to whatever terror he can cook up to force his demands? Evidently not. Getting back to atheism, you know just what it would take to convince me of your existence, removing even the slightest of doubts in my mind. Why don't you provide this proof?
Well, Lord, as usual, you've been pretty silent here as I've expressed my thoughts. In fact, I haven't heard a peep out of you yet, ever! I guess I'll never get the answers I want. I have no choice but to continue on my lonely road searching out truth in philosophical naturalism. In all honesty, I am not terribly afraid of you or this Hell place you made because, to me, you have demonstrated irrationality in every area of thought, and with irrationality comes erratic behavior; for all I know, you might change your mind tomorrow and find pleasure in saving atheists for being honest with themselves and their intellects, while getting a kick out of damning to Hell the redneck, backwoods, Bible thumping, fundamentalist Christians who believe in the tall tales that you put in your holy book—who knows, right? Since you are, by definition, an unknowable being, is there any point in even trying to figure you out? Well, enough writing. I'm going to enjoy a cold Dr. Pepper or something.
(JH)
# by evangelical - May 29, 2008 10:25 PM
The First Set of Questions:
1. God's creation, as traditionally understood by Christians, was a free act of the will. He did not need to create but He did choose to create. Was it a want for God to create? I suppose you could put it that way if you keep in mind that the traditional understanding also holds God would not have been depressed or feel unfulfilled if He freely chose to not create. He created because it was His good pleasure to do so.
2. The three Persons of the Godhead all share the same knowledge if by that you mean they are all omniscient. They do not all share the same knowledge if you mean they each share a single mind. Three distinct persons implies three distinct minds. Moreover, since the distinction is real, they may communicate with one another. They can also communicate with mere human beings for while they know what we are going to say we are still free to say it just as the three Persons are free to ask us. If you want to say that is not meaningful since no new knowledge is gained then I guess you could do that. However, communication is really a lot more than merely an epistemic device. Finally, worship is the response to the glory of God as opposed to being the giving of glory to God who initially lacks it.
3. Again, God looses nothing if we He looses worship. We loose something instead. God is selfless in His love. For example, He gave up His own Son for us. That is selflessness. Now the Bible does speak of God as jealous but I think you have conflated equivocal meanings of the term "jealous." In other words, when a human being feels jealousy, we normally think of that as a lover who does not trust the one they love. We see our girlfriend or wife talking to another man and we feel rage. And yet, love always trusts, according to the Bible. On the other hand, when we think of divine jealousy we normally think of idolatry. Since God is the only one we should worship, it is wrong for us to worship other gods falsely so called. God likes us to worship Him but He looses nothing if we don't. It is a proper act on our part and, in some qualified sense, God perhaps benefits in some way from our worship, but, in an unqualified sense, He does not need it. I do not think of Him as an egomaniac but He is supreme and it is only proper to recognize the supreme as such and worship. He is within His rights to get angry with our lack of worship.
4. God is eternal so of course He did not cause Himself to be. Rather, He (and He alone) is a necessary Being. He cannot not be. Is lack of existence an ontological privation. In no wise. In other words, it is the nature of God to be the Supreme Being. It is the essence of a necessary Being to exist. To describe that as a limitation is like describe man as not being free because s/he likes to be happy. To be truly free s/he should be free to enjoy being depressed. Sure, there would be more freedom of choice but I like to be happy just as much as you do. It is in our nature to do so. No entity can logically be other than their nature. Since God cannot be self-contradictory He has, in a strange/misleading way of speaking, no freedom to not be.
5. There is a radical discontinuity between the cosmos, if that exists, and God, if He exists. The cosmos is a contingent being whereas God is a necessary Being. It is impossible to ascribe necessary-eternal existence to a contingent being. Such an idea is utterly meaningless. If the cosmos were eternal, it would still require an explanation for it's existence. Perhaps in that case there would be a more supreme Being, namely God, to establish it in existence. It you want to say that the cosmos is itself a necessary being then you are going against direct observation.
6. This objection, I presume, you got from "The God Delusion." And I need to warn you that that book was laughable in its shallowness. What does it mean to be complex. It means to consist of more than one part. However, "parts" have reference primarily to material reality. God's mind must be immaterial since He is an immaterial entity. So we see that God's mind consists of at most one part. It cannot, therefore, be complex. At the same time, God is omnipotent so He may create a complex material reality.
7. You start out this objection, I think, by alluding to "Why I am not a Christian." That is also notoriously shallow (even with respect to logic and Russell was a logician!). You then say that we know things to exist or be a certain way only by limits. I see no reason to agree with that apparently arbitrary assertion. How do we recognize varying degrees of beauty, for example. Because we already have an understanding of what one might call infinite beauty. You then go on to say how people know finite things by way of negation. I am no not seven feet high, for example. God is not many things (e.g. merely powerful, merely knowing, merely present).
8. Oh dear, back to "The God Delusion" again. It is logically impossible for God to know that we shall do the opposite of what He omnipotently pre-establishes we must do. Also, it is logically impossible for us to freely choose to do the opposite of what God foreknows we will choose. In other words, God's omnipotence, if you want to put it in a strange/misleading way, is powerless to do the logically impossible. Christians have always agreed with that. Omnipotence, as defined by theologians, necessarily precludes the meaningless ability to meaninglessly perform the meaninglessly impossible.
# by evangelical - May 29, 2008 11:45 PM
The Second Set:
1. Satan is a created being that was originally good. Leaving a knife in a playpen is irresponsible parenting because the child does not know any better than playing with the knife. Satan knew what goodness was and was free to continue to choose it. That he did not was his own choice. For there to be free will in the rational creation, as God apparently decreed, then the possibility must really be present for the devil to exercise that freedom. Finally, evil is no more a thing then coldness. When we use the term "cold" we really mean "less heat." And we cannot say that "heat" really means "less cold." As natural science uses the term there can be more or less heat but no positive coldness. And evil is a privation of the good. God created all things but evil is not a thing.
2. If humans are truly free than they must be able to choose evil. Period. Is it bad that we are not robots? I don't know about you but I kind of like being free. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, as you must have read in the Bible.
3. You do need to have the possibility of evil to be free to choose it. God's foreknowledge is an awareness of our freewill choices not a cause of them. Freewill is by very definition an escape from the infinite maze of cause and effect.
4. An omnipotent being may only choose between a handful of options if only a handful of options are open to Him. Temptation is not a necessary prerequisite for sin. Freewill is. The angels were free to reject God, let us say, in Heaven. However, glorified Christians are apparently not free to reject God (i.e. sin against Him) in the afterlife. Why is not particularly clear to me but there is not logical contradiction in saying that a. angels and humans can sin when temptation is not present b. angels can sin in heaven and c. humans cannot sin in heaven.
5. God is not only willing and able to get rid of evil, He is right now doing so. God was free to choose to create free beings and those free beings must have the ability to choose evil. God does not want them to choose evil for He is Holy and Good but He allows it because He has no choice, if you want to speak of it this way, since He already chose for man to be free. It is not necessary that God be testing men or trying to teach them anything. He has decreed they be free and therefore there is a real possibility of evil. There is no contradiction here.
6. God is most certainly not the creator of evil for evil cannot be created for evil is the lack of the good. God did not cause this. The free will of creatures are responsible for choosing, of their own free will, to be less good than they ought to me. Do not blame God for your choice (and mine).
7. Death is the result which is the result of human, and angel, choice. If animal death is the result of human sin then it is apparently because man rules over animals and the rest of nature. The death of mere animals really is not so important. We don't want to torture them as caring human rulers. But when an animal dies it really isn't that big a deal. When a human dies, that's a big deal.
8. You are presenting a false dilemma (Euthyphro). It is God's essence to be a certain way. And that way we call good. God is not arbitrarily defining the good. Neither is the good higher than God since it is subsumed within His nature. There are no atrocious acts in the Bible comitted by God. (In the interest of space and in light of the fact that you'll probably be dealing with this again in your Bible subpage, I'll leave the topic for now).
9. God cannot be neither moral nor immoral for such an idea is manifestly contradictory. However, He does transcend human ethics. So He is more, and not less, than moral in the human sense of the term.
10. People die in warfare. It is a fact of life. People that have sinned-and that includes everybody-deserve death as a matter of nature. God allows all of us to live for a time which is more than we deserve. It is ultimately man who is responsible for his own death because he sinned in spite of God's warning.
11. If a reasonably intelligent adult goes to Hell, it is not for disbelief per se. Instead, it is for not accepting Jesus. It there is only one way of escape and one does not take it, of course they must be damned. Though, of course, this deeply grieves the heart of God. "But how can one accept a Jesus they don't believe in," might be asked. I am going to say something which may sound incredulous but I stand by it. Namely, that God exists is absolutely certain, logically speaking, and that Christianity alone is the true religion of that God is beyond a reasonable doubt. And I may still legitimately hold to this controversial view after reading "Problems with 'Proving' God" elsewhere on this website.
12. An atheist is a person who believes there is no God (though you would probably say that you merely lack belief in God). God certainly believes in His own existence. Cogito ergo sum. C. S. Lewis well said that the door out of Hell is locked from the inside.
Some final thoughts. God, as you have presented Him here, seems to be very different from God as He is in the Bible (whether you admit He exists or not). Second, naturalism is too impoverished a philosophy to be taken seriously by men according to Lewis (and I agree with him). Thirdly, Joe, and finally, I get the impression that while you may be sincere in your new found atheism, you have been deeply hurt by hypocritical "fundamentalism." Why do I say this? The tone of your "Questions for God." For example, speaking of prayer as spiritual masturbation sounds like you are intentionally trying to be blasphemous because you are, apparently, angry. If you were deeply hurt by a person, or group of persons, in ultraconservatism then my heart goes out to you. The scares of one's own familiar friends cut the deepest. Such hypocrisy is clearly condemned in Scripture, as you know, and does not demonstrate the loving footsteps of our Lord. I challenge you to search your heart with the question, "do I really have intellectual problems with true Christian faith, or is my new found skepticism just an emotional/psychological smokescreen?" If you are fully persuaded that you do have legitimate intellectual objections then my heart still goes out to you. Atheists can be moral and happy and fulfilled, perhaps, but I know that my own faith is a very important part of my life. If I were to wake up one morning and decide to stop believing (if that is possible) it feel to me as if my heart had been ripped out of my body. You had a similar experience? At any rate, I do believe in God, and so, as you know, I consider all unbelievers to be in dire straits.
# by Joe E. Holman - May 30, 2008 4:55 AM
Oh boy! I love it when the pathetic try to answer the impossible!
I got me another self-proclaimed apologist here! An “evagelical” apologist too. :-? OOKKK!
I see you just started a blog. It might be good to say a little something about yourself rather than just proclaim yourself an apologist right out of the box and begin making arguments. That sort of style is usually a dead giveaway of the fact that said “apologist” is just another bloke who emailed me before and didn’t like the way things were going, and so decided to come back as someone else, someone a little more “unbiased” and with a fresh start.
Well, whatever the case may be, I’d advise you read my book which is now out and do a review of it from the Christian perspective. Until it makes Amazon, it can be found here…
http://www.lulu.com/content/1909682
Also, if you’re going to have a pro-Christian blog, it would be a good idea to say a little something about exactly what “branch” of Christianity you represent.
No matter. On to your drudgingly unoriginal and piss-poor answers…
The First Set of Questions:
YOU SAID: 1. God's creation, as traditionally understood by Christians, was a free act of the will. He did not need to create but He did choose to create. Was it a want for God to create? I suppose you could put it that way if you keep in mind that the traditional understanding also holds God would not have been depressed or feel unfulfilled if He freely chose to not create. He created because it was His good pleasure to do so.
MY REPLY: Makes no sense at all. When I was young, my cousin and I were playing action figures. I was a genie and he was the hulk. I was a little older and so I turned “the hulk” into a lightbulb. I said, “You can’t get out because you ARE the lightbulb.” But cousin persisted, “But the hulk can break out,” to which I replied, “No, listen, you ARE the lightbulb. You can’t break out of yourself.” He couldn’t see it because he as too young and didn’t want to. Same here with you. God creates out of want or need; no other option is possible, and you quibble around the point saying I can call it what I want, but that it was God’s “good pleasure” to do!
I know, being an apologist, you’re a baffoon, but do you have to be a TOTAL baffoon? You haven’t addressed this problem at all. You’ve just ignored it completely. Fact is, you CANNOT have a creating omni-max deity—not now, not ever. It’s an utter impossibility. If he could create us, he wouldn’t. That was the point.
YOU SAID: 2. The three Persons of the Godhead all share the same knowledge if by that you mean they are all omniscient. They do not all share the same knowledge if you mean they each share a single mind. Three distinct persons implies three distinct minds. Moreover, since the distinction is real, they may communicate with one another. They can also communicate with mere human beings for while they know what we are going to say we are still free to say it just as the three Persons are free to ask us. If you want to say that is not meaningful since no new knowledge is gained then I guess you could do that. However, communication is really a lot more than merely an epistemic device. Finally, worship is the response to the glory of God as opposed to being the giving of glory to God who initially lacks it.
MY REPLY: Are you listening to yourself? You are speaking with authority about what you have a) no idea is true, and b) is totally incoherent. How is a 3-in-1 deity supposed to be composed of 3 separate minds? How can you subdivide or separate the infinite? It sounds so funny to here someone like you speak as though you know what you’re talking about. If you had a lick of sense, you’d drop the trinity and go with the “great cosmic intelligence” of natural theologians and deists. You’ll never make a lick of sense on the road you are heading down. I do wonder, though; can these individual “God”-minds ever disagree? Can they fight, quarrel? I bet you’d say not, because that would mean unrest in the Almighty, and if you say “no,” then you only further support the obvious truth that a deity – whatever that being is or could be – can only be of one mind—and intelligibly, not even that.
YOU SAID: 3. Again, God looses nothing if we He looses worship. We loose something instead. God is selfless in His love. For example, He gave up His own Son for us. That is selflessness. Now the Bible does speak of God as jealous but I think you have conflated equivocal meanings of the term "jealous." In other words, when a human being feels jealousy, we normally think of that as a lover who does not trust the one they love. We see our girlfriend or wife talking to another man and we feel rage. And yet, love always trusts, according to the Bible. On the other hand, when we think of divine jealousy we normally think of idolatry. Since God is the only one we should worship, it is wrong for us to worship other gods falsely so called. God likes us to worship Him but He looses nothing if we don't. It is a proper act on our part and, in some qualified sense, God perhaps benefits in some way from our worship, but, in an unqualified sense, He does not need it. I do not think of Him as an egomaniac but He is supreme and it is only proper to recognize the supreme as such and worship. He is within His rights to get angry with our lack of worship.
MY REPLY: Yes, he loses something because he created us to worship for a purpose, and if we don’t worship, that purpose isn’t fulfilled. About God being jealous, don’t even start with that game of “God’s not jealous like we are jealous” nonsense. Jealous means jealous or we must use a different word. But jealousy is a human frailty, and it only makes sense in animal beings capable of anger. Read the Bible. God is jealous. He puts people’s heads up on sticks to appease his anger (Numbers 25:4). That’s vile and very human conduct. How you can’t see it is staggering. And your insistence that God “benefits” in some way from worship is akin to saying God “gets something out it,” much like we can sometimes use a good talking-to or a hot shower. It’s total nonsense. You can’t give the creator what he already has, which is everything!
YOU SAID: 4. God is eternal so of course He did not cause Himself to be. Rather, He (and He alone) is a necessary Being. He cannot not be. Is lack of existence an ontological privation. In no wise. In other words, it is the nature of God to be the Supreme Being. It is the essence of a necessary Being to exist. To describe that as a limitation is like describe man as not being free because s/he likes to be happy. To be truly free s/he should be free to enjoy being depressed. Sure, there would be more freedom of choice but I like to be happy just as much as you do. It is in our nature to do so. No entity can logically be other than their nature. Since God cannot be self-contradictory He has, in a strange/misleading way of speaking, no freedom to not be.
MY REPLY: But we have no “necessary beings” with which to serve as logical countermodels. We don’t deal in “necessary” beings; we deal with the tangible and the corporeal, which have limits and logical conformity. We know of nothing else. I point out a logical contradiction and you essentially say, “God just is!” That’s all you’ve said here. You might as well have just said, “God just is!” and been done with it.
YOU SAID: 5. There is a radical discontinuity between the cosmos, if that exists, and God, if He exists. The cosmos is a contingent being whereas God is a necessary Being. It is impossible to ascribe necessary-eternal existence to a contingent being. Such an idea is utterly meaningless. If the cosmos were eternal, it would still require an explanation for it's existence. Perhaps in that case there would be a more supreme Being, namely God, to establish it in existence. It you want to say that the cosmos is itself a necessary being then you are going against direct observation.
MY REPLY: But which one – the cosmos (matter) or “God” (non-matter, your “necessary being”) – do we KNOW exists? Answer that and you’ll solve this dilemma yourself. One we know exists and we accept its existence as a “brute fact,” as it were, and the other is nebulous and incoherent all-round. We reject it because it is not rational.
YOU SAID: 6. This objection, I presume, you got from "The God Delusion." And I need to warn you that that book was laughable in its shallowness. What does it mean to be complex. It means to consist of more than one part. However, "parts" have reference primarily to material reality. God's mind must be immaterial since He is an immaterial entity. So we see that God's mind consists of at most one part. It cannot, therefore, be complex. At the same time, God is omnipotent so He may create a complex material reality.
MY REPLY: Uh, no, friend. I haven’t read The God Delusion. This is an old philosophical argument. And btw, drop the “shallowness” talk. It only makes you sound elitist and arrogant. If anything, these answers of yours could be put in the dictionary under the word, “shallow.” You are a frustrating, unfunny joke; you speak of minds as something that can be without a tangible, matter-base (something we have NO experience of or ability to conceive of), and at the same time, you speak of a mind consisting of “one part” while believing that mind is somehow divided up into 3 separate gods making up one great God! If it weren’t so terribly, eye-rollingly stupid, it would be hilarious! Let’s be honest. What do you have here? You have a mind without a mind, intelligence without limits, transcendence. Why do you persist in putting this song to the tune of logic? Just say what you’re trying to say—you want me to believe and accept that a ghost made the world! Just say it, “God is a ghost and he made a complex world.” There, done. But you still haven’t explained away my argument.
YOU SAID: 7. You start out this objection, I think, by alluding to "Why I am not a Christian." That is also notoriously shallow (even with respect to logic and Russell was a logician!). You then say that we know things to exist or be a certain way only by limits. I see no reason to agree with that apparently arbitrary assertion. How do we recognize varying degrees of beauty, for example. Because we already have an understanding of what one might call infinite beauty. You then go on to say how people know finite things by way of negation. I am no not seven feet high, for example. God is not many things (e.g. merely powerful, merely knowing, merely present).
MY REPLY: yes, I’ve read Russell, but he certainly wasn’t in mind here. No, it’s not shallow. You are. And you’re wrong; we don’t ascribe beauty in “infinite” proportions. We use “infinite” in no usable sense in ANY facet of life. Life and all that is in it is defined by limits, and our inability to do this with God must raise the logical red flags. God himself can’t even comprehend himself because he is infinite. He can no more comprehend himself than he can count to the highest number. Such a being can exist in vague concept only. That’s really funny if you think about it; God decides to run the universe like it’s his, like he’s in charge, but he may not be. So far as he knows, there’s no one higher, but he could be wrong! He doesn’t know why he exists and he has no purpose. It’s really a mind-bending exercise in futility, thinking about this silliness.
YOU SAID: 8. Oh dear, back to "The God Delusion" again. It is logically impossible for God to know that we shall do the opposite of what He omnipotently pre-establishes we must do. Also, it is logically impossible for us to freely choose to do the opposite of what God foreknows we will choose. In other words, God's omnipotence, if you want to put it in a strange/misleading way, is powerless to do the logically impossible. Christians have always agreed with that. Omnipotence, as defined by theologians, necessarily precludes the meaningless ability to meaninglessly perform the meaninglessly impossible.
MY REPLY: Nope, won’t work. The problem for YOU is, that if this ghost exists, he’s a slave to the universe and causality just like we are. He CAN’T do a great many things, nor can he be involved in everything. He’s a waste, superfluous altogether. We don’t need this idea. In order for God to exist, he must be the ultimate creator of time, space, causality, and every arrangement, and since he isn’t, but is subservient to causality just like we are, you have no ground to stand on. And I don’t care what apologists say or think is in agreement with God or not. The point it, he is limited, unable to do some things. Deal with it.
The Second Set:
YOU SAID: 1. Satan is a created being that was originally good. Leaving a knife in a playpen is irresponsible parenting because the child does not know any better than playing with the knife. Satan knew what goodness was and was free to continue to choose it. That he did not was his own choice. For there to be free will in the rational creation, as God apparently decreed, then the possibility must really be present for the devil to exercise that freedom. Finally, evil is no more a thing then coldness. When we use the term "cold" we really mean "less heat." And we cannot say that "heat" really means "less cold." As natural science uses the term there can be more or less heat but no positive coldness. And evil is a privation of the good. God created all things but evil is not a thing.
MY REPLY: So can you tell me why the loving and totally just creator of the universe saw justice in allowing a spiritually sodomizing snake to be put into his garden with his pure and precious children? By your logic, I should let some child-sodomizing wino in to see my niece and have his way with her. She’s only 2 months old, and she has freewill—about as much innocence as Adam and Eve had, and yet they were exposed to a villainous creature in total innocence with no chance of making an informed decision on things. Is that just? And no, you can’t have freewill with God because he knows the end from the beginning. You can give me no meaningful answer as to why the master of the universe had to allow a wicked creature to corrupt his ways. Why did he create that being to begin with? God knew what his actions would be. Or, if for some reason, he chooses to create him anyway, he can destroy him at the moment of disobedience and not let it spread. He needn’t let atrocities play out. And again, even this is purposeless since he knows all things beforehand anyway. And no, one need not have evil to have a choice. That’s the beauty of knowledge (or lack thereof)—one won’t follow what they don’t know, and yet choice is still intact. You don’t present damning knowledge that will be misused and result in harm, just as you don’t build a building with stares without handrails. Accountability demands no less, and yet you take a bronze age myth and try to dress it up to whitewash the creator of the universe who has more blood on his hands than any mortal or demon ever could. Sickening, truly sickening.
YOU SAID: 2. If humans are truly free than they must be able to choose evil. Period. Is it bad that we are not robots? I don't know about you but I kind of like being free. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, as you must have read in the Bible.
MY REPLY: We are robots! God knows the end from the beginning! Freewill is an illusion! Your naïve, childish mind, still obviously impressed by schoolboy arguments and lame Baconian one-liners and simplistic Christian clichés, makes you think you’ve got it all together, but you are deplorably ignorant—and arrogant.
YOU SAID: 3. You do need to have the possibility of evil to be free to choose it. God's foreknowledge is an awareness of our freewill choices not a cause of them. Freewill is by very definition an escape from the infinite maze of cause and effect.
MY REPLY: Know you don’t, as I’ve already explained. You don’t put a knife in the child’s playpen and then blame the child for unknowingly cutting himself. That’s not accountability. The creator of the universe could have fashioned an ideal environment and instilled any knowledge to allow us to live in fellowship with him. The universe must be the way the creator ultimately wanted it to be, and yet it is demonstrably improvable. Can’t have that. Stop preaching and start reasoning. Any country bumpkin Baptist preacher can say what you’re saying here.
YOU SAID: 4. An omnipotent being may only choose between a handful of options if only a handful of options are open to Him. Temptation is not a necessary prerequisite for sin. Freewill is. The angels were free to reject God, let us say, in Heaven. However, glorified Christians are apparently not free to reject God (i.e. sin against Him) in the afterlife. Why is not particularly clear to me but there is not logical contradiction in saying that a. angels and humans can sin when temptation is not present b. angels can sin in heaven and c. humans cannot sin in heaven.
MY REPLY: Stop it! You’re just trying to salvage an already logically awkward position. You can’t do it. You can’t rectify it. Just admit it doesn’t make sense, and as such, is not believable. That’s the difference between you and I—I only believe things that are believable!
YOU SAID: 5. God is not only willing and able to get rid of evil, He is right now doing so. God was free to choose to create free beings and those free beings must have the ability to choose evil. God does not want them to choose evil for He is Holy and Good but He allows it because He has no choice, if you want to speak of it this way, since He already chose for man to be free. It is not necessary that God be testing men or trying to teach them anything. He has decreed they be free and therefore there is a real possibility of evil. There is no contradiction here.
MY REPLY: They are NOT free, and even if they were, you don’t create evil as an option and then punish your children with death for utilizing an option that you yourself gave them, stupid! That’s like a hotel making one room without a floor, and when people check in, they fall through. Then, the hotel management says, “Hey, I didn’t want you to fall, but you didn’t look.” That’s not accountability, as stated. You don’t provide options that are NOT in someone’s best interest, and yet your fiendish creator has a system set up so that the majority (and not just some) will be tortured forever. That’s sick, purely sick. Your God has not gotten rid of evil. He has only made himself responsible for populating hell.
YOU SAID: 6. God is most certainly not the creator of evil for evil cannot be created for evil is the lack of the good. God did not cause this. The free will of creatures are responsible for choosing, of their own free will, to be less good than they ought to me. Do not blame God for your choice (and mine).
MY REPLY: Read my book. The Calvinists are right; God did create evil (Isaiah 45:7; Proverbs 16:4; Amos 3:6). But nevermind. By allowing his creatures to take a path that results in their peril, he created it. He’s the ultimate authority. All answer to him, which means none of this had to happen. Quit making excuses for the dictator you serve.
YOU SAID: 7. Death is the result which is the result of human, and angel, choice. If animal death is the result of human sin then it is apparently because man rules over animals and the rest of nature. The death of mere animals really is not so important. We don't want to torture them as caring human rulers. But when an animal dies it really isn't that big a deal. When a human dies, that's a big deal.
MY REPLY: As I’ve shown, you haven’t said a thing; death is God’s fault; all blame goes back to the one accountable. But you make me sick, you piece of crap! Yes, animal suffering is a terribly big deal! Your deity set up a kill-or-be-killed system that is truly agonizing, and you have no feelings for creatures not unlike yourself that feel pain just the same. I’d rather see you suffer with your heartless views than a maingy, flea-ridden dog on the street, and I’m dead serious about that. You’re a monster, a heartless, mean servant of a ruthless dictator who cares only for a few who happen to be like him. In addition to being childish, that’s just evil, sadistic even. You epitomize the inquisition-like mindset of Christianity. And besides that, you didn’t explain anything. Where’s the JUSTICE in killing animals merely because we rule over them? Care to explain that? The truth is, you have no answers. You have nothing to say. You’re just trying to bolster your weak-as-soup contentions of the typical homosapien-glorifying war-god you adore. Go home!
YOU SAID: 8. You are presenting a false dilemma (Euthyphro). It is God's essence to be a certain way. And that way we call good. God is not arbitrarily defining the good. Neither is the good higher than God since it is subsumed within His nature. There are no atrocious acts in the Bible comitted by God. (In the interest of space and in light of the fact that you'll probably be dealing with this again in your Bible subpage, I'll leave the topic for now).
MY REPLY: Bullshit. The question of WHY God holds those morals still remains. The answer you’ve given is typical, the usual dodge theists make. I won’t accept it.
YOU SAID: 9. God cannot be neither moral nor immoral for such an idea is manifestly contradictory. However, He does transcend human ethics. So He is more, and not less, than moral in the human sense of the term.
MY REPLY: Dullard! If he’s neither moral, nor immoral, then all his decisions on morality are arbitrary, which means we shouldn’t kill babies merely because God sat around and said, “Aaaah, nah, go ahead and don’t kill babies. It fancies me to make that decision.” You’ve read my article, but you haven’t really “read” it. You’re as clueless as a nineteen-year-old, self-fornicating, Campus Crusade for Christ-er who’s in denial about his sexuality.
YOU SAID: 10. People die in warfare. It is a fact of life. People that have sinned-and that includes everybody-deserve death as a matter of nature. God allows all of us to live for a time which is more than we deserve. It is ultimately man who is responsible for his own death because he sinned in spite of God's warning.
MY REPLY: No, no one deserves death or suffering, not even Hitler and not even whitewashed lackies like you. And if what you say is true, children (before they sinned) would be perfect and immortal at birth until whatever time they first sin, at which point, they’d become like the rest of us. But it isn’t like that, is it? You can’t explain why. You know nothing. You are nothing. And you spread a message that terrorizes mankind.
YOU SAID: 11. If a reasonably intelligent adult goes to Hell, it is not for disbelief per se. Instead, it is for not accepting Jesus. It there is only one way of escape and one does not take it, of course they must be damned. Though, of course, this deeply grieves the heart of God. "But how can one accept a Jesus they don't believe in," might be asked. I am going to say something which may sound incredulous but I stand by it. Namely, that God exists is absolutely certain, logically speaking, and that Christianity alone is the true religion of that God is beyond a reasonable doubt. And I may still legitimately hold to this controversial view after reading "Problems with 'Proving' God" elsewhere on this website.
MY REPLY: You are so naïve and childish. I’m almost speechless! No one can deserve eternal punishment, and no one can “offend” an infinitely powerful being, can they? It’s like putting a dent in truly impenetrable metal. It can’t be done. You are just another idealist who thinks he has the right way. I have no time for you, and when I get done posting these answers, it is seriously doubtful if I’ll continue any correspondence with you. I have no time for someone who is so young and idealistic that they think everybody will be logically led to come around to their way of thinking “beyond a reasonable doubt.” That’s silliness. Why isn’t the knowledge of God inherent in everyone if what you say is true, and there is “no excuse”? If he is omnipresent, why is there ever ANY doubt of his existence? Have you stopped to think of that at all?
YOU SAID: 12. An atheist is a person who believes there is no God (though you would probably say that you merely lack belief in God). God certainly believes in His own existence. Cogito ergo sum. C. S. Lewis well said that the door out of Hell is locked from the inside.
MY REPLY: This is laughable…God believing in his own existence! I guess he also baptizes himself too! Damn, you are funny! You read my whole article and didn’t get the gist of any of it! And C.S. Lewis is as clueless as you. He sickens me just the same. No matter how you try to square it, you can’t; if the door out of hell is locked from the inside, why was the room created to begin with, masochist?
YOU SAID: Some final thoughts. God, as you have presented Him here, seems to be very different from God as He is in the Bible (whether you admit He exists or not). Second, naturalism is too impoverished a philosophy to be taken seriously by men according to Lewis (and I agree with him). Thirdly, Joe, and finally, I get the impression that while you may be sincere in your new found atheism, you have been deeply hurt by hypocritical "fundamentalism." Why do I say this? The tone of your "Questions for God." For example, speaking of prayer as spiritual masturbation sounds like you are intentionally trying to be blasphemous because you are, apparently, angry. If you were deeply hurt by a person, or group of persons, in ultraconservatism then my heart goes out to you. The scares of one's own familiar friends cut the deepest. Such hypocrisy is clearly condemned in Scripture, as you know, and does not demonstrate the loving footsteps of our Lord. I challenge you to search your heart with the question, "do I really have intellectual problems with true Christian faith, or is my new found skepticism just an emotional/psychological smokescreen?" If you are fully persuaded that you do have legitimate intellectual objections then my heart still goes out to you. Atheists can be moral and happy and fulfilled, perhaps, but I know that my own faith is a very important part of my life. If I were to wake up one morning and decide to stop believing (if that is possible) it feel to me as if my heart had been ripped out of my body. You had a similar experience? At any rate, I do believe in God, and so, as you know, I consider all unbelievers to be in dire straits.
MY REPLY: Your elitism is a joke. Your talking snake theory is the impoverished one. No, no one hurt me, and when I attack God I do so bluntly and plainly. I make no apologies for it. You’re a childish, naïve, arrogant, and woefully unwise little guy with about as much wisdom as a cucumber. I do hope you grow up. I’m not in dire straits, or if I am, I know there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve fought my battles with the tyranny and fear your god instills, and I’m done fearing ghosts. I grew up. You should too.
(JH)
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