Introduction

When it comes to arguments for atheism, that is, arguments for the non-existence of God, [1] none are considered so compelling as the Problem of Evil category of arguments—not only by atheists but for some reason also by many Christians. It is my contention that such a state of affairs exists for one overriding reason: that much of the general public (atheists and Christians alike) have not been taught how and therefore don’t know how to evaluate arguments critically. Starting around the turn of the last century and persisting to present day, as a society we all at once fell for the seductive allowances of postmodernism, shifted our obligations from family and society to radical individualism, and laid out a minefield of political correctness that a person dares trespass only on pain of being ostracized. “To argue for truth today is to stir an immediate debate,” noted Ravi Zacharias, “as if a heresy of devilish proportions has been invoked.”

So critical thinking skills, as instruments of evaluating truth claims and arguments, have incrementally lost value as items for our mental toolbox—especially since almost by definition they imply the existence of objective truths. If truth claims don’t or can’t describe reality objectively, always falling short of the task for one reason or another, then the tools for discerning objective truth claims grow rusty from disuse. Much more can be said on this, however I don’t wish to digress.

But for those who know what ‘validly’ means and how to reason accordingly, those who can tell the difference between an assumption and a conclusion, who are familiar with and can recognize errors in reasoning (fallacies), the more we interact with arguments for atheism the more we discover that none of them validly prove the non-existence of God, including the Problem of Evil versions. For a constellation of other reasons, I think this is why Greg Koukl, in his most recent Mentoring Letter, encouraged subscribers to engage criticisms head-on. “Sometimes it’s better to move towards an objection rather than away from it, to embrace a charge rather than run from it,” he writes. “In other words, don’t run from the problem; run towards it and defuse it. Don’t evade; invade.  Embrace it, undermine its relevance, and take the wind out of its sails.” [2]

In an effort to evaluate my position under the fire of critical scrutiny, I have recently begun engaging in a series of debates on Problem of Evil arguments for atheism, where my opponent is invited to defend whatever version thereof he or she feels best proves the non-existence of God. This article shall examine the first of these debates, which took place at the Debate.org web site. [3] As these debates conclude, at that site or some other location (e.g., message board, email, etc.), I will post another article here at the Aristophrenium evaluating the results thereof. Until it is defeated—assuming it even can be—I will continue to maintain my resolution, that “there are literally no versions of the Problem of Evil argument that succeed at proving the non-existence of God.”

Note: In all my arguments, on this and any other matter, the term ‘God’ always refers to God as revealed in Christian scripture canon (viz. the 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament) and possessing all the commonly recognized attributes thereof (e.g., trinitarian, omnipotent, righteous, sovereign, etc.). I have no interest in defending, nor do I even recognize the legitimacy of, any deity other than the God of Christian theism.

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Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (1974), p. 119.

The word ‘Christian’ today is more of a soporific than a slogan. So much—too much—is Christian: churches, schools, political parties, cultural associations, and of course Europe, the West, the Middle Ages, to say nothing of the ‘Most Christian King’—a title conferred by Rome where, incidentally, they prefer other attributes (‘Roman’, ‘Catholic’, ‘Roman Catholic’, ‘ecclesiastical’, ‘holy’) which they can then, without more ado, simply equate with ‘Christian’. [However,] inflation of the concept of ‘Christian’ leads like all inflation to devaluation.

Student refuses assignment on Devil

Granted, this is typically Mathew’s arena but I could not pass it up, being unsure that it was even on his radar out there in Australia. Every day there are countless stories of interest regarding society and culture with respect to Christian living, which I hear in my corner of the world on FamilyNet Radio (Sirius XM). Today I heard that in Hope Mills, North Carolina, there was a female student who was coerced with a failing grade on an assignment if she refused to complete it. However, she said the assignment violated her Christian beliefs.

Even though Tieanna Trough is an honour student and usually positive about school work, the report said, when she received an assignment to write a paper on making a deal with the Devil, she refused. “I believe you don’t write about how to sell your soul to the Devil,” she said.

According to CBN Newswatch, the assignment

was part of a creative writing class at Gray’s Creek High School meant to get students thinking. Students had been studying a short-story called The Devil and Tom Walker, about a miser who sold his soul to the Devil to get rich. The students were told to write an essay on how they would sell their souls to the Devil, or what trade they would make with the Devil.

When Trough refused to write the essay, she said her teacher offered her a lousy deal: either do it, or get a zero. Trough’s parents said their daughter’s rights were violated. They complained to school officials after Trough was given another assignment that still conflicted with their daughter’s beliefs.

“We can’t allow God into the classrooms, but yet we’re going to allow the Devil in the classroom? That’s the way I felt,” her mother said.

The book and its short-stories are standard curriculum material, the school principal John Gibbs said. “I don’t think it’s anything wrong. I mean, parents are going to do what they think is correct and, y’know, I respect that. We can sit down and talk about what we think is right.”

He doesn’t think it’s anything wrong? What if, in the context of English literature, the students were asked to write something about their soul with respect to God? Would the principal think something was wrong in that scenario? If engaging the creative minds of the students with respect to the Devil is okay, could God sneak into the classroom through the same backdoor entrance? Or is that the point at which we would discover a zealous display of Special Pleading?

And if a student refuses an assignment on the grounds that it violates her religious beliefs and the teacher responds by threatening to fail her on the assignment, does the principal really think there’s nothing wrong there? Really?

It is almost impossible to respond to this:

Once honored for voicing substantive theology in the Reformed tradition, Union Theological Seminary’s 2010 Sprunt Lectures will feature a feminist speaker who favors replacing the cross with a lactating breast.

I couldn’t make that up if I tried. The feminist speaker in question is Margaret Miles, who said that despite the claim by theologians “that crucifixion scenes exhibited the extremity of God’s love for humans, it was scenes of the child sucking at the breast that spoke to people on the basis of their earliest experience.” She suggests that the cross is inappropriate as a symbol of God’s love because “it presents a violent act as salvific.”

The article tells that Union Theological Seminary is one of eleven seminaries that are officially related to the PCUSA. That actually explains a lot.

You can read the whole article here.

(Thanks to Mathew for pointing out the incorrect URL.)

I don’t tire of saying it, Akshay is simply one of the most insightful well-articulated obscure young(?) Christian thinkers in the blogosphere.

I’ve been told more times than I’d like to have heard it that religion is the root of all war. The people who say this are generally people who believe that religion is irrelevant, unscientific, illogical and unreliable – the kind of stuff that weak people need to believe in so that they can cajole their insecurities, calm their restless fears and play the sacrificial host to their nagging superstitions – the kind of stuff that helps you sleep at night.

Their views of religion aside, I find it naive and somewhat ignorant that one would assume that religion was the root of all war. Naive, because it assumes that man would not go to war if not for religious beliefs. Ignorant, because it negates all the war and violence in history that was initiated by the most non-religious of men. [eg. Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin]

Men go to war because men have war in their hearts. Religion may fuel the fire, but I find it naive to think that religion started the fire. If there was no religion, would not men fight for the color of their skin, for their place on the ladder of social class, for the borders of their countries, for the expansion of their kingdoms, for the establishment of their non-religious dogmas? Have they not gone to war for those very reasons in the past?

To take religion out of the picture would only mean that there was one less reason/excuse in the world for men to go to war. The fact that men go to war is not the failure of religion. It is the failure of man. It is his greed, his pride, his stubborn rebellion against reason and his insatiable hunger for glory. To fail to recognize that, is to fail to confront ourselves as a people. To fail to confront ourselves, is to set the stage for a world at war with itself. With or without religion.

http://whereisakshay.blogspot.com/2007/10/at-head-of-every-sword.html

Sorry misotheists, I know this is news to you but religion is not to blame; certainly no more than skin colour or social class systems are to blame. Because without all these things men would still have war in their hearts. Religion is not the reason for wars or the cause of our ills. It doesn’t poison everything as one of the four horsemen of the new-atheist apocalypse puts it. Far from it. You see, it’s not skin colour; it’s pride. It’s not social classes or land; it’s greed. It’s not religion; it’s man. Man is to blame. Man and every wicked thing within his heart. The rest is just an excuse. It’s fluff. And as soon as you take your focus off the man to point the finger elsewhere, you’ve taken your eye off the real instigator.

The other day I was accused of being something that, to be honest, I hadn’t heard of before (and I’ve heard a lot different accusations!). It’s a seemingly innocuous term and at first I puzzled at what it meant. The term and accusation that was levelled at me was that I was pro-birth. Notice I wasn’t accused of being pro-life – which is ordinarily how I would label myself and am quite comfortable to be accused of being – but pro-birth. This arose out of a discussion that had developed over the course of a few of days (via Twitter) on the subject of abortion – a discussion which has been interesting and which I will go into further in a separate post (soon to be published) – but on the branding of the term pro-birth, I had to pause.

Shortly, it occurred to me that the term was to mean a world view which would hold that – under every circumstance of pregnancy – the mother must bear the child to full term; that the mother must birth the child, no matter what. It then occurred to me that the term is used as a euphemism for someone who forces their view onto others (namely, in this instance, that a pregnant woman must give birth), effectively making (forcing) an un-welcomed decision onto another, inhibiting their freedom of choice. In a nut shell, being pro-birth “robs” women of their choice.

I’d like to think that I’m open to the criticisms that come my way (I try to look at them as opportunities for self-evaluation and improvement; I also think this is a biblically sound manner in which to live a Christian life and certainly appears to be the psalmist’s approach (Ps 139:24)), hence, I pondered the pro-birth label for a while and searched inward to see if there was truth to it.

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“Baby killer’s day out from prison to go shopping”

“Baby killer let out to visit mall”

Just two of the many headlines from several pages of The Daily Telegraph’s (DT) diatribe on Friday 26th June 2009 rallying against the supervised shopping trip of one Phillip King, who was imprisoned after he “killed his own baby son in a fit of rage when he punched and kicked Kylie Flick’s stomach after she refused to have an abortion”, the DT reports.

“He didn’t steal a car, he stole a life”, was one expression used by Kylie Flick to express her anguish over the memory of the birth of her stillborn son, whom she Christened Jonathan.

The DT also point out that Ms Flick’s son “never drew breath” – a seemingly redundant piece of information – and that King’s “horrific 2002 crime led to a new law with a maximum 25-year jail term for people for people who kill a foetus…”

This attack by the media you might say is fair game. He did take the life of a defenseless human being after all, and injured several others both physically and emotionally in the process. So why shouldn’t the media have their pound of flesh? Well it’s the inconsistent way that they go about it that irks me. Here are some more of the headlines and comments from the same articles.

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For those whose lives revolve around apologetics and iPod’s there’s always the Apologetics 315 MEGA-mp3 page!

Aiden Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, Ch. 19. [PDF]

To ‘abound’ in sin: that is the worst and the most we could or can do. The word ‘abound’ defines the limit of our finite abilities; and although we feel our iniquities rise over us like a mountain, the mountain nevertheless has definable boundaries. It is only so large, only so high, it weighs only this certain amount and no more. But who shall define the limitless grace of God? Its “much more” plunges our thoughts into infinitude and confounds them there. All thanks be to God for grace abounding. We who feel ourselves alienated from the fellowship of God can now raise our discouraged heads and look up. Through the virtues of Christ’s atoning death, the cause of our banishment has been removed. We may return as the Prodigal returned and be welcome.

Below is a powerful five-minute scene from an episode of the TV Series ER aptly titled Atonement (watch from about 0:50 to 3:20). It depicts a conversation between a dying man seeking real forgiveness from a real God and a woman trying to respond to this need with the typical inclusive/pluralistic placebos that permeate our culture today, especially regarding religious issues.

Some notable quotes include:

. . . all I’m hearing is some new age “God is love” one-size-fits-all crap.

. . . I want a real chaplain who believes in a real God and a real Hell.

. . . I need answers, and all your questions and your uncertainty are only making things worse.

. . . I need someone who will look me in the eye and tell me how to find forgiveness, because I am running out of time!

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“We have turned God from the one we fear, to the one we’d like to have coffee with” – Al Stewart
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If nothing else, this short scene serves to give hope to those of us who during our obedience to Christ, have never come into contact with someone who honestly recognizes their dire situation before a holy and just God and genuinely seeks the hope of forgiveness that we know is only available through Jesus Christ.

Exhibit A . . .

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For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more – Heb 8:12
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It stands to reason that there are many people out there who have similarly grown weary of the lies and the postmodern “God is whoever you want him to be” gobbledegook. If by God’s will you find yourself speaking to such a person, make sure you’re ready to tell them the good news. Forgiveness and redemption are possible, but only through Jesus Christ, who lived the life that you could not live, who died the death that you should have died and who rose in triumphant victory over Satan, sin and death, so that you can have a relationship with God that is no longer marred by sin.

[Post edited by Duane: 17th Feb 2010]