God under attack
abracad, · Categories: reviews, spiritualityThe recently published God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens is the latest in a long series of attacks on the concept of God.
One of its more prominent predecessors is The God Delusion by acclaimed Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, backed up by a national television series in the UK.
In the days before mass education it was easy to use the pulpit image of a judgemental God to keep the ignorant masses under control. Be god, work hard and there's a place in heaven waiting, but step over the line and it's eternal damnation.
These days such ideas are rightly condemned as superstitious nonsense. What loving father could possibly watch his children suffer as so many do on earth, especially when much of that suffering is inflicted by the hands of his other children, and even more especially when much of this is done in the name of "God" (witness the "war on terror" aka Christendom vs Islam!). That's not a God many would want to be associated with.
Science has given us cars and planes, microwaves and refrigerators, TVs and stereos, cell phones and the Internet... It's cured many of the ailments that once killed us. Who needs the white-bearded old man on a cloud any more, especially when he doesn't seem to lift a finger to solve our problems.
Science is indeed king. But... only within its own domain the 4-dimensional world of space-time composed of matter and energy. Here it reigns supreme. Trouble is there's more to reality than this. It can't explain our Spiritual dimension, the myriad accounts of anomalous phenomena experienced throughout history and now being confirmed in the scientist's laboratories. It can't explain why we've long felt the need to follow religions/superstitions (depending on your point of view) or to express our most abstract thoughts through art, literature and music.
Even science recognizes its own limitations. In studying the origind of the universe the equations break down at a certain point in what's known as singularities. The single most successful theory of quantum mechanics is based on an inherent randomness (or indeterminacy).
No, God isn't always good (whatever good may mean), because in incarnating we are possessed of free will. If God were to intervene every time we had trouble we'd sure have an easy ride, but we would learn nothing, and would be no more than automata acting out a script. In short our earthly existence would be pointless.
One answer to Dawkins and Hitchens is offered by Dawkins' fellow Oxford professor and scientific theologian, Alister McGrath in The Dawkins Delusion.
If you read Dawkins, Hitchens or both, in the interest of balance you owe it to yourself to read McGrath.
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