On the Coyness of God

I’m fairly certain, if God is indeed maximally good and therefore would do everything he could to draw people, free agents, towards him, the greatest good, that logically, the best option would be to reveal himself not just occasionally, but always so that there can be no doubt as to his existence.

For though the heart of the atheist and other non-believers may be hard, and their minds closed off, I’m fairly certain even Dawkins and Osama Bin-Laden would have gotten on their knees and prayed for forgiveness and most likely would NOT have even needed to do so if God was always undeniably present.

What deficiencies, if any, are there on this option

 

Have you ever been an atheist? I was. I would have defied God to his face, and blasphemed the Holy Spirit. I solemnly assure you that I would have. The coyness of God is the only thing that saved from the one thing the Bible clearly says is an unforgivable sin.

The only real doubts about God’s existence come from sin, from a psychological unwillingness to face facts. God is abundantly, transcendentally, painfully obvious even to pagans — because otherwise they would not have bothered inventing gods if they did not know, deep down, that they were made for worship, designed by a designer, built by a builder.

Modern atheism springs from the wealth and plenty of the industrial revolution, men who think they can live without God, who then go looking for excuses, flimsy ones, not to believe in Him: Marx, Darwin, Freud.

1. Marxism looks for an unthinking and inanimate set of forces, call the material dialectic, to explain the fall of man, the progress of history, and the eventual restoration of paradise, all without God. But history is either an unplanned and undirected series of events, or it is a story. Marx attempted to make it a story, with a beginning (primitive communism) a middle (capitalism) and an end (worker’s paradise of socialism) but without a storyteller. That is a contradiction in terms a child can see.

2. Darwin looks for an explanation of the origin of species and the teleology of the parts of animals, that is, to explain their design and the perfect fittedness of each organ to its purpose without a designer. He wants creation without a Creator in the same way Marx wants a story without a storyteller. What his theory predicts is not borne out by the evidence around us: where are the birds who only build half a nest, or the newt with only half an eye, who are halfway to evolving real nests and real eyes? Those things that are presented as transitional or preevolutionary halfway marks, such as light-sensitive spots or bird who mash down grass without weaving a proper nest, still evince a teleology, a that-for-the-sake-of-which, which the bird or critter in question did not himself decide or determine. Either the organs and instincts are purposeless, or there is purpose in nature. But nature cannot hold a purpose unless nature is an intelligent being, that is, a being capable of making self aware decisions, which is what a purpose is.

3. Freud thought to explain, or, rather, explain away the conscience, sin and soul of men by means of fairy tales given austere Greek names. The concept of a ‘subconscious’ is a contradiction in terms: it means the part of our awareness of which we are unaware. Rather than speak of sin, be spoke of Id; rather than speak of soul, he spoke of Ego; rather than speak of conscience, he spoke of Superego, which he characterized as merely tyrannous, unthinking, negative, the source of all mental illness. His solution for madness was to urge people to indulge their impulses whether good or bad. What a boatload of rot.

Marxism and Darwinism and Freudianism are science fiction stories just as much as anything penned by HG Wells.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.