GUESSING ABOUT GOD (Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief Book 1)

by David Madison

Electricity comes to mind, but this provides no analogy for God, since electricity can be generated, measured, stored, bought, sold, shipped, and verified. We don’t have to take it on faith that electricity exists.

why do theologians need to keep pumping the idea of the mystery of God? Why are believers exhorted to revel in the hiddenness of God? There’s a simple answer to all these questions: God is invisible and silent because he does not exist.

God is invisible and silent but not transparent. In other words, God has a problem with clear, contemporary self-disclosure.

The burden of proof operates in exactly the opposite way that believers assume. The burden of proof rests on those who believe.

The burden of proof ALWAYS lies with the side making the positive claim

Non-believers are not obliged to demonstrate that God doesn’t exist, any more than you would be obligated to prove a neighbor’s imaginary dragon did not exist.

The burden of proof ALWAYS lies with the side making the positive claim

It gets mighty suspicious when believers buckle under the pressure of questions and brush them aside impatiently, sometimes contemptuously, and say that we just have to “take it on faith”

One of the reasons to question the extent to which we have authentic words of Jesus in the Gospels is that very few people in his audiences would have known how to write them down even if they wanted to.

Since, for most centuries since Jesus died, the majority of the population couldn’t read or had limited access to books, why would an all-knowing God think self-revelation through a book was a good idea? For 1,500 years or so after the death of Jesus, God’s holy book remained inaccessible to most everybody except Christian priests who did the reading and interpretation of the book. Does this sound like a plan designed by the “God of the Universe”?

there’s the question of which holy book is sacred. Christians give no credence to the Qur’an or to the Book of Mormon. In their view, those books do not qualify as revelation. How did they make that decision?

Delusion and cognitive dissonance

Christians don’t seem to be all in with their belief in revelation via sacred text. Once they bump into the books of Leviticus and Numbers11 with their strange commandments, believers hem and haw.

The portions of the Bible discounted by modern Christians are an implicit admission that the status of revelation is reserved for the parts they like.

When reviewing the Bible with a critical eye, it’s hard not to think that God’s skills as an author or an off-site editor fall far short of what we would expect of an omni-competent being.

If he left his comfortable perch “outside time and space” to inspire a few dozen authors to write a 1,000+ page tome, why not give us a head start on understanding something as important as why we get sick?

Why didn’t God drop hints about how to prevent infant deaths?14

Mankind has been engaged in a long struggle to understand nature and our place in it. Why couldn’t God have given us a massive book about biology, astronomy, cosmology, agriculture, and oceanography. If God inspired the Bible, he has utterly failed as mankind’s mentor in teaching us how the world works.

how do we know if the resurrected Jesus actually appeared or spoke to Paul? Apparently, there was no doubt about this for Paul, and most Christians are fine with just taking it on faith that Paul’s visions were the real thing. But where and how do we draw the line?

Believers seem to easily put themselves in the position of doubting the visions claimed by other faiths and other versions of their own faith. It’s their default position. The Jews don’t recognize the divinity of Jesus. The Muslims don’t recognize that the Jews are the Chosen People. And none of them recognizes the visions claimed by other religions.

Any Christian who claims that visions are valid, that they are a way for God to communicate with humans, must provide evidence that visions are not simply a product of brain chemistry. And reasons for rejecting the visions of other religions and denominations must be provided.

Christianity: the belief that a god created a universe 13.75 billion light years across, containing 200 billion to as many as two trillion galaxies, each of which contains an average of more than 100 billion stars, just so he could have a personal relationship with you.

The arrogance and clear narcissism is actually sickening

You can’t posit that God is outside space and time while simultaneously claiming that human brains, which exist very much in both space and time, have a means of breaking that barrier.

Well herp de derp you sure can if you claim god can do anything. It's such a copout.

Where is any evidence that the lump of living tissue in our skulls is an instrument for communicating with an invisible-but-not-imaginary being?

If prayer is an authentic means by which God communicates information to humans, then it is exceedingly strange that Christians — who talk to God on a regular basis — disagree about so many things.

It is almost like the whole thing is made up

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” Susan B. Anthony said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”

With no data about God, relying so heavily on speculation, what could they possibly agree on? And how could their speculations be counted as proofs? Their very lack of agreement is evidence that theology long has been running on empty.

Many believers have been burned at the stake because they happened to be on the wrong side of the right theology in power.

For all his admirable knowledge of science, Haught ultimately makes his living by coming up with answers that are in line with dogma. He is guided by what worshippers want to hear.

that side of God’s being which cannot be fully represented in personalistic terms, may help us to make some sense of the “scandal” of the divine hiddenness.28 I couldn’t have used a better word than scandal. But he thinks there’s a way around it because of “the transpersonal dimensions of God’s life.” How do theologians learn to talk like this? Why are they allowed to get away with such gibberish, even in academia?

The Little Engine finally succeeds: “I knew I could!” But theologians have never made it to the top of the hill. They convince no one outside their narrow preserves and the pious church folks who pay their salaries. They may have studied and prayed and meditated far more than ordinary people, but that doesn’t mean they’ve tapped into divine reality.

The “wisdom of the theologians” as a source of knowledge about God is no such thing.

The respected and revered religious thinkers of the various faith traditions inspire awe because they’ve mastered dogma and can sound like they know the an...

As the physician Lewis Thomas writes, “The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth century science has been the discovery of human ignorance.”

Our ignorance, Ferris notes, “has always been with us, and always will be. What is new is our awareness of it, our awakening to its fathomless dimensions, and it is this, more than anything else, that marks the coming of age of our species.”

But we have not been able to compare notes with any other thinkers in the Milky Way, to say nothing of all those other galaxies. We are profoundly isolated. So how can we be so confident about our ideas of deity?

Perhaps some super-advanced means of travel will be invented. In the meantime, our isolation is absolute, and our ignorance is staggering. Theologians should take the hint. Our knowledge of the Cosmos is threadbare, and we have seen that all of the ways to know God claimed by religious believers — revelation, visions, prayers — are evidence only of what’s going on inside human heads.

“A further difficulty,” Christopher Hitchens pointed out, “…is the apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of the Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition...”

One can make a case that the intellectual adventure of ancient man stalled with the emergence of monotheism, especially the version preached by the apostle Paul, who detested curiosity and learning. He warned the Corinthians that the “wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

reality is what happens outside the patient’s head. In trying to figure out God, should we rely on revelations, visions, prayers, and all of those other religious sensations that take place inside our human heads?

How could a deity competent enough to create this Universe — if he/she/it has any interest of being known or listened to — be such a massively poor communicator that we are left GUESSING ABOUT GOD.

In Western monotheism, a book — well, different books, depending on which monotheism you believe in — can be trusted to deliver God information.

The Bible’s validity can’t be derived from the Bible itself. Gripping the Bible on your knees in the moonlight — even on a mountain like Moses — and waiting for a soothing “there, there” from the Holy Spirit is, in my view, simplistic self-indulgence. It falls far short of a rigorous, unbiased pursuit of truth for truth’s sake.

Anyone can choose to believe the Bible is a divine book, but those outside the circle of believers want and deserve to see evidence that such faith in a book is warranted. There must be an ironclad case to begin with that the Bible can be trusted.

Proving the Bible’s authenticity by quoting from the Bible is closed-loop reasoning.

If you don’t believe in the Bible to begin with, its authority is likewise null and void. Building a belief that the Bible is the Word of God based on verses from the Bible is not a valid authentication.

The theists, in fact, are among those who deny that the Word of God comes in book form — when it’s the other guy’s book. They are like kids in a playground taunting others, “My book is holier than yours!”

They may go so far as to ridicule the desire for certainty and declare that anyone who won’t make the leap of faith and simply believe that God is the author of the Bible is guilty of spiritual cowardice. But we can reply that it is also possible that faith may prompt or manipulate believers to accept products of imagination or even hallucinations as revelations from God.

Is it true that an ancient author was moved directly by God to write, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son?”7 If so, then why on Earth during the 14th century, when the Black Plague was killing a quarter of the population between India and Iceland, didn’t God whisper in a few ears, “It’s the fleas!” That piece of information, planted in a few thousand minds, could have reduced human agony significantly.

when Job questioned God’s goodness, God chastened him, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”8 This is the ultimate “because I’m the daddy, that’s why” response.

unless you’re picking and choosing selected passages — so much of it is so tedious. So much of it has little, if any, relevance to our lives today.

The truth is that no lay person could begin to understand the dense ramblings of the Bible without a lot of tutoring provided by theologians and local ministers. And as I’ve mentioned earlier, even the experts are arguing with one another over what the Bible means.

At the end of the story, he’s in a drunken stupor for two nights in a row and gets seduced by his daughters. Thus, he fathered his own grandsons. Oops, where does this tale fit into the scheme of traditional family values? Fundamentalist Bible believers are trapped by such stories.