Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised by the New Atheists

by Sean McDowell

Concerning the Old Testament, it is beyond dispute that slaves in Israel had a “degree of status, rights, and protection unheard of elsewhere.”

Influence takes time and moral progress is often painfully slow.*

DOES ATHEISM NATURALLY LEAD TO HUMAN DIGNITY AND EQUALITY?

The Bible unequivocally teaches universal human dignity and equality because all are made in the image of God.

If you remove God from the equation, you also remove inherent human dignity and equality.

Atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (who was carefully read by Adolf Hitler) explains: Equality is a lie concocted by inferior people who arrange themselves in herds to overpower those who are naturally superior to them. The morality of “equal rights” is herd morality, and because it opposes the cultivation of superior individuals, it leads to the corruption of the human species.20

What is most needed is the transformation of the human condition. And that, in stark contrast to the worldview of atheism, is exactly what Jesus of Nazareth offers.

Eagleton is an agnostic and Marxist who has written a book-length critique of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (who he refers to as “Ditchkins”) in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate,

If such a dignity-endowing Creator doesn’t exist and if nature is all there is, it’s hard to make sense of the rights assumed by our legal system and historic moral reforms

So, whether you are new to Christianity or have read the Bible for years, we want to be crystal clear that the point of Christianity is not to avoid hell, but to enjoy the presence of God now and forevermore.*

intellectual honesty and the principle of charity compel us to play by the rules of language.

So, if heaven is where people become fully human, then hell is the ultimate disintegration of what it means to be human.

The darkness refers to the complete absence of relationship in hell.

the essence of hell is relational.

hell is a place where people “pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power.”

The source of anguish is the awareness that floods in from the absence of this fundamental relationship.

Modern people inevitably think hell works like this:

To lose his presence totally, that would be hell—the loss of our capability for giving or receiving love or joy.

Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others … but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God “sending us” to Hell. In each of us there is something growing, which will be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.14

Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: “What if when we die we don’t end, but spiritually our life extends on into eternity?” Hell, then, is the trajectory of a soul, living a self-absorbed, self-centered life, going on and on forever.

The purpose of creation was relationship with our Creator. And the possibility of relationship requires the choice to love or not to love.

Hitchens seems to have a picture of God as a divine sadist.

However, as we have already seen, people won’t be roasting over open flames in hell. But does God actively inflict pain on those in hell for eternity? No place in the Bible indicates that he does. In fact, the image of God as a divine torturer is utterly inconsistent with the clear teaching of Scripture:

But the anguish people experience in hell is completely of their own design; flows out of their own characters, actions, and regrets; and is proportional to their choices given the information they had in life.

But it needs to be emphasized that God is not punishing people while in hell because his presence has been finally and fully withdrawn. Hell is defined by what is not there and can never be again.

If God Is Loving, Then Why Can’t He Just Forgive Everyone?

In contrast to Hitchens’s conception of a capricious and sadistic God, if you carefully examine the narrative of Scripture in context and grant that humans have been given significant freedom with which to do good or evil, then God’s wrath is consistent with his other attributes of love and justice.*

Is it just for God to punish an innocent person? James Taylor has a helpful comment on this: “Since Jesus is God the Son, he is not merely an innocent human being who was sacrificed in place of the guilty. He is the one wronged by human sinners. As such, it is his prerogative to choose mercifully to endure the penalty owed to him by those who wronged him. Moreover, as a human being who lived a life of complete obedience to the Father, Jesus is the perfect one to represent the entire human race in paying the penalty of sin. Therefore, it is both that justice was served (the penalty was paid by someone who had the right to pay it) and that the sacrifice was effective (since Jesus paid the penalty, those who trust in Christ are saved from having to pay it themselves).”

“I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.”

The Great Divorce.

http://www.redeemer.com/news_and_events/articles/the_importance_of_hell.html

WHY HELL IS LOVING AND NECESSARY

But Hitchens admits that he doesn’t want to go to heaven, even if it exists. Why not? Because heaven would be “hell” to him. He doesn’t want to be in God’s presence here on Earth, so why would he want to be with God in eternity?

But why forever? First, it wouldn’t be right of God to annihilate unbelievers.

God cannot annihilate his own image.

God’s ideal in creation can best be expressed in the Hebrew word shalom.

The webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight is what the Hebrew prophets call shalom. We call it peace, but it means far more than mere peace of mind between enemies. In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.5

God is, after all, not arbitrarily offended. God hates sin not just because it violates his law but, more substantively, because it violates shalom, because it breaks the peace, because it interferes with the way things are supposed to be…. We may safely describe evil as any spoiling of shalom, whether physically (e.g., by disease), morally, spiritually, or otherwise.

Any discussion of events regarding war, injustice, or humanity’s evil intentions and actions must take this backdrop seriously.

As such, Christians are justified in incorporating the relevant biblical resources in response. We are also right to point out that the New Atheists’ condemnation of God’s actions and commands makes use of an objective moral standard they have been unable to adequately justify,

as well as care for any women and children that had not fled.*

ISRAEL WAS A THEOCRACY AND YAHWEH SANCTIONED PARTICULAR WARS

But by no means are all the wars in the Old Testament portrayed in the same way as the conquest of Canaan.

So the conquest of Canaan, as a unique and limited historical event, was never meant to become a model for how all future generations were to behave toward their contemporary enemies.

the conquest of Canaan is not analogous to Islamic jihad and was inappropriately used to justify wars like the Crusades that involved Christians.

GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING ARE INACCURATE TERMS FOR THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN

Molech was a Canaanite underworld deity represented as an upright, bull-headed idol with human body in whose belly a fire was stoked and in whose arms a child was placed that would be burnt to death. It was not just unwanted children who were sacrificed. Plutarch reports that during the Phoenician (Canaanite) sacrifices, “the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries and wailing should not reach the ears of the people.”

The conquest of the land of Canaan “is repeatedly portrayed as God acting in judgment on a wicked and degraded society and culture—as God would do again and again in Old Testament history, including against Israel itself.”

“It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”

God later used the nations of Assyria and Babylon to judge Israel for their wickedness and idolatry with even more severity than what occurred in the conquest.