Category: theodicy

New York Times touts tired old Christian theology

April 19, 2019 • 10:02 am

Well, this Sunday is Easter, and so it’s time to hear about how and why Jesus died for our sins, and why. Here we have an answer in The New York Times, penned Peter Wehner, a man identified this way:

Peter Wehner (@Peter Wehner) a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer, as well as the author of the forthcoming book, “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.”

 

The crucifixion and Resurrection, as the central myth of Christianity, have always been a mystery to me, for it seems bizarre that God would have used such a tortuous scenario to convince us of his presence and his love. And I am not all that convinced that there was even a real person on whom the Jesus myth was modeled. But I am as certain as can be that any such person was not divine, was not the son of God/incarnation of God, and was not resurrected.

Yes, the crucifixion and resurrection could be a metaphor for eternal life: something that reassures Christians that this brief span on Earth is not all we have, for Jesus himself, who was part human, did come back to life. But Wehner says that it’s more than this.  It actually happened, and the fact that it happened brings Wehner enduring peace as an “interpretive prism.”

But there’s the rub, for if it’s more than a symbol, and actually happened, then for Wehner there must be evidence for it. He considers himself a skeptical person riddled with doubts, and yet he accepts the whole megillah without doubt.

Yet even if it happened, there are still questions.  Why, if God wanted us to believe and be saved, hasn’t he sent Jesus back to us? After all, he said (in Matthew 16:28): Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.  Did the Son of man come into his kingdom when we weren’t looking?

I won’t belabor this article, which is nothing more than one fervent Christian saying how inspired and moved he is by the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also recounting the same old reasons why it happened. So Wehner trots out the same old explanations. These quotes come directly from his article:

  • “Perhaps the aspect of the crucifixion that is easiest to understand is that according to Christian theology, atonement is the means through which human beings — broken, fallen, sinful — are reconciled to God. The ideal needed to be sacrificed for the non-ideal, the worthy for the unworthy.”
  • “’I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross,’ John Stott, one of the most important Christian evangelists of the last century, wrote in The Cross of Christ. ‘The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?’ From the perspective of Christianity, one can question why God allows suffering, but one cannot say God doesn’t understand it. He is not remote, indifferent, untouched or unscarred.”
  • “Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., and a lifelong friend, pointed out to me that on the cross God was reconciling the world to himself — but God was also, perhaps, reconciling himself to the world. The cross is not only God’s way of saying we are not alone in our suffering, but also that God has entered into our suffering through his own suffering. . .What God offers instead is the promise that he is with us in our suffering; that he can bring good out of it (life out of death, forgiveness out of sin); and that one day he will put a stop to it and redeem it. God, Revelation tells us, will make ‘all things new.’ For now, though, we are part of a drama unfolding in a broken world, one in which God chose to become a protagonist.”

But all this blurs the distinction between the cross as a symbol of God as a savior and the cross as something on which a divine Jesus person (aka God) was really crucified. Is it really important that the story actually happened, or is its use as a symbol sufficient? The purpose of Wehner’s article—which, I admit, isn’t really clear to me except as a way to tout his beliefs all over the editorial pages—appears to be that it really happened, and that despite his admitted doubts, he has a “settled belief” that the crucifixion and resurrection were real.

But perhaps I don’t get it, as I’m not a Christian. I can’t get past the question, “If God is loving and powerful, why didn’t he just cut out the middleman and dispense with Jesus, saving people directly? Why go to all the trouble of making himself human and getting himself nailed to a cross?”

Please read the following and tell me what the sweating writer is trying to say. Emphasis below is mine:

Wehner:

Worshiping a God of wounds is a little strange, as my friend said. For some, it is grotesque and contemptible, a bizarre myth, an offense. But for others of us, what happened to Jesus on the cross is profoundly moving and life-altering — not just a historical inflection point, but something that won and keeps winning our hearts. As individuals with wounds, flawed and fallen, we cannot help but return to the foot of the cross.

The most important moment in my faith pilgrimage was when the cross became my interpretive prism. What I mean by this is that I was and remain a person with a skeptical mind and countless questions. There are parts of the Bible I still find puzzling, difficult and troubling. (That is true of many more Christians than you might imagine, and of many more Christians than are willing to admit.)

But I did arrive at a settled belief that whatever the answer to those questions were — answers I’m unlikely to ever discover — I would understand them in the context of the cross, where God showed his enduring love for people in every circumstance and in every season of life. I came to treasure a line from an 18th-century hymn by Isaac Watts that I have replayed in my mind more often than I can count: “Did e’re such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?”

In response to his fictional P.R. person’s claim that using the cross as a symbol for faith would be mad, Malcolm Muggeridge replied: “But it wasn’t mad. It worked for centuries and centuries, bringing out all the creativity in people, all the love and disinterestedness in people, this symbol of suffering. And I think that’s the heart of the thing.”

It is the heart of the thing. Where some see the cross as superstitious foolery or a stumbling block, others see grace and sublime love. For us, the glory and joy of Easter Sunday is only made possible by the anguish of Good Friday.

But it’s still a symbol!

This to me seems close to the populist but naive theology of C. S. Lewis. I always scratch my head when I read this famous passage from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, perhaps the most popular work of Christian theology ever:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

I’m going for one of the non-divine explanations: that Jesus, if he did exist (and I’m not at all convinced of that) was an apocalyptic, itinerant, and deluded preacher, i.e., a poached egg. It’s not at all obvious that Jesus wasn’t a lunatic.

In his book Lewis demonstrated, as does Wehner, that it’s only religion that can turn a thoughtful and intellectual person into a babbling, superstition-soaked idiot. And why the New York Times would publish a guy doing garden-variety witnessing for Jesus? What’s new here?

 

A philosopher at the NYT writes about the incoherence of most people’s theism

April 8, 2019 • 12:00 pm

It’s surprising that the New York Times would publish an atheistic op-ed showing that most people’s notion of God is incoherent, but the piece below (click on the screenshot), is actually Unsophisticated Atheism in at least part of its argument. And the parts that aren’t weird are old and familiar arguments.

Well, perhaps believers need to hear arguments about God that have been repeated to previous generations, explaining why Atterton, a professor of philosophy at San Diego State University, attacks the claim that God can be omnipotent. He first trots out the old bromide “Can God make a stone so big He can’t lift it?” and then asks, “Can God create a world in which evil does not exist?” The first question is barely worth arguing, but the second is. And, as has been pointed out many times before, the existence of moral evil in the world, while explained by theologians as necessary for the action of free will (NOTE: it’s libertarian, you-can-do-otherwise free will this argument uses), does not explain the existence of physical evils like the suffering of animals, the diseases like leukemia that kill children, tsunamis that sweep away the innocent, and so on. As I’ve said before, the existence of physical evil is the Achilles Heel of Abrahamic religion and the death knell for the idea of an omnibenevolent God. Only through tortuous and unconvincing logic can you explain why God allows little kids to get leukemia.

And there’s no reason God couldn’t have created a world in which people can choose freely, but always choose to do the right and moral thing. Free will and The Best of All Possible Worlds are not logically inconsistent.

But here’s the bit that gets me: God couldn’t be omniscient because if he were, he’d be touched with evil. Or so Atterton maintains:

. . . if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection. Why?

There are some things that we know that, if they were also known to God, would automatically make Him a sinner, which of course is in contradiction with the concept of God. As the late American philosopher Michael Martin has already pointed out, if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect.

What about malice? Could God know what malice is like and still retain His divine goodness? The 19-century German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was perhaps the first philosopher to draw attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”

. . . It might be argued, of course, that this is precisely what distinguishes humans from God. Human beings are inherently sinful whereas God is morally perfect. But if God knows everything, then God must know at least as much as human beings do. And if human beings know what it is like to want to inflict pain on others for pleasure’s sake, without any other benefit, then so does God. But to say that God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others is to say that God is capable of malicious enjoyment.

However, this cannot be true if it really is the case that God is morally perfect. A morally perfect being would never get enjoyment from causing pain to others. Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.

I don’t really get this. You can understand what it’s like to sin without being a sinner yourself; all you have to do, if you’re God, is say, “Okay, let me be imbued with the feeling that somebody gets when he kicks a dog.” That doesn’t make God a dog-kicker, someone who enjoys kicking dogs, or in any way sinful—at least in my view. If God were omniscient, he’d know what it would feel like to sin without having sinned himself.

Now there’s another issue not discussed: if God knows everything, then he knows how we’re going to decide to act. Doesn’t that obviate the libertarian free will beloved of religionists? You might say that it doesn’t, but if libertarian free will means anything in a theistic world, it has to be a choice that is made without the knowledge of God. Otherwise the concept of eternal reward and punishment have no meaning, and we’d be a bunch of Calvinists whose fate is already known to God.

But I don’t believe in either God or free will, so I leave this vexing questions to the theologians.

Peter Singer on why the Christian God doesn’t exist

April 28, 2018 • 1:45 pm

Reader Mizrob sent this 13-minute video in which philosopher Peter Singer dismisses the notion of the Christian god simply by showing that “the world around us” doesn’t comport with such a God. (His debate opponent is a mustachioed Dinesh D’Souza.) The most obvious stumbling block to such a god is the suffering in the world, but Singer dismisses the typical Christian response to suffering: it’s an inevitable result of god-given free will.

Many of us know these arguments and counterarguments, but it’s still salubrious to hear a smart person address them. The issue of suffering, both produced by natural disasters and in non-“fallen” animals, is the Achilles Heel of any religion that espouses a beneficent God.

Finally, he takes up the Biblical assertion that Jesus would return during the lifetime of those who heard him preach. Even if you’re a literalist about just the New Testament, this is a problem.

If you have some spare time on your hands, here’s a different debate, two hours long, between D’Souza and Singer, on the topic “Can there be morality without God?“

Believer wonders why God’s letting the world go to hell

December 3, 2017 • 8:45 am

I’ve always maintained that the Achilles Heel of any Abrahamic religion is the existence of bad things happening in the world that shouldn’t be happening were a loving and omnipotent god in charge. I refer here not to “moral evils,” in which people do bad stuff—religious people can always fob that off as collateral damage from God’s Great Gift of free will to humans—but to things like cancers in kids, earthquakes and tsunamis, animal suffering, and so on. There is no clear reason why these would happen on a good God’s watch (yes, I know some theologians have confected unconvincing explanations), so religious people have to do a fast shuffle to comport these with their notion of a deity. This week in PuffHo, though, we see a minister realizing that this doesn’t really make sense (click on screenshot below to go to the article).

 


The author is Susan K. Smith. a reverend who, for the emolument of zero dollars, gets to put her lucubrations on the PuffHo site (I think they’re getting more and more desperate, judging from the paucity of updates on the back pages). Smith surely has the cred to claim she’s a believer; as her author’s page notes:

I am a writer/author, a former pastor, musician and social activist, and am also the founder and executive director of Crazy Faith Ministries, a non-profit which is dedicated to teaching the concept of faith as a spiritual force (not religious, necessarily) in order to do social justice work and to fight against forces that seek to keep people stymied. I am a graduate of Occidental College and Yale Divinity School, and earned a D.Min from United Theological Seminary, studying under the late Rev. Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor and the Rev. Charles Booth. My latest book is “The Book of Jeremiah: The Life and Ministry of Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.,” and I am currently working on a book about the life of Rev. C.T. Vivian, who was a major voice and participant in the Civil Rights Movement.

I’ll be brief here: Dr. Smith is perplexed because God, even though partnering with humans to make the world better, has recently allowed a lot of bad stuff to happen. I quote:

I grew up believing that God wanted order and peace. Even though bad things were going on in the world, I was assured by Sunday School teachers, my parents and relatives, that God didn’t make bad things happen. That was comforting.

But I struggle, still, with a God that allows bad things to happen, who allows peace to be supplanted by utter confusion.

The whole world, it seems, is upside down, swimming in chaos, much of which has been and continues to be caused by this president and by a slew of accusations of sexual impropriety by rich and powerful men.

The relationship of this country with its allies is certainly shaky; it feels like America is becoming more and more estranged from her allies and that she is losing her moral authority and respect. The call of British lawmakers this week for the invitation to this president for a state visit to England to be rescinded because he retweeted fascist, racist images of Muslims. While foreign lawmakers come down on America’s leader, however, the US Congress is strangely silent and pliant.

It goes on and on; she gripes about what the Republicans are doing, about “America’s sexist and patriarchal system”, about Kim Jong-un and his missiles, about Trump, and about Flynn’s guilty plea (but that’s good!). At the end, even though claiming that we’re supposed to help God improve humanity, she’s deeply puzzled about why God’s letting us go to hell in a handbasket:

But God allowed it to happen. God did not cause it to happen, but God allowed it to happen, just as God allowed and always allows the worst storms to impact the people who can least withstand their winds and rain.

Some of us are taught [JAC: the implication here is that “what we are taught” equals “truth”] that we, the children of God, are co-creators with God, meaning God needs us to help God keep the world in order. That is why the work of organizers and activists is so important, because they keep the thumb of righteousness and fairness on the chest of injustice which fights to have its way.

But we, the co-creators, seem remarkably impotent to stop or even slow down the descent into chaos we are experiencing now. This is a scary time, and God, who I was taught could do everything and anything, seems not to be interested in changing the course that we are on.

It remains to be seen how all that is going on will shake out, but it feels like God is allowing chaos to triumph over community, and that is very, very troubling.

The answer is simple, and was voiced most eloquently by the Alabama philosopher Delos McKown (I love this quote):

“The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.”

And of course the invisible and impotent is less parsimonious than the non-existent. I left a comment on Smith’s post—the only one there.

Or—and I just thought of this—here’s another reply: “Why not just cut out the middleman and assume there is no God?”

I’m sure Dr. Smith would welcome more comments to help her with her dilemma. If you want to help, just click on the balloon button at the bottom of the post (you can click on the screenshot below to go to the post). Maybe only a small nudge will take her over the border into nonbelief. . .

The Atlantic blatantly touts religion: why “thoughts and prayers” are great for stopping gun violence

October 11, 2017 • 9:30 am

The Atlantic continues its downhill slide (I swear, is every good journalistic outlet going to become clickbait?) with a new piece by Katelyn Beaty,”The case for ‘thoughts and prayers’—even if you don’t believe in God.” Of course, Beaty, a believer, slants most of it toward fellow goddies, not atheists. Her author profile describes her as “an editor at large with Christianity Today magazine, and the author of A Woman’s Place.”  They omit the entire title of her 2016 book: A Woman’s Place: A Christian Vision for Your Calling in the Office, the Home, and the World).

So what’s her case for prayer? First, the one for nonbelievers. Beaty describes, tediously, the studies showing that meditation improves calmness and focus, and reduces fear.  That’s been known for a long time. But you don’t have to pray to a god to get those benefits; Zen, or any form of focused meditation, will suffice. So the case for atheist “prayers” collapses immediately. Nevertheless, she continues by arguing that the emotional calmness induced by prayer can lead to political action:

But prayer is not inaction. I would argue that it is perhaps the most powerful form of action you can engage in during a crisis—and that’s true whether you believe in God or not. There are good reasons why prayer remains a daily activity for more than half of all Americans (55 percent), including about one in five religiously unaffiliated people or “nones.” Even for those of us who aren’t sure that God exists and that our prayer can change God, prayer can certainly change us.

. . . But are we really to think that prayer and meditation will help stop gun violence in the United States, even if many Americans aren’t sure there is a God who answers prayer?

Actually, yes—especially in the initial throes of a tragedy. Since prayer aids in clear, calm, and empathetic thinking, if we are going to respond well to complicated issues such as gun control, prayer may be more helpful in leading us toward better policy solutions than would an urgent, fretful, ill-considered response.

The same applies to our elected officials: If we want them to use their power to change gun laws (or tackle any other incredibly complex issue of the day), then we should want them to be engaging with “thoughts and prayers”—although in order to have a positive effect, this does need to be a sincere and regular activity, not just an ad-hoc performance on Twitter. Again, the positive effect on mental and emotional health is there even if they don’t believe that human prayer can change God.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Notice again that she conflates prayer and meditation, even though the title of her piece mentions not meditation, but “thoughts”—and the mantra “thoughts and prayers” is conventionally used to mean “good wishes and prayers”, not “meditation and prayers”, so she’s again downgrading the atheist bit. Note as well that most people think that “thoughts and prayers” help in themselves—they’re not seen as vehicles to center your mind so you can get on with gun control. Were that true, and given who’s doing most of the praying in America (see below), we’d already have a ban on assault weapons and private ownership of handguns.

More important, though, is her ridiculous claim that prayer and meditation will stop gun violence in the U.S, because “prayer aids in clear, calm, and empathetic thinking”. Well, let’s test that. Which party is the party that most opposes gun regulation? You’d think it would be the party that prays the most, right? That’s not true, of course. Here are data from a Pew “religious landscape” study in 2014. It shows what we already know: Republicans are far more religious than Democrats:

And here’s the frequency of prayer, showing pretty much the same thing. Only 16% of Republicans pray “seldom or never”, but that jumps to 28% for Democrats. 62% of Republicans, but only 50% of Democrats, say they pray daily.

Conclusion: given that Republicans are the main advocates of gun lunacy, as well as the party that deals the worst with “complicated issues” Beaty’s claims are falsified.

That should be the end of it, and the Atlantic’s editors should have consigned Beaty’s piece to the circular file. But Beaty, being a Christian, can’t resist banging on about her theistic God:

Most Americans—nearly three in four—believe that prayer is a direct line to a God who cares about the world and is intimately involved in the lives of all people. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this God is not the removed watchmaker, who set the natural laws in place and let things run their course, passively looking on as innocents are killed in mass shootings. This God “bends down to listen” and “inclines His ears to hear” the utterances of every person who prays, to quote the psalmist of the Bible. This God is radically interventionist, and can move nations’ leaders to pursue righteousness and justice on behalf of said innocents.

This is no less true in the wake of a tragedy like that in Las Vegas. If you really believe that there is a God who responds to prayer, is intimately involved in human affairs, and could heal this nation’s deep pathologies of violence and revenge, then prayer should be the first thing you do after a mass shooting. Not the only thing, but the first thing.

Beaty doesn’t seem to realize that she’s gotten herself all balled up in theodicy here. If—and given her book, I’m sure she believes this—God really does listen to prayers, and even answers them, and is interventionist in many ways, then you have to ask yourself this: if God is so powerful, why didn’t he stop Stephen Paddock from killing 58 people and injuring nearly 500? Is this some sick divine tactic to make people beg God for gun control? Seriously, any god who is “intimately involved in human affairs”, and had an ounce of compassion, wouldn’t have left hundreds of people dead in our many incidents of mass slaughter, and thousands more bereft at the loss of their friends, family, or loves ones. Beaty’s god is not a kind god, but an evil one: he refuses to stop mass slaughters when he could have. Why, Ms. Beaty? Further, when tested scientifically, prayer doesn’t work (see also here). So if God exists, he’s both nasty and deaf. Beaty has failed miserably in her appeal to both atheists and believers.

h/t: Diane G

p.s. I see that Andrew Seidel, a lawyer for the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), has written his own rebuttal to Beaty’s ridiculous article. I haven’t yet read it because I wanted to convey my own thoughts here, but now I will; and you can see Seidel’s response at Freethought Now!, the FFRF’s blog.

Free will for cancer cells?

May 10, 2017 • 10:30 am

This tw**t, sent by Grania, called my attention to an article in the Irish Times that criticizes the country’s blasphemy law:

What is the penultimate sentence? I’ll put the last paragraph here and bold the sentence and the one before it:

In any case, Fry’s comments to Gay Byrne, far from being an insult to God, were a profound and eloquent statement, albeit in a robust form, of what philosophers call the “problem of evil”, the challenge in arguments for the existence of God in reconciling an all-seeing , omnipotent, benevolent God with the pain and evil we see manifest in the world around us. “Why,” Fry asked, “should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?” To which the reply of the Christian, though not altogether convincing, should be “because God created free will”. And not a knock on the door from the boys in blue.

Well, it’s not “not altogether convincing”, but “wholly UNconvincing”! But the editorial is pretty good, and the “inane sentence” is not quoted with approval. Still, it’s worth pointing out that believers in a beneficent and omnipotent God have never come up with a remotely good argument for UNDESERVED evil, like the death of people from tsunamis or, as Hammill notes, bone cancer. Plantinga suggests that Satan is responsible, but given the absence of evidence for Satan (is that a “basic belief”?), that’s a cop-out. So is free will, which can’t be adduced at all for things like cancer, earthquakes, and so on. Free will for who? The Earth? Cancer cells?

Ask yourself this question: if you were God, would you allow children to get bone cancer? Of course not! Conclusion: if there is a God, he’s a nasty piece of work—or not very powerful.

Scorsese’s new film about how God was hidden but still exists anyway

December 23, 2016 • 9:15 am

Today’s posts are going to be largely about faith, perhaps because The Season is upon us and the Internet full of religion.

From the Aussie ABC we hear of a new movie by Martin Scorsese, a reliably good director.  The critically acclaimed film, called “Silence,” is about the absence of God, but of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t a god. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation gives a bit of the plot:

Set in 17th century Japan, Silence portrays a Portuguese Jesuit Priest ministering in secret to a hounded and persecuted minority Christian population in villages around Nagasaki.

Father Sebastião Rodrigues is forced to watch helplessly as various members of his flock in the hand of the Japanese “Inquisition” are set on fire, slowly tortured with boiling water, drowned, hanged or beheaded in front of him. Rodrigues screams out to his God for mercy, intervention or even just a word. In return he hears nothing.

Silence.

It is the weight of that silence that Scorsese explores in his adaptation of the novel by Shusaku Endo. He took almost three decades to make the film after first reading the novel in 1989 and it is clearly a profoundly personal exploration of a pressing dilemma for someone of Scorsese’s faith: Where is God in the darkness?

Indeed, one might well ask that question. If Nessie hasn’t shown up in Scotland, and there was plenty of opportunity for that reptile to have done so, including deliberate submersible attempts to find it, then one can reasonably conclude that there is no Nessie. But, according to the ABC—and Christians—God is different. When He doesn’t show up, well, it’s not because he isn’t there. He’s just wily and enigmatic!

By the end of Silence, Scorsese’s priest Rodrigues looks in more than one sense utterly defeated. His dreams are in tatters. Death is all around him. His whole identity has been wrenched from his grasp and his formidable resolve cruelly beaten out of him.

And yet, the silence of God does not mean the absence of God. It is in the silence that Rodrigues senses the presence of God suffering beside him. This is the God he believes feels deeply the injustices large and small that humans inflict on one another; who enters the human drama as a child and fully engages with the human experience.

It’s only in religion—in faith—that the absence of evidence is taking for evidence of presence. And really—God engages with the human experience as a passive spectator, as His children are tortured and he won’t help them? He only feels those injustices in his “engagement”? Only in religion can you get the tortured logic of theodicy.

Now one can say that that is Scorsese’s take on the movie, but I’m pretty sure it’s also the opinion of the piece’s writer, Simon Smart.  After all, this isn’t a movie review, but an “opinion” piece, and the ABC describes Simon Smart  like this:

Simon Smart is a Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and the co-author with Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Rachel Woodlock of For God’s Sake – An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion. A former history and English teacher, he studied theology at Regent College, Vancouver. He is the author of a number of books including Bright Lights Dark Nights – the Enduring Faith of 13 Remarkable Australians.

So we can take the analysis above as Smart’s theology as well. He ends like this:

The Christmas story claims to be, out of the void, a moment of profound communication — a break in the silence between a creator and his creatures — God drawing near to us. Our literature and art has for centuries reflected the mysterious wonder of the incarnation and the sense that it represents the best hope that, despite appearances to the contrary, we are not alone in the universe.

That’s a remarkable statement (and an obscure one), for what gives “the best hope. . . that we are not alone in the universe” is not evidence, but a “story” in an ancient book. That story isn’t made more credible by centuries of “wonder.” Nor does Scorsese’s film appear to add any credibility. But such is faith, defined by Hebrews 1:11 as “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Here’s the film’s official trailer:

h/t: Phil