CADRE Comments

  The good folk over at the Secular Web have published a short blog in its Kiosk section entitled “ The Pandemic Disproves God .” The article, written by a someone named James A. Haught, makes unsupported assertions that the God’s cannot actually exist because the coronavirus exists. While I expect most Christian apologists would see through this charade quite quickly, I wondered why he is choosing such a non-event as the coronavirus to prove his proposition.  After some introductory questions that the author, James A Haught, apparently believes would create problems for Christians, he writes:  The pandemic gripping the world raises the age-old philosophical dilemma called "the problem of evil"—which asks why a supposedly all-loving God does nothing to stop horrors like diseases, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and the like. If there's an all-merciful father-creator, why did he make breast cancer, childhood leukemia, cerebral palsy, natural disasters, and predator ...

The Free Will Defense is offered by Christian apologists as an answer to any sort of atheist argument such as the problem of pain or the problem of evil. The argument runs something like: God values free will because "he" ("she"?) doesn't want robots. The problem with this approach is that it often stops short in analysis as to why free will would be a higher value than anything else. This leaves the atheist in a position of arguing any number of pains and evil deeds and then crying that God had to know these things would happen, thus God must be cruel for creating anything at all knowing the total absolute pain (which usually includes hell in most atheist arguments) would result from creation. The apologists answers usually fail to satisfy the atheist, because in their minds noting can outweigh the actual inflicting of pain. Something atheists evoke omnipotence and play it off against the value of free will, making the assumption that an ...

Yesterday I had a discussion with atheist on theodicy problem. That's the problem of pain and evil. Why does God allow it. There are two questions there but I think the answers to both are related. My classic answer is my own version of the "Free Will defense." The thing that makes my version different is the twist I put on internalizing the values of the good. This my version from Doxa and here's how it plays out. I call it "Soteriological Drama." Soteriology means the study of salvation. I am saying there's a drama, not entertainment but the kind of real drama one finds in life, concerning the pursuit of salvation. God has designed a serach into the process because it is only by searching that we learn to internalize the values of the good. Basic assumptions There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so oblivious, but nevertheless must be dealt with here. (1) The assumption that God wants a "moral univ...

I am going to approach the issued raised by Chris Price  (Layman) a couple of weeks ago, Divine Hiddenness, and come at for a perspective very different from his. This is not intended a criticism of Chris's view, I do not necessary disagree with him. I do have a different perspective from the one the takes to the problem. I'm going to began, not by summarizing all three posts by Chris but by quoting for J.D. Walter's summary of the argument in the comment section to the last post: I think you [Mark] misunderstand how the argument from divine hiddenness is supposed to work. It generally goes like this: if the biblical God existed, due to his love he would make his existence more obvious. But he doesn't, therefore he probably does not exist. Notice the 'would' in that argument? How would Schellenberg or any other advocate of the hiddenness argument know to expect God's existence to be more obvious? They are taking for granted the Western classical conc...