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 present societal shutdown from the coronavirus is really unprecedented in my lifetime. For some of us, this is a time that raises questions about our own mortality and what is truly important. For some people, this time with its rising world-wide body counts also raises another iteration of the usual question about God: How can a good and loving God allow this to happen? Oxford Mathematics Professor John C. Lennox has written a short booklet addressing the concerns that Christians may have about God during this virus crisis. Entitled, “ Where Is God in a Coronavirus World? ”, the book is short and can be purchased for less than $5 on several websites. I purchased mine for under $4 at Christianbooks.com. The book itself is divided into six short chapters. These chapters are: Feeling Vulnerable – A quick recognition of the anxiety that this crisis is engendering and a reminder that while prior plagues that have rocked the Earth seem far in the distant past, pandemics obvio...

"God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad." ~ C.S. Lewis This past week, we had two horrendous shootings in El Paso and Dayton. It saddens me to think of the evil that people can inflict on each other. Sometimes they do it in the name of religion, but there are multiple reasons (illogical though they may be) for someone to shoot someone, blow someone up or drive a car into a crowd that have nothing to do with religion; rather, they have to do with our sinful nature. Some will ask “where was God” during these events. That is the problem of evil in a nutshell. How can a perfectly loving, all-powerful God allow someone to hurt and kill innocent people? As I have written previously, the intellectual problem of evil has long ago been solved. C.S. Lewis’ ...

Three men walk into a hotel to spend the night. The hotel clerk tells them that the hotel has only one room available, and that room costs $30. Each of the three men contributes $10 towards the bill, the $30 is paid, and the three men go up to their room. Later, the hotel clerk realizes that he overcharged the men, and that the room’s actual cost is only $25. He gives the bellboy $5 to return to the three men. On his way to the room, the bellboy recognizes that the three men will have difficulty splitting the $5 between them, so instead the unethical bellboy gives each of the three men $1 and keeps $2 for himself as a tip. So, in the end, the three men paid $9 each for the room which is $27 and the bellboy kept $2 for himself which is $29. What happened to the final dollar? A few years ago, my brother in law’s father, a devout atheist, posted a really nasty meme on his Facebook page. I don’t remember the details, but it basically accused God of being part of the rape of a child becau...

So, last night I got to be sexually violated in absolutely unspeakable ways. Fortunately, I was only dreaming. I have stress dreams which often turn nightmarish, eight to ten hours every night -- for about forty years now. I can wake up and deal with whatever I was dealt with living and maybe dying through the night before. I've had a lot of practice. But for very many people in the world today, and for vastly many more throughout all history, that living hell isn't a dream they can wake up from. It happens in their waking life (and also, I suppose, in their dreams). Maybe all their lives, for years or months or weeks or days, or decades, until they die. Christmas is for them, of course -- although when I say "of course", let me pause a moment to give cultural context: here in modern Western Civilization we might easily think "of course, whatever good Christmas means, it must be for victims of the worst injustice". But that expectation is a result of C...

A man walking down the beach comes across an old bottle. He picks it up, rubs it and out pops a genie! The genie says, "In exchange for freeing me from the bottle, I will grant you three wishes." The man says "Great! I want one billion dollars in a Swiss bank account." Poof! There is a flash of light and a piece of paper with account numbers appears in his hand! He continues, "Next, I want a brand new red Ferrari right here." Poof! There is a flash of light and a bright red, brand-new Ferrari appears right next to him! He continues, "Finally, I want to be irresistible to women." Poof! There is a flash of light and he turns into a box of chocolates. ~ Edited from Christiansunite Clean Jokes   It is probably the most consistent challenge raised to the existence of God: the problem of evil. It has been most succinctly and accurately stated with the following syllogism:  If an all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God exists, then...

It was a horrible crime; a crime the riveted the attention of the good people in the State of New Mexico like few have. The mother of a beautiful little girl, Victoria, who was celebrating her 10th birthday conspired with her new boyfriend and her boyfriend's cousin to drug the little girl with methamphetamine so that the boyfriend and his female cousin could sexually abuse the young child without her resisting. At the end of the sexual abuse, they compounded their evil by killing the little girl by both strangling and stabbing her multiple times. They then dismembered this beautiful, innocent child, put her dismembered body in a bathtub, and set it on fire. Victoria's mother – the woman who society instinctively understands bore the responsibility to care for this nine-year-old girl – stood by and watched while the boyfriend and his cousin engaged in these terrible actions. Not surprisingly, the front page of the local paper has been obsessed with the event. Intervi...

    Alexander Pruss Philosopher at Baylor on October 8, 2012 10:40 AM | the prosblogian a philosophy of religion blog  Admits we can't have a valid piror on theitsic arguements but we can have non numerical reasoning from comparing stength of evidence. For instance, we might have the judgment that the evidential strength of the Problem of Evil (POE) as an argument against theism is no greater than the evidential strength of the Finetuning Argument (FTA) as an argument for theism. Two thoughts in support of this: (1) the low-entropy initial state of the our universe has been estimated by Penrose to be utterly incredibly unlikely (my paraphrase of his 10^(-10^123)) and some of the other anthropic coincidences come with what are intuitively extremely narrow ranges; the theist has proposed various theodicies--they may not be convincing, but it seems reasonable to ...

Bill's topic from a few days ago is something that Christians (and other theists of all stripes) have been chewing over for thousands of years. It might seem like the answer is a simple yes or no; but there are concepts which supernaturalistic theists are (in principle) committed to, which introduce difficulties. I spent several hundred pages in Sword to the Heart ( which can be found for free in some different formats, including first here on the Cadre Journal ) slowly and carefully working up those concepts, but I'll summarize them below in a progressing topical order relevant to the question of God's responsibility. ( Click here on the jump to proceed. )

Common misconceptions about the statement “Objective morality cannot be grounded without a transcendent reality” The idea of morality finding no 'grounding' without a transcendent reality (i.e. a reality that is more than just the natural, physical world, such as that which is postulated by theism) depends on what 'grounding' refers to. Defining it correctly changes the meaning of the statement drastically; I suggest that 'grounded' could be defined as 'made objectively true'. 'Objectively true' then refers to the idea that to say something like 'racism is wrong' is to make a statement about reality, which can be considered either 'true' or 'false' for all times and places, independent of what any contingent, physical mind believes about the matter. To say a moral maxim such as 'racism is wrong' is 'objectively true', is to say that it is true in the same way that the statement 'the moon exists' i...

The problem – intellectual and emotional – of why what we call 'evil' exists is age-old, and an issue that every human being, whether atheist or Christian, ultimately is confronted with. Philosophically and intellectually, it seems to be fairly easily overcome (as I will hopefully try to explain below) in a Christian worldview, but pastorally and emotionally, it is terrible and devastating upon us all, from atheist to devout Christian. My argument would then be that the Christian worldview, in fact, provides both a much more hopeful answer and decent solution  to the pastoral issue, as well as coping intellectually with the problem.  We can start with the intellectual response, where we can split the 'problem' into three forms: logical, evidential and emotional/pastoral. See more >>

I've been posting a lot recently on different models of the atonement (and there's more to come!) but recently I came across a potent reminder of why we need it in the first place. Usually affirmations of human depravity come from theologians, and we are tempted to think they make such affirmations only because their job depends on it! But recently I have come across quite a few unabashedly secular authors saying surprisingly religious things about the human condition. A recent, eloquent and persuasive example is an essay by Theodore Dalrymple (by the way, if you have not read absolutely everything written by him, you have your homework assignment; he's that good). It is titled 'Modernity's Uninvited Guest', a very appropriate title, given Dalrymple's thesis: put very simply, we weren't supposed to be worrying about evil anymore. It was a basic tenet of Enlightenment thinking that people are basically good, and only become evil through exposure to bad ...