Tag Archives: Man

Polemics

Why doesn’t God gives us more evidence that he exists?

14 Comments

Welcome, Please Convince Me listeners! This post was mentioned in Please Convince Me Podcast #190.

Have you ever heard someone say that if God existed, he would give us more evidence? This is called the “hiddenness of God” argument. It’s also known as the argument from “rational non-belief”.

Basically the argument is something like this:

  1. God is all powerful
  2. God is all loving
  3. God wants all people to know about him
  4. Some people don’t know about him
  5. Therefore, there is no God.

You may hear have heard this argument before, when talking to atheists, as in William Lane Craig’s debate with Theodore Drange, (audio, video).

Basically, the atheist is saying that he’s looked for God real hard and that if God were there, he should have found him by now. After all, God can do anything he wants that’s logically possible, and he wants us to know that he exists. To defeat the argument we need to find a possible explanation of why God would want to remain hidden when our eternal destination depends on our knowledge of his existence.

What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

Dr. Michael Murray, a brilliant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, has found a reason for God to remain hidden.

His paper on divine hiddenness is here:
“Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993.

He argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.

But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.

(Note: I think that we don’t seek God on our own, and that he must take the initiative to reach out to us and draw us to him. But I do think that we are free to resist his revelation, at which point God stops himself short of coercing our will. We are therefore responsible for our own fate).

The atheist’s argument is a logical/deductive argument. It aims to show that there is a contradiction between God’s will for us and his hiding from us. In order to derive a contradiction, God MUST NOT have any possible reason to remain hidden. If he has a reason for remaining hidden that is consistent with his goodness, then the argument will not go through.

When Murray offers a possible reason for God to remain hidden in order to allow people to freely respond to him, then the argument is defeated. God wants people to respond to him freely so that there is a genuine love relationship – not coercion by overt threat of damnation. To rescue the argument, the atheist has to be able to prove that God could provide more evidence of his existence without interfering with the free choice of his creatures to reject him.

People choose to separate themselves from God for many reasons. Maybe they are professors in academia and didn’t want to be thought of as weird by their colleagues. Maybe they didn’t want to be burdened with traditional morality when tempted by some sin, especially sexual sin. Maybe their fundamentalist parents ordered them around too much without providing any reasons. Maybe the brittle fundamentalist beliefs of their childhood were exploded by evidence for micro-evolution or New Testament manuscript variants. Maybe they wanted something really bad, that God did not give them. How could a good God allow them to suffer like that?

The point is that there a lot of people who don’t want to know God, and God chooses not to violate their freedom by forcing himself on them. God wants a relationship – he wants you to respond to him. (See Matthew 7:7-8) For those people who don’t want to know him, he allows them to speculate about unobservable entities like the multiverse. He allows them to think that all religions are the same and that there is nothing special about Christianity. He allows them to believe that God has no plan for those who never hear about Jesus. He allows them to be so disappointed because of some instance of suffering that they reject him. God doesn’t force people to love him. If they don’t want to look into these things because they want to avoid having to care what he thinks, then he lets them think anything they want that “works for them”. What they think is false, but so long as they don’t investigate anything, then they can keep doing what they want and thinking it’s fine.

Michael Murray’s work

Murray has defended the argument in works published by prestigious academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, (ISBN: 0521006104, 2001) and Routledge (ISBN: 0415380383, 2007). The book chapter from the Cambridge book is here. The book chapter from the Routledge book is here.

Michael Murray’s papers are really fun to read, because he uses hilarious examples. (But I disagree with his view that God’s work of introducing biological information in living creatures has to be front-loaded).

Here’s more terrific stuff from Dr. Murray:

News

Woman meets stranger who rescued her during ice storm

Leave a comment

Wes sent me this story of a heroic rescue.

Full text:

A woman saved by a stranger gets her wish, to say thank you to her weather hero in person.

Greta Nelson’s car slid off the road and into a pond during last week’s ice storm. Less than 24 hours later, CBS Atlanta helped reunite the Nelson with the man who saved her. Nelson waited eagerly to meet the man who she says saved her life.

Thursday night she met Robinson’s entire family.“That’s my saving angel. Thank you so much, thank you. Now I remember, I remember the face,” said Nelson when she saw Joe Robinson.

Until the moment they saw each other again, Nelson only knew him as Joe, the man who stopped during last week’s ice storm when her car slid off the road and into a pond. That night, Robinson had just slid on the same icy patch when he looked in his rear view mirror.“I saw her just whip off the road and over this bank and sort of just disappeared,” said Robinson.“All of a sudden I heard the splash and I thought, ‘I’m in water? Oh God, I’m in water,’” said Nelson.“I was kind of just going through the scenario of what I have to do. Do I have to get all the way in the water?” said Robinson.“All of a sudden I heard him knocking on the back of the car,” said Nelson.

Nelson was on her way home from work and Robinson was on his way to work when they say the meeting “the heavens set up” happened. “He sent the right person. God sent the right person. Just the fact that he is the kind of person he is, is why my life was saved,” said Nelson. Robinson has two new nicknames, hero and angel.“I don’t think I’m either one,” said Robinson.Robinson said he’s thankful he was able to help Nelson.“That’s the way I feel about it. I’m glad I could help her and I’m glad she’s safe,” said Robinson.

I think it goes without saying that we want to have more men like this, and to hold out men like this as examples for younger men to follow. How do we do that?

And we really need to make a big deal of men like this instead of celebrating sports figures and Hollywood celebrities and people who read teleprompters. This is a REAL man. REAL men have specific roles that they are meant to fill. REAL men are meant to be providers (work hard, keep what you earn, provide for your family and charities), protectors (be armed, kill terrorists, deter criminals, defeat lies with reason and evidence), and moral/spiritual leaders (have authority to teach about morality and religion in the home, do not be subverted by the school system, demonstrate devotion and love for women and children). We need to be encouraging and choosing real men who can do these things.

We all have to think about the messages that we are sending young men about what we want them to be. We have to be careful not to discourage good men from their aggressiveness and protectiveness. And we have to be careful not to tempt them down towards selfishness and sexuality instead of upward towards chastity and chivalry. If we want good men, we may have to think about what is best for men instead of thinking about ideologies and -isms. If we want men to be providers, we have to educate them to be providers and encourage them to work hard and to take responsibility by letting them keep what they earn. And we need to encourage women to choose GOOD men – and teach them why they should choose good men – and what they are choosing good men to do. Women need to understand what society and family requires from men, and how to prefer men who demonstrate skill at those responsibilities.

Women aren’t going to get good men by taxing them, disarming them, and then offering them sex without any expectation of having them first demonstrate that they can be committed protectors and providers.

News

Man chases down kidnapper’s vehicle to rescue young girl

2 Comments

Story from ultra-leftist MSNBC of all places. (H/T Mara)

Excerpt:

A man who rescued an 8-year-old girl who had been abducted by a stranger says he was “beyond scared” as he forced the alleged kidnapper to stop his truck and hand over the child.

At about 6:45 a.m. Tuesday, Victor Perez, 29, recognized the truck from media reports about the girl, who was taken while she played outside a home in Fresno, Calif., at 8:30 p.m. Monday.

He gave chase in his own vehicle and repeatedly tried to force the alleged kidnapper’s truck off the road. Eventually, Perez saw the girl’s head in the truck’s window.

“He kept getting away. He kept going round my truck. The last time I completely said, ‘Either he crashes into me or he stops.’ He stopped and pushed the little girl out,” he told NBC station KSEE 24 News.

After being forced out of the truck, the girl ran to safety.

“The first thing she told me, ‘I’m scared,'” Perez said. “She was shaking. I said, ‘You’re all right now.'”

[…]Perez told CNN that he saw a vehicle matching the description of the one used in the abduction — an older-model, reddish-brown Chevrolet with a white stripe on the side — as he stood outside his house talking with his cousin about the abduction early Tuesday.

“I thought, that could be the truck,” Perez told CNN Tuesday night.

“I had a split-second decision to decide to call 911 or go after it,” Perez told ABC News. “I decided to go after it while my cousin was dialing 911. I took a chance to go and ask a question to see if that was the man that we’re looking for.”

He got into his 1988 white Ford pickup, and began to follow. As he tried to cut off the truck, its driver reportedly told him, “I don’t have no time,” and claimed his battery was dying.”The second time I reached him, the way he acted — yes, I was, for a split second I was nervous until I saw the little girl and all fear was out the window after that,” Perez told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“I didn’t have no fear. I wasn’t thinking of me no more. I was just thinking we need to get that little girl to safety,” he added. “I wasn’t going to give up. … I couldn’t give up.”

“I kept telling him, ‘That’s not your little girl.’ We argued. We exchanged words,” Perez told CNN, admitting that he had wondered whether the motorist had a gun. “I was beyond scared.”

“He was hiding her — like pushing her down. I thank God he put me here to help out that little girl — that’s for sure,” he added.

On the fourth attempt, he forced the vehicle to stop.

This man is a hero! We need to make a big deal out of him in order to encourage more men to be heroes.