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Richard Carrier: God is Silent
Sep. 1st, 2008 10:35 pmIn a conversation with a Christian (edited: who was actually ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
robhu, as Rob's given me permission to say) recently, I asked my usual question on personal relationships with God: why do all these people who claim to have one end up disagreeing? How do we know who to believe? To paraphrase their arguments:
( Read more... )
Aren't you just asking why God doesn't announce his presence? I suppose I am. Annoyingly, someone has got to that question before me and made my arguments better than I can. The brilliant Richard Carrier's essay Why I am not a Christian (not to be confused with Bertrand Russell's essay of the same name) contains a section called God is Silent which points out the contradiction between what Christians say God is like and how he acts. Go read it.
My arguments about Christians and their relationship with God are, as my correspondent rightly says, a special case of the general argument that God is silent. Talking about Christians specifically negates one of the common defences against that argument, namely that if God were too obvious, it would do away with free will. But Carrier points out that such defences are ad hoc: who thought to mention that God values free will above almost everything else before people started debating the problems of silence and of evil? What is the evidence for this? If you're evangelical, where does the Bible say that God values free will so highly? Christians can't even agree that people have it, let alone that God values it.
God's silence, and his entrusting of what we're told is a very important rescue mission to a bunch of people who are pretty bad it, are pretty powerful arguments that he's not there. If I saw any amputees miraculously healed, though, I'd certainly reconsider.
robhu, as Rob's given me permission to say) recently, I asked my usual question on personal relationships with God: why do all these people who claim to have one end up disagreeing? How do we know who to believe? To paraphrase their arguments:( Read more... )
Aren't you just asking why God doesn't announce his presence? I suppose I am. Annoyingly, someone has got to that question before me and made my arguments better than I can. The brilliant Richard Carrier's essay Why I am not a Christian (not to be confused with Bertrand Russell's essay of the same name) contains a section called God is Silent which points out the contradiction between what Christians say God is like and how he acts. Go read it.
My arguments about Christians and their relationship with God are, as my correspondent rightly says, a special case of the general argument that God is silent. Talking about Christians specifically negates one of the common defences against that argument, namely that if God were too obvious, it would do away with free will. But Carrier points out that such defences are ad hoc: who thought to mention that God values free will above almost everything else before people started debating the problems of silence and of evil? What is the evidence for this? If you're evangelical, where does the Bible say that God values free will so highly? Christians can't even agree that people have it, let alone that God values it.
God's silence, and his entrusting of what we're told is a very important rescue mission to a bunch of people who are pretty bad it, are pretty powerful arguments that he's not there. If I saw any amputees miraculously healed, though, I'd certainly reconsider.
