Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Christianity

  • Focusing the Atonement

    Peter Kirk has been involved in some extended debates about the atonement, and you can read about it here and here. Peter has written some good stuff on understanding the atonement. I have generally just been saying that we must recognize our ways of explaining the atonement as metaphors, and not as the reality. A metaphor is good, and is the only way we can talk about God, but when you place the metaphor above the reality, or make the metaphor into the reality, you get into a sort of doctrinal idolatry. I say that not to provoke, but simply because there is an important similarity. In the idolatry that involves the worship of a physical image, the danger is that one mistakes symbol for reality, and starts to give adoration to the created thing, rather than the creator. This in turn tends to get everything else out of balance. The same thing happens with a metaphor, which will better illustrate some things than others. If the metaphor replaces the reality at the center, then one’s entire vision can get skewed.

    So what do I believe must be at the center of our view of the atonement? Since we are always short of speaking absolutely correctly about God, there is a danger in defining this, but if I can grab something from all of the metaphors and all of the Biblical writers it would be this: God did it. That is the focus of scriptural statements. Protecting that one fact is the focus of many Biblical rebukes. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul didn’t say that it’s OK for you to do a few extra works, just so long as you also trust in Jesus. He said that putting your trust in those works meant that you were denying Jesus (Galatians 5:2).

    Elsewhere, however, he said that he would become “as one under the law” (1 Cor. 9:20) to reach those who were under the law. The circumstances were different at the church in Corinth. There was even a party there (“I am of Christ” – 1 Cor. 1:12) that made a special point of pride of being followers of Christ. What’s wrong with that? Well, if you set yourself up as superior to others because of your status, then there’s very much wrong with it. The whole first epistle to the Corinthians stands against the notion that any physical, temporal thing about us makes us superior to others.

    A key fact about the “foolishness of the cross” (1 Corinthians 1) is that I don’t get to be at the center any more. I’m saved by grace, pure grace, and I am not superior to anyone else spiritually. I can know more about some things. I may be able to do some things better, but as far as being God’s child, I have nothing whatsoever to boast about.

    The very human temptation, however, is to make me feel superior. This temptation comes in many ways. Doctrines of holiness can easily become means of making a superior category of believers. I’ve encountered churches where the intercessors were an exclusive club of superior believers. These folks had made their call to pray for other people into a badge of superiority. But our desire to be superior for any reason has been eliminated, because God broke past the barrier between infinite and finite in the person of Jesus Christ. That profound thought led Paul to say,

    (26) You’re all God’s children through faith in Christ Jesus. (29) For as many as have been baptized into Christ are wearing Christ as a garment. (28) There is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (29) For if you belong to Christ, then you’re Abraham’s seed, and according to the promise–heirs! — Galatians 3:26-29 (my translation)

    Our distinctions have been wiped out in the incarnation. We want to revive them. We want to feel more special than others. But all our versions of “special” have been torn apart, bulldozed, leveled in the cross of Christ. We are all equally recipients of grace. I teach a doctrine I call infinite ignorance. God is infinite, there is an infinite amount to be known about him. I know something of God, but when you subtract any finite amount from infinity, infinity still remains.

    The same thing goes for grace. Infinite grace has been poured out on us. My brother or sister in the faith may have required more grace than I, but when you subtract that difference from infinity, infinity remains. Our distinctions are meaningless under the infinite outpouring of grace.

    Now if we can keep focused on that one point, I think we will get less out of balance. It doesn’t mean that right and wrong doctrine don’t matter for anything. It doesn’t mean that right or wrong behavior don’t matter. It’s just that they don’t matter for salvation, because that is God’s business. It means that they don’t make me or you closer to God.

    We try to escape this in so many ways. For Paul in Galatia it was folks who thought that Gentiles needed to become Jews first in order to be Christians. They had to keep Torah, be circumcised, obey the food laws, keep feasts, and so forth. Paul had no problem with Jews being Jews. He had a problem with that distinction being made important for God’s salvation.

    The individual believer pursuing holiness is placed in danger of seeing that holiness as a way of earning God’s favor. The fact is that holiness is part of the grace that God gives. It is a result of God’s favor, unearned by you, and not a badge of distinction.

    We can try to make our position superior by means of doctrine. Doctrine learned and taught as our best efforts to understand and receive from God is wonderful, but when we try to make our doctrinal knowledge a badge of superiority over someone else than we have fallen short of the reality of grace. That includes my own doctrine. These words are just my stumbling way of trying to express the experience of the grace of God, and I can recognize how poorly I express it even as I write it. But even when I think the words are flowing beautifully, when I feel my writing is inspired, if I believe that makes me superior to the person who teaches a view of penal substitutionary atonement that makes my blood boil, I have fallen short of the mark set by God’s grace.

    I can’t earn it by spiritual discipline, I can’t earn it by theological knowledge, I can’t earn it by a life of ethical decision making. I can only receive it by grace, with no point of pride left to me whatsoever.

    There’s the scandal of the cross. Christians are confronted at various times with the dilemma of a mass murderer who, with his final breath, accepts Jesus Christ as savior. “Will that man go to heaven?” we are asked. Too often we stumble. It’s too hard to accept that the mass murderer might find himself in heaven next to a saint who spent a lifetime giving and suffering. But such is the reality of grace. Such is the scandal of the cross. God is about redemption, not about punishment. This doesn’t mean there are no consequences, and no punishment. It does mean that in God’s view vengeance isn’t in the driver’s seat; grace is. If that person sincerely seeks God’s forgiveness and receives God’s grace with his last breath, no matter how horribly evil he has been, he receives. Infinite grace always trumps finite evil. If that’s too scandalous for you, you need to spend some more time at the cross.

    In Turkey recently three Christian workers were brutally murdered. The widow of one of them has expressed forgiveness in an interview on Turkish television (source – scroll down to bottom or search text for April 20, 2007). That’s grace in action. That’s not easy. Humanly, I suspect it’s not even possible. But there it is.

    The cross is a scandal. Live with it!

  • God Doesn’t Forgive?

    OK, this is shocking.

    Peter Kirk reports that:

    I interrupt my normal programme to bring you this shocking quote. Yes, the news is going round that Richard Cunningham, director of UCCF, said

          God never forgives – he punishes.

    Apparently he said this during a talk at the recent Word Alive conference, the same one which is separating from Spring Harvest.

    Go to Peter’s blog and read his discussion on this.

    This looks to me like an example of the problem we get into when we regard a metaphor as the actual core of the truth. Substitution, even penal substitution is a good metaphor, but it remains one metaphor. When you put it at the center of your doctrine of the atonement and then build everything else around that, oddities like this result.

    At the center of our doctrine of the atonement should be the amazing love of God who became human in order to redeem us, and made such a complete and thorough job of it that he died like one of us. Then you can build on why with various metaphors, but perhaps keep a better balance.

  • Moral Choices when Viewing

    When I saw the post Virtual Gomorrah: Temptation, Technique, and Technological Progress on the evangelical outpost, I expected to be annoyed by calls for censorship. And indeed there are a few words that tend to annoy my libertarian approach, such as these:

    . . . My basic position is that while they are desperately needed they are also hopelessly ineffective. I’ve come to believe, as Princeton Professor Robert George says, that “laws are likely to be least effective when they are needed most.” I’m still trying to decided how to say that is a way that doesn’t sound defeatist or pessimistic. . . .

    After that note from the introduction, however, the post is right on target, and worth reading. The question I think we need to ask ourselves is simply this: Do I have the will to live my convictions? For a Christian I would put it more precisely: Will I allow the Holy Spirit to keep guiding me into greater maturity?

    The success of pornography and violence in the public media, whether on television, video, games, or via the internet suggests that many people who claim to be disgusted by x-rated material really aren’t. When nobody is watching, they are quite ready to watch the things that they condemn. If that were not the case, e-mail inboxes would not be flooded with offerings of pornography. Those who sell this material know that if they scatter their ads far enough there are people who will pause before hitting that delete key and then they will get sucked in, one step at a time.

    I wrote about this a couple of years ago (pre-blog) in an essay titled Off-Switch Censorship. I think it’s still applicable now.

    We are far too anxious to get someone else to solve our problems of will. There is a simple but difficult solution. Learn to say no. Decide not only what you will watch but how much. This can apply to politics, war coverage, or entertainment. There are some things that are no good in any proportions, but there are also things that are good when used in balance, but are dangerous when used to excess.

    Consciously establish your own boundaries and then work hard to stick with them. If you have problems doing so, then get some help. Christian churches should provide opportunities for people to be accountable to one another. I’m not talking about big brother, in which the church tries to monitor your private life, nor am I talking about an intervention group for acknowledged addicts. I’m talking about a group of people who talk to one another about how their Christian walk is going.

    Let me give you an example from my own life. My morning starts with a short time of prayer, then there are certain morning activities, things that need to be done immediately. Then I have my time of Bible study and prayer that is somewhat longer. Now my wife knows by experience that my day goes much better if I have that second period of study and prayer. That’s my time with God that lets me hear from the Lord about my priorities for the day and generally feeds my soul.

    Unfortunately, I have a strong tendency to look at the list of things I really need to get done that day, and to decide I need to get started. After all, I’ve already had prayer time. I can rationalize this by noting that I will spend several hours working on a manuscript having to do with a Biblical or spiritual topic, so I am, after all, studying the Bible. Well, your mileage may vary, but for me there is a huge difference between relaxed, devotional study, and editing or writing a manuscript, however good that manuscript may be.

    As I said, my wife knows how this works, and she can identify when I’ve done my devotions and when I haven’t by my attitude through the rest of the day. Devotional dependency? Perhaps. 🙂 But the fact is that she gently holds me accountable on that point. When she notices the results, she’ll ask me, “Did you have your devotional time?’ Now your spouse is not likely to be an adequate source of accountability, though I think a spouse can help a great deal. But having someone just ask you can be a big help.

    I would suggest that laws against pornography and obscenity are not going to be generally successful. Like drug laws, we have the unfortunate tendency to measure their success by the number of people caught, not by the number who have access to the material. (I am opposed to censorship in any case. I just happen to believe in this case that censorship is also going to be ineffective.) That means that those of us who do not approve of such materials need to take responsibility for our own actions.

    One last thing–turn the switch off before the program you don’t want to watch even starts. Delete the e-mail before you gaze at the thumbnails and wonder. Once you’ve decided on the boundaries, enforce them on yourself with rigor.

  • Public Policy and Prophecy

    John has an interesting post over at Locusts and Honey titled The Bible, Politics, and Pseudoprophecy. Though there have clearly been some extended exchanges, I haven’t followed them closely, so I’m not 100% certain what John means by Pseudoprophecy, but I think he makes a number of good points. I’d like to comment a bit further.

    First, prophecy is a term that gets used in various contexts. The prophets of Old Testament times often spoke of social justice and challenged the authorities over that. As a result, voices that call for justice against the prevailing view in society are labeled “prophetic” and this activity is called “prophecy.”

    But while words do commonly get used in different contexts, if one tries to apply the definition appropriate to one context in a different one, one will simply get confused. There are many aspects of Biblical prophecy, and also of the type of ongoing prophecy that takes place in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. One of those aspects is a call for social justice. But nobody in Biblical times would have accepted “a person who cries out for social justice” as a good definition of a prophet. A prophet was someone who spoke for God, and a prophecy was a message spoken for God, most commonly in words that were attributed to God. The key to the identity of a prophet was the “ne’um YHWH,” the message of YHWH, and not the content of the message.

    So not every person who calls for something good is speaking prophetically. They may well be speaking correctly, they may be giving an important message, but the critical element is whether they are giving a message that comes from God to apply to that situation.

    Now if we look at the public policy situation, we can ask just how the prophetic word applies to the particular political situation. There is where one can easily get into trouble. Jonathan comments that we should preach it if it is Biblical. But this doesn’t respond, in my view, to John’s original problem. The Bible doesn’t say that much about public policy directly. We can look at Israelite policy, but at a minimum we must admit that Israel’s circumstances were substantially different than ours, and thus we must look for the principles and apply them to our current situation.

    For example, if we look at Israel’s immigration policy (Leviticus 19:33-34), we also have to look at their welfare policy (Deuteronomy 24:17-22). We can only create a coherent replication of the intent of those two policies by seeing how they apply under our circumstances. (Note that I do not intend to present my two references as an exhaustive study of the particular policies, just as a general directional arrow.)

    When we try to apply these principles we get into much larger debates. We can generally agree that murder is bad, though we disagree on the definition. Is abortion murder? Is it murder if you kill someone who is robbing your house? Then we further get into differences of opinion on how best one prevents murder. Is the death penalty appropriate? In my experience both death penalty proponents and opponents claim to respect life. I honestly believe they both do. They just believe in different policies for accomplishing their goal.

    We all agree, I think, that Jesus wants us to care for the poor. Do we do that by supporting public welfare programs or through private efforts? Is it possibly some combination?

    In Ben Witherington’s post on gun control he asks:

    My question is— are their ethical teachings in the New Testament that have a bearing as to whether Christians, as private citizens, should be bearing arms?

    I would say that yes, there are ethical teachings. But do you notice the gap here? Witherington’s answer will be that we should not be bearing arms. But I can still see quite a difference between the ethical imperative for me, as a Christian, and the public policy issue. I personally do not own a gun. I am capable of firing one with substantially above average accuracy, but I would hardly be called a sharpshooter. But I don’t believe that my ability to make a decision to use a firearm in an emergency situation would be accurate enough to make me safe. So I’ve got a couple of reasons not to own a weapon. But is there an automatic link to public policy? I don’t see it. Personally, I think the idea that anyone can own any weapon is silly (not immoral, silly), and that substantial controls over the use of dangerous devices such as firearms is appropriate and necessary. But those who disagree with me–and in my area that’s a substantial number–do not do so because they think murder is good.

    It’s easy to agree on the idea that if it’s Biblical we’ll preach it. But the further one goes into public policy, the less clear it is just what is Biblical. I see a huge amount of proof texting in this whole area. If we can draw principles for Israelite policy, then surely we should support the death penalty, executed in a public and painful way. Yet most of us do not. But if we support one Biblical idea, how is it that we can oppose another? Actually, it’s very easy. There’s the context, the time, the place, and all other circumstances.

    I believe that Christian principles can inform public policy, and that as Christians we should be implementing those principles when we engage in public policy. What I don’t see is any way in which the Bible clearly sets the specific public policy position we need to take. Gun control, death penalty, pacifism, social welfare, and other issues must be argued on on a basis other than proof texts.

  • Embarrassed Again

    I knew when the news of the tragedy at Virginia Tech came out that there would be religious responses that would be obnoxious, and even some that would be downright despicable. It seems that with every tragedy there are uninvolved people available to place blame and to pontificate. I personally have no words that are worth saying to those who have lost a loved one in this tragedy, or for that matter to the Virginia Tech community. They’re going through something I have never experienced.

    I have, however, experienced tragedy, and I know how people use it for their own agendas. When our son died of cancer at age 17, and throughout the five year battle that preceded that event there were people who needed to question us. We were either grieving too much, in which case our faith was weak, or we weren’t grieving enough, and were thus in denial. We weren’t using the right treatment plan, out of the many dozens of non-traditional treatments suggested. Some thought that he would be healed if we just took him to the right church and had the right group pray for him. They couldn’t understand why we didn’t jump up and go where they suggested immediately.

    Then there were those who just looked at us pityingly. My wife and I have taught–and still teach–weekend seminars on prayer. How could we be teaching about prayer, and yet our own son was not healed. For some reason these folks didn’t check what we actually teach, or they would have found that we do not and have never made the claim that prayer should replace medical care, or that there is some certainty of healing through prayer. In fact, we behaved precisely as we teach. We sought the best medical care available, and we maintained a strong prayer life.

    Now the vast majority of our friends and neighbors were wonderful. I’m talking about a tiny minority who were nonetheless quite vocal. I learned how to ignore people. The point here is not what we or anyone else believe. The point is that everyone thinks they have the right to stick their philosophy and opinions into someone else’s decisions and grieving.

    With that in mind, I’m going to comment on a couple of “Christian” responses to the Virginia Tech tragedy. Now if the bereaved want to sound off in any way they wish, I’m not going to jump in, but these are responses from people outside. They make me embarrassed to be a Christian. I’m never embarrassed to be a follower of Jesus; just sometimes the name “Christian” gets so horribly besmirched by this type of comment.

    The first is a comment by Dinesh D’Souza:

    To no one’s surprise, Dawkins has not been invited to speak to the grieving Virginia Tech community. What this tells me is that if it’s difficult to know where God is when bad things happen, it is even more difficult for atheism to deal with the problem of evil. The reason is that in a purely materialist universe, immaterial things like good and evil and souls simply do not exist. For scientific atheists like Dawkins, Cho’s shooting of all those people can be understood in this way–molecules acting upon molecules.

    Now that paragraph is wrong in so many ways. I’ve recently responded to Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (see category “The God Delusion” on the sidebar), and while I have many disagreements with Dawkins, something that should surprise no one, I don’t see D’souza’s characterization as at all accurate. On the surface, yes. Dawkins is a materialist. But simply explaining everything as molecules acting on molecules, well, not so much. In addition, however much some Christians might like it to be so, Dawkins is not the sole atheist on the planet. Atheists work and hope, live and learn, love their families, make moral decisions, in short, they do the things that everyone else does. And there’s no evidence to suggest that they make worse neighbors.

    But it’s not the wrongness of all this that embarrasses me. It’s the insertion of this religious (or philosophical) goal. I haven’t read any such, but if an atheist writer used the tragedy to announce gleefully that this proved there is no God, I would find that offensive as well. Let the tragedy be what it is. Especially let’s not use it to demonize any group of people. I’d also like to call attention to this very moving response (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars).

    Then there’s Dr. Grady McMurtry, president of Creation Worldview Ministries, who believes that teaching evolution was the cause:

    . . . people should not be surprised when mass shootings occur, such as the one on the Blacksburg university campus on Monday. “And at Virginia Tech, what do we have?” he asks rhetorically. “We have a person who, unfortunately, thought that humans had no more value than cats and dogs — and unfortunately, I think, probably felt the same way about themselves.” (source HT: Pandagon)

    Probably felt that way about themselves? Does he think it’s appropriate to be gratuitously insulting at this point? I’ve discussed this issue before and am not going to revisit it now. All I’m interested in at the moment is the way the tragedy is being used to push agendas, and not in a kind way.

    The agenda we should be pushing–and yes, I have an agenda as does everyone–is simple love and respect. I’m a long ways away and there’s remarkably little I can do, but I can speak with respect of the people involved, no matter what their religion or lack thereof. I can see them as human beings seeking a way to deal with the tragedy that has struck their lives. I can refrain from pretending I possess a one stop answer to their problems.

    I think that’s what Jesus would do in these circumstances.

  • More on the Atonement

    Peter Kirk has collected a series of his comments into a single post along with links to various blogs that can bring you up to date on the atonement wars. I weighed in with a post over on my Participatory Bible Study blog. I see that Coops hasn’t posted in his atonement series since March 19th.

    I know how it can go. One can get really, really tangled discussing the atonement!

  • What Embarrasses me About Christianity

    A discussion has been raging over on the Religion Forum, and Tom Sims has taken it up on his blog regarding Bishop Spong and a quote (Rochester, MN Post-Bulletin) in which he says:

    “Religion in America today embarrasses me,” said Spong, 75, who will speak in Rochester next week. “If that’s what Christianity is all about, then I’m not really interested in that.”

    Of course the question is clearly just what Bishop Spong thinks Christianity is actually about. Frankly, while Spong is one of the more popular characters in modern liberal Christianity, he is by no means the most thoughtful, in my view. In fact, when it gets right down to it, I don’t find his historical reconstructions I find him one of the least credible of the writers on the historical Jesus.

    He makes one excellent point, however, in the interview I cited, when he tells us that the problem comes in when someone claims that their way is the only way it can be. I’m one of those “embarrassments” who believes in the resurrection. Once I’ve swallowed a doctrine like the incarnation, it hardly seems a matter of concern. Could I be wrong? Of course I could! I’ve been wrong before, am quite probably wrong about many things right now, and I suspect I will go right on being wrong until I die.

    Especially in matters of theology we do well to walk and talk humbly, simply because when dealing with the infinite we are by definition infinitely ignorant. We have to recognize that very often the more rational option is to simply admit that we don’t really know. But I, and others like me, have a category of experience to describe, and it is religious language and even religious doctrines that describes it.

    For Bishop Spong, however, and for many in the Jesus Seminar, one has to ask just how Christian their Jesus actually is. I do not arrogate to myself the right to judge whether they are Christians or not, or what their relationship to God might be. My question is simply one of picking up their views and making them my own.

    I recall the series of stories by Isaac Asimov which are set at the dinners of the Black Widowers. Each guest was asked one major question: How do you justify your existence? I think the question that needs to be asked of Spong’s Jesus is the same one: How do you justify your existence? When one limits oneself to a purely historical reconstruction, and one done with a seriously skeptical turn of mind, then the resulting “Jesus” is often rather weak, and one has to wonder why anyone should care whether such a person lived.

    In the historical sense, one might make the question instead whether the Jesus one has discovered by historical research would be likely to have had the impact that he had. The one thing I always find when I think about Jesus in purely historical terms is that in the end I’m certain that Jesus must be more than what I can prove him to be historically, otherwise there is an excessive effect for the cause involved. In some ways, however, the Jesus of Spong fits well with American Christianity–tepid and not terribly challenging.

    There are a number of things about American Christianity that do embarrass me, though they don’t primarily have to do with doctrinal beliefs.

    I’m embarrassed

    • that we have so many buildings and so much real estate that tends to be idle during the week. I believe we could improve our use of that property for building up our communities.
    • that we now have almost as many definitions of heresy and orthodoxy as there are denominations. At least the inquisition worked from one script. Now I can be fundamentalist, orthodox, heretical, and an atheist all at the same time. Just ask my critics!
    • that we still permit discrimination and even foster it in our society–any discrimination that considers something other than the ability of the person in question.
    • that we are depending more on political and temporal means than on the transforming power of the gospel.
    • that for so many Christians church is just a social club. We debate the spiritual gospel and the social gospel, but while we do so the “comfy chair” gospel is often winning in churches.
    • that so many of us couldn’t even discuss the issues that Spong is raising, because we have no clue what we believe or what our church claims to believe in the first place.
    • that our faith is so weak and so poorly grounded that we have to get into a real tizzy about every new book that comes out about Christianity.

    I’m embarrassed, but I don’t dwell on it, except for posts like this. Mostly I just try to help alleviate that situation in the little corner where I am.

  • Methodist Blog Weekly Roundup 4/13/07

    . . . has been posted by Allan Bevere.

  • Freedom of Speech and People’s Feelings

    It appears a couple are threatened with offending Hindu sensibilities for their wedding, according to this story from the Evening Standard (London). (HT: Dispatches from the Culture Wars.) This is an Indian case, and due to the fame of one of the participants there is some indication India won’t pursue it.

    Those who approve of laws against “hate speech” or various similar restrictions on freedom of speech should be warned, however, that no matter what your views, this could be you.

    This is a serious danger to freedom, especially in cases of religion. When a government makes “offending” any class of religious people a legal offense, there is virtually no barrier before any speech whatsoever can be banned. What can I possibly say that will not blaspheme somebody’s religion. I do not believe Mohammed was a prophet. I’ve offended Muslims. That belief should be no surprise, however. I’m a Christian. I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Islam should be illegal, no matter how offensive Muslims find them. But note that at the same time I don’t think cartoons or art mocking Christianity, Christians, or major Christian figures should be illegal either. That’s freedom of speech. If you’re easy to offend, get used to being offended.

    Of course many non-Christians will agree with me on that point, but I again let me extend that further. Hate speech laws that target conservative Christian criticism of other religions or homosexuality, for example, are also anti-freedom. I often really don’t like the categories of speech they forbid, but that’s not the point.

    Let freedom of speech reign, and let’s all learn to be less offended by it.

  • The Complexity of the Creator

    The attack on moderation, or excluding the middle (broadly conceived) and the assumption that this is all there is are the two key points of disagreement, from which most everything else follows.

    The assumption that this physical universe is all that exists is illustrated in the discussion of the multiverse theory (pp. 145-147). Now do not take this too far. I’m actually attracted by the multiverse theory as he expresses it. It’s obviously speculation, but it’s enjoyable speculation at least, and may even point in the right direction in years to come. My knowledge of physics is too small to go any further than that.

    But for me the question still remains–who is the creator? At some point you do have to get to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The environment in which the universes of the multiverse exist, such as to be subjected to natural selection must exist, and thus you only push the question back another step. Now, instead of asking where the universe comes from, you must ask where the multiverse comes from. The universe is clearly not nearly so universal as we thought (if these speculations are true). It is naturally caused by the multiverse.

    This should be familiar to those who have studied arguments for the existence of God. The question frequently comes back to where God comes from. But that is the point of that particular category of argument. Because nothing else is self-existent, we look for a self-existent source for other things, because it seems pretty clear that something must be self-existent. (Of course it may indeed be “turtles all the way down!”)

    At the same time if we admit that something is self-existent we have already taken a step beyond anything we understand within the physical world. We’re imagining something that’s so far out of the box that it’s, well, out of the universe, or perhaps even out of the multiverse. At this point, I think I’m making one of the best arguments for agnosticism. Whatever is the ultimate cause or “ground of all being” (Tillich), is not something we can measure according to the standards we know.

    Thus I find it totally irrelevant, though interesting, for Dawkins to claim that God must be “very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” Well, yes. And if theists in general were asserting that God had first evolved into what he is and then created the universe, that would be relevant. But this is a clear example of Dawkins assumption that even God must be natural. He first defines God into the natural universe and then argues against him, but that is simply a complex way of assuming one’s conclusions. As it is, it kind of misses the point.

    What theists are saying is that there simply is no natural force that can produce the creator, period, so the creator is something that is outside of our physical universe, who operates according to very different laws.

    For a contrary view more conservative than mine, see Christianity and Secularism by Elgin Hushbeck, Jr. (My company publishes that book.)