That is an interesting argument. God is too good to be true. That must mean that God should be evil to be true.
The problem with this and other facile arguments that atheists use is they are false. The life of Jesus is the Christian ideal. He did not live a long life. He did not marry. He did not own a home or a business. He died alone on a cross.
Faith is born of human desires is not born of selfishness, hatred, and fear. It is born of love, joy, and peace. If love, joy, and peace are illusions then life is not worth living, because God does not exist.
I found this in particular rather amusing.
In almost every argument put forward by atheists, that refers to the character of God, he can’t exist because He is a vengeful, slavery loving, tyrannical monster, so really, you’re better off if he doesn’t exist. But well, that wouldn’t fit this particular one…
Interesting to note that to the degree atheists hold this view, like fundamentalist creationists, they too believe a creator is required to account for God belief. It is beyond me why they should doubt such belief evolved naturally to make sense of human existence. Of course they would trivialize this by only looking to explain outward things like lightning and earthquakes. Oh, they’ll say, we don’t need Gods to explain the world any more. Indeed science is better for explaining things in the world but what about the world of our experience? In my experience, the scientism held by most fundamentalist atheists will insist science will in time explain absolutely everything: literature, love, you name it. Apparently the entire soul can be replaced with a long list of empirical facts with nothing left out. But of course that is absurd.
I don’t believe God is a being apart from everything which He has brought into being. So I’m an atheist as far as Christianity is concerned. But I’m no fundamentalist nor do I worship science or just my own pleasure.
Christians believe that God can, did and does reveal himself through legitimate testimony* (and not just the testimony of the beauty of nature and the grandeur of the cosmos). And the Bible also tells us that there is an adversary who wants to dissuade belief and trust in God and excels in lies and counterfeits.
*He had been mentioned before as a relatively modern example, and it seems to me that it takes considerable denial to dismiss him casually and portray him as a self-deceived charlatan:
Altair/Alex…you quoted part of an article without a general reference. It would be nice to read the whole thing so as to have context. The idea that God was somehow manufactured by people has been said by others – and could partly be true — that is, if God is Someone who grants our every wish, approves of hot fudge sundaes for breakfast, is OK with the occasional shoplifting or casual rape, and stops the aging process — or any other thing we “feel” inclined to at the moment. We do tend to make Him in our own image at times, and we do trot this “god” out from time to time, dust him off, and admire the image of ourselves that we see in him. But then, no one really thinks that this is right — not ultimately. And then there is always something that each faith entails which is “hard” to say the least. How can the hard stuff be “born of human desires”? Are we all masochists? Well, maybe Freud would say so…but then we get into other weird things. For me, the real problem with atheism overall is that most atheists are like everyone else — that is, they believe in a lot of things they cannot see (quarks for instance)…and never write that thing off to “faith born of human desires”. …It is only when they get to the notion that there is Someone out there Who transcends ourselves. And this then seems to them like a problem
Rrrright… I never came across THAT(especially rape, unless you referring to the fact that some think women deserve it)…
Being the devil’s advocate I would say that people made up the hard stuff in order to control the populace i.e to keep them well behaved. Now I’m not an expert but it seems like even the sceptics have come away from this idea lately, besides if there were too many snags then the majority wouldn’t want to follow IT in the first place.
Thanks Marta…and as for hard stuff…I suppose just about any idea looks like a control device (no right turn on red…be in bed by nine…eat more calories than you burn up and soon you will be classified as ‘calorically impaired’, or whatever the latest term is, but you surely will not fit into your leggings any longer!) if you do not like or want it…but a control device that turns out to be good for you (thou shalt not commit adultery) plus other people/things (“save some for the fishes”…“you should care for the poor”…“do not gossip”) is probably, in the long run, NOT a bad thing…and the only question is why we do not like it. The “hard stuff” like “gossiping is a sin” or “you break it you own it” is hard because it mostly holds some accountability. I’m sure we can make a list of hard things…and if religion or deity were eliminated from them, many of them would still look reasonable to us psychologically or from the perspective of civic order, good eating habits, etc----and there are other control devices such as police, psychiatrists, prisons — which technically should eliminate the need for deity. …But still the concept of deity remains.
So why do you think it still remains? And was it purely invented because there was no police at the time? And did people were just inventing rules as they went along to suit their needs?
I presume you are thinking of 'belief in a deity" when you ask “why do you think it still remains?” That could actually be separate from the questions you ask about the police and whether or not people invented something…I think the need for deity is just there in us because it was meant to be there to begin with. It could be just like a shadow on the sidewalk. If we see a shadow, we know it came from something or someone, even if the person is right around the corner and has not yet come into view (depending on their location, or yours). The “shadow,” in this case, is the universality of some concepts – such as do not murder. steal etc., Something about those basics (before you define different gradations of each illegal act) has always been in humans. And they existed before the first police department, otherwise we would never have felt the need for law enforcement to begin with. Another “shadow” is the need to worship someone or thing. If we don’t worship God, then we worship our jobs or an entertainer or guru or our new car or spouse or kids…Worshipping these other things eventually get us into trouble at times because people disappoint and new cars break down at unpredictable times and the job has layoffs…but that is because they are really not what we should have placed faith in to begin with.
There is no ‘what if’ hypothetical for some. I will point to George Müller again (I have a lot lately, it seems – I don’t know if you have seen any – there are two above – here and here) and your profession* ties in:
*Dan’s a statistician, for those who don’t know. (He’s still a statistician, for those who do. )
you must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong… I see my religion dismissed on the grounds that ‘the comfortable parson had every reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in another world’. Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is an error, I can see early enough that some people would still have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the other way round, by saying that ‘the modern man has every reason for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is rejecting’… But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds—a matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.
Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking’. You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
to me a lot of atheists suffer from Santa syndrome, talking about the imaginary friend in the sky, which is amusing when accompanied by the claim of their intellectual superiority. Not to be able to look past this childish view of God is a bit embarrassing and a bit of a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy.
There is indeed something uncomfortable about the claim that there is some entity that sees everything we do and judges us for it, so the faith into the absence of such authority is an understandable wish born out of human desires. After all, that is what sin is about, the rejection of authority over ones self. Its the problem of puberty, and luckily a lot of us grow out of it.
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