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[John Opinion]

Hello friends. I grew up as a Christian, moving from liberal Methodism of the church I went to as a kid (and where my father was a minister) into a more conservative evangelicalism when I got older. Over the past few years I've drifted more and more from a Christian worldview. I'm currently on a kind of spiritual journey: a few months ago I quit my job and started selling off a lot of my possessions, in the pursuit of a more simple life that isn't based around possessions and material gain. I decided I wanted to honestly question all of my beliefs about life, and to discard any I couldn't reasonably defend. This weekend I started to think about the beliefs I grew up with and have supported for most of my life so far (I'm currently 34) and came to the conclusion that they just don't make sense. Here are the conclusions I have reached. I think that if these are now my beliefs, it is no longer right to call myself a Christian.

There is no incontrovertible evidence that a personal God exists, who listens to and answers prayers, is interested in human behaviour or moral codes and intervenes in the natural order of the world. This is to say, my position is now agnosticism, not atheism. I don't think that atheism is any more or less warranted than theism: there simply is not enough evidence for or against the proposition that God exists.

Christianity in any form generally proposes that God has a certain plan for the creation. Part of this involves following certain instructions, as laid down in the Bible, or church tradition, or a specific set of teachings or doctrine derived from these. Yet the sheer diversity of ideas and beliefs within Christianity about what it is that God wants suggests that these instructions are not clearly defined. If God has a purpose for us, why not make his instructions clearer? Relatedly, if God exists at all, why leave so much room for doubt? I know that the "free will defence" is likely to be involved here, and/or some appeal to "faith" as filling the gap between belief and knowledge, but I don't find this line of reasoning at all convincing. It would be perfectly possible, for example, for God to demonstrate his existence in a way that could not be doubted by anyone, but still leave us with the capacity to choose to follow or not follow his instructions.

The entire edifice of Christianity allows far too easily for self-deception. I don't believe that this is a deliberate conspiracy by religious authorities, just that it is a kind of historical accident. For every sensible question that can be asked, there is a ready-made Christian answer that only obfuscates the issue, but doesn't really address it. I'll give you some examples:

a). Prayer. Prayer is generally understood as a communication between the believer (or group of believers) and God. Usually this involves human language: Jesus teaches his disciples the words of the Lord's Prayer, for instance, and says that this is how they are supposed to pray. However, God does not respond verbally to prayers. There is no evidence that God has ever actually, literally, spoken to anyone using human language. Many people feel that God has spoken to them, but this is almost always described as personal, internal experience, and not something that can be shared or independently verified. Here the capacity for self-deception comes in. We all know how easy it is to lie to ourselves, to convince ourselves that something happened, or is true, when really it isn't.

Another problem here is the answers to prayers that God apparently sometimes gives. People have done all sorts of appalling things based on the belief that they are following instructions from God, even when their actions directly contradict Christian morality: when a psychotic person commits a murder, for example. Examples of this sort of thing are not hard to find.

Finally, there is the response to this criticism that "sometimes the answer is no". This, it seems to me, is a cop out, making the efficacy of prayer an unfalsifiable hypothesis. When things do go the way you want, God has answered your prayer; when they don't, God has answered your prayer, but said no. How then is there any room for the possibility that sometimes God doesn't answer prayers? The facts are also perfectly consistent with the hypothesis that God doesn't exist at all, and therefore never answers prayers.

b). The problem of evil. Every Christian has to grapple with this. The quantity of human suffering in the world is enormous, greater than is even emotionally possible to grasp. Appalling things happen every day: child abuse, terrorist violence, war, starvation, illness and death on a massive scale. If any of this is punishment from God, then in almost all cases it appears to be grossly disproportional to any sin that could have been committed. Thousands of children die of starvation every day, for instance. A person walks into a night club with a gun and kills 50 people for being gay - to give just one recent example among hundreds (due, apparently, to a religious belief of his own that God somehow wants him to do this). Again, all Christian responses to this problem allow for self-deception. (We can't know or understand the ways of God. Perhaps what we think is bad is somehow working for good, to further God's plan. It will all be alright in the end because these people will go to heaven, or be resurrected at the end of time. God needs to allow for evil so that good people can do his work. Evil is not God's fault, it is all caused by human sinfulness. And so on). Once again, all of this is perfectly consistent with the possibility that God does not exist at all. In fact another, more reasonable conclusion to draw would be that God does exist, but is evil, and not the good Christian God that Jesus is supposed to reveal.

This is as far as I've got, but as you should be able to appreciate by now, it doesn't seem possible for me to call myself a Christian anymore. I can only be a deist, or an agnostic. Oddly enough, I still believe that Jesus may well have risen from the dead - I consider the historical evidence for this to be reasonably good, as far as evidence for anything in ancient history goes - but I don't think anything necessarily follows from this. It doesn't prove that God exists, or that what Jesus taught was divinely revealed. It just proves that sometimes weird and unexpected things happen in the world.

I am open to any and all debate on these matters, and will try to engage fairly with any argument you may have against my position. Please, I am not interested in any responses that boil down to, "I will pray for you", and still less to any threats of eternal punishment because of having strayed from the faith. I am interested in ideas, and in what is actually, objectively true.

Thank you.

[jimwalton]

Yeah, you've missed a lot. Thanks for giving the opportunity for conversation.

> There is no incontrovertible evidence that a personal God exists

That's right, but if we examine the arguments for the existence of God and those against his existence, if we are sincerely planning to infer the most logical conclusion, theism wins hands down. The arguments for the existence of God, though not incontrovertible, are vastly stronger than competing arguments. If you have deserted belief in God because the arguments were not incontrovertible, you have by necessity latched into a belief that has far weaker arguments, which is not a reasonable transition. You have missed something.

> Christianity in any form generally proposes that God has a certain plan for the creation

God's plan in the Bible pertains almost exclusively to the salvation plan in history, not individual plans for individual lives. In that sense, God does not have "a purpose for us"—a will for your life that is like a path that you must find and follow. The course of our lives is subject to our experiences and choices, not to a rigid plan that God expects us to follow robotically. There is so much room in this "plan" for flexibility because God gave us wonderful, dynamic minds that are capable of creativity, reason, exploration, and inquiry—it makes sense that as we interact with God's communication that our minds will take us to many places and in many directions. It's one of the blessings of being human, not an evidence that God has given instructions that are ill-defined. You have missed something here.

> The entire edifice of Christianity allows far too easily for self-deception

Self-deception is a human characteristic and not a function of the edifice of Christianity. You'll find self-deceivers in politics, business, education, law, Hinduism, Islam—you name it. It's a result of sin, not a flaw in Christianity.

> Prayer

Prayer is not two-way communication. You've misunderstood something here. It's a way we fellowship with God. It's a one-way avenue of communication. God most often speaks to us through the Bible—His Word, revealing his character and his will to us through its words, not through verbal communication.

> Many people feel that God has spoken to them, but this is almost always described as personal, internal experience, and not something that can be shared or independently verified. Here the capacity for self-deception comes in

This is very true. In the Bible God's pattern is generally that if he is communicating with you and telling you to do something, he verified that with a sign (a miracle) to confirm the communication. Christians don't seem to understand that and too easily claim "Oh, God told me to..." I hardly ever believe those kinds of statements.

> People have done all sorts of appalling things based on the belief that they are following instructions from God, even when their actions directly contradict Christian morality

Yep, right again. It's a travesty of human self-deception, not a weakness of Christianity or even of theism. It's a case of too many idiots spoiling the village.

> making the efficacy of prayer an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

It's impossible to study prayer using the scientific method or statistical hypotheses. There are too many variables and unknowns to be able to subject prayer to our little experiments. The answers to prayer are not merely a matter of confirmation bias, because confirmation bias in itself requires variables that are not part of what prayer is. You're definitely missing something here.

> The problem of evil

The problem of evil has been grappled with by scores of Christians, and with good results. The arguments are well established that the existence of evil doesn't negate the existence of a good and all-powerful God, nor does it show him to be cruel or inadequate. You state "If any of this is punishment from God...", but it's not. The Bible tells us a story far different. That's another place you must be missing something.

> Again, all Christian responses to this problem allow for self-deception.

Not at all. You must have accessed a very limited supply of Christian responses. The answers you gave as examples are all caricaturish, not carefully-thought-out and reasonable Christian responses to the problem of evil. You've missed something.

I fear that you've left Christianity for all the wrong reasons and based on inadequate information. I'm certainly willing to talk to you more. Please don't walk away based on the things you've said here. You've missed something, for sure.

> I still believe that Jesus may well have risen from the dead

The historical evidence for the resurrection is better than reasonably good, and a lot follows from it, contrary to your thoughts. If the resurrection is true, the implications are nothing short of staggering.

I would love to talk to you more.

[John Opinion]

> The arguments for the existence of God, though not incontrovertible, are vastly stronger than competing arguments. If you have deserted belief in God because the arguments were not incontrovertible, you have by necessity latched into a belief that has far weaker arguments, which is not a reasonable transition. You have missed something.

I don't think I've attached on to any belief at all. I'm trying to be neutral and honest about the subject. I'm not arguing for atheism - the idea that God doesn't exist, only for agnosticism - the idea that God might exist, but there are no good arguments for or against it. You can't really argue convincingly that something doesn't exist, only that it does. The arguments I have come across in favour of the existence of God I now find to be unconvincing, therefore I have chosen to reserve judgement. God might or might not exist. That's all I'm saying.

> God's plan in the Bible pertains almost exclusively to the salvation plan in history, not individual plans for individual lives. In that sense, God does not have "a purpose for us"—a will for your life that is like a path that you must find and follow. The course of our lives is subject to our experiences and choices, not to a rigid plan that God expects us to follow robotically. There is so much room in this "plan" for flexibility because God gave us wonderful, dynamic minds that are capable of creativity, reason, exploration, and inquiry—it makes sense that as we interact with God's communication that our minds will take us to many places and in many directions. It's one of the blessings of being human, not an evidence that God has given instructions that are ill-defined. You have missed something here.

Now this is a line of thought I definitely have a lot of time for! I never liked the evangelical-style Christianity where you have to prayer sincerely to discover "God's plan for your life", for you personally. I just never found that to be credible, and very self-centred (and therefore kind of un-Christian!). The general idea that God has a plan for the world (all of creation, not just the human race) is much more interesting, and I would agree with, has much more to do with the narrative of the Bible. After all, the Bible begins with the creation of the world, and ends with its redemption, turning it into "a new heaven and a new earth". I think that's a very important thing to bear in mind. To focus specifically on this part of your post, then: "There is so much room in this "plan" for flexibility because God gave us wonderful, dynamic minds that are capable of creativity, reason, exploration, and inquiry—it makes sense that as we interact with God's communication that our minds will take us to many places and in many directions."

My problem is that there seems to be too much room. The church as a community of faith should, and in most cases does, keep itself in check. Worship and living a Christian life are a shared experience. When people go "off the deep end" so to speak, and start pursuing their own personal agendas within a broadly Christian framework, that's often where things go wrong: it leads to the formation of cults, or worse. And whole churches can go astray too: everyone's heard of the Westboro Baptist Church in America, of course. Even the strictest conservative Calvinists who may agree with some of what they say about predestination, eternal punishment and so on, probably disapprove of their methods and rhetoric. By the standards of every other Christian church, they've simply stepped over the line. Most Christians, I would have thought, would not be willing to call the Westboro church Christian. But here's my point: God doesn't even intervene in these extreme cases. He allows for such a hateful corruption of everything Christianity stands for. There is no reason to believe he has done anything to stop them from poisoning their culture as they do. All the intervention that exists has been because of people, some of whom are Christians, some of whom are just morally decent people with no other religious agenda. Everything that happens to tackle this evil is a result of moral consideration, that can exist with or without faith. I think you can say the same for evil in the world in general: there is just so much of it, and no reason to believe that God does anything to prevent or even lessen any of it.

> The arguments are well established that the existence of evil doesn't negate the existence of a good and all-powerful God, nor does it show him to be cruel or inadequate.

I'd like to know more about this. Which arguments are you referring to?

If you want to talk more, I'm happy to continue the conversation. Thank you for engaging with me so comprehensively. I'm getting quite a few replies now so it's hard to keep up and respond to them all, but I will do my best. I think any of the form "you just need to believe this because the Bible says it" I'm not going to bother engaging with. I don't see the point. I'm interested in the philosophy, rather than the religious doctrine as such.

[jimwalton]

> The existence of God.

You must be familiar with the logical arguments for the existence of God (cosmological, ontological, teleological, axiological, from design, from fine tuning, from consciousness, from multiple minds). They are excellent arguments, and while none of them prove conclusively and incontrovertibly that God exists, they go about 95% of the way, and other arguments offered in refutation pale by comparison. While no one, as you say, can argue convincingly that something doesn't exist, the logical arguments for God's existence show that if we are inferring the most logical conclusion, we will side with theism.

> My problem is that there seems to be too much room.

Ah, a lot of tragedy has come from the wonderful capabilities of the human mind. Think of it this way (and this also pertains to one aspect of the problem of evil): I think you would admit that the natural world is dynamic, with a large number of systems that interact, balance, and even depend on each other. Some exhibit characteristics more like chaos (though that is a scientific category of a dynamical system) and others more like order and purpose. It is within these two categories that natural systems cause stupidity as well as natural evil (I'll include this because you want talk about evil anyway).

Have you ever tried to balance a broom handle on the palm of your hand? You can do it for a while, but eventually something (distraction, wind, your movements) causes it to become less stable, and it falls. This principle was posited by a meteorologist in the late 60s, who wrote a paper titled, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" This thought was so important, we now know it as the Butterfly Effect. Even if we had delicate sensors in every square foot of the globe and its atmosphere, we would still not be able to reliably (100%) predict the weather. The "Butterfly Effect" would always be present. Too many variables because the system is dynamic.

Our world seems to manifest a huge number of interacting chaos systems: weather patterns, electrical impulses, the firing pattern of neurons in the brain, ecosystems, etc. And they behave occasionally in wild ways. And they result in natural evil: "too much room," drought, earthquakes, volcanoes, disease.

Should God stop all of that? I contend that a dynamic world in which free creatures can exercise genuine creativity, thereby bringing about truly novel effects, is a better world than a static world. A consequent corollary is that God would want to create a dynamic world. For instance, since both our circulatory system and nervous system are beneficial chaotic systems, there is strong empirical evidence to say that dynamical systems are beneficial to life. The heart can recover from occasion arrhythmias; our brains can recover from some injuries. In addition, if the brain were static, creativity wouldn't be possible. If the natural system were just linear and status, natural processes (trees, snowflakes, clouds, shorelines, faces) couldn't produce novel outcomes.

Hopefully you can see that while God might have created a static world of nonlinear dynamical systems, eliminating all reason, creativity, and scientific inquiry, and he might have created a world where his sovereignty overrode all possibilities of evil, also overriding all possibilities of good, this would not be a desirable world. Natural science, engineering, and education would be vapid, courage and excitement would be absent. Careful structural design would be meaningless (no earthquake or tornado would ever be allowed to hit a building, and God would stop any building from ever collapsing on a person). Medical arts wouldn't exist, since disease would never harm or kill.

Therefore, God cannot make a dynamical world in which natural evil can't occur. It's self-contradictory, and ultimately intensely undesirable as a form of existence.

So while you and I agree that too many times there's "too much room," ultimately the magnificence of humanity requires that "room".

Now let's talk about suffering and evil a little. There's no reason to think that the existence of God and the existence of suffering in the world are contradictory concepts. Logically speaking, there's nothing in the "syllogism" that is irrational. What's really hard about it (besides the suffering itself) is trying to make sense of it all.

For one, I think that's a clue. You feel a pull to make sense of it all. We all do. That tells you you believe in purpose in the universe and in our lives, both of which point to the existence of God rather than just random natural processes. But the scene contradicts your sense of justice: Why didn't God do something? Why do things like this exist without God's interference, especially for his own people? A couple of thoughts come to mind.

One is the retribution principle: if the world was a just place, then good people should get rewarded and bad people get punished. If God was just, that's the way the world would work. But that doesn't really make sense. If that were the case, people would start being good just to get the prize, and so they really wouldn't be being good, just selfish or greedy or whatever. But then would it be more fair if the good people had it worse than others? Of course not; there's nothing fair about that. So the retribution principle really is not the way the world works or the way God works. Good and bad things happen to us all, at apparently undetectable percentages. That doesn't mean there is no God or that he is unfair.

As far as suffering, it also can't be true that REAL good always works to eliminate evil as far as it can. For instance, we say that pain is evil (and suffering is an absurdity), but wait a minute: when a doctor performs surgery, he causes pain, but he doesn’t stop being good because he did that. As a matter of fact, the pain was part of the good he did, and you can't get rid of that "evil" without getting rid of the "good" too. So a "good" God and "pain" aren't automatically contradictory.

Well, you may continue, then, maybe it's only evil when it doesn't produce a good that outweighs the evil. Well, but you’ve already admitted then that the existence of pain is not a contradiction to a person being good and allowing that suffering.

OK, then. Maybe God is perfectly good only if he tries to eliminate every evil that he can without also eliminating a greater good? Bingo. God can be all-powerful and good, and certain evil can still possibly exist. That’s what I would say, for sure. Sometimes suffering brings out the best in people, and they display nobility and courage in the face of it. Sometimes people get stronger by it, or learn important lessons. It’s very possible that good and evil together can be a good state of affairs. And that means that God can be all-powerful, and permit as much evil as he pleases without forfeiting his claim to being good, as long as for every evil he permits there is the possibility of a greater good—as long as there is a balance of good over evil in the universe as a whole. That’s exactly what the Bible teaches.

People's suffering is tragic, no doubt, but it's not an absurdity. If you think so, you have to show that if there is ANY evil, it's unjustified evil, and that evil is always unjustified. But even if it’s remotely possible that evil is justifiable for a possible greater good, than there is no contradiction with God being good and evil existing. Is this getting too tangled, or is it clear? You’ll have to let me know.

All I’m saying is that it’s possible that God is perfectly good, and that God allows evil to exist in the world although he could prevent it. The point is there may be reasons he doesn’t prevent it, but that doesn’t make Him not good.

But what about those "evil" and "absurdity" of Parkinson's or protracted cancer? To prove that its' unfair (besides the deep pain you are feeling) what you have to prove is that even those suffering never do and could never possibly have ANY redeeming value if your point is true. I would say that’s difficult, if not impossible, to prove, and that what the Bible teaches is still possible, and certainly not a contradiction or an absurdity.

We can start there. Take your time to answer. If you want to talk more, I'll still be here.