The Bad Daddy Argument


New Atheists place great reliance on what I shall call the Bad Daddy argument: God is accused of numerous crimes and shortcomings. The idea is to portray belief as ridiculous by making God out to be a scoundrel, having done and said things inconsistent with being all knowing and all loving. The argument says that is more sensible, or even morally superior, to disbelieve in the character religion portrays as the supreme being.

A milder form of this argument is that it is easier not to believe in a God guilty of sins of omission: an unanswered heartfelt prayer, a clear wrong that goes unrighted, an unbearable loss that you  must bear none the less. The goal of this argument is to undermine faith by equating the value of our faith with our wishes being met. Sometimes this form of the argument is given a metaphysical slant: If the universe really meant anything more than just our own experience of it, as accidental creatures, the universe would work better than it does. Our desires would be more readily fulfilled than they are because they would count for more to a loving God.

The folly of either form of the argument is the presumption that we know everything. Either says that God (or the concept of God) should be judged by our reasoning, our feelings, our hurts or joys. But God will not be limited in that fashion. He uses the whole spectrum of our experience to form us, if we are really Christians. Hebrews 12:4-12 gets to the nub of the problem. If you have no hardship, you are not God's child.

The New Atheists have little directly to do with my topic of Christian unity, except in that they annoy all of us. But in looking at the Bad Daddy argument we may see, indirectly, that all Christians believe something in common, and altogether contrary to that. When man judges God, man does so according to human standards, which is not at all the point of Christianity. Rather, all Christians would agree that bringing God's standards to bear when thinking of man is the way to do it, we fall short of those standards, and God has done something miraculous about that.

The Bad Daddy argument attacks something basic to any Christian understanding of the world, thus in an odd way it is a lens to understand a point of commonality among all Christians. In the New Atheist view, man is competent to judge God, but Christians make no such claim. Instead, God shows us by example how we should live in a world wracked by evil. To follow Christ's example is to know hardship--and to meet it head on. Good and evil are ever in conflict. Side with good and you will surely find that out. The way of wisdom is not to turn away from God, as from a flawed concept, but to embrace him as the higher reality by which we see and understand this sometimes dreadful world--God, the light that shines in the darkness.

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