The book is extremely light on knowledge of Christianity (Carrier only evinces a very rudimentary knowledge of C.S. Lewis’ brand of “mere Christianity”), and doesn’t even really attempt to touch the surface of theology and philosophy...

Slightly tangential, but Dawkins and Myers have taken to directly mocking the notion that a knowledge of these subjects is necessary to debunk theism. Their meta-argument is roughly that arguing the details of textile technology is nothing but a distraction from noticing that the emperor is stark naked. It dovetails nicely with their generally angry outlook, since it allows them to make various cracks about "discussing the merits of imported versus domestic newt tongues for making love potions," and such like.

I'd like to see a cogent meta-counter-argument explaining where "sophisticated theology" comes into play. As a non-theologian, I'm ill equipped to make it myself: I can see Myers and Dawkins et al veering off the beam, but can't necessarily articulate where they went wrong exactly. Unfortunately I can see that their mockery is partly on target: a sizable chunk of apology appears in my view also to rely fatally on the assumption of what they're trying to prove; they really do take the form of "discussing textiles" instead of confronting the question whether the emperor's posterior is or is not showing.

In "The God Delusion," which in all honesty I haven't read, I understand it to focus mainly on origins. God's reason for being is to explain the unexplainable concerning origins; we now have explanations for those previously unexplainable mysteries; therefore, there's no need for God. And since beings only exist if they're needed, God doesn't exist. QED. On that score my first reply is, "Jessica Simpson!" Clearly useless beings have an annoying habit of existing. So putting God out of a job does nothing to attack the question whether He exists or not.

Dawkins of course thinks he's addressing a deeper epistemological problem; he believes that the only reason people believe in God today is their need to fill the gaps. His error is clear: practically nobody believes in God for that reason. It's as good a theory as any other, I suppose, for how primeval people went about inventing their myths and superstitions, but subsequent generations don't repeat that process anew. They believe in God (or their parents' gods) for the simple reason that their parents did. It's now communicated to them, along with other cultural elements, as part of their upbringing. If asked why they believe, most will say they "Just do." So attacking "God of the gaps" doesn't lay a glove on them.

American fundamentalists (and their overseas brethren) make Dawkins overconfident, because they do retroactively pin their belief on such things. I.e., they didn't start believing in God to fill gaps, but after the fact they did start hanging their faith on the idea that these gaps are proofs of God. It makes their faith easy to destroy, because the foundations are so shaky: instead of attacking what might even be an impregnable structure, you undermine the foundations and watch it fall like Jericho. It has the opposite effect on those of us who aren't fundamentalists, because he's not touching our building nor its foundations, but he is strutting around proclaiming himself conqueror of all he surveys. It makes one want to snicker and call, "Jettez la vache!"

But to my regret, it's not a complete response to Dawkins. If I personally pointed this out to him, he would turn the tables and reply, "So tell me, Mr. Jeenyus, why do you believe in God?" Any reply I make will get me skewered, since my main reason is... I just do. I have only indirect evidence to point to, such as the power and meaning of scripture in my life, and mumble mumble prophecy. I'm not the David to send out to slay him with a well-chosen apologetic sling stone. So while I see that his theological unsophistication causes him to miss the mark, I'd be interested myself in a more complete, cogent explanation of what this mark is that he's missing.

Great piece. It dovetails with some other recent posts on BTDF. The nutshell summary is that "fellowship" is about having a relationship with each other, carried out as a partnership.

By itself, that wouldn't seem very impressive; we talk about that all the time. We routinely exhort about how we're "family." The key bit is to truly appreciate the implications of a "relationship." We have a distorted view of them, because we're born with all these family relationships, and often treat them as fetters to be strained against. They just are; they don't take work; and the best we can hope for is for them not to inconvenience us too greatly.

If we think in terms of a friendship, or a marital relationship, we get a different picture entirely. If we don't nurture those relationships, then our friends turn into strangers and our spouses turn into enemies. They require regular care and feeding. And there is a burdensome aspect, since that means putting up with their quirks or accommodating their bizarre sensitivities--but unlike our family, our friends and spouses are not stuck with us. If we neglect them, they are free to go elsewhere for what they're needing. (If we regard our spouse as "stuck with us," and treat her accordingly, we'll either discover her gone some day, or discover that our lives have become hell on earth.)

Ecclesial relationships are like friendships or marriages. If we do the Sunday-morning-handshake routine, they're not brothers and sisters; they're strangers. If we ignore them, except when we feel motivated to rebuke them, they will feel free to ignore us, or hate us, or go elsewhere--they certainly won't be influenced in any useful way, unless they happen to be masochists. And so on.

So when it says they "devoted themselves to fellowship," it's saying that in the context of preaching the word, exhorting, reading, praying, and all that, they consciously and effortfully nurtured their relationships with each other and with God.

At that superficial level, the 'new perspective' folk sound like Christadelphians. Except that we know from other sources that they're trinitarian. I'm wondering whether the Trinity isn't the only obstacle to making common cause with them?

I say that with trepidation, since I don't even know their stance on resurrectional responsibility, or clean flesh, or, or, or...

Edit: If everyone had a personal relationship with their ministering angel/God then their would be no more need to preserve free will and hide from us. Although this is characterised as Adam hiding from God. You would have personal proof like me. You have to voluntarily surrender your free will in this life or you were never sincere. How can you be sincere if you only surrender your free will when you have no other choice, at physical death?

This is the way it will be in the future and that is EXACTLY why it says their will be no more death, no more suffering, because their will be no more free will. You cannot have both.

duh.

You just replied to yourself and said, "Duh."

Sense or not, people find it very disconcerting to find themselves replied to four years after they said something, and other people find it very disconcerting to be sucked accidentally into conversations with ghosts of four years ago. Most people like conversing with actual humans.

Bumping the thread up in Google doesn't have anything to do with it; nobody asked anybody to go around bumping threads up in Google.

I realize that people are often criticized for posting FAQs without ever using the search function--but if a person has a habit of resurrecting necrothreads, I'd recommend that person find some other hobby than reading necrotic threads.

Mercia, you are the necromancer of threads. You make them rise from the dead, years later, and shamble about. Please try not to do that--necrothreading is actually considered bad manners.

I wish someone would convince my son Dawkins is a......errrr.....dawk! He thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread right now lol.

His writing on evolution and related subjects is top notch. It's just that he seems to suffer from the delusion that brilliance in one area makes one competent, or at least not utterly incompetent, in others. The same reason doctors are notorious for losing their shirts investing--they think being smart makes them competent investors.

How could that be when Israel didn't come along until a long time after and from Adam came all sorts of other nations?

You need to read the book to get the background, but the basic idea is that Genesis was finalized after the exile--perhaps by Ezra, say. The post-exilic writings such as Chronicles recast Israelite history in order to address the burning question of the day: what does it mean to be a Jew in light of the diaspora? How are they God's people, if they've lost their land and temple? What of God's promises of an eternal kingdom, since their kingdom was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and the throne has never been reestablished since? How can they worship God while living in Babylon without any access to the temple, nor any temple to access? Etc., etc.

The critical development in Jewish theology after the exile was the concept that God scatters but also regathers; punishes but also relents. Genesis 1-3, in its final form, tells the same story that plays out over and over in the OT, and it's precisely the story of Israel: God picks out His people, puts them in a good land of His choosing, gives them commandments and access to His presence, and then they disobey and are punished but also redeemed. Adam's biography is a reenactment of Israel's history. Apart from serving as an allegory of Israel, Adam is also specifically identified as Israel's ancestor via the genealogies in Genesis, so his special creation by God and his covenant relationship to God is another thing that makes Israel special. Genesis is ambiguous about the existence of other people at the same time, such as Cain's wife, or the people Cain was afraid of, etc., but that wasn't the primary concern of the Jews; although they seem to have believed that he was the ancestor of everyone in the world, Adam's relationship with other nations was of no interest to them. Adam was the special son of God, Seth was the special son of Adam, Shem was the special son of Noah, and so on, making the Jews the "firstborn" among the nations--so they specifically were the heirs of Adam's specialness in a way that no other nation was. Thus Adam both literally and figuratively marks the Jews as special to God despite Adam's exile from the garden and Israel's exile from the promised land.

See, I wondered whether he was complaining that too many parishioners are modalists and tritheists. He's not getting any sympathy from me on that front.

Most adults in our Christian churches are not Christian in a biblical sense. A majority of the people who attend Christian churches are not Christian and have been attending the same church for nearly a decade.

I'd like to know more about this. We would say that none of 'em are Christian, of course, but that's obviously not what the author meant by that statement. What defines a "biblical" Christian in their eyes, and why are most adults not ones?

Depending on the answer, I might end up agreeing that half of Christadelphians are not "Christian in the biblical sense," which would be a powerful takeaway.

In a recent exhortation I got this right: I said that Mark, specifically, borrowed elements of a "heroic" narrative style for his gospel, but then (purposely) "betrayed" the readers by having the hero die a criminal's death, and then denying the readers any triumphal climax by ending on an ambiguous note with confused women at an empty tomb.

(I suggested that verses 9-20 of Mark 16 should be treated as an "afterward," and that the reader should pause after verse 8 for a bit before reading on.)

Thanks, your videos explain a lot.

Aren't you one who is at a loss to explain suffering?

Of course that's true. Nobody said any different.

Not sure I can help you, Mercia. I reason with kids and stupid people all the time. I assure you it's a one-way process, in which I try to find the best way to crowbar information into their heads.

Do you actually think God is requesting a mutual exchange of ideas, in which He has a few good points and you have a few good points? Is that what you think?

So back to Ken's question. I've seen my cat exhibit what looks like love, hate, fear, and even conscience. In its own way it wants to live, and doesn't want to die. Why is that not enough to make it wrong for me to decide whether it lives or dies? Who says its own brand of self-awareness isn't enough to make it deserving of life?

It seems remarkably self-serving, not to mention circular, to suggest that human sentience is the threshold at which murder becomes wrong. An alien race with an average IQ of 300 (on human IQ tests) would probably call us charming little animals with digital watches. They might well reason precisely as Ken does, but decide that we're below the threshold of intelligence that entitles us to our own lives. They'd probably keep us as pets, or perhaps servants. They would probably call us "self-aware, but not sentient," or perhaps, "sentient, but not intelligent." Of course yet another alien race, with an average IQ of 500 on human IQ tests, would probably call THEM charming little animals, and call us insects with digital watches...

Now I've no clue, nor do I care to guess, as to what God's IQ is. Nor, for that matter, do I claim that IQ really means anything. NOR, for that matter, do I claim that there's no upper limit to intelligence. For all I know, there's an upper limit to how intelligent any being can be, and the "300 IQ aliens" might be possible but the "500 IQ aliens" impossible.

None of that really affects my basic point. Namely, that Ken's attempt to use intelligence as a standard with which to bootstrap a prohibition against murder that at the same time justifies hamburgers, suffers from the defect that this threshold he posits is entirely arbitrary.

Where you are former Muslim or something? Only this is just the sort of division they create in mind between man and God?

No, I'm just elitist.

I've consistently talked about INTELLECT ONLY, and it seems like that part of it is not coming through to you. Ken spoke of sentience as a reason that destroying humans is bad, while destroying cows is not bad. I remarked that by the standards of someone with an IQ of 145, someone with an IQ of 55 is no more sentient than an animal. This is something that must be experienced to be truly appreciated.

If you've experienced it, it should be obvious that a surprisingly small difference in intelligence--on the order of 30 IQ points, say--is enough to create an unbridgeable gulf. People on one side of the gulf are not only incapable of thinking the thoughts that people on the other side can; they're incapable even of imagining in their dreams what those thoughts might be like. As a result, they're probably unaware that the gulf even exists. To folks on the other side, however, it can be like belonging to a different species entirely. You're not just speaking a foreign language when you communicate across the gulf: you're forced to do like the cowboys in a racist movie from the 1950s. "You like 'em fire water? Me bring heap plenty fire water! You bring 'em buffalo hide!"

Now I don't know what I look like to a genius. Part of not being one is that I can't see the world as he sees it. But based upon considerations as above, I know he sees a different world that I can't see. So merely knowing that God is "awfully awfully smart" is enough to know that His idea of an intellectual conversation is something I can't even envision in my dreams. Whatever pleasure He gets out of me, an intellectual conversation is not one of them.

Marcia, what do you mean "non-communicative"? Humans can talk. They just don't have anything to say that's intellectually stimulating. Imagine yourself surrounded by three year olds for 1,000 years, if you like.

Joshua must be a real problem for you. If God really commanded it, then some sort of justification is necessary, or else the conclusion would be that God did wrong.

On the other hand, I can't begin to imagine how you justify meat eating. I'm not an IQist, so I don't buy the argument that it's OK because they're stupid. If that were the standard, we could also eat babies and very stupid people.

To get away from cats, did you know that 99% of the population has an IQ between 61 and 139? If so, do you have any idea what it's like for someone with an IQ around 145 to have a conversation with someone with an IQ of 100, or 60? "Stimulating" is not the word for it. It may be very enjoyable, but it is not intellectually stimulating. Any enjoyment is going to come from somewhere other than the intellectual front.

Again, I have no idea what God's IQ is. I'd hazard a guess that it's higher than 145, though. Our poor little Mensa member, impressed as he may be with himself, is not going to be providing God with any intellectual stimulation. God may take pleasure in him, but it won't be for that.

I'm really not getting why you're so worried about this. Does it really bother you that much to consider the fact that we will never impress God with our cleverness--that by His intellectual standards, we have no intellect worth speaking of? Do you have that great a need to try and convince your self that God would actually find us challenging opponents at chess, say?

Since no data is available on God's IQ, nothing can be said dogmatically, of course. I'm under the impression, from reading my Bible, that God is actually all-knowing, though. If God ever decided to have a conversation with me, or a chess game, he would know what I was going to say next, or what my next move is. There's really no scope here for God to be surprised, and intellectual stimulation depends vitally on surprise. When we already know what the other person is going to say, we're unspeakably bored.

God says He loves us, which suggests He isn't bored with us, but it's not for lack of knowing exactly what we're going to say next. My reading of scripture indicates that He appreciates our love, and our gratitude. Nothing I read suggests that He finds our conversation scintillating--and if He does, given that He knew what we were going to say a million years before we said it, He must have a very different sense of scintillation than we do. Which is of course possible, but in that case we're describing something that's foreign enough to our way of thinking that we can't really imagine what that's like.

On the whole, I think it's a compliment to say that our intellect is to God's intellect as a cat's intellect is to a man's intellect. The cat can at least surprise us, which is something we can never do for God.

A Father is wiser than his son, but does not see him as a cat, that was all I was saying.

A father is of comparable intelligence to his son. He is not infinitely smarter. I have no idea precisely how God views a human, but I can say that we are MUCH dumber compared to Him, than a cat is compared to a human.

Sentience is relative. Although I'm sure our ability to reason and dialogue is important to our relationship to God, nevertheless I suspect that the pleasure we offer God is very like the pleasure my cat gives me. We are much too grotesquely stupid to discourse on anything like equal terms with God.

Budster, when God spoke to Moses they spoke as friends...

But not peers.

Adam had a personal relationship with God before his sins seperated him. God would not have created us in His image to be his friends and to do His will (which is our will) and wish us to think of ourselves to Him as a cat...

You underestimate cats. They make excellent friends. In any case, I understand your emotional arguments here: it seems demeaning to think of yourself as God's cat. But I was talking about intellect. Do you think you're smart as God? Or even a millionth as smart as God? That's pretty much your answer.

You cannot love an animal like another human being or like we are promised God loves us. Or what would be the point of even bothering?

I don't really understand the question, because I never thought of myself as God's intellectual equal. I'm perfectly comfortable being unimaginably stupider than God.

His science is incredibly garbled, but I give him full marks for not trying to blame tornadoes on teh gayz.