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Mac Donald contra God, cont.
Heather Mac Donald writing at NRO lays out the reasons she doesn’t believe in God. Her premise is that Christianity says that God’s will is literally working—or could work, if God wanted it to—all through the creation at every moment. Therefore if anything bad happens, like someone being killed in a traffic accident, that proves either that God doesn’t exist or that he is an arbitrary, cruel, and capricious God unworthy of our love. What she’s really saying is that the occurrence of any injustice or any apparently unequal result anywhere in the universe (e.g., a good man is run down by a car, while another, equally good man is not run down by a car) proves God’s non-existence. The threshold for establishing the existence of God has certainly been raised. It used to be that the systematic murder of millions of human beings proved the non-existence of God. Now a single traffic accident proves the non-existence of God. Now that Mac Donald has published these arguments, which were also the arguments used by my unnamed interlocutor a year and a half ago in the three-part discussion on “God and the Tsunami” (here, here, and here), I feel at liberty to reveal that my interlocutor was none other than Mac Donald.
I’m glad she’s gone public with her views, revealing to the public her uninformed understanding of the Christian and Jewish God, and giving more people the chance to reply. I myself pointed out to her at length that this is not what Christianity says. For example, I noted that the phrase “Thy will be done on earth” in the Lord’s Prayer suggests that in the ordinary course of things, God’s will is not done on earth. I also said that the main point of God’s relationship with man is not that God doles out good material things to man like the government, but that man (through God’s grace) strives to live his life in accord with God’s will. I made many other arguments, including Augustine’s great explanation of evil. None of this made any impression on her. She is basically saying that if Christianity fails to live up to her liberal, secular, and materialist expectations of what Christianity ought to be, then it is a false religion. Email entry |