Cold Case Christianity: Why Is God So Hidden?

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Why Is God So Hidden?

Posted: 22 Sep 2017 01:15 AM PDT

286As a young atheist, I denied the existence of God for practical, experiential reasons. During my elementary school years, I found it difficult to understand why anyone would believe in God without visible evidence.

Probably because, in the real world, failure to prove an allegedly life-changing proposition with visible evidence rationally justifies skepticism toward it. 

I knew my parents, teachers and friends were real, because I could see them and I could see their impact on the world around me.

That's apparently also the reason the apostles believed Jesus rose from the dead, so if God was willing to cater to the human desire for empirical proof back then, then we are justified to believe something is wrong with this god if we find there is no such visible confirmation available today for God's existence.

God, however, seemed completely hidden. I often thought, “If God exists, why would He hide in this way? Why wouldn’t God just come right out and make it obvious to everyone He exists?” As I examined these questions many years later, I began to consider other factors and considerations, particularly related to the nature of “love”.

Yeah, sometimes love really wants you to avoid a danger, but chooses to not notify you of such danger except through fortune cookie-means like ancient scripture, whose adherents have disagreed with each other for 2,000 years over what it means and what it implies.  Yeah that makes sense.  

If I see your child drowning in your swimming pool, maybe the godly way for me to warn you is to knock on your door and talk to you about how terrible death is for a family?  Gee, physically going to the pool and jerking your child out of the water, well that might not necessarily be the most loving thing I could do, eh?  And yet your bible characterizes evangelism similarly as you pulling the unbeliever out of the fire, Jude 1:23.

I held love and compassion in high regard, even as an unbeliever. These were values I embraced as essential to our survival as a species, and values I considered to be foundational to human “flourishing” (as many atheists commonly describe it). But love requires a certain kind of world,

Is this the part where you invite a 5-point Calvinist Christian into the discussion so your audience recognizes that your ideas about love and freewill are rejected by other equally born-again Christian teachers?

Or do you say no 5-Point Calvinist can be a real Christian?

Or do you say not even being genuinely born again can protect one against believing heresy for a whole lifetime, in which case we legitimately ask why we should believe God has ANY part to play in ANYTHING.

and if loving God does exist, it is reasonable that He would create a universe in which love is possible; a universe capable of supporting humans with the ability to love God and love one another. This kind of universe requires a number of pre-requisites, however, and these pre-requisites are best achieved when God is “hidden” in the way He often seems to be:

Love Requires Freedom

True love cannot be coerced.

Which means the God of Ezekiel 38:4 cannot be true love.

We love our children and we want them to love us. We cannot, however, force them to do so.

Correct, but we would still jerk them out of the street if they refused our command and some drunk was barreling toward them in a speeding car.  We wouldn't be stupid like god and say "well if you don't love me, I won't protect you", we instinctively love our children even if their own stupidity evinces their lack of love for us.  It's the wise mature thing to do, and remains the case even despite our inability to know the future or exert infinite power.

When we give our kids direction and ask them to accept this direction as a reflection of their love for us, we must step away and give them the freedom to respond (or rebel) freely.

Love also forces the loved one against their will when the loved one's stupidity or rebellion is headed for certain destruction.  So if we are on our way to hell, God's "love" would imply he'd force us to believe, not that he'd just stand there telling us to read the bible like a robotic emotionless idiot. 

If we are “ever-present”, their response will be coerced;

Is God "ever-present", yes or no?

they will behave in a particular way not because they love us, but because they know we are present (and they fear the consequence of rebellion).

That's exactly the motive God wants the Israelites to act under:  they better obey him, or he will kill them, see Deuteronomy 28:15 ff.

If God exists, it is reasonable that He would remain hidden (to some degree) to allow us the freedom to respond from a position of love, rather than fear.

That's not what other spiritually alive Christians called 5-point Calvinists say.  They say our sinful acts are always in conformity to God's "secret" will even if they conflict with God's revealed will.

What now?  Will J. Warner Wallace admit that somebody can be sincerely born again and yet go their entire lives holding to heretical absurd theology?   Could that possibly provide rational justification for saying the Christian god is fake?

Love Requires Faith

Love requires a certain amount of trust;

Not from the parent's point of view.  If our 5 year old doesn't love us and runs out into the street in willful rebellion, we will go to jail if that child gets hurt and it can be proved we only did what God does, and stood there issuing warnings without doing anything to force them out of the street.  Love does not always shrink back from using force.

we must trust the person who loves us has our best interest in mind,

You mean after they PROVE that they love us?  Sure.  But not before.

even in times of doubt.

If you have already had their love demonstrated to you personally and empirically, then yes.  If not, then no, doubts will be justified.  You don't just blindly trust that somebody loves you if they've never demonstrated any such thing, which is precisely the case with your alleged god who allegedly chooses to remain so hidden, that your choice to be a Christian appears to be nothing more spiritual or special than anybody else's choice to join some religion.

There are occasions when trust requires us to accept something as true, even though we can’t immediately see this to be the case.

But this proceeds from your biblically faulty premise that God wants us to love him freely, when in fact plenty of conservative Christian scholars deny the libertarian sense of freewill that you adopt.

In essence, trust often requires “hiddenness” on the part of the “lover” if love is to be confident, powerful and transformational.

Well gee, then the disciples could have been mightily transformed by a hidden resurrected Christ, and not just one that provided empirical proof?  If so, why did Jesus bother to provide empirical proof, as alleged in Acts 1:3?  Did he think remaining "hidden" would reduce the transformative effect?

Love Requires Evidence

Love does, however, require sufficient evidence. While we may not want to coerce our children, we do need to give them sufficient reason to believe we exist, support and love them.

But as already stated, sometimes our kids do things that require us to force them, if we love them, against their will to protect them from the consequences of their own rebellion or lack of love for us.  Ezekiel 38:4 shows God will force people to do things, even force them to sin, so the more you deny the meaning of this verse, the more your whole "love requires freewill" business becomes bunk.

While many non-believers may deny there is any evidence for the existence of God, the natural world has provided us with sufficient (albeit non-coercive) evidence God exists.

You are doing nothing but preaching the choir.  If God really did think atheists were in danger of hell-fire and really seriously desired them to avoid this fate, he already knows from the first century that empircally proving himself to their empirical senses works wonders, so he has nobody to blame if a different result is achieved with us because he refuses to act today consistent with how he allegedly acted back in the first century. 

We have the ability, however, to deny this evidence if we choose.

Other spiritually alive genuinely born again Christians such as 5 Point Calvinists disagree, and you are a fool to expect spiritually dead unbelievers to figure out which of you correctly understands the bible here.

Love Requires Response

In the end, we do need to show our children our promises have been reliable and their love and trust in us has been well placed.

And if we give them godly love and qualify that our love for them doesn't necessarily mean we'll always be willing to protect them from rape and murder, they would be rationally justified to call 911, got into foster care,  and stop experiencing our "love".

Even though we may have to be “hidden” at times in their lives,

Yes, but our children drown in pools because we aren't there to protect them, and if it were proven we knew they were drowning and could have saved them, and didn't, the more we claim at the parental neglect trial that we had a godly love for our children, the more the jury will find us insane.

at the end of the day, love requires us to make a visible response. The Christian Worldview maintains that God will respond visibly at “the end of the day”. While He may sometimes seem “hidden”, He will ultimately be evident to all of us.

Tell that to the 5 year old girl who is being raped, whose live depends on a protector refusing to stay hidden.

Under biblical logic, it would be blasphemy for a Christian woman to curse god after she had been raped.  For this reason, you'd have biblical authority to rebuke her sharply...but could you seriously blame her?

If God exists, it is reasonable He would personify and fulfill the requirements of love, as described in Christian scripture:

Romans 1:20

For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they (we) are without excuse.

Hebrews 11:1

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Yup, you don't give one rat's ass about answering skeptical objections here, you are just preaching to the choir.

God created a world reflecting His holy nature:

No, he tried and it went to shit, by his own reluctant admission, Genesis 6:6-7

We live in a universe where love is possible.

We also live in a universe with a bible that teaches God sometimes forces people to sin, Ezekiel 38:4.

This kind of universe can sometimes be a scary place, because it requires un-coerced human freedom. God offers us this dangerous liberty (and often remains hidden) so our love will be genuine.

And a solid half of conservative Christianity disagrees with you and says godly love on our part does NOT require the type of libertarian freewill you say it does.

my reply to youtube's "deflatingatheism"

Update: September 26, 2017

Cold Case Christianity: Who Created God? Answer: mankind

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Who Created God?

Posted: 20 Sep 2017 01:00 AM PDT

If the intelligent design theory be true (i.e., that which is complex cannot exist except by being created by a prior equally if not more complex production-agent), then assuming God created us, we only have our degree of complexity because God himself possesses at least this degree of complexity.  So if our own complexity implies we were intelligently designed, why doesn't God's own complexity imply He was intelligently designed?

Apparently, the only reason you stop the "complexity requires intelligent designer" argument before it starts asking questions about God's complexity, is because you need to stop it at that point for the sake of theological convenience, nothing more.   Well if "complexity implies design" is a safe rule of thumb, your gonna need something more than theological convenience before you insist that there are cases of complexity where the rule doesn't apply.

 287Richard Dawkins, the famous English evolutionary biologist and renowned atheist, revived an objection related to God’s existence in his book, The God Delusion. In the fourth chapter (Why There Almost Certainly Is No God), Dawkins wrote, “…the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” In essence, Dawkins offered a restatement of the classic question, “Who created God?” On its face, this seems to be a reasonable question. Christians, after all, claim God created everything we see in our universe (all space, time and matter); He is the cause of our caused cosmos. Skeptics fail to see this as a satisfactory explanation, however, because it seems to beg the question, “If God, created the universe, who (or what) created God?”

Part of the problem lies in the nature of the question itself. If I were to ask you, “What sound does silence make?” you’d start to appreciate the problem. This latter question is nonsensical because silence is “soundless”; silence is, by definition, “the lack of sound”. There’s something equally irrational about the question, “Who created God?” God is, by definition, eternal and uncreated.

Then you are avoiding the skeptic's objection merely by defining it out of existence.  You insist your god is eternal, therefore, there can be no questions about where he came from. But you don't know your god is eternal, you simply trust a book full of fairy tales which says as much.

It is, therefore, illogical to ask, “Who created the uncreated Being we call God?” And, if you really think about it, the existence of an uncreated “first cause” is not altogether unreasonable:

It’s Reasonable to Believe The Universe Was Caused

Famed astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is everything that ever was, is and will be.” If this is true, we are living in an infinitely old, uncaused universe that requires no first cause to explain its existence. But there are good scientific and philosophical reasons to believe the universe did, in fact, begin to exist. The Second Law of Thermodynamics,

No, this law does not teach that the energy in the universe is running down.  Energy is nothing but matter in motion, matter doesn't disappear into nothing when it is converted to energy, it just changes its physical form.  The first law of thermodynamics prevents the creation or annihilation of matter, logically requiring that what's here, has always been here, and new things are just recombination of the same original atoms.  I am made of the dust of the stars and the oceans flow in my veins.

the expansion of the universe,

 That's based on the Doppler interpretation of the red-shift (stars moving away from us).  Wouldn't matter if it was true, the Andromeda Galaxy is blue shifted (moving toward us), and your big-bang theory, if true, would not allow for an entire galaxy to do a complete u-turn while racing away from us, and start coming back toward us.  There's not enough matter around the Andromeda Galaxy to explain how it managed to slow down from the initial big bang thrust, do a u-turn, and start heading in the opposite direction.  The proper conclusion is that movement of celestial bodies in the cosmos goes in all directions, which of course contradicts the "expanding away from each other" theory required by a big bang explosion.  Guth's Inflationary theory does not fix this problem and remains speculative nonetheless.

the Radiation Echo,

This is likely misinterpretation, see
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/big-bang-echoes-that-proved-einstein-correct-might-just-have-been-space-dust-admit-scientists-9461699.html

http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence/do-we-have-the-big-bang-theory-all-wrong

And of course, who doesn't know that the conservative evangelical young-earth scientists over at two creationist websites deny the big bang theory and explain this radiation echo otherwise:

https://creation.com/echoes-of-the-big-bang-or-noise
http://www.icr.org/article/big-bang-theory-collapses/

You can hardly say spiritually dead skeptics/atheists "should" know the scientific truth proving your god, when your own spiritually alive brothers and sisters in the faith disagree with your interpretation of the scientific data.  Does it makes sense to tell you to avoid trumpeting from the rooftops until God's like-minded ones get their act together?  Or do you care somewhat less about divisions in the body of Christ than Paul and Jesus did?

and the problem of Infinite Regress cumulatively point to a universe with a beginning.

No, if the universe is indeed infinite, as appears likely,an infinite regress of causes would be real and would correctly explain any currently moving object.   And your God's eternal nature logically requires that the list of his past actions goes on forever, as a real and true infinite regress.  So you cannot say infinite regresses are logically impossible.

In the classic formulation of the Kalam cosmological argument: (1) whatever begins to exist has a cause,

This assertion is stupid, we have no scientific evidence that anything ever came into existence in the sense of being composed of new previously non-existent atoms.  A baby begins to exist, of course, but this is only a recombination of previously existing matter.  You probably don't mean "begins to exist" in the sense of "using preexisting atoms to produce a new shape" when you talk about God creating the universe.  You probably meant "begins to exist" in the sense of "brand new atoms that didn't previously exist".  And there you go...we have no empirical evidence that any material thing is composed of atoms that previously didn't exist.  its just a cosmos wherein the same atomic sub-structures that have existed for infinity continually combine and recombine.    If you think some of the matter in a log disappears into literally nothing after the log has burned up in the fireplace, you are sorely mistaken. ALL of the matter that was once part of that log, still exists after it has burned up, it is just that the application of heat caused it to change chemically and physically and for some of its matter to depart from it.  The heat that comes out of the chimmney is made of atoms that continue to exist even after the heat cools down.  Matter is eternal, just like the 1st Law of Thermodynamics says.

(2) the universe began to exist,

that logically requires the logical absurdity of a beginning to time itself, so your second premise is assuredly false. What fool talks about things that happened before time itself?

therefore, (3) it is reasonable to believe the universe has a cause.

Nope, see above.

It’s Reasonable to Accept the Existence of An Uncaused “First Cause”

This “first cause” of the universe accounts for the beginning of all space, time and matter.

Only if you ignore the serious problems that attend the concept of a first cause, such as this first cause logically existing temporally prior to time itself, your God being intelligent without a physical brain,  and the other problem previously stated, that your god has at least as much of the complexity that humans have, which you say implies an intelligent designer, but you blindly insist no intelligent designer is implied by God's own an infinitely greater complexity. 

You just stop the "complexity implies intelligent design" train where you need it to for no other reason than theological convenience, not for any logically compelling reason.   You either ride that train all the way to the end of the logic line and admit God's own complexity proves he himself was intelligently designed, or admit that because you know of at least one case of complexity that can exist without being intelligently designed, your rule of thumb that complexity implies intelligent design is not as logically forceful as you wish.

It must, therefore, be non-spatial, a temporal and immaterial.

Yeah, about as believable as something existing "beyond nature".  But I certainly agree that your god is immaterial.

Even more importantly, the first cause must be uncaused. If this was not true, the cause of the universe would not be the “first” cause at all. Theists and atheists alike are looking for the uncaused, first cause of the cosmos in order to avoid the irrational problem of an infinite regress of past causes and effects.

No, the atheists who think the universe is infinite, like me, no longer search for a first cause since that logically wouldn't exist in the infinite universe.

It is, therefore, reasonable to accept the existence of an uncaused, first cause.

It’s Reasonable to Believe God Is the Uncaused, “First Cause”

Rationality dictates the ultimate cause of the universe, (even if it isn’t God), must have certain characteristics. In addition to being non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial and eternal (uncaused), it must also be powerful enough to bring everything into existence from nothing.

No, creation ex nihilo is a logical contradiction.  We have no empirical evidence that zero could ever produce something, and the mathematical impossibility of this strongly argues the notion doesn't work anywhere else either.  SO if God really did create matter, than it can only be pieces of God or God's power, and thus pantheism is logically implied.

 The apologists who say quantum theory allows for virtual particles to be created from nothing and disappear back into nothing, are being dishonest by failing to inform you that this is only the Copenhagen school of quantum theory, there are several schools of quantum theory, and some of them deny that particles can come into existence from nothing. 

Finally, there is good reason to believe the cause of the universe is personal. Impersonal forces cannot cause (or refuse to cause) at will.

Stuff in the universe was never proven to have been put here by a will anyway, so no dice.

The minute an impersonal force exists, its effect is experienced. When the impersonal force of gravity is introduced into an environment, for example, its effect (the gravitational attraction) is felt immediately. If the cause of the universe is simply an impersonal force, its effect (the beginning of the universe) would occur simultaneous with its existence. In other words, the cause of the universe would only be as old as the universe itself. Yet we accept the reasonable existence of an uncaused first cause (one that is not finite like the universe it caused). For this reason, a personal force, capable of willing the beginning of the universe, is the best explanation for the first cause of the cosmos. This cause can be reasonably described as non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial, eternal, all-powerful and personal: descriptive characteristics commonly reserved for the Being we identify as God.

The universe was never caused, its always been here, obviating any need to refute your above-cited statements which stand on the falsified premise of the universe having a beginning.

All of us, whether we are atheists or theists, are trying to identify the first cause of the universe.

Count me out, the universe is infinite, there is no such thing as a "first" event in an infinite universe.  I've stopped looking.

The eternal nature of this non-spatial, a temporal, immaterial cause is required in order to avoid the problem of infinite regress.

Infinite regress was never a problem in an infinite universe.  Ever see the Hubble deep field?  The farthest we can see into space, there is no outer limit to the field of stars, it just continues on indefinitely.  There's no reason to think we'd ever reach the farthest star if we flew in a rocket ship in a straight line for 99 trillion years, we'd still see endless stars in front of us the whole time.  But we'd have to have eternal life to make this observation, and Lord knows, I don't want that.