Cold Case Christianity: Four Truths About the Universe You Can Share with Your Kids to Demonstrate the Existence of God

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

Four Truths About the Universe You Can Share with Your Kids to Demonstrate the Existence of God

Posted: 25 Sep 2017 01:19 AM PDT

If you’ve raised your children to believe Christianity is true, you probably want them to continue to believe it’s true, especially through their critical university years. There are good reasons to be concerned for young Christians once they leave our care. Statistically, most will walk away from the Church (and their belief in God) during their college years.

Probably because it is only outside their protective homes and churches that they will become exposed to truths that create serious problems for the fundamentalist view they were raised with.  There can be no doubt that the number of Christian "fundamentalists" has dwindled significantly since the explosion of the internet in the popular sphere in 1995. 

What can we, as parents, do to address this growing problem? How can we help them know that God exists?

What a shame for you that although you claim to depend on "God", the way in which you solve the problem betrays that you don't think God actually does anything more here than he does when you order fries at the drive-through.  If you are the one implementing the safety procedure, then the only reason you credit your kids' safety to God is your theological insanity.  And it gets more insane if in spite of not crediting your own good works to yourself, you readily credit your bad works to yourself (i.e., when you do good works, it's God's fault...when you do bad works, it's not God's fault).

As a cold-case detective, parent, and prior youth pastor, I have a suggestion: master the case for God’s existence and start sharing it with your kids at an early age.

And the best way to do that is to purchase your forensic faith materials and basically swallow whatever marketing gimmick you use, correct?

Sounds simple, right? Maybe, or maybe not. If your kids asked you to defend the existence of God right now, what would say? What evidences would you provide? Are you ready to make the case for what you believe, even as the world around us often makes the case against God’s existence?

Is there anything in the writings of the NT that requires Christians to make the case that God exists?  No.  You are blindly assuming that all Christians be evangelists and teachers, but not every person in the body of Christ can do this:

 11 And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers,
 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; (Eph. 4:11-12 NAU)

 28 And God has appointed in the church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, administrations, various kinds of tongues.
 29 All are not apostles, are they? All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they?
 30 All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they?
 31 But earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way. (1 Cor. 12:28-31 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Don’t panic, you don’t have to be a theologian, philosopher or scientist to defend the truth. All you need to be is interested.

You don't even need to be interested.  The bible makes plenty of room for a person to a a genuinely born again Christian whose witness to others does not consist of learning arguments.

It’s not hard to be interested when the spiritual fate of our kids is hanging in the balance.

Here you blindly assume the stakes are high, when liberal Christian theologians make a persuasive case that everybody will be saved and a hellish afterlife are false doctrines.

Make a commitment to investigate the case for God’s existence so you can communicate it to your kids.

Translation: "purchase the materials that I so ceaselessly promote".

The Apostle Paul was correct when he said that God’s “invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made” (Romans 1:20).

Which means you are not addressing anybody here except those who believe everything Paul taught as blindly as you do.

We’ve written God’s Crime Scene for Kids to help you and your children investigate everything “that has been made.”

Which cannot be reconciled with your alleged belief that the bible alone is sufficient authority for faith and practice. God would probably worry himself sick if you stopped helping the Holy Spirit through your attention-deficit lectures and videos, wouldn't He?

Along the way, you’ll discover four truths that will help your kids demonstrate the existence of God:

Implying that God wasn't capable of demonstrating these to Christians between the 1st and 20th centuries.  But if he was capable then, he's capable now, in which case modern Christians no more need your forensic faith bullshit than hey need Benny Hinn.

Our Universe Requires a Divine “First Cause”

Scientists have determined that our universe is not infinitely old.

You conveniently leave "scientists" unqualified, thus creating the false impression that "most" scientists deny the infinite age of the universe.  You are incorrect, the number of scientists who are open to the possibility of the universe being infinite is growing.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: So it goes on, but is it infinite? Chuck Bennett is an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University.
CHUCK BENNETT: It is somewhat unimaginable, but quite possible that our universe simply goes on forever.

=============

  Scientists have predicted the possibility that the universe might be closed like a sphere, infinite and negatively curved like a saddle, or flat and infinite.
A finite universe has a finite size that can be measured; this would be the case in a closed spherical universe. But an infinite universe has no size by definition.
According to NASA, scientists know that the universe is flat with only about a 0.4 percent margin of error (as of 2013). And that could change our understanding of just how big the universe is.
"This suggests that the universe is infinite in extent; however, since the universe has a finite age, we can only observe a finite volume of the universe," NASA says on their website. "All we can truly conclude is that the universe is much larger than the volume we can directly observe."

Wallace continues blindly appealing to what his intended audience already believes:

In fact, they now believe that everything in the universe, all space, time and matter, had a beginning in the distant past. Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. What could account for the beginning of the universe?

 No, see above, you are giving the false impression the only respectable scientific theory on the universe is that it is finite.  You apparently know not even that which can be determined with a quick Google search, or you are dishonest.

One thing is certain: whatever caused the cosmos must be something other than space, time or matter (since these didn’t exist prior to the beginning of the universe).

Well since the universe is infinitely old, the problem of where the universe came from, disappears.

That means we’re looking for something non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material, and incredibly powerful. Sounds a lot like God, doesn’t it?

It also sounds like a fairy-tale solution more in line with religious belief than empirical observation.  There are no concretely established cases for the existence of anything that is "non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material", so until the day you establish such, you cannot get rid of the possibility you'd like to get rid of, that what you are talking about is pure nonsense.

Life in the Universe Requires a Divine “Author”

Scientists have also determined that life in the universe is formed and guided by information. Biological organisms (like humans) possess deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules. The nucleotide sequence in DNA is an incredibly long (and sophisticated) code that guides the growth, development, function and reproduction of every living organism.

But where does the information in DNA come from? Did this incredibly complex series of instructions come about by chance? Was it caused by the laws of physics or some process of evolution? No. The best explanation for information is intelligence. The information in DNA requires an intelligent author. Once again, God is the most reasonable explanation.

Why do predator birds have very sharp eyesight?  If the world of lving things was vegatarian before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, then nobody would need eyesight any sharper than that of a cow, to locate and eat foilage and fruit.  In which case you cannot cite the degrading effects of the Fall to account for today's predatory birds having super-sharp eyesight.  If you continue denying evolution's ability to increase the complexity of creatures over time, you are forced to blame God for predatory birds gaining an increase in their visual acuity at some point after they stopped being vegetarians in Eden.  In which case your god is personally responsible for causing eagles to be motivated to inflict the misery that carnivores typically inflict on other animals.  And your god's doing this is arbitrary since apparently becoming carnivorous wasn't a requirement after the fall as so many billions of cows testify.

And if you say predatory birds were carnivorous even before any sin entered the world, then it is a world full of tooth and claw misery and pain, that God is calling "good" in Genesis 1:31, using the Hebrew word "tob" for "good" that is used in 2:17 to signify the moral opposite of evil.  In which case God in 1:31 is asserting the full moral goodness of a world full of carnivors inflicting misery and pain on each other.

That should come as no surprise, for when God inflicts rape upon disobedient women (Deut. 28:30), this is something he "delights" to do no less than he "delights" to grant prosperity to those who obey him (v. 63).

That's how you cause the intelligent design argument to back-fire in the face of Christian apologists.  Since you deny that random chance and evolution can account for why eagles desire to kill, lions and others have fangs suited to little more than ripping flesh, etc, only intelligent design can account for these, in which case your God's idea of "good" is so alien to everything you stand for that it can only be by a truly "blind" faith that you insist this God is always "good".

Moral Laws in the Universe Require a Divine “Law Giver”

All of us recognize the existence of moral laws and obligations. While some behaviors (like stealing or lying) may be justified on rare occasion (to save the life of an innocent person, for example), it’s never morally acceptable to steal or lie for the fun of it.

Your 5-Point Calvinist brothers and sisters in Christ, whom you aren't likely to deny the salvation of since they accept all doctrines you say are "essential" to salvation, assert that a person is fulfilling God's secret will when they sin, even if with such act they are also contradicting god's "revealed" will.  So if some criminal steals a six-pac of beer from the corner store mostly because she thinks it "fun", this must be credited to God, and that sucks for you, because you insist that anything which God wills, is righteous by definition.

If even spiritually alive Calvinists can "misunderstand" the nature of God's sovereignty in a sinful universe, as you will likely accuse them, you are a fool to expect spiritually dead atheists and non-Calvinist Christians to think your views on this matter are the end of the discussion. 

This is true for all of us, regardless of when we have lived in history or where we have lived on the planet. These objective moral laws also describe obligations between persons. No one, for example, is morally obligated to the laws of physics or chemistry.

All laws such as these require law givers.

No, the laws that most humans agree on, they agree on because obeying them conduces toward facilitating easier survival, that's all the rationale needed to explain why most human beings think torturing babies for fun is immoral. We are social animals the the acts we think of as crimes, just happen to be those that end up playing a significant part in breaking up society which inhibits survival.

Objective laws and obligations that transcend all of us require an objective, personal law giver who transcends all of us. Once again, God is the best explanation for the moral laws and obligations we all recognize.

Well since your own god takes credit for motivating pagans to inflict horrible miseries on the Israelites:

  15 Though he flourishes among the reeds, An east wind will come, The wind of the LORD coming up from the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry And his spring will be dried up; It will plunder his treasury of every precious article.
 16 Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open. (Hos. 13:15-16 NAU)

 ...you cannot assert that humans are rebelling against god's moral will when they murder each other.  You are forced to agree with your bible that they were empowered by God to do these things.

You will say God doesn't force people to hurt others, but that in his judgment he sometimes withdraws his prevenient grace so that such humans naturally inflict the misery they are already naturally inclined to inflict, so that God is free from responsibility for the evil he knew would happen as a result of his own choices, but this is about as convincing as the dog owner who intentionally unleashes his pit bull for the purpose of mauling you, then arguing later in court when you sue for injuries, that because he didn't maul you himself but only removed the restraints on his dog knowing the dog would maul you, he is thus not responsible for your injuries.  Yeah right.

Evil in the Universe Requires a Divine “Standard”

Some people point to evil as an evidence against the existence of God. Why would an all-powerful, all-loving God allow bad things to happen?

Maybe because his idea of love is so different from ours, the acts we perceive to be unloving, he thinks are loving?  And therefore, when you assert "God is loving" to the average person, you are guilty of deception and equivocation?

If God's "love" cannot be construed as an absolute guarantee that he will do all in his power to, say, prevent a child from being raped, then why are you so sure God is "loving" toward children?  Answer: your blind faith that because the bible says God is loving, that must be the end of the discussion. 

Is He unable to stop them?

Yes, the God who was helping Judah win a war, wasn't able to overcome the power of iron chariots:

 17 Then Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they struck the Canaanites living in Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. So the name of the city was called Hormah.
 18 And Judah took Gaza with its territory and Ashkelon with its territory and Ekron with its territory.
 19 Now the LORD was with Judah, and they took possession of the hill country; but they could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had iron chariots.
 20 Then they gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had promised; and he drove out from there the three sons of Anak.
 21 But the sons of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites who lived in Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have lived with the sons of Benjamin in Jerusalem to this day.
 (Jdg. 1:17-21 NAU)

 Even Christian scholars who accept and defend biblical inerrancy, are forced to speculatively "presume" something not implied in the text, in order to "explain" this surprising admission that God's power wasn't enough to do the intended job:

In our text (v. 18a) the narrator explicitly attributes Judah’s successes in the hill country not to equivalent military power but to the presence of Yahweh. Then why could they not take the lowland? Why is Yahweh’s presence canceled by superior military technology? The narrator does not say, but presumably the Judahites experienced a failure of nerve at this point, or they were satisfied with their past achievements.

Block, D. I. (2001, c1999). Vol. 6: Judges, Ruth (electronic ed.). Logos Library System; 

The New American Commentary (Page 100). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

Wallace continues:

Is He simply unwilling to prevent them?

Read Deuteronomy 28:15-63.  God not only "allows" evil (i.e., rape, v. 30, parental cannibalism, v. 53), but he takes credit for causing or inflicting it.  Worse, he "delights" to inflict such atrocities on them, v. 63.

In either case, the existence of evil seems to invalidate our definition of God as an all-powerful and all-loving Being.

It wouldn't make much sense for you to defend God's all-loving nature, if you have to argue that certain acts we find unloving, God thinks are loving.  If God's idea of "love" is so contrary to our own beliefs about it, you aren't "defending" anything, you are simply preaching the bible and reminding the believing audience that God's definition of love is more accurate than the definition accepted by civilized societies.  Which then involves you in the stupidity of asserting that God condemns the evil men that God uses...sort of like paying a hit-man for murder, then telling everybody that while what he did was evil, your using him to commit murder was not evil for YOU.  Well fuck you.

But what defines something as evil in the first place?

How about your bible?  Since God in Ezekiel 39 is punishing the Gog and Magog armies because they warred against Israel, we can soundly presume God thought these armies had done evil...but in Ezekiel 38:4, it is God himself who is forcing these armies to commit this specific evil (i.e, "hook in your jaws", a metaphor that puts images in the mind that are wholly contradictory to any notion that God "respects human freewill" or that God doesn't want people to do evil.)

Is something “evil” simply because we don’t personally approve of it,

Yes, there's no natural law that says a person's subjective beliefs about evil are disqualified.  If I think it is evil for fundamentalist Christians to evangelize unbelievers, I am rational to think that way despite the fact that other people would disagree.  Nothing else is more common than people disagreeing on what constitutes evil.

or do we believe some acts are truly evil, regardless of our opinion? If the latter is true, we would need an objective, transcendent standard of good by which to judge any particular act.

And since we all agree that a) sex within adult-child marriages is evil, and b) God doesn't have jack shit to say about this evil, you don't have an "objective, transcendent standard of good by which to judge" this particular act as evil. You have nothing but your own conscience, and some would argue your conscience is hardly objective or transcendent.

The existence of God offers such a standard,

And used car salesmen offer used cars to solve your transportation problems too. Many of those cars are lemons, and so is yours, you shameless salesman.

and God often allows and uses temporal evil to develop our eternal character,

If I cannot justify murder by saying the emotional outrage this causes will develop the survivor's moral character, then when you try to justify God with the same argument, you are doing so because of blind and arbitrary choice to believe God just cannot do anything wrong.  You have defined God as "good", so to you, trying to allow that God could do wrong is, in your mind, equal to suggesting that the word "good" could sometimes mean "evil".  Well in light of Genesis 6:6-7, God is quite capable of making the wrong decision and regretting it later, and your "this-was-just-an-anthropomorphism" excuse derives neither from the genre of Genesis, the context nor the grammar of the passage, and is therefore most likely a false interpretation forced on the text because of your prior belief that other bible passages are correct in saying God is always infinitely good.

draw us to himself, and achieve a greater good (if not immediately, over the course of history).

According to Deuteronomy 28:15-63, God also inflicts and causes evil solely for the purpose of causing the misery and destruction of the people he is hurting.   Yet, you will never tell Christian parents that God allowed their child to be raped because God was angry with them because of some sin.  You are more interested in telling people what comports with their existing beliefs, than in telling them the more harsh brutal biblical truth.

Evil doesn’t disprove God’s existence, but instead requires a standard of good to be anything more than a matter of opinion. Only God can provide such a standard.

There’s much more to examine in the universe, and you can help your kids make the case for God at www.CaseMakersAcademy.com. They’ll solve an intriguing mystery, as they also learn how to investigate the truth about the cosmos. They’ll also have a chance to become Case Making Cadets and earn a Certificate of Graduation after completing our free Case Makers Academy. It’s never too early to master the truth. Help your kids defend with they believe so they can worship God with their hearts, souls, and minds.

This article first appeared at Crosswalk.com.

 And the fact that you make money of of this marketing gimmick makes us wonder how God was able to teach before you came along, suggesting Christians don't "need" your materials half as much as you pretend.

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