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Posts from the ‘The Problem of Evil’ Category

Jan 1

7 Comments

Chaos and Grace

I finally finished Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed last week. It’s a heart-wrenching and tragic story. One reviewer compared it to Dostoevsky’s novels and while I’m not sure I would go quite that far, it certainly does share similar pathos-inducing qualities. In the story, a normal, reasonably happy life for a normal, reasonably happy couple is slowly and steadily reduced to a tale of pain, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and anger. There is hope, as well, but in very measured and cautious doses. Read more

Sep 6

10 Comments

Only Human

This week a friend sent me a link to an event taking place just down the road in Victoria this fall. The University of Victoria is hosting an evening with two prominent Canadians—singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn and the former head of UNAMIR (the United Nations peace-keeping mission to Rwanda), Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire. The proceeds from this event will be going to help fund the Child Soldiers Initiative in Africa, an international research and intervention effort focused on the eradication of the use of child soldiers. The price-tag for this event might prove prohibitive ($81.50), but I’m hoping to find a way to get down there for this. Read more

Aug 26

10 Comments

Prayer

One of the things I’ve found myself doing more regularly since I began as a pastor is praying. Not just private prayer (i.e., pleading with God to help me learn how to do this job well and with integrity and honesty) but public prayer as well. I’ve been given the opportunity to offer something like a “global prayer” during the service on most of the Sundays since we arrived here and it’s been both a rewarding and a challenging experience. Read more

Jun 27

6 Comments

Done!

Well, sixteen months of toil came to an end today as I finally submitted my thesis for grading. I can’t tell you how good it felt to plunk that big stack of paper down at the Regent front office today. I am very relieved to have this completed—it’s a huge load off my mind. For those who might (still) be wondering about what, exactly, I’ve been beavering away at for so long, I’ve reproduced the abstract below. If you’re interested enough to read more, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy. Read more

Jun 12

6 Comments

A Shared Moral Universe

Well my thesis is mercifully coming closer to completion—I submitted the final chapter to my supervisor’s scalpel yesterday. After a year or so spent on the same topic, not to mention the ordinary frustrations of thesis-writing, the question of why I ever started this project sometimes occurs to me (apart from my requiring these credits to graduate). Atheism and the problem of evil. Not exactly the most inspiring or uplifting topics to immerse oneself in for a sustained period of time. Read more

May 27

3 Comments

For and Against God?

The last chapter of my thesis is where I try to make the move from the existence of a strong element of moral protest in the new atheism, to the claim that the whole enterprise can profitably be understood as an attempt at theodicy. As such, I’ve been brushing up on some responses to the problem of evil in Encountering Evil. I came across these passages in John Roth’s chapter on “protest theodicy” this morning, and I’ve been mulling them over since: Read more

May 17

2 Comments

Rippling

Richard Handler is, as far as I can gather, the resident philosopher at the CBC, and I’ve come to enjoy reading his articles since I first came across him several months ago (officially, he’s the producer of the CBC radio program Ideas). This week’s article deals with the subject of death—our omnipresent fear of it and one way of dealing with it from an unbeliever’s perspective. Read more

May 9

12 Comments

The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough—it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation—the scientific one—is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from. Read more

Apr 25

9 Comments

Ehrman and Wright on the Problem of Suffering

The following exchange on beliefnet is worth checking out for those interested in the problem of suffering and evil, and how the biblical narrative addresses (or fails to address) it. Bart Ehrman is a former Christian and professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina who has recently authored God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. N.T. Wright is a biblical theologian, the Bishop of Durham, and the author of numerous books on the the historical Jesus and the early church, as well as, more relevant to this discussion, Evil and the Justice of God. Read more

Mar 24

5 Comments

I Wish Jesus Didn’t Have to Die

Last Thursday I took my kids with me to our church’s Maundy Thursday service. I wasn’t really sure how they would react.  It is, after all, a fairly somber and dark service, whose purpose is to lead its participants through the fearful events of Jesus’ final days. I had some reservations about even exposing a couple of impressionable six-year-olds to the full weight of the Easter story, but my apprehension intensified when they informed me, after watching a steady stream of volunteers moving to the front to read the selected Scripture readings, that they wanted to read one too. Read more

Mar 7

40 Comments

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

Another shameless self-promotion alert!

The Other Journal is an online journal that explores a whole range of issues related to the intersection of theology and culture. This month their focus is atheism, and they’ve been gracious enough to publish an article I wrote which attempts to summarize the main gist of my thesis. From now on whenever the inevitable “so what are you writing about?” question comes up, I can just refer them here…

If you’re interested, here’s the link.

Feb 16

Two Ways of Waiting

Lent is a time of waiting—something we are all, in various ways and to varying degrees, familiar with. During Lent our waiting is oriented towards Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the high points of the Christian calendar. But “waiting” is a theme that extends far beyond the period of Lent. Read more

Jan 31

11 Comments

My Thesis in a Nutshell

I suspect that anyone who has ever written a thesis, a dissertation, or done any other kind of sustained writing on a particular subject may, at times, come to dread the inevitable question presented when someone learns of the nature of your task: “So what are you writing about?” Typically, when I am asked this question, I will begin to scratch my head and, if I can’t manage to change the subject, mumble something to the effect of, “well I’m trying to interpret the rise of the new atheism through the lens of theodicy.” Read more

Dec 19

Death, the Enemy

Sitting here in the library on a dreary, rainy December day, I find myself thinking about death—which is ironic, and perhaps a little morbid considering the fact that we’re in a season of the year which is focused on the birth of Christ, who came to give us new life. Nevertheless, I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with a student on the last day of the class I taught at CBC this past semester—a conversation in which she wondered why I had presented death as the ultimate “enemy” of humanity in my final lecture. “Why do we need to see death as an enemy?” she asked. “Why not just look at it as a normal part of life and make the most of the time we have?” Read more

Dec 14

3 Comments

The Adopted God

I’ve been reading John Swinton’s Raging with Compassion off and on for the last couple of weeks, and have appreciated his challenge to move past the logical problem of evil in order to focus on active resistance of evil. Swinton is less interested in a series of disembodied arguments about evil than he is in reflecting on how evil can be resisted and transformed within the life and practices of the Christian community—how we can live faithfully in the midst of an ambiguous world where unanswered questions remain as we wait God’s redemption of the whole of creation. Read more

Dec 11

7 Comments

A Two-Pronged Hope

A lot of the reading I am doing for my thesis is related to the idea of hope—how it provides an account both of the “unfinished” or “unsatisfactory” state of the natural world and the existence of human beings who expect and long for better from the world. I recently came across this quote from Nicholas Wolterstorff, from a chapter in The Future of Hope, which I feel captures these two themes well: Read more

Oct 29

15 Comments

Who’s Afraid to Face Reality?

Over the course of the last half a year or so I’ve slogged through pretty much the entire catalogue of atheist writings that have come out in the last four years. Not surprisingly, this hasn’t been the most edifying experience I’ve ever gone through, but at the very least it does force one to think carefully about the claims these authors make about religious folks. One of the consistent refrains found in Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, Onfray, Stenger and, before them, Freud, Feuerbach, and Marx is that religion is for people who are afraid to face reality as it is. The inability of religious people to deal with the harsh realities of life is claimed to lead them to wild flights of fantasy and delusion in order to provide comfort and security in a universe that, at rock bottom, is characterized by nothing but “blind pitiless indifference.” Read more

Oct 24

5 Comments

Theodicy for the “Onlookers”

I have spent and continue to spend a good chunk of time thinking and writing about the problem of evil in some form or another. I’ve been told on occasion that this is unhealthy, unproductive, or just plain weird. My thinking about evil has ranged from the purely abstract (the “logical” problem of evil) to the more pastoral (what do you do/say when someone close to you is suffering?) to the theological/philosophical (what is it about human beings and the world that leads us to expect better?) to the sociological (What role does theodicy play in the adoption of and adherence to this or that worldview?). What is notable about all of this thinking/writing is that it has, thus far, been undertaken by one who has remained virtually untouched by suffering. Read more

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