“I’m fed up with God!” (2 Kings 6:33, The Messenger )

Bart D. Ehrman got fed up with God and wrote a book about it entitled God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.

Most of us have flirted with this kind of mutiny — in the face of pictures of starving children and genocides and tsunamis under which planet Earth groans.

Suffering is the wedge that cleaves humanity into two camps — the “curse God and die” (Job 2:9) camp, symbolized by Job’s wife; the “though he slay me, I will hope in him” (Job 13:15) camp, symbolized by Job. There are only two possible “chairs” to sit in, as Francis Schaeffer observed.

Man, beginning with his own mind, tries to draw a circle big enough to circumscribe all reality. He sets out to take in the evidence and judge it, but of course that’s as ludicrous as a child trying to empty the sea with a Dixie cup.

What do you do with the evidence of unspeakable beauty — a perfect lily; a baby’s softness? Which is more reasonable to believe — that God is schizophrenic? Or that there is a mysterious Enemy skulking about who has thrown a wrench in everything? (Matthew 13).

What do you do with the evidence of changed lives: Murderers to ministers of the gospel?

Yesterday I got a letter in the mailbag from a woman who lost her husband five years ago in a freak accident while on a missions trip, serving the Lord. And she has drawn closer to God through it. Go figure.

There is much we don’t see behind the curtain. And where can I go? He has the words of life.

In this essay in The Smart Set, an atheist chastises the atheist authors we’ve all come to know and love: Hitchens, Dawkins, et al.

They didn’t simply want an end to fundamentalism or the use of religious doctrine in governmental policy. They treated Christians as if they all believed the Earth was only 6,000 years old, and Muslims as if they were all strapped with explosives. If you pray to Jesus when your world is falling apart, or blame Mercury being in retrograde when your car won’t start, you are part of the problem.

The essayist, Jessa Crispin, goes on to comment on a new book, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens by theologian John F. Haught.  She calls this book, or at least part of it, “a warm-blooded medium between the atheists’ cold logic and the fundamentalists’ fiery fury.”  But when you read Crispin’s essay - and it’s nice to read about atheists who don’t hate us as much as Hitchens would have them hate us - she sounds like someone who’s simply not willing to accept the either/or proposition of God that most people understand is, in fact, there.  Which is to say, the real-ness of God has some serious and meaningful implications for anyone believing in him.  Neither Hitchens nor Augustine muddy their understanding of the seriousness of the God proposition.  Crispin, as kind as she seems, wants to believe in God and not believe in him, too.  In the end, that kind of thinking is probably worse than the kind we get from more committed atheists.

In this sad article, Dennis Overbye bemoans the uses of the word God when talking about science.  Overbye admits that he’s done it in the past (for example, when writing about the “God particle”).  And Einstein, he admits, also made references to God when talking about science, but we all knew he didn’t really believe in him.  Einstein was too good of a scientist to actually believe in God!

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