Post tagged with God

  • Does God punish people through natural disasters?

    October 05th, 201110:48 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    By some counts more than three hundred thousand people were killed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake while an additional three hundred thousand were injured and one million rendered homeless. The scale of human suffering is truly unimaginable. And then, even as people were still struggling for their next breath while buried in ten tonnes of concrete, a...

  • Does God answer prayers for parking spaces at the Pottery Barn?

    September 16th, 201104:24 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Right now a prayer is being offered up by a desperate mother somewhere at a camp in Somalia. Her severely malnourished child is suffering from severe diarrhea and vomiting. She has been told by one of the men that these are signs of cholera. Her child is dying in her arms and she can do nothing. Her prayer is desperate and anguished. If God hears ...

  • Why “God hated Esau” is of no use to the Calvinist

    September 11th, 201107:42 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Pete asked what a person who believes God is omnibenevolent does with "God hated Esau" (Malachi 1:3; Romans 9:13). There are a number of complexities in these passages. To begin with, there is the fact that the specific individuals Jacob and Esau serve as symbols representing people groups (Israel and Edom, or more broadly, insider and outsider). ...

  • The End of Christianity? A Skeptical Review (Part 7)

    August 17th, 201112:58 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Chapter 6 of The End of Christianity brings us to Valerie Tarico's essay "God's Emotions: Why the Biblical God Is Hopelessly Human". While the argument of the essay is not altogether clear, it would appear that Tarico hopes to extend Jaco Gericke's assault on the biblical portrayal of God by arguing that the presence of "human" emotions in the bib...

  • Who needs the Trinity? A Review of Fred Sanders, “The Deep Things of God”

    August 06th, 201112:42 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    Fred Sanders. The Deep Things of God. How the Trinity changes everything. Crossway, 2010. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4355-1316-9. "Dear heavenly Father, we thank you for dying for us." I winced. The church elder meant well of course. He certainly didn't mean to endorse patripassianism. He was just aiming to provide an offeratory prayer in a sleepy subur...

  • Religion briefly defined

    June 15th, 201102:03 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    A few weeks ago I blogged on the myth of religious violence. In the article I complained about those who define religion in an arbitrary fashion so as to marginalize a certain segment of the population. But how then does one define religion? I wasn't really interested in offering a clear definition at the time. Rather, I was more interested in iden...

  • Does God ‘rape the will’ to save people from hell?

    June 07th, 201111:27 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    "Irresistible force used by God on his free creatures would be a violation of both the charity of God and the dignity of humans. God is love. True love never forces itself on anyone. Forced love is rape, and God is not a divine rapist!" (Norman Geisler, "God knows all Things," Predestination and Free Will, (ed.) David Basinger and Randall Basinger ...

  • How much evil could God allow for a greater good?

    April 29th, 201109:32 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    In "Does God ever visit Ronald McDonald House?" I asked a question that crushes me. But as a Christian theist how can I not ask it? A few responses from the skeptics in our midst were, as I expected, incredulous. For example, Ray replied with the following: "The good of consolation is only a runner-up prize to the good of not needing consolation. ...

  • Michael Douglas on the upside of cancer

    January 24th, 201111:32 AM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    It came as a shock to many last August when Michael Douglas, in an appearance on David Letterman, announced that he had been diagnosed with stage four throat cancer. And the Letterman public appearance would be the last one before disappearing down the black hole of seven weeks of intense radiation therapy. Douglas has since reemerged cancer free ...

  • Carl Sagan's old time religion

    September 30th, 201002:42 PM ET
    By Randal Rauser
    I would like to say some more about Sagan’s Pale blue dot fallacy but before doing so let’s say something about Sagan’s (ir)religiosity. It is often assumed that Sagan was an atheist. (Here I am assuming the standard definition of atheist as one who believes there is no God where “God” is defined broadly as the being as defined by the wes...
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About this blog
An exploration of faith, knowledge, reason and doubt (with the occasional trite pop culture reference thrown in for good measure).