to brian

i tried to "comment" this to your blog, but it was too long. here's what i was thinking in reaction to your post and comments on Celebrity Atheist List. __________ brian, good commenting. i really like the way you're processing through these things. being someone who strives to parse these things out as well as i can--for His glory (i tell myself)--i also must draw your attention to the essentially faith-based nature of both theism (obviously) and atheism. you will never be able to simply convince an atheist that there is a God worth serving through logical argument. Blase Pascal had to be one of the most intelligent people to ever live and even he couldn't convince those who were convinced that there was no Purpose. (He made a brilliant Wager, though!) Lewis' point in The Problem of Pain is that pain, much more than anything else, works to shake us from the spiritually oblivious but otherwise pretty-hard-to-discern mentality that we are living in a material-only, Godless, good-less, teleologically empty universe. The Problem with pain is not that it exists but that it inexorably drives people either toward or away from God. Case in point: Charles Darwin was a Christian originally. He wanted to be a pastor. Then his daughter died at a very young age. He believed a good God--who Darwin prayed to earnestly and fervently and repeatedly--would not have taken his daughter. Darwin became so disillusioned with the notion of a "God Who Is There" (Schaeffer) that he dumped the entire idea of a purposeful reason for living. To him, and many others, God cannot be loving. Darwin's solution was to adopt the deist position that there 'is' a God, but that He doesn't really care much for us. This decision is ultimately one based in faith as much as our believe that God does indeed care for us. Of course, as Christians, we don't help the matter much when we address these people's genuine sorrow and anger at the injustice of the world as a logical problem to be solved. It isn't. It's a soul that needs to be healed. The only way it can be is if it comes to the Healer. Usually the only way it will come to Him is through the His Followers lovingly and long-sufferingly introducing the person in pain to the Man of Sorrows. And the best way to do the introducing is to love that person the way that God loves them--not for who they might be when they accept Jesus, but for who they are right now. Who they were created to be; not necessarily the faulty, craptacular person you see before you. That, my friend, is much harder than arguing for the existence of God. (And I would argue probably can't be done on a website!)