Bestaat God? ds. Hendrikse…

De PKN (Protestantse Kerk in Nederland) dominee Klaas Hendrikse gelooft niet dat God bestaat, maar dat Hij “gebeurt.”

Continue Reading Add comment februari 28th, 2010

Jezus: opgestaan of niet?

Paulus preekte Jezus als lichamelijk opgestaan, het bewijs voor alle mensen dat God de wereld zal oordelen door hem.

Continue Reading 1 comment februari 25th, 2010

Secularism on the warpath: is the end in sight?

Review of Hunter Baker, The End of Secularism, by K.T. Karnick, in the magazine Christianity Today, Feb. 11, 2010

What the current spate of anti-Christian screeds really reflects, it now seems clear, is bitter disappointment at Americans’ continuing refusal to come to their senses and stop believing in God.

Continue Reading Add comment februari 22nd, 2010

Franca Treur

Franca Treur, romanschrijver, ex-belijdend lid Gereformeerde Gemeente

Van Kim Batteau

Het is diep en diep triest dat er zo veel Franca’s in Nederland rondlopen. Haar eigen conclusie, na jaren studie in Leiden: God is een menselijke projectie en niet meer dan dat. Ze zegt dat ze veel moest huilen toen ze nog tobde over haar afscheid van het geloof. Maar op basis van rationele overwegingen kwam ze tot deze voor haar onvermijdelijke en eerst zo emotionele conclusie.

Nederland heeft meer, niet minder apologetiek nodig op onze universiteiten en hogescholen. Wie is het met me eens?

En: laten we blijven bidden voor Franca Treur.

Continue Reading 5 comments februari 21st, 2010

Haiti: God and scepticism (4)

God and disasters (4). Post from Talking Philosophy by Mike LaBossiere and a response from Kim Batteau.

When watching the news clips of people speaking about prayer and faith in the face of an earthquake, I was reminded of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake [9]. in philosophy [10], this event is best remembered in the context of Voltaire’s criticism of Leibniz [11]‘ claim that this is the best of all possible worlds [12]. After all, it is rather difficult to reconcile the idea of a benevolent and all powerful God [13] with such natural disasters. David Hume [14] also wrote on this problem and explicitly criticized Leibniz.

Response from Kim Batteau: Let us look at the phenomenon “earthquake” more closely, thinking of the famous Lisbon earthquake 0f 1755 and the Haiti earthquake of 2010 as our examples. In these and similar earthquakes tens of thousands of people, men, women, and children lost their lives in violent deaths, or died after somtimes long drawn-out suffering under collapsed buildings. Voltaire and Hume reacted with their criticism of Leibniz, as Mike LaBossiere points out. Leibniz was a theist of sorts, and defended the compatibility of the existence of a good and all-powerful God with natural disasters. Voltaire was not an atheist, but a deist, believing that God had created everything, winding nature up like a clock, which then moved totally mechanically on its own and without further interference from Him. Hume was a sceptic, and most likely an atheist, although he clothed his ideas about religion in deist-sounding words, and criticized some of the blatant atheism of his time. Voltaire and Hume were adamant in finding God’s (theoretical) direct involvement with natural disasters as an incompatible with His (possible) goodness. Therefore they doubted such involvement. Effectively they were criticizing the God of the Bible, who creates, but also causes (or allows) natural disasters. This criticism struck a chord with Enlightenment man, and today the atheist’s creed (see my first entry under this heading) is widespread in the West, among intellectuals and among ordinary people on the street.

To a certain degree, we may perceive this critical reaction to natural disasters in the Bible book Job, where Job complains to God that he is being unfairly punished, with family being killed (by a natural disaster) as well as with his own sickness. However, we notice that Job never doubts God’s existence or involvement with life on earth. Making Job a modern man, as in the play J.B., is a modern misuse of him.

The key issue has to be: on what consistent basis can we say that natural disasters “ought not to happen”? On the basis of naturalism, natural disasters are simply natural phenomena. The consistent naturalist must deny that nature “ought” to behave in one way or another. Nature is not a matter of “ought,” but of “is.” Therefore we get the paradoxical result of naturalists (Voltaire, Hume) objecting to the theoretical possibility of God’s causing or allowing natural disasters, on the basis of the idea that “such disasters ought not to happen,” while their naturalist presuppositions deny that such an objection to natural phenomena is possible. This is more than a paradox: it makes their case against God groundless. It is also leads inevitably to the philosophical position that the terrible suffering of people in earthquakes is simply a natural phenomenon.

We may not let naturalists get away with murder, philosophically speaking. You cannot be at peace with a nature in which natural disasters are merely natural phenomena, and at the same time be deeply disturbed by such disasters. Even the word “disaster” is a misnomer here. However, your disturbance may lead you to question the “normality” of nature as we now experience it on earth. With the result that one’ s gut feeling that natural disasters like the Lisbon and Haiti earthquakes “ought not to happen,” is warranted, and leads you on to the truths which the Bible reveals about God as creator, judge, redeemer and recreator, and you begin to look at nature, earthquakes, and the story of our life on earth in a new way.

Continue Reading Add comment februari 6th, 2010

Haiti: God and scepticism (3)

God and disasters (3). Post from Talking Philosophy by Mike LaBossiere and a response from Kim Batteau.

When watching the news clips of people speaking about prayer and faith in the face of an earthquake, I was reminded of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake [9]. in philosophy [10], this event is best remembered in the context of Voltaire’s criticism of Leibniz [11]‘ claim that this is the best of all possible worlds [12]. After all, it is rather difficult to reconcile the idea of a benevolent and all powerful God [13] with such natural disasters. David Hume [14] also wrote on this problem and explicitly criticized Leibniz.

Response by Kim Batteau: It is one of the puzzling questions in the history of philosophy: why did no one at that time (as far as we know) respond to the naturalism of Hume by demonstrating naturalism’s destruction of moral discourse? Further, almost no one (as far as we know) responded to Marx’s naturalism, or Nietzsche’s naturalism, with this very simple yet totally devastating argument. That is, if all reality is either a natural state or a natural event, and if nature by definition is amoral, therefore any “objections” to reality, either social reality or religious beliefs, are themselves amoral statements masked as genuine moral discourse. If everything is nature, that includes all thoughts and words of the animals called human. If nature is amoral thus all the thoughts and words of the animals called human are themselves amoral. To then call one state or event “evil,” is itself neither good nor bad, but amoral. And words such as “evil” or “good,” or saying “suffering is bad,” are by definition amoral and thus totally self-contradictory. One cannot both be a part of nature, which is amoral, and try to function outside or above nature, with moral language.

Let’s use a visual example. One says “everything is water.” But then one says: “we arrived on dry land.” However, if you first say “everything is water,” there can be no dry land in your universe. If everything is amoral nature, there can be no moral discourse in your universe.

Continue Reading Add comment februari 4th, 2010

Haiti: God and scepticism (2)

God and disasters (2). Post from Talking Philosophy by Mike LaBossiere and a response from Kim Batteau.

Let’s look again at what Mike LaBossiere writes:
Rather than focus on the problem of evil, the point I am addressing is that it seems rather odd to pray to God in such a context. After all, if it is assumed that God exists and has the usual attributes (all good, all powerful and all knowing) then praying would make no sense. This is because the earthquake was allowed (or perhaps caused) by God. He knows about the event and hence prayer is not needed to let God know that a disaster has struck. Since He is all powerful, He could render aid. However, if He did not want the disaster to strike, then it would not have occurred. Praying to God would be like asking for help from the person who is punching you in the face-obviously that person is not going to render aid.

Response from Kim Batteau: This sounds logical, but it is a flawed piece of reasoning. If naturalism is an impossible basis for moral discourse, since a purely natural world is morally neutral, and all events and states of affairs are therefore morally neutral, then we are left with a world in which God has made us. God has apparently the power to rule over all things, without Himself being guilty for the evils which men do. He also has the ability to “subject creation to futility” as Paul writes in Romans 8:20, so that natural disasters are commonplace on earth. These natural disasters may be His punishment for specific human evil, but can also be an instance of His general “curse” of the earth due to Adam’s sin in the beginning (Gen. 3:17). It is not illogical for God to be continuing to subject the earth to futility (the curse), with natural disasters as the result, and His being able to listen to the prayers of His people for mercy in the midst of this judgment. Concretely this would mean that Haiti has been subject to the consequences of the Fall for creation–an earthquake, and that Christians in Haiti can pray for God’s help to alleviate their suffering and deliver them from death.

Continue Reading Add comment februari 4th, 2010