I recall reading the description of CUWoCS in the Freshers' Handbook a decade or so ago. Like many religions, they said, we believe that our god will return and condemn people to horrible torture; unlike other religions, however, we don't claim that this somehow means our god is good.

I mention this partly because there's a bit more discussion on C.S. Lewis and Timothy Keller's view on Hell in a thread on my last posting.

However, I mention Great Cthulhu because of a vision that has been given to, no, vouchsafed unto, me, of the time when the Stars are Right and He returns. You can see the full horror over on Facebook. This is a stark reminder of the choice we all face: who will be eaten first?

Thanks to scribb1e, the D&Ders, and the Cthulhu Crochet blog.

Timothy Keller is pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, a successful church in New York. He's written a book, The Reason For God, which he says is for people doubting Christianity, and for Christians wanting to answer questions from their non-Christian friends. nlj21 lent me the book, and I read it while on holiday recently. If you'd like to see Keller in action, you can watch his talk at Google, which rehearses some of the arguments from the book.

The success of Keller's church sounds surprising when you learn that the church is pretty evangelical in theology, because (going by the people he quotes objecting to Christianity) New York is apparently full of the American equivalent of Guardian readers. But having seen Keller's style, I can see why he's successful. He deals sensitively with the human problems people might have had with the church or with conservative Christians as well as the factual arguments. He admits where arguments are only suggestive rather than conclusive, and he mentions the arguments against his position. He admits that there's no argument that will persuade everyone, so the best thing is to look for arguments that will persuade most of the people, most of the time.

Ultimately, though, I think Keller shows more good will than reason, which makes the title a bit of a misnomer. Keller shows that you can construct a Christianity that hangs together, that a belief in God isn't completely crazy. That's certainly necessary, but hardly sufficient, for a reasonable person to believe it. A lot of the book is assertions without evidence for them, when evidence is precisely what is required.

That said, since the book is better than most Christian attempts at evangelism I've read or seen lately, I thought I'd do a couple of posts on it, of which this is the first.

Arguments against God

The book is divided into two parts: one dealing with the arguments against God, which Keller wants to show are faulty; and one dealing with the arguments for God. We'll look at his responses to objections, using the chapter headings from the book.

There can't be just one true religion

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How could a good God allow suffering?

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Christianity is a straitjacket

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The Church is responsible for so much injustice

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How can a loving God send people to Hell?

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Science has disproved Christianity

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You can't take the Bible literally

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Summing up

Some of the objections Keller gets from New Yorkers are ill considered, and Keller bats them aside easily. In other cases (theodicy and Hell), his method is to argue that there's still a chance that Christianity is true, so the objections aren't completely conclusive. I don't find this that impressive, because the sensible objector isn't claiming that their objections are conclusive, merely that they're strong evidence. To defeat that, one must produce stronger evidence, which as we'll see in the next part, Keller fails to do.

A while back, robhu was looking for Bible study courses, and nlj21 recommended TEAM, a course which is run by the vicar of an offshoot of my old church (you might remember my posting about his sermon on The God Delusion).

I poked at the media site. Surprisingly, I didn't make a bee-line for the sex one: anyone who has been in an evangelical church for any length of time has heard 1 Cor 7 preached to death, and knows that sex is a Good Thing if you're married (but if you're very keen on evangelism, or merely very bad at talking to girls, you can be "single for the gospel"). Instead, I picked on the evangelism one, specifically the Q&A session (that's a link to the audio, which you may want in a minute) on how to convert your friends. Know your enemy, right? :-)

John Richardson(edited: I got the name wrong initially, apologies to Richardson and Woodcock should either read this)Pete Woodcock, the speaker, is a straight-forward sort of bloke. He's also pretty funny. The Q&A starts with a worked example of how to talk to various types of people about Jesus, which says sensible stuff about working out where people are coming from, sensitivity and suchlike, while also having a slightly cheeky approach (he talks about how he gave the residents of a new estate flyers saying "your foundations are crumbling", for example).

There were a couple of bits which stood out as quick shocking. Looking at it from the evangelical viewpoint, I'd say Woodcock is being consistent with it, and that this is so much the worse for the evangelical viewpoint. See what you think.

( Pray for your well off friends to have an accident, pray for obstructive liberal vicars to be converted or to die )

It's lucky this chap isn't a Muslim, or he'd have his own Channel 4 documentary team doing a programme on him. We're not quite in Undercover Mosque territory, as there's no suggestion of giving God a helping hand with the brake lines (not worrying about a "dead vicar" here probably refers to a spiritually dead vicar, i.e., one who is not an evangelical Christian): at least praying for something gives God the option of saying no.

These are off the cuff responses to questions. I imagine the poor chap never thought they would turn up on some atheist's blog. But the important thing to realise is that, as far as I can tell, Woodcock is perfectly consistent with evangelicalism, consistent in a way which even many evangelicals are not (the lack of consistency in the other evangelicals is possibly a manifestation of belief in belief: they think it's good to believe in hell, so they say they believe in hell, but they don't anticipate-as-if there's a hell). If you ask your evangelical friends where you're going when you die, if you're not a Christian, they'll tell you're going to Hell. Hell is the worst thing ever, so keeping you out of it is pretty important. What are horrific injuries in the temporal world compared to an eternity in hell? What is the death of one man if it leads to the salvation of many?

One might quibble about the advice to pray for this stuff, rather than, say, praying for God to convert the person or get the vicar out of the way and letting God sort it out. For some reason, it's usually thought to be better to pray for specific stuff rather than generalities. If we concede that it would be right for God to do this stuff, it's surely right to pray for it. So would it be right for God to do it? Recalling that whatever God does is right, that the Bible is inerrant, and that the Bible says that God isn't averse to killing people that get in the way of his chosen people, it's hard to say that smiting recalcitrant vicars isn't something God might do (it's right to pray that the vicar gets converted, but recall also that God doesn't force himself on people to make them converted, so the smiting is a useful backup plan if the vicar won't become a real Christian). In the case of the car accident, we know from C.S. Lewis that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Speaking of car accidents, this sort of thing does make you want to have a Barlet moment, doesn't it?

In the comments on a recent posting of mine, there are several discussions on the subjects of consciousness, Hell, whether a choice is free if the chooser is subject to threats, and a whole bunch of other stuff. robhu is speaking for the "we sinners all deserve to burn, but God is so super that he saves some people" side, gjm11 for the opposition. I've been busy all day so haven't had much chance to contribute. I think it's shaping up to be the post of mine with the most comments. Have fun.

Channel 4 recently screened a documentary called God's Next Army about Patrick Henry College, an evangelical Christian college in America. You can watch it over at Google Video. Why not download it using the Google Video Player thingy so you can still watch it when Channel 4 finds out?

Channel 4 also brought us Richard Dawkins and the Root of all Evil (why not get part 1 and part 2?) God's Next Army lacks the pugnacious presenter, preferring instead to give the ropefloor to the college's staff and students. The college aims to produce people who will take part in some sort of Christian version of The West Wing, where the staff of the White House will successfully battle to prevent gay marriage while engaging in snappy but incomprehensible dialogue. Luckily, it seems that evil contains the seeds of its own undoing.

While I was reading Rilstone on Dr Who (I am firmly in the "Fear Her was crap, less soap and more science fiction, please" camp), I ran across Helen Louise, a Christian wrestling with the idea of Hell. She'd linked to The Gobbledygook Gospel, which pretty well describes the dissonance at the heart of the evangelical gospel (but which then goes on to argue that God is like a big friendly dog: it takes all sorts, I suppose).

I also found The Shock of Your Life and downloaded the first chapter, which is about what non-Christians can expect when we die, told in the first person by a non-Christian who is about to be unpleasantly surprised. It's sort of really bad Christian fan-fiction. The author gets special extra bonus points for juxtaposing a partial quote of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats with an assertion from the narrator's angelic guide that it's not what you do that gets you into heaven; unfortunately the partial quote is one that leaves out the bit where Jesus says that it is what you do that gets you into heaven. It's a good thing that Revelation 22:19 strictly only applies to the Book of Revelation itself, I suppose. One cannot judge the canon (geddit?) by the fan fiction, but I find myself slightly worried that this sort of stuff is being marketed to teenagers. Why can't they read more wholesome stories about Snape having sex with Hermione instead?

"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your Deity made you in his own image, I reply that he must have been very ugly." -Victor Hugo

I've been emailing one of my Christunfrends on the subject of hell. Hell is the dark underbelly of orthodox Christian belief. Christians are, with some notable exceptions, a nice bunch. Remember the natives of the planet Krikkit? In Life, the Universe and Everything they believe in "peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms." As I've said before, evangelicals are sometimes a bit like that. Only instead of the obliteration of all other life forms, we have the eternal conscious torment of non-believers in Hell (annihilationism being viewed as suspiciously liberal by people like Reform).

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