As Promised...

Here are my thoughts on Paul Copan's article Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?

The objections he is answering come from the pens of the neo-atheists.  They assert that God is a moral monster, not worthy of our respect, love, or obedience.  I won't get into details, but they are quite vehement in their attitude toward God.

In responding to this objection, Copan relies heavily, and rightly so, on the idea of redemptive history.  God did not give his people everything they needed to know in one moment right at the beginning, but in his wisdom he used a long process of training and revealing to get his people where he wanted them to go.  God accommodated himself to our speed.  This idea is a very useful tool for those who want to understand the Bible, especially the Old Testament, since there is much there that is confusing otherwise or could be wrongly understood and misapplied.

In his response, Copan organizes his answers under a few major headings.  The first has to do with the difference between morality and legality.  Mere keeping of the law does not make a person moral.  Morality has to do with more than just laws, it has to do with all of life.  And to make this point God did not simply give his people a list of commands, but showed them the lives of those who have gone before them, lives lived in relationship with God.  The lives, of course, were not perfect, and so we cannot simply look at these people (like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc.) and do what they did.  We cannot jump from the 'is' of their lives to the 'ought' of our lives.  We have to read God's revelation wisely.

The second section shows more of this.  Copan argues that many contemporary discussions of the Old Testament start from the wrong point.  They begin by projecting our modern, post-enlightenment morality back to pre-enlightenment times.  The proper way to understand scripture, however, is to understand it in its context.  This section provides a comparison of the Biblical law code and the law codes of the Ancient Near East (ANE), and shows how God used these ANE codes, but made them better.  The laws in the Bible do not match up to what we want to see now, but they are far better than the laws which were contemporary with it.  God was showing to the world around Israel the better way to live--not an alien way, but a better way--by redeeming their codes of law.

The third section is where Copan really gets to the heart of the matter.  Instead of the God of the OT being hard and cruel, Copan shows how God, even in the OT, wanted his people not simply to obey, but to love him and respond to him out of that love.  There is, Copan writes, a warm moral tone throughout the OT that cannot be represented by mere lists of laws.  The laws are necessary, of course, but to stop at the laws and not see beyond them is missing the heart of the Old Testament.  God was forgiving of his people time and time again.  He dealt with them in compassion, he made it possible for them to have a relationship with him, sinners relating to a holy God.  This is not the picture of a moral monster, this is the picture of a loving God who truly wants his people to love him.  Through the OT, God is leading his people to Christ, where the true nature of God is clearly and powerfully shown.  The read the OT without looking ahead to Christ is to not read the OT properly.  There are not two gods, but there is only one God, who is God both of the Old and the New Testaments.

But what do we do about the less appealing bits of the OT?  What about the Canaanite conquest?  Copan provides a good response here as well.  The war against the Canaanites was not a war against people, but a war against their religion, a false religion (see Deut 7:1-6 -- they would not be totally destroyed, but their way of life and their religion would be rendered powerless).  But the most important point to remember is who God is.  As the Creator and Maintainer of all creation, he has some authority over all of life, including human life.  The Canaanites, practicing false religion, are not honouring God as they should, and so are to be punished (as Israel herself was when she turned away from God in disobedience).

The question is, do we hold God to our moral standards, or does God hold us to his?  I prefer the latter, since God is wiser and better than myself.  And if we read the Old Testament properly, this is clearly shown.  Especially when it is read in light of the development of the New Testament.  Then the objections of the neo-atheists come to nothing.  God is no moral monster, he is instead a loving and compassionate Creator, working in history to bring his people back to him out of the pit of sin.

To see anything else is to look with closed eyes, seeing only what you want to see.

Currently Reading:

In between reading Sidney Greidanus' Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, I have picked up issues of the journal Philosophia Christi, the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society to which I subscribe.  

The article I am reading presently is about the new atheism (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and the like) and Old Testament ethics.  The article is written by Paul Copan (www.paulcopan.com), and is so far an enjoyable read.  I will write about it when I am done, which should be soon...I'm just too tired right now to finish it.  I will say this though, he takes the new atheists to task for reading the Old Testament superficially and simplistically.  And he builds a very good case for his point.

I will write more later, but if you want, you can read the whole article at the EPS website: Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?

If you're an Atheist...

...don't ever change your mind. Other atheists will start to question your intelligence, your motives, and whatever else they can find to attack.

Okay, that's a broad and unfair generalization, but it seems to work out. I ran across this about Antony Flew on another blog (Between Two Worlds):

Antony Flew, for those who do not know, was an atheist. He is now about 84 years old, and for most of his life championed the cause of atheism. One of his well-known articles is "The Presumption of Atheism," which argues that in discussions about the existence of God, we have to start with the assumption that God does not exist, and the burden of proof lies with the theist to prove God's existence.

But, a few years ago (I can't remember exactly how many), Antony Flew changed his tune. He began to believe in God. Now don't get all excited--he doesn't believe in the God of the Bible, but more like the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, or the Watchmaker god of the Deists. But still, he changed his mind on the matter. This has been documented in a new book which came out recently called "There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind" written by Antony Flew and R. A. Varghese.

Apparently, though, in a review of this book in the New York Times, the writer questions everything from Antony Flew's involvement in this book to his intellectual capacity at the age of 80-something. The writer just couldn't accept that Antony Flew could change his mind and believe in something so ridiculous as God.

In a response to this Review, R. A. Varghese writes: "Tony has taken it on himself to respond to every attack on his intellectual integrity in contributions to publications ranging from a rationalist journal in New Zealand to the latest issue of Skeptic magazine in the UK. The attacks on him are always highlighted on the Internet--his responses are never to be found unless you happen to get hold of the print editions." The article this is taken from can be found here: Doubting Antony Flew.

It seems that atheism is just as dogmatic as they claim theists to be, and in the words of Varghese, referring to Antony Flew's position on the matter, several of the greatest "apostles of reason" are just "bigots."

I thought that this whole discussion was interesting, considering as the most vocal atheists all claim to deal with reason alone--until it doesn't prove or show what they want it to, apparently.

They don't take into consideration the fact that even our faculty of reason has been tainted by sin, and so we must constantly keep watch over our own thoughts as well, testing even those spirits that we find in ourselves.