God to Stephen Fry: what's this pretense to intelligence?

If the British actor Stephen Fry were to meet God he would have little consideration for Him other than disdain. "What's this about bone cancer in children?", he would demand of the Almighty. So he said in an interview a few days ago. You can see it here: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/01/stephen-fry-god-evil-maniac-irish-tv

Now before you get too hot and bothered about such impudence, and we can certainly understand your feelings there, let's keep in mind two things. One, Mr. Fry is not asking God such questions for information and enlightenment but rather as an attack without a care about truth and rightness. He's made up his mind that God (if He exists) is a jerk and that's that. Fry isn't looking for truth. He's looking for a straw man to support his preconceptions of an all powerful being.

But point two is the one upon which we must expound. Let's be fair, friends: it is okay to ask God questions, even questions which at first glance may seem impertinent, if we indeed ask them in search of understanding. In that sense, it's okay to ask even of God what about bone cancer in children?

Any God worth having can answer that. The short answer by the way is this: philosophically, no creation can equal its creator. A man might create a chair, but the chair is certainly not equal to the man. It can't be: the man simply cannot give all of himself to something else. Ergo God, being perfect, can't give His perfection away because He can't give all of Himself away. This must mean that creations, being less than their Creator, will be imperfect. And that means that human bodies will suffer problems: they can't maintain themselves perfectly. It helps to stress that this is a philosophic and not theological point. It can be accepted and understood by the seriously religious and the scientist equally if each are willing to be reasonable.

Would Stephen Fry care to address that point? We doubt it, because his mind is made up: God is contemptible. Yet we Christians are the close minded bigots in the western world.

Atheists do not understand Religion

Atheists tend to make one critical error about religion. It is that error which reveals much about their attitudes towards serious religion.

Atheists assert that religion is entirely faith based. They like to quote the Letter to the Hebrews: faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). True enough. Yet they abuse the passage as well as the concept of faith. They are wrong to assert, as normally follows, that when someone has faith in something, no amount of logic or evidence can change their immediate view. For anyone of real faith realizes one important fact: faith and reason cannot contradict one another.

A belief in a God is a point of philosophy, not religion. It is a truth readily and conveniently overlooked by many nonbelievers. As such, the profoundly religious do not argue that faith is beyond or without reason. The history of the Catholic Church is deep with Saints who assert that faith and reason compliment rather than contradict one another. Aquinas, Augustine, indeed any Doctor of the Church says as much. So as philosophy is based on reason, and the existence of a God is a philosophical matter, it follows that faith must be congruent with philosophy. We are, ahem, graced with the ability to reason. No just God (and a just God is again a rational philosophic conclusion) would allow for any type of knowledge to contradict another. Knowledge, being of three basic styles (empirical, rational, and faithful) must be in harmony or it would have no value. The real truths of science, philosophy, and religion must be in league, or all knowledge is suspect.

That people, even Popes and Imams, have used religion poorly is without doubt. No human being is perfect; ergo, any human being can err. Yet how many secularists, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, have also done horrible things against humanity (one wonders if perhaps they together killed more and caused more calamity than presumably religiously inspired actions) without the aid of religion? Still, to assert that religion is based solely on faith is a rather hollow claim. It begs the question of whether the accuser actually researched religion or is simply acting knee jerk.