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.

Science and Religion

No good Christian would have any issue with good science. Indeed Christianity and science go rather well together, as better thinkers than myself have said in better ways than I for years. Yet there is a breed of science which will have no quarter with any ideals save its own. It is the realm of pop science, and its followers are legion.

Pop science is most noticeable in the area of global warming, but exists in many other forms. Environmentalists who see the Earth as better off without human beings and those who insist on evolution as the only acceptable theory on the origin of people and things are two other examples. We should of course be concerned with meteorological cycles and I will admit that we have not always used our resources wisely; further, we must allow that evolution may well be fact. All of this is, to one degree or another, open to reasoned debate. But what is truly galling about pop science is how it so readily dismisses religious belief when it is so nearly a religion itself.

You don’t think so? If not, why the presumption (for that is all it is; who out there has observed a world without US in order to rationally make such a judgment?) the earth would be better without humans? Science is the area of fact and observation; value judgments are beyond its scope. Likewise the assumption that short term warming is bad, or that all the matter in the Universe was once compacted into an object the size of a basketball which just happened to be around (while the possibility of God just being around is deemed fantasy). What do these beliefs sound like? What do they appear based upon?

The answer is obvious: faith. The pop culture, of which pop science is a part, believes what it believes simply on the faith that it's true. They believe because it is what their conclusions lead them to think. Which is not to say that, on a case by case basis, there may be no reason for their faith. It purely illustrates that their ideas emanate from what the religious readily admit about theirs: knowledge is ultimately built upon axioms, starting points which are simply accepted as true. We believe in God because without an uncreated Creator nothing makes sense. They believe in the big bang basketball because, well, matter had to start from somewhere.

So you see, much of today’s science and religion share an approach to their creeds. It is not unfair to say, in a very real sense, that science is religion.

Let’s see if the evolutionists can handle the rebound.