The Hambleton Evangelical Church is a quiet church near York
This is a response to a leaflet published by the Hambleton Evangelical Church in 2004. A PDF copy of this leaflet can be found at http://bit.ly/UvyN3L. If you take issue with anything in this, or any, post feel free to write a comment and I will respond as soon as possible.
This leaflet is fairly standard fair, by and large. The first page advertises a bible interpretation service to the public; the second offers an evangelical look at the 2004 olympics (although it can be applied to most olympics); and the third ‘recounts’ St Paul’s journey to Mars Hill. While theres a lot I could say about any of these pages, it is the third I would like to focus on today.
The third page is a delineation of the beliefs of St Paul, and by implication of the church. In this post I shall issue a point-by-point response to the beliefs raised.
- “God made the world and everything it contains” – This clearly means that god has precise individual control over every single quantum particle ever made. It also (when taking point 2 into account) conflates the universe and the world – this could be a relic of 1st millennia geo-centric thinking; it could simply be a linguistic tradition. However, St Paul himself did come from a time when the possibility of other worlds was not really considered (in the physical sense), and the mechanism of stars was far from understood. Of course I could go into much more detail about the whole creationist argument, but this has gone far enough already.
- “God is still in total control of the Universe” – Couple of things here. Firstly, it is in conflict with Quantum Mechanics, other than from a deterministic interpretation where the hidden variables are ‘God’s plan’. Secondly it seems unlikely as the laws of physics seem to do an OK job of that already, and ‘that’s how the universe works’ is a much simpler explanation than genesis. But most importantly this has implications with the problem of evil, which will become a recurring theme throughout.
- “God is everywhere – he isn’t confined to any particular place” – It is interesting to not that this passage specifically applies gender to God. Other than that there’s not much wrong with this except the God, which we could (and have) filled books debating. This passage asserts that god is not physical – it is incompatible with materialism. We can therefore consider that this passage makes the prediction that a consciousness cannot be constructed by purely material means. This then means that were we able to do so, or prove that to do so is possible, it could be considered evidence against evangelical belief.
- “We can’t do God any favours – he already has everything he needs” – This ties into the problem of evil. If God has everything he needs, then why inflict suffering upon humanity. The standard answer is that it is because humans reject god, however this implies that god needs, or desires, our belief. One of the two must be at fault.
- “Everything we have, even our breath itself, comes to us from God.” – This is simply trying to make us feel like we owe God something – if he created and controls anything then there is no way that anything could not come to us from God, the fact that stuff does notwithstanding.
- “There’s only one human race throughout the world – and God made us” – This, again, is determined by the claim that god made and controls everything. This also means that evolution is incompatible with this specific set of beliefs – if there is only one human race we cannot diversify genetically because that would eventually lead to multiple human sub-races, or even multiple human races. Although that depends on the use of the words ‘world‘, ‘human’ and ‘made’. On a positive note, this means that Evangelical Christians should be against racism, which is nice.
- “It’s God who decides the comings and goings of governments, empires, and superpowers.” – this means that humanity cannot be considered to hold blame for the mistakes of it’s governments – the germans were not punishable for electing hitler, the british not to blame for the evils of their empire, and Scandinavia not to blame for the secularism of it’s leadership. This has implications for the problem of evil.
- “God wants everyone to seek him in the hope that they will find him.” – This ties into the ‘god gave me a brain so I could doubt’ argument, although thus-far there has been nothing said against it (however, I know from background knowledge that it is connected to some solutions to the problem of evil, especially some evangelical ones). Also, from an informal point of view, I would say that if he is trying to make me find him he is doing a damn bad job of it. Which is impossible because he is omnipotent.
- “God isn’t hard to find, because he’s all around us.” – Again, I would say that he’s doing a damned good job of hiding. However, some christians would say that God works through physics so I can’t make that as a formal argument.
- “Never imagine that you can get God all worked out.” – this, surely, renders preists and the like redundant? Probably not. However, there is a legitimate point here. If God, or even a god, is impossible to fully understand, he is impossible to predict, and is therefore scientifically useless. This is because of a fundamental scientific principle that can be summarised as ‘the which cannot be disproved can never be considered true’. In this scenario any predictions that come true or not can be considered to be misinterpretations (depending on personal opinion) which means that all evidence regarding an incomprehensible God is considered redundant, and therefore he cannot be considered to scientifically exist.
- “God’s been amazingly kind in not destroying us for our ignorance about him. ” – This is simply illogical. In the previous points we have essentially removed all agency and control from mankind. Therefore God controls whether or not we are “ignorant about him“. Therefore, were God to wipe us out for our ignorance (or more or less any of our failings) he would essentially be doing it because he wanted to; rendering him malevolent, and therefore not ‘amazingly kind‘.
- “God has fixed a day when everyone in the world will face his judgment.” – This is simply a biblical interpretation, unless I am mistaken, and so is pinned upon the bible’s validity. The bible, again, is a tricky one, as anything that is disproved within it simply becomes a metaphor. Again, the bible is scientifically useless in this regard; unless of course evangelical christianity is willing to write down exactly what in the bible is literal, and keeps it at that for ever, which is, of course, impossible by the nature of belief.
- “Jesus will be our judge” – dependant upon Jesus. Another long one to argue against, but in summary the dispute rages on over wether or not there is a dispute over wether or not jesus actually existed, so its far from a settled issue
- “The fact that he rose from the dead is the proof of this.” – I dispute the use of both “fact” and “proof”. I’m not entirely sure how the one leads to the other, let alone how it irrevocably proves it. And “fact” is just a bit silly – especially when taking things like the story of Doubting Thomas into account (john 20:29), which highlight the value of faith over evidence (which, by the way, really annoys me).
- “God commands everyone wherever they are to repent right now so that they will be ready to face that judgment.” – Going to have to let this thing pass. Yet again it ties into fundamentals of christianity which take too long to discuss here. Some might say its connected to the problem of evil, I personally wouldn’t agree: its a little too convoluted.
In summary this leaflet doesn’t stand up to rational inquiry, and much of it is defeated by the problem of evil, which I will get back to at a later date.
Rational Rage 