When disasters like that in Haiti occur, and we are confronted with human suffering of the most terrible kinds, people naturally ask how such events can be squared with the existence of God.

This is a reasonable question, and what answers can be given are complex and partial. The starting point for any answer has to be that it is better for God to create a world in which suffering is possible than one in which it is not. In a world in which suffering is possible there are goods that could not otherwise exist: for example, our actions have consequences and so our choices have moral significance, and we become interdependent, forming communities instead of living in isolation. A world without suffering can only be desolate. A world with the possibility of suffering can sometimes be cold and lonely, but it can sometimes be so much more. (more…)

In The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy argue that Jesus never existed, let alone died for the sins of the world and rose again.

Freke and Gandy argue this on the basis of the similarities between Jesus’ biography and those of many of the gods of the ancient pagan religions. Jesus’ biography, they suggest, is so similar to the myths told of these other gods that it cannot be anything but a copy of them. If Jesus’ biography is a copy of the biographies of these other gods, though, then there is no more reason to think that there existed a historical Jesus than there is to think that there existed a historical Mithra or a historical Dionysus.

Some of the parallels drawn by Freke and Gandy, however, are not between Jesus’ biography and the biographies of the pagan gods, but between Jesus’ biography and the biographies of the pagan sages. One such parallel concerns Socrates and Jesus’ third-day resurrection. (more…)

I’ve recently been re-reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and one question keeps gnawing away at me: Why does Dawkins think that he’s qualified to write about philosophical theology?

Dawkins is, no doubt, a good evolutionary biologist, and he’s certainly a very good communicator of science to the masses. But that doesn’t mean that he knows anything about theology.

And as a scientist, Dawkins must know a bit about logic; interpreting evidence requires an ability to think carefully about what conclusions can be drawn from it, and with what degree of certainty. But that doesn’t mean that Dawkins knows anything about philosophy.

Yet Dawkins does, for some reason, feel qualified to write about philosophical theology. Why? (more…)