I will confess that after salivating at the prospect of engaging Eusebius Mckaiser’s arguments about the supposed nonexistence of God, I was left underwhelmed by their feebleness.
I was expecting a sterner challenge from one of the country’s most celebrated public intellectuals. But alas!
His argument rests on the inviolability of the law of non-contradiction.
This law states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. “A” cannot be “non-A” at the same time, in the same way.
I agree one hundred percent with him there.
He then proceeds, disappointingly, to construct a strawman argument about God. He bases it on what he describes as the inconsistent tetrad around the reality of evil in the world.
An inconsistent tetrad consists of three propositions, of which at most, two can be true.
The three propositions he proffers are:
1. God is omnibenevolent (Infinitely good)
2. God is omnipotent (all powerful)
3. God is omniscient (all knowing)
Because evil exists, the idea of the existence of God cannot be valid, he asserts, because its presence implies God falls short in at least one of the three propositions. Which he avers, are central to the idea of God.
He seems smugly secure, in the water tightness of this faux logical dilemma he has created, that supposedly checkmates serious thinkers who believe in God.
The only choice they face, purportedly, having been cornered by him, is either to affirm logic and abandon belief in God, otherwise to abandon rationality and choose to believe in God anyway, even if in defiance of logic.
I will demonstrate how easy it is to pull the rug underneath his entire edifice by pulling down only one of its pivotal pillars: God’s supposed omnibenevolence.
“God cannot be omnibenevolent and allow floods to ravage KwaZulu Natal and war to desolate the Ukraine in equal measure”, he contends.
Because these things have happened, it proves that he is either not omnibenevolent, omnipotent, or omniscient, he suggests.
While his construct is alluring in its façade of gaudy elegance, it does not describe the Christian God. Not in the least.
So, the god he has proven not to exist is the god that he has created.
It is true that the Lord God is “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth”. It is also equally true that He “by no means clears the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”
In other words, in addition to the stated propositions, the biblical God possesses other attributes such as a fierce raging sense of justice, among many other character attributes that hold together in pristine harmony.
In Isaiah 45:7, God dismantles into smithereens McKaiser’s puerile notions of divine omnibenevolence and perhaps, ominously, those held by not a few professing christians, when He thunders:
“I form the light and create darkness,
I make peace and create calamity;
I, the Lord, do all these things.’”
There is Satan, of course. But that is a discussion for another time.
My point now is that God is always good, for sure, but that goodness must never be confused with docility, akin to a Santa Claus in the sky, a popular albeit false contemporary caricature of God. God's goodness also manifests in fierce retribution at evil, as it should!
For our God is also a consuming fire before whom the wicked tremble, as they must!
So, McKaiser’s argument is weak because it is based on a construct of God that is incongruent with the biblical God.
Though he succeeds in dismantling that construct with self-satisfied ease, it is a statue of a god of his own making.
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