Home > Work > The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World
1 " In a fallen world, the only currency of love is suffering. Indeed, the only way to tell how much one person loves another is by what that person is willing to endure for the other. "
― William A. Dembski , The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World
2 " God does not hinder the exercise of human freedom but rather anticipates its consequences. "
3 " The violence described in the Old Testament was endemic to the ancient Near East and remains endemic to much of the world today. Although our refined Western sensibilities recoil from these violent passages, in fact the Old Testament is to be credited for presenting the human condition in all its starkness "
4 " The promise of the Christian faith is that this life presages a glorious new life that will make present pains seem negligible: "
5 " In short, the problem of evil starts when creatures think God is evil for “cramping their style.” The impulse of our modern secular culture to cast off restraint wherever possible finds its root here. "
6 " theology requires metaphors and concepts that come from our understanding of nature and therefore from science. "
7 " Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. . . . The errors of mankind, mistaking the true conditions of its own well-being, have been the cause of moral and physical evil.28 "
8 " God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist. "
9 " humanity is the gatekeeper through which evil passes into the world. In this metaphor, the Fall becomes the failure of the gatekeeper to maintain proper control of the gate. "
