Salah Michel Bouraad, “Dieu est évidence“

 Éditions du Jubilé, 2006

This book by a Lebanese Christian layman who is both a successful businessman and deeply involved in charity in his home country has two main theses, which he develops across several chapters – 1) what the world needs most is love, and 2) love is both a gift from God and the best way to God. It’s a book written in a fluent, conversational style, easy to read; it’s not a systematic exposition, but it illuminates its theses from different angles in order to support them.

Concerning the first thesis, I found myself agreeing with many of the author’s examples and observations. On the second thesis, well, as I’m skeptical concerning the existence of God, I lack the basis for accepting the premise, but the author is graceful enough to appreciate if people embrace love without God; he hopes it will lead them to God in the end. For me, if reading this book makes some of its readers want to make this world a better place, it would already justify the labor of the author. If God exists, I hope he will see this the same way.

 

Demiurg and Observer

SMBC's take.

Hobbes's God

Last week's Economist published a review of "the first critical edition of Hobbes’s “Leviathan”". Even though Hobbes

destroyed many of his private papers, which is one reason why the life and work of Hobbes has long been such a tricky subject for scholars,

it's astonishing that it took so long. I liked this nugget:

Above all, though, it was Hobbes’s scientific materialism that rendered him an anathema. Like Descartes, and other devotees of the “new philosophy” pioneered by Galileo, Hobbes regarded nature as a machine. But he took this idea further than anyone else and maintained that absolutely everything is physical. There are no immaterial spirits: man’s immortality begins with the resurrection of his body. And God himself is a physical being. This is what made Hobbes an “atheist” to practically everyone except himself. For most of history an “atheist” was a man who worshipped the wrong God, not no God at all; a physical God, as imagined by Hobbes, was not really God. Hobbes’s idea is one of the rarest heresies in the history of Christianity. Some have claimed that Tertullian, one of the Latin Fathers of the Church, believed it. But the idea was abhorrent to all denominations until the 19th century, when the new American religion of Mormonism adopted it. Like Hobbes, Mormons maintain that the Bible means what it says in the passages that describe man as made in God’s image. If Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate in next month’s American presidential election, believes the scriptures of his own religion, he accepts that God the Father “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s”—the very belief which caused Hobbes to be vilified for centuries.

Now, whatever official theologies say, the image of a god with a human form has always been a feature of Christian popular belief (the father-figure with the beard). Interesting to see this view to be held at least by one great philosopher and by one major religion.

Have you read the bible?

Mr. Plotz has (at least the Old Testament). After outlining the reasons why everybody living in our Western culture ought to have read it (a notion on which I fully agree, the Bible is the clue to so many parts of our culture), he describes the results for his faith:

You notice that I haven't said anything about belief. I began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. I wished for a God, but I didn't really care. I leave the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. I'm brokenhearted about God.

After reading about the genocides, the plagues, the murders, the mass enslavements, the ruthless vengeance for minor sins (or none at all), and all that smiting—every bit of it directly performed, authorized, or approved by God—I can only conclude that the God of the Hebrew Bible, if He existed, was awful, cruel, and capricious. He gives us moments of beauty—such sublime beauty and grace!—but taken as a whole, He is no God I want to obey and no God I can love.

...

Unfortunately, this line of reasoning seems to leave me with several unappealing options: 1) believing in no god; 2) believing in the awful, vindictive God of the Bible; or 3) believing in some vague "creator" who is not remotely attached to the events of the Bible, who didn't really do any of the deeds ascribed to Him in the book and thus can't be held responsible for them.

My background is different (my parents were vaguely Christian, and I have oscillated between vague belief, agnosticism and atheism in my youth), but I feel with Mr. Plotz, and the option I chose is No. 1. If you believe in God's existence, you don't have this option, so I'd be interested to know how believers get around this problem (if they notice it at all).