Why trust John Loftus?

“Steve at Triablogue in The Servant King,responded to Why Trust in God? I will respond to him here.”

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-trust-god-part-ii_115072956557449315.html

No, Jason Engwer was the one who responded to Loftus, not me. And while Loftus pays me a high compliment by confusing Engwer’s work with mine, I have to say that unless Engwer is leading a double life as a serial ax-killer, he has done nothing sufficiently heinous to merit such a drastic demotion!

However, as long as I’ve been brought into this thread, I’ll say a few things.

“Notice Steve didn’t say anything about my claim that Job is not reporting historical conversations between God, Satan and Job.”

This is a non sequitur. Doubtless the speeches are highly stylized. That doesn’t render the book fictitious. You can turn prose into poetry. No doubt there’s a rhetorical finish to the speeches, as well as an artistic symmetry to the book as a whole, which goes beyond a bare transcription of what was said and done. The author has given literary form to the raw materials.

“There’s a lot in Job I don’t have the time to comment on. But God merely says that Job is his faithful servant, blameless and a man who fears him. (1:7-9) After the first test, God later adds that Job maintained his integrity ‘even though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason (2:3).’ Notice that God says there was no reason for the suffering brought on Job. God said it! This is gratuitous suffering without a point…’without any reason.’ That’s why I said it was basically a bet with satan, for that's the only reason for God ruining Job for no reason. And the text says that God caused the suffering too, for God accepts responsibility for causing it. The question of the bet was whether or not Job would buckle and curse God. And I maintain that Steve’s view of God already knew what Job would do. So my question was why did God accept the challenege in the first place, according to the story.”

This is a systematic misreading of the text. As one commentator explains:

“It is not the Accuser but the Lord who initiates the testing of Job; for the Lord says: ‘Have you considered my servant Job?’ (v8)…As in Gen 3, God sets the stage and allows man to be put to the test…That purpose is not just to test Job as an end in itself but to give Job the opportunity to honor his Lord to whom he has pledged his allegiance with a solemn oath. The Accuser insinuates that Job’s allegiance is hypocritical (v9). If only God would remove the protective hedge he has placed around Job (v10), this ‘devout’ servant would certainly curse God to his faith. The tack is on God through Job, and the only way the Accuser can be proven false is through Job. So Satan is given limited but gradually increased access to Job—first to his possessions, then to his family, and finally to his physical well-being. But through it all…’the primary purpose of Job’s suffering, unknown to him, was that he should stand before men and angels as a trophy of the saving might of God, an exhibit of that divine wisdom which is the archetype, source, and foundation of true human wisdom,’” E. Smick, The Expositor’s Bible Commentary (Zondervan 1988), 4:880-81.

In the nature of the case, a Christian theodicy will be predicated on a theological value-system. An atheist will reject this because an atheist will reject theological values. He doesn’t value God. He doesn’t value an existential knowledge of God.

“I’m just commenting on the book of Job. Looking at that book what do we find? We find a God who will inflict a great amount of pain and suffering to win a bet he supposedly knew in advance the outcome.”

I just discussed the book of Job on its own terms. Now let’s turn to Loftus’ standard of comparison.

Unbelievers have been invoking the problem of evil as a defeater for Christian theism for a very long time. Voltaire’s Candide is a classic example.

As a result, there is a stereotypical pattern to the atheological argument from the problem of evil. The same argument is recycled year after year, generation after generation.

But what this fails to take into account is that while the contemporary atheist may be using the same definition of God, he is no longer using the same definition of man. Secular science, if we choose to call it science, has redefined human nature.

It is therefore incumbent upon the honest atheologian to update the problem of evil in order to make allowance for a revised anthropology. An atheist is no longer entitled to use a commonsense view of human beings. I’ve mentioned this before, but Loftus, for one, is stuck in a time-warp.

For example, Richard Dawkins defines human beings as blindly programmed survival machines.

If you plug that definition into the problem of evil, then what’s the problem with experimenting on blindly programmed survival machines? How’s that any different than a TV repairman?

For his part, Paul Churchland thinks that “pain” and “suffering” are folk psychological archaisms which ought to be expunged from the materialistic lexicon.

If you plug that definition into the problem of pain, there is no problem of pain, for pain is illusory. We have no feelings. There’s no such thing as consciousness. That’s a prescientific theory of human nature.

Finally, Loftus is acting as if the book of Job presents a theory of God, and whether or not we believe in God depends on whether we find the Joban theory appealing or unappealing.

Now, this may be how an unbeliever approaches the Bible, but it’s hardly paradigmatic for Christian belief-formation.

The Christian faith claims to be a revealed religion, and the primary line of approach is to establish its revelatory credentials.

What we like and what God is like are logically independent. The truth of an existential proposition is hardly contingent on whether I find the proposition agreeable or not.

I’d add that every time Loftus or his fellow dubitantes find something offensive in Scripture, their very disapproval undercuts the Freudian theory of Christian faith as wishful-thinking.