God is my co-pilot

I notice that atheists and cessationists are both making hay about Prionda HIll, who ran over a motorcyclist because “she was driving and out of no where God told her that he would take it from here and she let go of the wheel and let him take it.”

i) It's predictable that atheists would cite this incident to discredit Christians. It's the kind of opportunistic, unprincipled attack you'd expect from atheists. 

ii) But for the same reason, that's why it's foolish for cessationists to seize in this incident as a way to discredit charismatic theology. There are responsible ways to critique charismatic theology. You can raise exegetical objections. You can raise empirical objections. But this is not a responsible way to attack charismatic theology.

iii) To begin with, why assume there's a charismatic connection? You don't have to be charismatic to hear, or claim to hear, strange voices in your head. Psychotics hear voices. In principle, a psychotic cessationist might hear voices. Cessationists are not immune to mental illness. Does the fact that psychotics hear voices discredit mental illness? 

iv) I'm reminded of how atheists pounced on Anders Breivik as a Christian mass murderer. But as we learned more about him, he didn't even claim to be a believer. He admitted that he was just a cultural Christian. 

If you're going to comment on Prionda Hill, you should at least wait for more background details to emerge. Did a tox report reveal drugs in her system? Does she have a history of mental illness?

v) Suppose she is charismatic. If her example disproves charismatic theology, do Westboro Baptists disprove Baptist theology? There's the obvious fallacy of the hasty generalization. 

vi) Likewise, evangelic cessationists believe in demonic possession. Someone who's possessed can hear voices. He may act on that, with dire consequences. Does that discredit belief in demonic possession? Does that bring the Gospels into disrepute? 

vii) There's also an elementary difference between saying you hear a voice and hearing a voice.

viii) Perhaps the cessationist argument is not that she actually heard a voice. Perhaps it's an argument from analogy: If you believe God still speaks to Christians in an audible voice, how can you deny that God may have spoken to Prionda Hill?

If so, that argument backfires. An atheist can easily turn that argument against them:

"Abraham heard a voice telling him to kill his son. If you heard a voice telling you do to that, would you?"

"How do you know God spoke to Abraham, but God didn't speak to Prionda HIll?"

Both cessationists and charismatics need to be able to answer the same type of question. There are parallel objections.