LISTEN, CHRISTIANS!

[Esquilax]

Scripture describes God as a hidden God. This means you have to make an effort of faith to find him, and there are clues you can follow. If that weren’t so, if there was something more or less than clues, we would not be free to make a choice about Him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then we could no more deny God than we could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get to faith. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want Him can have while those that don’t want Him are not forced to do so. Those who want to follow the clues will.

The Bible says, Seek and ye shall find.” It does not say that everybody will find Him; it doesn’t say that nobody will find him. Some will find him. Who? Those who seek. Those whose hearts are set on finding Him and who follow the clues.

The evidence that God has established has been finely tuned to allow you to find it without overwhelming your free will and coercion.

So I guess the important question to ask there is the one that you're assuming in your argument and in essence taking it for granted, which is: why is finding god in this way a thing that needs to happen? Or to put it more clearly, why does god need to hide himself rather than appearing without all the pomp and circumstance, laying out his case, and allowing us to choose for ourselves whether he's worth following or not?

What I'm proposing here is something roughly analogous to the way political parties work: we all know they exist, but we aren't bound to follow them as a consequence either. They make arguments, they stand for things, that attract or repel us in line with our principles; why couldn't god be the same way?

I suspect I'm about to hear something about heaven and hell, about how the potential reward and punishment, once applied to a definitely real entity, would rob us of our choice, but I have two problems with that, the first being that god set up this system himself, he made it, in this case, so that the stakes would be so high as to make one choice impossible. If I'm pointing out that the system seems arbitrary to me, pointing to another component of the arbitrary system doesn't make it less so. Besides, it's not as if god couldn't have simply obscured the heaven or hell part of the equation from us and just come to us as a moral being, presented the substantive elements of his case away from the pressures of the carrot and stick.

That, incidentally, is my second problem, because I don't think just pointing to the carrot and stick serves the believer particularly well in this case. Randy, I've seen you talk about god's inherently good nature, I presume that you have some other reason for being a christian than your fear of hell and desire for heaven? You must, surely, be a member of your religion for a reason other than that, yes? Would not presenting that case, in the light of the sure fact that it finds its source in an objectively real being, be sufficient to convince anyone else? If we knew that god was real, wouldn't his views be sufficiently convincing to get us on his side?