• Considering all branches of learning-literature, medicine, psychology and biology, for example-to what
extent is Dawkins's claim justifiable that theology has made no significant contributions to knowledge?
• What have been the prominent theological responses to the problem of evil throughout Christian history?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• What causes people to hate God? Does it make sense to hate the idea of a God that does not exist?
• Though many explanations for the problem of evil have been offered by theologians and philosophers,
widespread suffering still blocks the way to belief in God for many people. Why do the answers to the
problem of evil provided by theologians and philosophers seem inadequate to some people?
- THE QUESTION OF MEANING
Though thinking people who believe in God are able to provide kinds of evidence for God's existence,
they are not able to prove God's existence the way they can prove, for example, that people need oxygen
to survive. If a person were to doubt this claim, you would only need to take away his oxygen for a few
seconds for him to change his mind. Some things are easy to prove.
But some important things are not so easy to prove. It is not easy to prove that life has meaning, and one
observer has said that the "more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
What people usually mean when they say this is that life has no ultimate purpose. They do not believe
in an afterlife, a next world, an answer to questions about why children die from cancer; they do not
believe that history is moving in any predetermined direction; they do not believe that a wise Being
presides over the world.
Clearly, though, most people do believe in ultimate purpose, even if they can't state exactly what that
purpose is; to them, the idea that life is ultimately purposeless seems odd. To many people, the thought of
an ultimately purposeless life is depressing. It is not depressing to everyone, however. As Greg writes:
We can live with proximate purpose alone and still live fully satisfied lives without the mythology of
ultimates. I believe humans would feel just as emotional and loving and caring in the absence of
ultimates as they do going about carelessly thinking that a better world awaits them when they die. I
think that we, like other social organisms, use proximate meaning and proximate purpose to get
through life. Ultimates are an invention of theology, and one we cannot easily shake from our culture.One has to wonder where humans would get a sense of ultimate purpose from a universe that is
ultimately purposeless. Put another way, how could ultimate purposelessness produce feelings of ultimate
purpose? Or do people mistake feelings of proximate purpose for something more than that? At the least,
these questions place people in an awkward position vis-a-vis the universe they are part of. Considering
this general theme in one of his notes to Greg, Preston asks:
How can it make sense for people who are part of this "inevitable," impersonal, just-as-it's-
supposed-to-be universe to want to change part of it, i.e., the behavior of others who are also part of
the same universe? If we are really just a part of this impersonal universe and no more, then how
would we know that something is wrong with the universe we're part and parcel of?