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86 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deeply Probative. Theologically and Scientifically Uncompromising. Patristic in Content and Scope. An Absolute Must-Read., December 18, 2009
This review is from: The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Hardcover)
In the final paragraph of The Consequences of Ideas, RC Sproul writes: "We need to reconstruct the classical synthesis by which natural theology bridges the special revelation of Scripture and the general revelation of nature. Such a reconstruction could end the war between science and theology." Though a dizzying number of syntheses have been proffered in recent years, William Dembski's The End of Christianity is a watershed in Christian theological thinking, a landmark contribution that looks to resolve the science-faith divide with what I will call a particularly evangelical robustness and manifestly high regard for biblical integrity that are all-too-rare in the forum of recent discourse. In this compelling, eminently credible treatise on how God's two primary sources of revelation - the record of Scripture and the record of nature - harmonize, Dembski engages in a deeply probative, carefully thought-through, exceptionally well-reasoned discourse of the kind we're used to encountering in the early Church fathers, and of the sort one would only wish more commonly occupied Church leadership today.
To fully appreciate what I predict will be the rather unique and considerable appeal of Dembski's theological assertions, it's crucial to bear in mind this reality: Evangelical and conservative mainline Christians take the Bible very seriously. For them, it is not merely a book of wisdom, encouragement, and hope, but a peerless communiqué from God to mankind. Divine in ultimate origin, it is absolutely error-free, affirming nothing that is contrary to fact in any category of information, including history and science. Inasmuch as the biblical authors are believed to have been "moved" and "inspired" by the Holy Spirit to write precisely what they did, the Bible serves as the prism through which all truth propositions must be viewed, assessed, and finally judged.
This brings us to the issue addressed by The End of Christianity. The Bible has long been understood by traditionalist Christians as asserting that all evil in the world - not only moral evil (stemming from human misdeeds) but natural evil (stemming from impersonal acts of nature) - is the result of Adam's sin against God ("the Fall"). In this view, the earth and its living populations, as initially created, were completely free of all suffering, death, and danger - until the first man succumbed to temptation and defied the will of God, an act of rebellion that brought divine chastisement upon himself, his future progeny (i.e., all of mankind), and the world over which he had been appointed master and covenant head. Hence, it was Adam's sin that caused the agents of physical suffering and death - including killer earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer, carnivorous activity, etc. - to befall planet Earth and its inhabitants. As disturbing as this scenario might at first seem to the non-Christian, the affirmation of man - and not God - as the culprit for all natural evil, coupled with an understanding of the divine plan of redemption, deliverance, and healing from that evil, has offered tremendous comfort to suffering, sorrowing believers throughout Church history.
This view has, however, been forcefully challenged by modern scientists, who roundly dismiss this Christian chronology and rather assert, based on a myriad of evidences from a variety of disciplines, that life-claiming natural disasters and diseases within the animal world were present and widespread long before the first humans existed. That is, by the time "Adam" arrived on the scene, the earth had already long been filled with suffering and death.
This clash of assertions about the ancient past is today playing out in epic proportions. For Christians, what's at stake is nothing short of the reliability of the Bible, the very character of God, and the Gospel itself. After all, how could a God who from the outset deliberately incorporates life-killing natural disasters and deleterious genetic mutations into the very fabric of His creation - indeed, who makes such "natural evil" the very engine of the development of life and the appearance of humans (as evolutionary theories require) - rightly be called "good," let alone loving or compassionate? And how could Genesis record with any credibility this benevolent God calling such a bloodstained creation "very good"? And if from its opening chapters the Bible so grossly mischaracterizes God and misrepresents Earth's history, how can its assertions about salvation through Christ be trusted? Indeed, to many Christians and skeptics alike, the scientifically-demanded perspective that natural evil has been an integral part of the world from the beginning makes its creator something of a sadist, the Bible patently false in its assertions, and faith in Christ questionable at best and mythological at worst.
Not surprisingly, evangelicals and conservative mainliners have been loathe to embrace these scientific truth claims, and with the preponderance of scientists convinced of their validity, a high-stakes standoff between two apparently warring epistemologies has emerged, a clash that has made a large swath of Americans skeptical of science and at the same time a large number of scientists equally skeptical of Christianity. Among the most vulnerable victims of collateral damage in this war of perspectives are the children of evangelicals who have been trained up by their families and pastors to believe that scientific claims of an ancient earth (which necessitate natural evil before Adam) are heretical and utterly antithetical to claims of Scripture, and that the veracity of the one categorically annuls the other - only to enter university and discover that in fact the empirical evidence for an ancient earth is not only overwhelming but ever-increasing, a sobering and devastating realization that, as the result of lifelong preconditioning, has for many shattered their confidence in the Bible and its Gospel claims.
Fortunately, Dembski, a theologian and professor of philosophy as well as mathematician and statistician, takes his Bible very seriously as well, as richly and reassuringly reflected in The End of Christianity. Its opening chapters deal with the issue of evil, specifically its origin, quality, and implications. The author surveys and rejects various prominent modern theodicies that, in turn: deny that evil actually entered the world through the Fall; admit evil's origination via the Fall but recast the event as positive and even edifying; regard the presence of natural evil rather benignly as simply the necessary cost of God bestowing true freedom upon every element of creation, elements which include the body's cells and the earth's crust. In contrast, Dembski affirms the traditional understanding that all evil of every stripe is indeed a "horrible tragedy" that does trace back to man's first sin, which then "propagates through nature and brings about natural evil" such that "the disordered state of nature mirrors the disordered state of our souls."
As to why a benevolent God "would allow natural evil to afflict an otherwise innocent nature in response to human moral evil," Dembski again upholds the traditional view that God uses natural evil in order "to get our attention, to impress on us the gravity of sin, and, most significantly, to bring us to our senses and thereby restore our sanity." He continues: "The gravity of sin consists in offending a holy God. [...] Because God is all that Christian theology teaches that He is, offending this God is the worst thing imaginable and trumps all the offenses that we commit against each other."
Yet such is the benevolence of God that despite man's (our) culpability for the presence of evil, we do not suffer in isolation, but God Himself joins and commiserates with us in our afflictions through Christ's Incarnation and Passion. Most gloriously, after sharing in human suffering, God ultimately vanquishes it altogether through Christ's Atonement. Thus, Dembski affirms the traditional Christian view that the presence of tragedy within the world was not brought about by a capricious or uncaring deity, but by a loving God who purposed to starkly reveal the depths of our fallen condition, and having done so eternally restore the damaged divine-human relationship.
Having affirmed these pillars of Christian orthodoxy, Dembski then turns to two of the most prevalent science-faith syntheses within modern Christendom: Young- and Old-Earth Creationism, both of which he finds fatally flawed. The former is seen as hinging upon a number of patently untenable scientific positions that manifestly disqualify it. The latter, while agreeing with science in affirming widespread suffering and death within the animal world before the arrival of man, in an effort to stave off any accusations that God is cruel or malevolent refuses to regard this bloody mayhem as truly evil or even morally significant, a stand Dembski sees as injurious to the character of God inasmuch as it "portrays the violence and cruelty of nature as a form of divine self-amusement." Hence, this view is dismissed on theological grounds.
By this time, having made a series of apparently irreconcilable assertions, Dembski appears to have painted himself into an ideological corner. On one hand, he has affirmed the traditional Christian view that man is culpable for all natural evil, an assertion that would appear to refute scientific geologic chronology. Yet at the same time he affirms the scientific claim that natural evil did in fact precede the appearance of man, which would appear to discredit the traditional biblical understanding of man's sin preceding suffering. In fact, this apparent conundrum - namely, how to reconcile two simultaneously asserted, apparently mutually exclusive claims in a way that...
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17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Treatment of the Toughest Problem, November 29, 2009
This review is from: The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Hardcover)
In The End of Christianity, William Dembski, one of the most gifted Christian thinkers addressing Christianity and science today, tackles one of the most vexed issues facing the Christian worldview: the problem of evil. The result is a clear, challenging, and profound treatise that is equally at home in the Bible, science, theology, and philosophy. Dembski's ingenious approach to explaining natural evil (particularly animal pain and death before the fall) will not convince everyone, but all who read it will benefit from a mind crackling with intelligence, insight, and expertise.
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58 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing and challenging, but not young-earth friendly, October 29, 2009
This review is from: The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Hardcover)
"The End of Christianity" is a new book by William A. Dembski, published in 2009 by B&H Publishing Group. Dembski is a philosophy professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (Fort Worth) and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (Seattle). As both a philosopher and mathematician, he is on the front lines of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement among scientists. His list of credentials and accomplishments impresses. With postdoctoral work at MIT, University of Chicago, and Princeton, Dembski has written over a dozen books, appeared on ABC News Nightline, BBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, and Fox News, and been cited by The New York Times and Time Magazine. He was interviewed for the Ben Stein documentary, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."
The book's subtitle is "Finding a Good God in an Evil World," and it is a theodicy, attempting to demonstrate that God's goodness is compatible with the existence of evil on earth, or, in other words, "to resolve how a good God and an evil world can coexist" (p. 4). Divided into five sections, it contains twenty-four chapters and 238 pages, including introduction and various indices.
More than mere theodicy, Dembski's goal is to outline a specifically Christian theodicy that defends three particular claims: "God by wisdom created the world out of nothing...God exercises particular providence in the world...All evil in the world ultimately traces back to human sin" (p. 8).
The eye-catching title has nothing to do with Christianity's demise, but, rather, its effect. "The end of Christianity, as envisioned in this book, is the radical realignment of our thinking so that we see God's goodness in creation despite the distorting effects of sin in our hearts and evil in the world" (p. 11).
One might suspect an author trained in mathematics and philosophy should not be the most interesting to read, but Dembski is no dull writer. He excels at casting deep theological and philosophical truths in easy-to-understand, creative, and thought-provoking ways, perhaps even reminiscent of C. S. Lewis.
The initial four chapters treat the topic of evil, and Dembski offers many keen insights. In the face of critics who say Jesus could not fully identify with human suffering, Dembski defends the Cross as far more than the Lord taking a few hours of pain. "In particular, Christ on the Cross identifies with the whole of human suffering, and this includes the ignorance and uncertainty that intensify human suffering" (p. 20). "The extent to which we can love God depends on the extent to which God has demonstrated his love for us, and that depends on the extent of evil that God has had to absorb, suffer, and overcome on our behalf" (p. 23).
Humans are to blame for both the presence of personal sin (i.e. disobedience to God), and the existence of natural evil (e.g. floods, disease, animal suffering, etc.). Says Dembski, "We started a fire in consenting to evil. God permits this fire to rage. He grants this permission not so that he can be a big hero when he rescues us but so that we can rightly understand the human condition and thus come to our senses" (p. 26). Sin forced souls into a state of disorder, which, in turn, came to be reflected in nature (p. 28). The evil and disorder apparent in nature are designed to impress people with the magnitude of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. Thus, "humanity must experience the full brunt of the evil that we have set in motion, and this requires that the creation itself fully manifest the consequences of humanity's rebellion against God" (p. 44). It is not that we serve a petty God who holds grudges, but, rather, that we must come to terms with the seriousness and consequences of human sin. "The problem isn't that God can't take it but that we can't take it--in offending God, we ruin the image of God in ourselves and so lose our true self" (p. 45).
Chapters 5-9 deal with creationism from a young-earth and an old-earth perspective. "God gave humanity two primary sources of revelation about himself: the world that he created and the Scripture that he inspired. These are also known as general and special revelation, or sometimes as the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture...We study science to understand the first of these books, theology to understand the second" (p. 71). Further, "God is a God of truth. As the author of both books, he does not contradict himself" (p. 72).
Admitting that "Young-earth creationism was the dominant position of Christians from the Church Fathers through the Reformers" (p. 52), Dembski says he "would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it" (p. 55). He sees a problem in that today astrophysics and geology posit an age of 13 billion years for the universe, 4.5 billion years for the earth. This model results in a world where animals predated humans by eons, and in which this animal planet was suffering the effects of natural evil. In other words, according to the current climate of accepted science, long before man arrived there were animals eating each other, dying slow deaths, suffering from parasites, drowning, falling in tar pits, etc. If humans are responsible for the existence of all evil on earth, then how could such evil exist before there were humans? The answer to that question is the gist of the book. More on that in a minute.
Young-earth creationists have no dilemma in which the need arises to account for evil before man, since everything was created in the span of six 24-hour days. But Dembski thinks this cannot--at least in the current scientific atmosphere--be made to harmonize with accepted facts of geology and astrophysics. "Christians, it seems, must therefore choose their poison. They can go with a young earth, thereby maintaining theological orthodoxy but committing scientific heresy; or they can go with an old earth, thereby committing theological heresy but maintaining scientific orthodoxy" (p. 77).
Taking young-earth creationists to task, Dembski accuses them of adopting a double standard, appealing to nature's constancy when it helps their case, and denying nature's constancy when it appears to hurt (p. 63). According to him, "Young-earth creationists, it would seem, hold to a recent creation not because of but in spite of the scientific evidence" (p. 70).
Chapters 10-15 are about divine creation and action. Writing on the creation week, he notes, "At the end of the six days of creation, God is exhausted--not fatigued, as we might be, but exhausted in the sense of having drawn out of himself everything needed for the creature to be what it was intended to be" (p. 99). However, Dembski does not take the days of Genesis 1 to be 24-hour days, which brings us to his unique solution.
Chapters 16-20 cover what he calls retroactive effects of the Fall. If, as Christians believe, the efficacy of Christ's blood at the Cross could flow backward in time, as well as forward, then why not also the detrimental effects of original sin? Because God is not bound by chronological time, he could engineer the world to account for sin's consequences, and allow those consequences to begin to play out long before Adam and Eve (who were the reason for sin's consequences) appeared in the Garden of Eden. This intriguing suggesting would allow for an old earth, in which animals and natural evil existed long before humans. Evolution's timetable could fit nicely, and even evolution itself since, as Dembski suggests, it is possible that part of sin's result is that God had man evolve from lower forms, not because it was the original plan, but because evolution would itself be a form of evil brought on by man's sin in the Garden, with God initiating evolution long before the Garden as a response to Adam's sin (which was yet to be committed, chronologically speaking).
As he puts it, "in the theodicy I am proposing, our evolutionary past would itself be a consequence of sin (i.e., evolution would be a retroactive effect of the Fall)" (p. 162). Remember, Dembski is not saying we got here by evolution, but he is saying that, with his proposal, theistic evolution is welcome at the table, along with old-earth creationism (with young-earth creationism seemingly the odd-man-out).
It's a bit of a mind-twister to think about this idea, somewhat akin to figuring out a time-travel plot in a science fiction movie. Writes Dembski, "God is under no compulsion merely to rewrite the future of the world from the moment of the Fall (as assumed by young-earth creationism). Rather, God can rewrite our story while it is being performed and even change the entire backdrop against which it is performed--that includes past, present, and future...In other words, the effects of the Fall can be retroactive" (p. 110). So, in a nutshell, natural evil is chronologically prior to man, but man is logically prior to natural evil.
This proposed solution harmonizes modern scientific belief about the age of the earth with the biblical account of the Fall, thus preserving the doctrine that all evil on earth traces back to man's sin, which is the third plank in Dembski's theodicy. And this, even though the beginning of evil on earth predates the arrival of man. "Young-earth creationism attempts to make natural history match up with the order of creation point for point. By contrast, divine anticipation--the ability of God to act upon events before they happen--suggests that natural history need not match up so precisely with the order of creation..." (p. 137).
But, if he is right, what about the creation account of Genesis 1? Dembski does not want to deny a literal interpretation of Genesis, nor does he want to suggest the day-age theory. He says, "Accordingly, the days of creation are...
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