The Second Week




In less than two hours we’re meeting tonight.

Disclaimer: I’m rushing the Blog this week because my week was a mess: super busy with a whole bunch of things that were urgent were pressing in upon me and then, then I did something catastrophically stupid that resulted in me needing to rewrite an exam from scratch.

Further disclaimer: my aim in meeting is for people to discuss whatever issue they want. I don’t intend to direct or interfere with the content of the discussion. God just keeps turning up all on His own. 

So, without further adieu here is my grammatically ruinous relay of last weeks discussion.

Last week we wrapped up around a question about the problem of evil.

So this was where we opened:
According to the Bible God is:

All good
All knowing
All powerful

So when we consider the tsunami where thousands of people were killed, God unconcerned with killing good along with those who ‘had it coming’. Now if that’s the case, then God’s not that good.

Further, if he couldn’t stop the tsunami then He is not all-powerful.

Either way, God does not fulfill the requirements of being the God of the Bible. The easiest explanation is that God simply doesn’t exist.

The whole thing gets even more uncomfortable when we consider childhood cancer. There is very little to be gained in such circumstances.

One of the people openly shared that they found that, in light of the previous conversation, they found it even more difficult to believe in God.

I shared a little about what the Dominican Priest, theologian and philosopher, Herbert McCabe had to say about the problem of evil. (you can make contact with me if you would like to read the Chapter on the problem of evil. For me, it’s the most satisfactory argument, it’s quite excellent)

I’ve wrestled with the question and upon resting upon the argument that the most logical reason for all the suffering in the world, the seemingly unabated  behaviour of evil men around the World, was that there was no God. But this just doesn’t ring true.

I try to pursue the Socratic position:

“The truth, insofar as it can be known, is that which cannot be disproved.”  
I’ve got no idea what the original quote was but it’s words to that effect.

I just think that the claim that there is no God is unsupportable. I shared the example of Anthony Flew and the HumanGenome Project: 

Ultimately, however, none of this persuades me.

It was my experiences that led me to God. That won’t cut it with people with genuine concerns so I always need to look for the smoking gun that might prove the whole thing a sham.

It is the New Testament that builds and solidifies my belief. Sure, there’s plenty I don’t understand.

(name removed) raised the concern that the translation of the Bible was unreliable: largely because it had been translated so many times.

I pointed out that translations of the New Testament are based on Greek and Aramaic. It’s not like a game of ‘Chinese Whispers’. The biggest problem is the relationship between theology and translation. This is where ‘meaning’ of particular verses can have a big influence. Here is an example:


The other thing mentioned was that (name removed) liked Jesus and believed he was an historical figure, however the minute Jesus claims that he is God, then, well, a line needed to be drawn there.

The challenged offered here was that the text was the source where we know about Jesus (there are other ancient texts that refer to Jesus that aren’t the Bible however they don’t go into anywhere like the detail of the Gospels). If you’re happy to take Jesus as an historical figure then you need to wrestle with the claims of the rest of the text. That is, are these people telling the story deceived, do they have an agenda, are they in fact lying?

Again we had something of a discussion of the layout of the New Testament as to Matthew, Mark and Luke.


I’m not sure how it came up but I did explain the curiosity of the Old Testament book of Isaiah, in particular Isaiah 53 wherein a figure is described that sounds an awful lot like Jesus. The text of Isaiah 53 predates the New Testament by about 800 years. Further, a copy was found in amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls that dates to just some year before Jesus’ ministry and the translation is the same as the Hebrew texts that we are familiar with today. The reason this is important is that there can be no basis to the claim that the text was modified to support the claim that it predicts the outcome of Jesus’ life. It is also important that, while the early church was made up of entirely of Jews many Jews reject Jesus Christ because they don’t believe he is the Messiah that the Old Testament prophecies are about. That right there is another extensive discussion.

I can't recall how we closed, except to say we would be meeting up again next week.

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