He never ...

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Human Suffering - Happiness & the Relief of Human Suffering

Do individual happiness and the relief of human suffering really represent the supreme expressions of good in society today? Are things that cause us happiness as individuals always good for us? Does human suffering ever involve a higher good? Defining morality in terms of happiness and suffering proves too simplistic. For example, many psychotropic drugs cause the user to experience euphoria, an extreme sense of happiness, yet these same drugs can cause physical addiction and organ damage, leading to death over long periods of use. You have stated previously, “When one looks at our drug laws -- the only organizing principle that appears to make sense of them is that anything which might radically eclipse prayer or procreative sexuality as a source of pleasure has been outlawed.” Most readers will readily see the exaggeration and anti-Christian rhetoric in such a statement. You point out, “In particular, any drug (LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, marijuana, etc.) to which spiritual or religious significance has been ascribed by its users has been prohibited.” Like all drugs, even those in regular use, the desired effects come laden with undesirable side-effects that affect members of the population unevenly. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and Ecstasy (MDMA) are all hallucinogens that offer the user side-effects such as vomiting, diarrhea, tachycardia (increased heart rate), dizziness, headaches, and anxiety. These drugs may also result in a long-term side-effect known as hallucinogen persisting perception disorder (HPPD) that can lead to life-long anxiety issues and sleep disorders. Psychotropic drugs provide instant gratification, but come with a heavy price tag.

What about the concept of human suffering? Is suffering always perceived negatively? Should we avoid it at all costs? Occasionally short-term pain acts as a warning device so that we can avoid long-term suffering. When we experience unexpected physical pain, it can serve as an admonishment that our health may be in jeopardy. If we address this indicator at an early stage, we often can look back and view that pain as a blessing.

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Contrary to your desire to see the eradication of all religions, I would prefer to see a greater degree of cooperation between science and theology. I find your claim that all faith-based beliefs are “flagrantly irrational” hopelessly naïve. If the truth claims of various religions were tested scientifically, and the resulting accumulation of evidence favored one religion, it's validity would be strengthened. However, if scientists and theologians do not begin to accept such a complimentary approach to the accumulation of knowledge, we will always remain on opposite sides of the fence. We could add the weight of such hard scientific evidence to the weight of existing evidence from the soft sciences, such as that found through archaeology and history.

We clearly cannot conclusively prove any religion wrong due to the impossibility of confirming a universal negative. Suppose I asked myself the question, “Is there enough gold in Alaska to subsidize homes for all the homeless in Seattle?” I could only answer this question in the negative after an exhaustive search of every cubic inch of Alaska. Similarly, I could only affirm the non-existence of God after having searched the entire universe, an impossible task. To answer this question in the positive, I would need to search and find gold nuggets, calculate their value and keep an ongoing tally. Each nugget added to my storehouse would bring me a bit closer to answering the question in the affirmative. Similarly, to affirm the existence of the God of the Bible, I would need to accumulate evidence that adds weight to the argument for His existence.

The archaeological evidence I previously cited provides a few nuggets to add weight to the argument for the validity of Christianity, at least as it relates to the historicity of the biblical manuscripts. The individual testimonies of the life changes attributable to Christian faith provide even more nuggets, although you may disregard these as mere pebbles. If the hard sciences begin to produce evidence for Christianity, this should provide even more weight to the Christian argument. Perhaps such evidence would amount to a gold brick.

In the New Testament, the only sort of evidence available to Jesus’ contemporaries was the evidence of the miracles He had performed and the testimonies of those who witnessed these events. Yet neither Jesus nor Luke would deny the impact of evidence or the role of skeptical inquiry on the faith of the believers.

Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. - Jesus in John 14:11

Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. - Luke in Acts 17:11

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How can thinking be free if certain areas of knowledge are summarily excluded as unworthy of cerebration? Someone truly free should not hesitate to include all areas of knowledge into their thinking. You claim that, “We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty.” I couldn’t agree more with that statement. However, I stand in stark disagreement with your next, which states, “Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.” Unfortunately, as I have alluded to previously, that respect doesn’t seem to extend within the hard sciences.

In your conclusion you assert that Christians are “right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure and contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about it's structure and contents any more respectable.” The arrogance and omniscience required to label another’s claims “unjustifiable” doesn’t befit you. Good and rational reasons exist to accept the validity of Christianity. Nevertheless, I understand your perspective, having once viewed Christianity in exactly the same way. Now, I can say with John Bradford, the English martyr who died under the reign of Mary I, “There, but for the grace of God go I.”

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My grandfather worked as an entomologist at Johns Hopkins University and devoted his life to understanding disease-carrying insects, especially mosquitoes. He conferred the name Anopheles darlingi on the mosquito of South and Central America most responsible for transmitting malaria to humans. His passion for understanding these disease vectors was only exceeded by his passion to enable others to learn how to control them ... and, admittedly, by his passion for my grandmother!

A scientific realist prior to the time the term became en vogue, my grandfather believed that his careful documentation and description of Anopheles species, embellished by my grandmother’s life-like drawings, would help future scientists learn how to decrease the incidence of malaria. Science provided him an objective study of reality that enabled progressive understanding to take place. On realism, philosopher J.P. Moreland notes:
[Stanley] Jaki adds that science and natural theology proceed in a similar way -- both use a bold leap of the intellect beyond sensory phenomena to the postulation of unseen causes responsible for those phenomena. Thus both natural theology and a realist understanding of science reject crude empiricism and use similar structures in arguments to the best explanation.
After receiving Bachelors and Masters Degrees in the hard sciences, my father received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University and worked as the chief technical editor for Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory for over 40 years. During my youth I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in the suburbs of Washington, DC with my family. Sunday school often came down to a choice between arts and crafts or listening to Bible stories depicted in a way that made them analogous to Aesop’s Fables. I recall standing outside the church at age twelve answering a friend who asked, “Do you believe in God?” At the time I did little more than reiterate my father’s beliefs, “Not if the whole Bible is just a bunch of stories!” As a Boy Scout reciting the 12 Scout Laws I always stopped short of the last one, “a scout is reverent.” While reciting the Pledge of Allegiance at school I consistently went silent while the rest of the class said “under God.” I was a quiet rebel.

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At the age of eighteen or nineteen I began to think about religion for myself. What modern atheists call freethought led me away from atheism and ultimately to Jesus Christ. In 1975, during my first semester of college, I dated a Christian young lady who encouraged me to read the New Testament as a whole, rather than just jumping from one Bible “story” to the next. Her suggestion helped me to view Jesus Christ and his impact on the world with greater understanding. Although my upbringing had trained me to view everything through the lens of science, I detected more to this Christ than science alone could explain. In December of 1975, my life radically changed due to an awareness of God in Christ that I find difficult to explain to those who haven’t experienced a similar event. There were countless theological concepts I had yet to understand. Then again, there were countless scientific concepts I had yet to understand at that age, so I could not rule out the possibility that these two disciplines would not ultimately support one another. For the past thirty years I have sought to deepen my understanding of these issues to determine whether such a synergy is possible. I am convinced it is.

In the meantime my father had become a more outspoken atheist. He retired in the late 1980s and moved to Florida. My parents attended a Unitarian Universalist church at first, but in time the church split and he and some others led an offshoot group to develop a new church based on Naturalism. Obviously, my father’s worldview differed radically from my own. In late 2003, my 80-year-old father contracted pneumonia and was hospitalized. Although he recovered from the pneumonia, his lungs weakened and he contracted pulmonary fibrosis, which took his life on Father’s Day in 2004. During the interval between his hospitalization and his death I gave him a preliminary draft of the manuscript for my next book, tentatively titled Colliding with Christ: The Science of Resurrection. I flew from my home in Colorado three times to visit him in Florida during that period. During my last visit he took me aside and whispered, “I think you’re right. I really think you’re right.” This led to a change I had prayed for all my life, but truthfully, did not ever expect to witness. He began to talk about “the transition,” a manner of speaking about death that, rather than mere annihilation, expressed a real faith in the reality of heaven. My last conversation with him occurred during a rather one-sided telephone call. His mental faculties remained as sharp as ever, but he found it difficult to both speak and breathe. We spoke for five or ten minutes when suddenly he could speak no more. I spent the next twenty minutes talking to him about his newly found faith. I set down the phone with the final admonition to “Trust Jesus.” The next day he died. At the memorial service a few days later my mother inquired, “What did you say to him that night? He would not let go of that phone for over an hour and he appeared more calm and peaceful than I’d seen him in days.” I saved my answer to her question until later in the service when I spoke to everyone. As I related our last conversation to the entire congregation of my father’s new church, founded on metaphysical naturalism, I offered them the same hope that he had found.

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Paul’s words in his first letter to the church he helped establish in Corinth, summarize so much of what I have tried to elucidate in this book. The evidence for the veridicality of the Resurrection of Christ is growing. In William Lane Craig’s The Son Rises he masterfully summarizes the historical and philosophical evidence for the Resurrection. N.T. Wright’s voluminous work entitled The Resurrection of the Son of God offers an in-depth evaluation of these same arguments and more.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed. But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. - 1 Corinthians 15:3-22

You probably consider the hope of a life beyond this mortal coil as nothing more than a mere pipe dream. However, millions of Americans see it as a present reality. The atheist has nothing to offer the dying man or woman who struggles with end of life concerns other than the legacy that may continue from the contributions made during his or her lifetime. The atheist offers no solution to the problem of apparent gratuitous evil. If we are all mere products of a Godless form of natural selection, many of us will have little more to look forward to than a life without hope, filled with unexplained suffering and ending in personal extinction. God provides the ultimate solution to the problems of evil and death, for He has offered to every one of us a means of living a life that counts forever and entering into the incommensurable joy of an eternity with Him.

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The atheist has nothing to offer the dying man or woman who struggles with end of life concerns other than the legacy that may continue from the contributions made during his or her lifetime.
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That's because our treasures are not stored here!!!

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I'd rather have hope

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Coz it floats?

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that's right lol you just can't keep it down lol