ie:missional teaching. glocalizing. living. serving. repenting. incarnating. loving. repeating.

With the evocative sub-title, Religion as a Natural Phnomenon, I had hoped that book would be really challenging and informative. Instead, it is really dull. Really, really, dull. Page 88 and I’m putting it back on the shelf dull.

Daniel Dennett, who is missing a chance to rake in some serious cash at Christmas time, is a philosopher and author from Boston, currently a prof at Tufts University. Alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, he is the fourth horseman of recent anti-theistic publishing.

If there is one word to describe the portion of the book that I did read, it would be: speculative. Even for a philosopher, Dennett seems consumed with hypotheticals and varying hypotheses and when I reached page 87 with “perhaps,” “might,” “might have,” and “perhaps” all on the same page, I just didn’t have any more time for the mind games. Perhaps I’m just too ADD.

I will use one quote to give a reason why I think Christians need to be careful when addressing the issue of the existence or non-existence of God:

Many contemporary Christians, Jews, and Muslims insist that God, or Allah, being omniscient, has no need for anything like sense organs, and, being eternal, does not act in real time. This is puzzling, since many of htem continue to pray to God, to hope that God will answer their prayers tomorrow, to express gratitude to God for creating the universe, and to use such locutions as “what God intends us to do” and “God have mercy,” acts that seem to be in flat contradiction to their insistence that their God is not at all anthropomorphic.

The reason for this quote is to demonstrate the anti-theistic view in which all representations of God are equally invalid. When one, Harris for example, is hammering away on Allah, he still possesses the same amount of disbelief in the God of the Bible–it isn’t one or the other, it’s zero sum.

Where I believe Christians are missing the mark is our defense of the existence of “God” as a vague, generic, nebulous higher intelligence. A Grammy winner strides to the microphone and gives thanks to “God.” A football player says, “I give thanks to God for giving us a good game.” A preacher says, “God wants to prosper you,” while another intones, “God is not in the business of making you rich.” A Muslim cleric says, “God is great.” Einstein apparently believed in a god that was the sum total of natural laws, and not personal, while British particle physicist Rev. John Polkinghorne holds to a personal God and Antony Flew is a deist.

Which God (or god) is the Christian defending? I think it is very important that Christians defend only the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ. In fact, if we authentically hold to the deity of Christ, that is the only logically consistent position we can hold. Otherwise, we are defending a false idea of God and just might find ourselves attempting to validate a false god.