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| (With graduating doctoral students at Palmer Theological Seminary) |
The Morals of the Story: Good News About a Good God, by David and Marybeth Baggett.
Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver, by Christian Smith.
Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology, by J. P. Moreland.
Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky.
Christian Ethics: Four Views, by Steve Wilkens.
Introducing Christian Ethics: A Short Guide to Making Moral Choices, by Scott Rae.
One theme in the discussion of theistic ethics is the goodness of God. Essentially. This - among other things - distinguishes the God of theism from other "gods." The theistic God is qualitatively different from other gods. I have met village atheists (see Nietzsche's critique) who fail to grasp this difference.
The incoherence of the "new atheists" is fading (see atheist John Gray, Seven Types of Atheism - this was one of my Christmas presents, thank you). They provided theistic philosophers a feast of beliefs to both defeat and defend. One such belief was the idea that the God of Judaeo-Christianity is just another god, in the same league as all so-called gods.
This belief funded the "new atheist" slogan: "We are just like you theists, except we believe in one less god than you do." That was a cute saying, parroted by philosophically untrained atheists, accompanied with a slight smile and wink of their eye, appearing like they have dealt Christian monotheism a final death blow.
In all my philosophy career I never heard a real atheistic thinker pull that slogan out of their internet. Here, perhaps, is why.
From David Bentley Hart:
"There are two senses in which the word “God” or “god” can properly be used. Most modern languages generally distinguish between the two usages as I have done here, by writing only one of them with an uppercase first letter, as though it were a proper name—which it is not. Most of us understand that “God” (or its equivalent) means the one God who is the source of all things, whereas “god” (or its equivalent) indicates one or another of a plurality of divine beings who inhabit the cosmos and reign over its various regions. This is not, however, merely a distinction in numbering, between monotheism and polytheism, as though the issue were merely that of determining how many “divine entities” one happens to think there are. It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders." (Hart, The Experience of God, pp. 28-29. Yale University Press. Emphasis mine.)
Philosopher David Bagget explains:
"Some atheists are fond of saying that they believe in just one god less than do the monotheists, but this is perhaps the wrong way to understand what’s going on. The difference between a polytheistic assortment of this-worldly, morally flawed gods, on the one hand, and an all-powerful, omnibenevolent God, on the other, can hardly be starker, so what accounts for the way some thinkers conflate these two radically different visions of reality?" (Baggett, The Morals of the Story: Good News About a Good God, pp. 41-42. Emphasis mine.)
There is, literally, a world of difference between the God Christians affirm, and the gods we deny. It would be like believing in cars, with the atheist telling me, "I just believe in one less pair of shoes than you."
