Is God Silent? Making Sense of “Divine Hiddenness”
Is God silent when we can’t sense him? Although many who seek God find him, others experience him as hidden and absent. What are we to make of this “divine hiddenness”? Often, we struggle to believe in and trust God, not necessarily because we fail to recognize His existence or suppress evidence of His existence, […]
The Scariest Nice Person in Your Church
What comes to mind when you think of “one-hand clapping”? Perhaps you think of the Zen “koan” in which the Zen master asks the student, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” For months, the student searches for it in vain until meditating and arriving at the “soundless sound” that transcends all sound.[1] “One […]
The Watchmaker Parable Revisited
Imagine you are enjoying an afternoon picnic in a high mountain meadow. Lush grasses stretch out from under your feet. Wildflowers add brilliant splashes of color to the scene. The distant mountain peaks still hold some snow. Most of last winter’s snowfall is still working its way out of the mountain springs and lakes into […]
The Sign I Missed: Reflections on John Donne
“You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, Lord, You know it all.” (Psalm 139:3-4, NASB) I sat in a grungy Exxon Gas station repair shop estimating the dollars remaining in my bank account. I’d come in for […]
Philosophy Questions: God Is in Everything?
Is God in everything? There is a sense in which, as the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas put it, “God operates in all things. . . . Therefore God exists in all things.” To make this point, Aquinas quotes Isaiah 26:12b, which says, “All that we have accomplished you have done for us” (NIV). So far, […]
The Most Important Question in the History of Thinking
*Editor’s Note: Years ago, Christian philosopher Terry Miethe (Ph.D., Ph.D., D.Phil. (Oxon. Cand.) debated his atheist friend Antony Flew on the question of “Does God exist?” What follows is Terry’s introduction to the debate, as recorded in the book Does God Exist: A Believer and an Atheist Debate, by Terry Miethe and Antony Flew. It […]
How Can a Good and Powerful God Exist with All the Evil in the World?
One common, and understandable, objection to the existence of the God of the Bible is the reality of evil. It’s not just an intellectual issue; it’s a very personal and deeply emotional one. But a number of considerations can help us see that the existence of God and the existence of evil in our world are […]
A Core Conflict within Atheism
Why do people become atheists? There are many reasons given for why people stop believing there’s a God, but a reason that rises to the top for many people is the problem of so much suffering. Atheist Andrea M. Weisberger explains that there is just so much evil in the world that, if there were […]
