Discussion Grounds

Luke,

I can see that I misunderstood your phrase “invisible … friend” when I took it to mean something like a childhood imaginary friend. I stand corrected on that, and I appreciate the clarification. I continue to hold, however, that the way you have depicted Christian belief is massively distorted. The general form of the distortion is to pick out those attributes of God that are most easily trivialized and make the least of them. Thomas Reid commented to say,

Your description here is analogous to the women who, when asked to describe her husband to the best of her ability, called him “someone who eats corn flakes”. Of course that’s technically true about him, but misses the much more important and fundamental aspects of his character. Most assuredly, this detail has no bearing on why she married him.

It’s an excellent analysis. Here’s another similar version: the teenager who, when asked to explain who her dad is, says, “He’s the guy who hangs around the house sometimes and buys us things,” or who says that her mom is “the lady who lives here and does stuff and buys us things.” If there’s truth in either description, it’s a twisted truth (unless the parents are twisted parents), because these are not the first things a child would normally say about her parents, nor are they the most important or salient.

I must stay on this topic until we agree on what it is we are debating over. You wrote,

But I never said the two were the same, or even implied it. I used the term “invisible friend,” I did not invoke the notion of a childhood imaginary friend, and as you admitted, the term “invisible friend” is literally true of what you believe.

Literally true? Yes, God is invisible in a woodenly literal sense; i.e., we can’t take a picture of him. He wouldn’t be much of a god (the lower case there is intentional) if we could. The description does not apply, however, if by “invisible” one means imperceptible or (by extension) unknowable in principle. God’s reality is perceptible in his works of creation, his revelation through Scripture, his presence in prayer, his guidance, the work he does in and through other believers, and more. And he actually did reveal himself visibly in the person of Christ for a time, of which we have a reliable record.

God is certainly a friend, and yes, I do literally believe in him as one. But as Josh McDowell used to put it, “He may be your Father but he’s not your Old Man.” He is not to be regarded without worshipful respect. He’s a friend, but he’s also the all-wise, all-powerful sovereign creator. It would be crazy to consider him a friend in the common “friend” sense that there is parity between God and me.

He’s a friend who “grants wishes,” you say. Now, that’s not parity, I’ll grant you that you have recognized that. You see that God (in your version of what Christians believe) has the ability to do extra-special things I can’t do, so he has some powers I don’t have. But my relationship with him is one in which I call on him when I need a favor done, and he does it for me sometimes.

Again, that’s an extremely trivialized and distorted picture of who God is and how Christians relate to him. Our relationship with him is primarily one of worship and love, in view of his own love and his absolute superiority. The relatioship is also one in which I grow into conformity with his character by maturing in the knowledge of him. It is one in which he answers prayer because of his love, not because of my controlling him like a genie in a bottle; and in which he answers prayer also to make his glory known.

As to the word magical, you wrote most recently,

But either way, Christians themselves certainly invoke the supernatural all the time. They pray to God to affect the natural world in their favor. They believe there is a particular “art” to it, as Jesus taught it (the Lord’s prayer, etc.). Most Christians believe there are specific techniques that are more effective than others, whether it be candles or holy water or drawing a cross on one’s forehead with oil.

You have changed the reference of the term here now. You said before that we believed in a “magical friend,” that God was magical. I remind you of my prior objection to that, which is that God does not (per the definition of magic) practice any art to conjure up results out of some power external to himself. You are probably literally right to say that “most Christians believe there are specific techniques taht are more effective than others,” but the Bible teaches, and maturing Christians know, that true prayer is a matter of relationship, not technique; and the most fundamental aspect of that relationship is to lovingly and trustingly seek God’s will in us, not God’s favors for us.

You say,

As for granting wishes, I never said that God’s only role was in granting wishes, just as I never said that his only attributes were invisibility, magicality, and friendliness. In any case, it sounds like you’ve agreed that your idea of God sometimes grants wishes (if not, then I assume you reject the idea of intercessory prayer, as some Christians do).

You never said those were his only attributes, but when you mock Christians for believing in an “invisible magical friend who grants wishes,” you effectively ignore all the other dimensions of Christian belief that make that not so ridiculous.

Why do people travel miles to see the Grand Canyon? It’s just a hole in the ground. That’s literally true and yet massively misleading. Misleading in a particular way, in fact: the person who insists that this is an adequate literal depiction of the Grand Canyon displays an impoverished sense of imagination, reality, perspective, or all three. Either that or else he is intentionally trying to cheapen and distort a great thing, so as to make those who appreciate its greatness seem like unthinking fools. The distortion reflects considerably more on him, however, than on those who see it for what it is.

You say a sad thing here:

As a Christian, when I realized that I literally believed in an invisible magical friend who grants me wishes, I ranted and raved against the atheist who said it. I told him he was being unfair and disingenuous. I really let him have it.

Maybe you really did believe in an invisible magical friend who granted you wishes. If so, then you certainly needed to grow out of that belief. The biblical term for it is idolatry. But if you actually had a belief in the God of the Bible, you should not have told that atheist he was being unfair and disingenuous. You should have told him he was wrong. He was insidiously wrong, in that yes, there is a small kernel of truth in all the words in that phrase, but God is not small, and are relationship with him is not a small thing, so overall, that depiction of the faith amounts to a large deception. It’s sad to me that you didn’t see it properly that way at the time.

I think this is extremely relevant to the course of our debate, Luke, because as I said last time, it makes no sense to debate the truth or value of Christianity or God when the words mean something so trivial to you. I am not here to defend belief in an invisible magical friend who grants wishes, and if you think that’s literally true of my position, as you have so often repeated (with italics), then we haven’t even defined the terms of our discussion yet.

Thank you, though, for your additional point of agreement:

For x to be a successful explanation of y, we do not need to also have an explanation of x.

That’s important and helpful. I hope we’ll get to the point soon where we can work on these things.