Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in Hell? Well, I, I'm told it's rather hot there, for one. Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality. Ok, the whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well-being of human souls. Now, happily, there's absolutely no evidence that the Christian Hell exists. I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.
Alright, 9 children die every year before they reach the age of five. ok, picture, picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004, that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those, every ten days, killing children only under five. Ok, that's 20, 24,000 children a day, a thousand an hour, 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony. Ok, think of, think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God, and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared. And their prayers will not be answered. Ok, but according to Dr. Craig, this is all part of God's plan.
Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them, or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr. Craig's view, most of these people - many of these people, certainly - will be going to Hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Ok, through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation.
Ok, there are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them therefore are polytheists. Ok, in Dr. Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed. If you are, if you are praying to the Monkey God Hanuman, you are doomed, ok. You'll be tortured in Hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9, and Matthew 13, and Revelation 14. Ok, perhaps you'll remember from The Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valanor, but they can be reborn in Middle Earth. I say that just as a point of comparison.
Ok, so God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus, ok. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. Ok.
On the other hand, on Dr. Craig's account, your run-of-the-mill serial killer in America, ok, who - who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus, on Death Row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in Heaven after death, ok.
One thing should be crystal clear to you: This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.
Ok, and please notice the double standard that people like Dr. Craig use to - to exonerate God from all this evil, ok. We're told that God is loving, and kind, and just, and intrinsically good; but when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people, of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that God is mysterious, ok. "Who can understand God's will?" Ok and yet, this is precisely-this, this, this "merely human" understanding of God's will, is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian, some - he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we're told that God is good. Ok. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious, ok. This is how you play tennis without the net...
...There's no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster Yahweh.
