God's Existence and Suffering and Evil

 

BIBLE STUDY SUBJECT:

In response to a commission to submit possible responses to the question of IS THEIR A GOD? and how does one respond to THE QUESTION OF EVIL & SUFFERING I submitted this short two page discussion paper....

 The Four Books.docx - Google Docs

Bible Course 2.0 Supplementary Resources

 

I'll be using this post as a depository for links to the resources I created and used as a supplement to the material provided by the Bible Society's Bible Course (new version)

Session 1: Bible Overview

Warm up Presentation: Presentation1.pdf - Google Drive

Supplementary Questions: God is the Question.pdf - Google Drive

On Biblical Authority: Biblical Authority.pdf - Google Drive

Session 2: Early Genesis

Warm up  Presentation: Early Genesis.pdf - Google Drive

Supplementary Questions: God is The Question 2.pdf - Google Drive

Sessions 3: Exodus

Warm up  Presentation: Presentation3.pdf - Google Drive

Supplementary Questions: God is the Question 3.pdf - Google Drive

AI Google notes: Notes.pdf - Google Drive

NB: Caveat: AI algorithms are based on the human neural model and have been trained using human generated texts. In the above "Notes" document I have used AI as a natural language interface to interrogate those texts for sought after information. Because of the clear human component involved in the creation of AI, AI responses must be treated as opinions. Therefore just as one treats the opinions of any human being with caution so must we treat AI output. 

See: Quantum Non-Linearity: The AI Garbage Bubble?

Session 4: Judges, Kings & Chaos

Judges, Kings & Chaos:  Judges, Kings & Chaos B.pdf - Google Drive

Supplementary Questions: God is the Question 4.pdf - Google Drive

Notes: Notes.pdf - Google Drive

Sessions 5 to 8 to follow....

BIBLE COURSE 1.0

The notes I made for version 1.0 of the Bible course can be found by going to these posts

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: The Bible Society's "Bible Course"

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session II: Genesis

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session III: Exodus.

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session IV: Judges & Kings

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session V: Exile & Prophets

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session VI: Jesus and the Gospels

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session VII: Acts and the Church

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: Bible Course Session VIII: Revelation

A Monumental Gamble

 

The above is a photograph I took of an article in the Spring 2025 edition of a church magazine called Idea. The article is by Richard Gamble who is the driving force behind the building of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer pictured above. I first took cognizance of The Wall in this post:

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: The Eternal Wall of Answered prayer

The Wall (yet to be built) is a truly monumental sized mobius strip filled with the accounts of answered prayer. In my original October  2020 post I reported the Guardian Newspaper telling us that the wall was.... 

An enormous Christian monument, more than twice the size of the Angel of the North, is to be built on the outskirts of Birmingham, fulfilling a vision its instigator says came from God.

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be constructed using a million bricks, each representing a prayer from a member of the public and its outcome. The aim is to “encourage and inspire people going through the storms of life”, said Richard Gamble, the project’s chief executive and a former chaplain of Leicester City football club.

The monument, which has been granted planning permission with work to begin next year, has three goals: to “preserve the Christian heritage of the nation”; encourage prayer; and “proclaim Jesus for the country”.

Well,  nearly five years later the wall hasn't even been started. In the article above Richard Gamble admits that the project is facing two problems a) Getting funding, although that, according to Gamble, is easier than b) finding those 1 million answered prayers of which Gamble says that so far he only has 40,000. He goes on to say why he thinks support for the project is patchy. But in spite of that the article ends by telling us that construction of the wall is to begin this year.

The Four to Six Mix

 From Gender mix in Australian church attenders - NCLS Research

The 4 to 6 mix seems to be pretty steady although my sample taken

on this Easter Sunday returned a 3 to 7 mix. 

It is several years since I wrote on the subject of the "4 to 6 mix"; that is the ratio of males to females in the church I attend.  In my last post on the subject I recorded it as being steady at 4:6 and in an earlier post I was amazed that my very rough & informal sampling had returned the same ratio that had cropped up in a far more formal and rigorous church wide study. (See also the Australian stats above)

I've been sampling the male to female ratio on and off for around 18 years now and yesterday's count has finally come up with a different ratio: I was sitting in the gallery and counted the people in the two main pew blocks on the ground floor: Of the 112 people in these two blocks 34 were male and 78 female; that's a roughly 3 to 7 mix! Perhaps the variation has something to do with an increase in attendance on Easter Sunday. 

Links to Amos Study

The occupation of Amos was as a herdsman

AMOS Part I

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeTWdWbndUcFlXZjQ/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-alVHgcpym-s63IJ7XT_wTw

AMOS Part II

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeX1RrU1hGMGsxUFk/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-PacjTNKtqE4nZnhpAFfHHA

Politics at Norwich Cathedral

 

The Revd Andrew Bryant, Canon for Mission and Pastoral Care at Norwich Cathedral, wrote a Network Norwich and Norfolk pre-election article on the citizen's voting responsibilities. The article can be read here:

Network Norfolk : Why voting should be regarded as a spiritual act (networknorwich.co.uk)

In these days when the cut and thrust and contentions of constitutional politics are under threat from those who seek to disabuse us of the right to agree to disagree and vote on it, I found myself agreeing with the article. Here was my reply

Timothy V Reeves (Guest)           21/06/2024 11:00

Thanks for the article, Andy. I very much agree with your conciliatory tone.

The constitution, forums and media of democracy must be preserved; they cater for the truism that as frail & fallible human beings we have a natural propensity to disagree and contend and therefore contention must be managed by systems of arbitration & accountability. Obviously, there’s always room for reform and enhanced justice but let’s respect our democratic culture of accountability as the way forward: As you say:

<<"Just as God calls us frail, fallible disciples to be bearers of the divine light in the world, so too the governance of our nation is placed in the hands of equally frail and fallible men and women, who need are our affirmation of their willingness to serve rather than a continuing reminder of where they have fallen short. Even as they are held accountable at the ballot box, we too will be held accountable on the Last Day.">>

Excellent! May we take that quote to heart! The alternative is dictatorship and the threat posed by dictators-in-waiting who make loud claims to being the saviour of society. There is of course only one saviour.

 

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Quoted from Network Norwich and Norfolk....

The Revd Andrew Bryant is the Canon for Mission and Pastoral Care at Norwich Cathedral. He was previously Team Rector of Portishead, Bristol, in the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and has served in parishes in the Guildford and Lichfield Dioceses, as well as working for twelve years with Kaleidoscope Theatre, a charity promoting integration through theatre for young adults with Down’s Syndrome.

You can read Andrew's latest blog entry here and can follow him via his Twitter account @AndyBry3.

The Problem of Suffering and Evil

 

I try to evade writing about this subject because a) Over the centuries gallons of ink have been spilt on this subject without a definitive solution b) Any "solution" proposed is in danger of trivializing the profundity of the question and usually withers away to nothing in the fierce heat of real suffering and evil.

However, as I recently attended a church session on suffering and evil I thought I'd better make a quick showing on the church FB page of how far my thinking has got on the subject and I reproduce that quickie FB post below; it is based on some ideas I expressed in a blog post I once made here.  It's a bit tongue in cheek though. 

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How can an omnipotent/sovereign loving & personal God tolerate suffering in the world He created? Shifting responsibility to human and satanic responsibility doesn’t work because that simply reflects back on the Creator’s responsibility in creating beings with such a propensity to screw up and fail so badly. Forget it.

Here’s a quick back-of-the-envelope solution to the biggest problem of all time.

OK, so if we demand our Creator deals with suffering, where does He start? Which suffering does he knock out of cosmic history? Well, because the cosmos, like Jesus' garment, is a seamless whole with many interlinked dependences it is very difficult to remove suffering in a piecemeal fashion; it has to be dealt with as a whole. The result is that the demand to remove suffering & evil entails removing all of it from day one, effectively shifting creation into another very different universe and a very different history to the one we know……Because our own existence is seamlessly bound up with the world we are part of this would mean that us sinners would have to go as well. For me that presents a very personal dilemma: Either suffering goes and me along with it, or the suffering world stays. The other thing I’d miss in a perfect world is that my favourite Bible verses, Phil 2:1-11, wouldn’t exist either. And I’m sure that if I found myself in a perfect world it wouldn’t be perfect for very long!

These considerations turn the problem of suffering and evil on its head: Viz: We have a big, big dilemma problem in the absence of suffering and evil. But perhaps because of Phil 2:1-11 the Sovereign Creator (bless His name) has selected our cosmic story for reification from among the many possible stories that can told. That reification must have cost Him a dearly in emotional pain. I suppose that's what we call grace.

QED(?).

Well, perhaps not QED, but the above can be the basis of more sophisticated thinking!