Jazz Shaw at Hot Air advises us all as to what a scientist’s wife thinks God must do to kep is ratings high:
I can only imagine how eager you all are to redefine God in a radically new and empowering way, and your various church and temple leaders will doubtless be looking forward to the upcoming lightening of their workload. But how exactly are we to structure this new god for the 21st century? Well, Ms. Abrams has five helpful bullet points which don’t so much involve who God is, but who He can not possibly be.
These are characteristics of a God that can’t be real:
God existed before the universe.
God created the universe.
God knows everything.
God intends everything that happens.
God can choose to violate the laws of nature.
Okay then! The good news is that those five stunningly simple points will shorten the Bible considerably, particularly the Old Testament, and the kids will have a lot less material to memorize in Sunday school. But any revolutionary new product requires a solid marketing campaign and Abrams understands that you’ll need the correct pitch to make the sale on this one. In the second part of her essay, cleverly titled, “A New Way To Think About God“, she goes into the details. Here.
She begins with a simple analogy for those of you who rode the short bus and might have trouble keeping up. You see, people are sort of like ants. Ants are stupid.
You get the picture.
Curiously, Nancy Ellen Abrams’ version of God was actually invented long before historical time. See: Imagine a world of religions that naturalism might indeed be able to explain:
Although they were not materialists, our ancestors do appear to have been naturalists. They believed in gods, but gods were merely beings with considerable powers over nature. They were usually placated. But they could be promoted or demoted, flogged or booted from the community, if they failed to bring rain, for example. The same fate could befall rulers, who were often thought to have semi-divine powers.
No necessary distinction existed between gods, ghosts, rulers, magicians, plain folks, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. Gods could die like anyone else. A sense of a transcendent God who created and sympathizes with man and nature — but is not a creature like them — came later, perhaps much later. Meanwhile, men could be gods and gods could be men, the hierarchy sometimes inverted. Either men or god could become any animate or inanimate entity as well. Though, strictly speaking, there were no inanimate entities; anything might have a soul.
It is really an Old Way to Think About God. And science was burnt toast.
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