Originally posted by ZylonBane
Sounds like Santa Claus! 
Feh, I just went through all this over on the TTLG board.
Suffice it to say that I'm neither so emotionally needy nor so creatively vacant that I need to believe in a magic man in the sky to make me feel warm-n-fuzzy and serve as an answer to all the "unanswerable" questions.
I've been through several of these kinds of debates. They're rather annoying, for both sides I think. Each side, in its own way, is completely convinced of its argument and can come up with plenty of rhetorical reasons to support it. But I think we can all agree that you can't change someone's mind who doesn't want his mind changed. I'd like to make a few points, though.
1. The Christian faith is NOT blind. It is not believing in the absence of reason - it is more like trusting that something will happen in the future because you've seen it in the past. In the Bible, faith is always coupled with knowledge. C.F. Acts 17:11, "Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and
examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true" (emphasis mine). They were comparing a new teaching to see if it was valid based on an old teaching that they held to be true. In the same way, God does not discourage honest questioning of our own.
2. God reveals himself to those who seek him. If you're not looking for him, you're not likely to find him. However, if you make an honest inquiry and you're willing to risk being wrong, you might be surprised at what you find. But God is not going to show himself to someone who does not give him the benefit of the doubt.
You may think that this conflicts with my earlier statement that God is the one going all out to reach you. It doesn't. God puts many clues on your path, but you're not going to see them if you refuse to believe the possibility that they exist. It's like billboards on a highway: No matter how many billboards there are, you're not going to see them if you're driving with your eyes closed.
3. God allows temorary evil in order to reach a greater good. The problem from our perspective is that we often can't understand what he's doing. Think of it like chess. If we didn't have the mental capacity to see forward several moves, we would be astonished to see someone sacrifice his queen in order to gain a better position. We would have no idea what he was doing, and we would conclude from our limited perspective that his objective was not to win the chess game but to forfeit his chess pieces. We might further say that the player was being deceptive in claiming to wish to win the game, that he could be lying to us, or any number of other things.
Hopefully, food for thought.
