Shot:
Atheist Stephen Fry explains what he would say if he was 'confronted by God'
“Suppose it’s all true, and you walk up to the pearly gates, and are confronted by God,” asked Bryne. “What will Stephen Fry say to him, her, or it?”Chaser:
The 57-year-old replied: “I’d say, bone cancer in children? What’s that about?"
Gerard Baker after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed hundreds of thousands of people:
If, then, what the atheists are attacking is the notion of an all-seeing, all-powerful benign deity, constantly engaged in and altering the tide of human events, they do not need a tsunami to prove their point. The knowledge that just one child somewhere was dying of cancer would bring the whole fantasy crumbing down. ...
Put it this way: imagine for a moment, that there were not only no earthquakes, floods and storms, but that there was no innocent suffering and never had been in the history of the earth. Imagine if, every time a faulty gene was on its way to being transmitted to an unborn child, the hand of God dipped in and the gene was corrected. Imagine a God frantically circling the globe redirecting every train headed for a faulty bridge, reprogramming every failed computer in a hospital operating theatre, and printing money every time some undeserving chap got down on his luck.
Imagine, in other words, if everyone since the beginning of time lived to a ripe old age and died in his bed, or at least died a death precisely commensurate with his moral contribution to the earth’s happiness.
Such a fair, challengeless world might be a wonderful place to live. But I don’t think that it would be recognisably human. If we have reason to doubt the point of our existence in this world, surely we would understand it even less in that one. And if I were God, and had created Man, I am not quite sure that I would see the point either.
Posts
