Dear Alister McGrath: So What?
Whenever I listen to people debating Professor Alister McGrath, who is constantly saying things like, “I feel it to be true,” and “it seems to me that the concept of God makes all the world fall into place,” I am every single time left wondering why they don’t just respond with a big fat “SO WHAT?”
“Professor McGrath,
While I have no doubt that your personal experience of God is very dear to you, and in your mind, as you’ve made clear by restating many and various times over, this concept makes the world make a lot of sense, could you please perhaps elucidate for me, and for all of us, why it you think that this constitutes a good argument for the existence of God?
Or, if you don’t think of it as an argument you are putting forth, could you please fill us in on why you insist on repeating it over and over again in debates, often times spending valuable minutes on it that you could be using for actual arguments or display of evidence?
Thanks a bunch, cheers.”
I could go on, and in fact my essay-writing impulse is urging me to insert more of a preamble to the question to set up the “So What” a lot more bitingly.
Or I could step outside and participate in some bicycle jousting going on outside of one of the units in my building. Something tells me — and I feel this to be true — it would be a serious mismanagement of priorities not to step outside.
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Apparently I’m more interested in listening to Sue Blackmore, some more, than in hanging out with a crowd of East Oakland bike-jousting scrapsters.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny stuff and good people. But it’s just not enough.
