Johan Braeckman preaches in his own church

In one blog on deredactie.be Johan Braeckman, known humanist, analyzes the claims of David Dessin and Khalid El Jafoufi regarding the statements by Stephen Fry. Johan wants to do this in a quasi fact-based manner, but ignores certain things that I would like to point out.

For example, he states that David and Khalid have difficulty making statements about Fry's statement because they do not know how much Fry knows about religion. Shouldn't he apply this rule to himself? How can he, as an atheist, know about religion and then judge everything based on it?

I am a heart specialist

Be careful, I agree with him. You cannot judge or call yourself a specialist because you know a part of something. For example, I know how a heart works: sinus nodes, electrical pulses, pumping blood, etc. But do I feel called to publish an article in Science in which I claim that Brugada is completely wrong with the syndrome named after him? No, I would be completely laughed at and rightly so.

Johan uses the same statement towards both believers, but does not apply it to himself. On the contrary, he is in a position to judge which arguments may be taken into account. I literally read on his blog:

but doesn't take them completely seriously because, well, they can't really be taken seriously

This is a classic tool in a discussion by which you indicate that you simply feel superior and that you are the only one authorized to judge which arguments are allowed to play a role - usually this means that your own arguments are allowed, the others are not. I expected a more neutral attitude from someone who has a doctorate.

Learning through trials

However, in his own shortcoming, Johan has provided the answer to his pressing question. Why does God do so little against evil? Yes, the answers we as believers give are limited. And unacceptable for those who do not believe. Because that's what it's all about: faith. Faith is the ultimate projection of who we are within.

As a Mormon, I believe in the plan of salvation. We lived as children of God with Him before we came to earth. Like every parent, at some point God said it was time to leave the nest, to gain experience for ourselves. He gives us a lot of advice, but at the same time He has given us the freedom to choose whether or not to listen to that advice.

In this respect he is no different from a parent who teaches his child to cycle. At a certain point you let go of the bike and shout “look in front of you, take it easy”. You say that once, twice, twenty times, but at a certain point you think “hey little one, you just have to learn it yourself, just get over it”. Are we as parents as bad as Fry's evil God? Or are we a loving parent who gives our child the opportunity to learn through trials? Or do we, as parents, continue to make all the decisions for our children and raise them in a sterile room, far away from all the evil of the world.

There must be contradiction in everything. No good without evil, no joy without sorrow, no ying without yang. We cannot learn without trial. And for those who ask why we have to learn? Mormons believe that as children of God we are His heirs and we strive to become like Him. How can we ever become like God if we do not learn to deal with all kinds of things?

I am a businessman and when I tell my story about my successes, I am praised when I say that I have achieved the most success by learning from my failures. I am invited as a speaker to make such statements: everyone swallows it like a sweet cake. Learning from failures is the key to success.

Strange that people cannot accept the same when it comes to the meaning of our existence here on earth. Why wouldn't we learn from the trials that come our way?

Would God – who can indeed intervene – want to deprive us of those opportunities? Wouldn't He just become a dictator if He took away our free will and decided in our place what to do, how to think and react? I wouldn't want to live in such a world.

Judging with limited knowledge

I am sure that Johan Braeckman also finds this reasoning too short-sighted, too much of a classic answer to something to which no answer can be given.

Let me also apply his own way of thinking to that. Can you judge something about which you have too little knowledge? His reasoning is that if there is a perfect God, there can be no reason for him to allow cancer. However, isn't that argument full of overestimated self-interest?

If there is an omniscient God, shouldn't we conclude that we only possess a portion of His knowledge? Our science is still searching for a model of everything. I'm not a physicist, but I try to follow suit. I understand that we still don't have an answer to the differences between the Newtonian models and the quantum models. Both are scientifically substantiated and no one doubts the laws of those models. But at the same time we know that the laws that apply at enormous distances do not apply at all at the smallest distances. There are theoretical models, such as the string theory, that talk about at least nine dimensions, of which we actually only understand a few. No scientist has difficulty dealing with missing science. I once knew a scientist say that science is mainly about realizing what we don't know.

Can I also apply that principle to God? Perhaps there are dozens of dimensions that He created that He understands, but we do not. Maybe if you understood all that, there would be a perfect answer as to why there is cancer. Perhaps the cancer is there because certain strings in those nine dimensions have to vibrate in such a way that gravity is created and, as an even effect, cancer. Sounds ridiculous? Until I have a more thorough knowledge of the heart, it sounds ridiculous to attack Brugada as a specialist. As long as they do not have the knowledge of God, we are unable to judge His omniscience – let alone perfection.

We are not perfect enough to judge His perfection

The statement “a perfect God who allows evil cannot exist.” way out of our pay check. The question that Johan Braeckman could well ask himself as a doctor of philosophy is whether we are able to make a general judgment about something that we actually know hardly anything about. Yes, we can speculate, but making a definitive judgment is only possible if we camouflage our shortcomings by disqualifying arguments as serious because, well, they simply do not fit our needs.

I also take the world as it is, at least as I can understand it. And I certainly cannot understand that the incredible (sic) balance in nature, in our universe, is pure coincidence. Statistically speaking, I am more likely to throw up a box of block letters and fall down in that perfect order to form a dictionary than the chance that our world produced life from which we emerged by pure chance.

And so it always comes down to faith: the humanist  believes in coincidence, the believer does not believe in coincidence. Let that happen to be the point where we conclude that this faith is the projection of who we are, the ultimate free choice that God does not want to interfere with. Therein lies His perfection: in His love for us. That love will ensure that we will learn much, line upon line and precept upon precept. In this life we ​​will not know it all; we should not have that arrogance. We are only here for a flash in the context of eternity and in the next life we ​​will often say “oh yes, now I understand”. Just as a nine-year-old child cannot calculate an integral or a 14-year-old teenager cannot be a doctor of philosophy. That's what I believe in.