Review: The End of Christianity

The End of Christianity: Finding Good in an Evil World
William A Dembski

This volume is about the end of Christianity, in the sense of its purpose, rather than the final point of its existence. The author chooses this title specifically in response to another book positing Christianity is ending. Mr. Dembski’s primary thesis is that the problem of evil, that evil exists, is impossible to reconcile to an atheistic worldview. While he gets to this in the end, he takes a long way around to get there.

In the process, the author makes a number of interesting points worth considering from a philosophical viewpoint. Mr. Dembski, for instance, argues that in creating the world, God actually diminished Himself, in a sense. Before God created the world, He had every possible world before Him as a possibility. After creating this world, however, God had narrowed Himself to creating this world, in this way. Hence God narrowed His choices by an exercise of free will, much like we narrow our choices each time we exercise our free will.

This argument applies directly to people who say that if you gain your salvation through an exercise of free will, you must be able to lose it by an exercise of free will; that you either must choose between no free will, or the free will to lose your salvation. The problem in their argument is that all acts of free will narrow the future scope of free will in some say, so their argument fails on an unspoken assumption: that all free will is always absolutely free of any scope or direction set in the past.

The author also undertakes to explain sin in a foundational way, in order to explain the human origin of evil. Here his explanation, again, hits the mark, explaining something that is hard to understand in terms most people will be able to grasp.

Perhaps the best we can do is offer a psychological explanation: Precisley because a created will belongs to a creature, that creature, if sufficiently reflective, can reflect on its creaturehood and realist that is not God. Creaturehood implies constraints to which the Creator is not subject. This may seem unfair (certainly it is not egalitarian). The End of Christianity

This jealousy provokes sin in the attempt of the creature to become like, or replace, the creator. This falls in perfectly with the story of the Fall.

After working through several problems, and laying down a background on which to paint, Mr. Dembski then begins to approaches the problem at hand directly. His solution is interesting; while I might not agree with the paths down which he takes his reasoning, I think he is on solid ground in many respects, and his idea of how to reconcile a perfect and good God with the existence of evil.

His bottom line argument is that man is the keeper of the world, and as keeper, he has failed. While it might not seem fair to us that one person’s sin could impact the life of another person, we find this is true in the world around us on a general basis; that in fact, we see this in the narrowing of the scope of decisions as free will is exercised, for instance.

From here, the author moves on to trying to explain why he believes an old Earth is not necessarily inconsistent with a direct and literal reading of the Genesis account. His general idea here is that just as Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross was applied retroactively to people, so Adam’s sin could have been applied retroactively to the world at large. Mr. Dembski is off on shaky ground, textually, in this section of his writing, and I don’t agree with his conclusions. At the same time, it’s well worth reading this section, and coming to grips with it, because it’s a well put together argument.

I strongly recommend this book, even though I don’t agree with all of the author’s positions and conclusions.