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Show Madsen: Can God die? "The overall effect of the God is Dead Movement has been to rephrase former ways of talking about God," said Brigham Young University's Dr. Truman Madsen, in a speech delivered last night as part of the challenge week program. "It can mean that God does not exist, the atheist position, that God is no longer relevant, that whatever the case for or against, the former ways of talking about God are in need of radical redefinition." "The consensus has been that we're in a seculai society and God cannot cope with-it." with-it." "My own conviction is that the movement has been mainly a theological movement," said Dr. Madsen. "There are profounder movements of which this is a symptom." The rational route starts with the assumption that causes have other causes, until eventually there is a first cause, God. "Two difficulties exist in this argument. It presumes only one thing exists without a cause and assumes everything else has one." Another outgrowth, the subjective argument, claims "that there is deep in man a quest for God, and if the quest exists, there must be something corresponding to it. "It is not true that because we care terribly, what we care about has to exist," maintained Dr. Madsen. "It is inspired imagination at best, self deception at worst." The weakness of the mystical argument for the " immediate awareness" of God " is that all who travel this road return empty of descriptive language." God becomes essentially unknowable. The irrationalist approach sees nature as a "leap in the dark." "People have faith not in God, but that God exists." The Mormon does not believe any of these approaches, claimed Dr. Madsen. "Once God is dead, everything is allowed. Created to force men to feel totally responsible for what they do and are, it is often used as a basis of total irresponsibility." "The Mormon believes instead that acts still have consequences, that God became what he is by harmonic coexistence with laws thatiwein him." "While the modern trend is to believe nothing is" sacred and that everything is secular, the Mormon believes everything is sacred or can become so. Whereas the ancients believed that religion should be related to the other world and this one disparaged, the Mormon sees a clear analogy between this one and the next." "Modern man cannot relate to the good because of c deep rooted fear that he might fail," said Dr. Madsen. The Mormon differs in that "he has a deep suspicion that he might be answered, and an idea what that answer might be." |
