Apologetics

One way to defend God is to simply describe what He is, but the only connection that has to apologetics is that He's responsible for answering our prayers.

Let us then pick it up from there. With regard to answering our prayers God ought to be

• omnipotent,
• omniscient and
• omnibenevolent,
  

for we don't want Him to answer

• What am I supposed to do about it?
• Nobody could have seen that coming!
• There's just more interest in seeing you suffer.
  

I'll now do something unheard of and assume that all of this is acutally true, that is, I'll show a real interest in what it means.

If God is all that with regard to answering our prayers, is he also all that with regard to the limits of our comprehension?

• Yes, in the case of omnipotence, for we can pray for any feat we can think of.
  
• Yes, in the case of omniscience, for we can pray for any information we can conceive of.
  
• No, in the case of omnibenevolence, for only for what exists in answer to our prayers a guarantee of benevolence has been issued.
  

And though this looks awfully like the objection of a mathematician, there's Biblical support right off the bat:

In the beginning was the notion and the notion regarded God and God was [acting through] the notion. The same was in the beginning regarding God. All things were made by it and no thing that was made was made without it. In it was life and the life was the light of men.

John actually has to state this, if he understands omnibenevolence in the aforementioned way, for these four verses extend its guarantee to all things that were made in the beginning, i.e. the world co-evolved in answer to the prayers of its inhabitants and today's woes resulted from man's life inspiring notion turning away from God.

Did God know what He did when he incarnated Ted Bundy? Yes.

It wasn't done in answer to a prayer appealing to the Holy though.

I've given a detailed study of prayer and evil isn't baked into it, yet men can pray for some things that are supposed to educate them regarding the reality of God's existence.

In any case, God's omnibenevolence shields us from the prayers of sinners and hence the case against Him is reduced to that He doesn't listen to ours.

I, of course, don't have that problem. Christ mentions lacking belief a lot. I concur, if you don't believe in something, it won't happen. And if you do, it will. So, do you believe that God will answer your prayers under certain circumstances? My belief in that isn't even particularly strong, I just believe that He exists and man in relation to Him and that He will not allow some men to abolish what it means to be a man, namely to exist in relation to Him, but in that I do believe.

Looking back at the time when I wished for guidance, but scarcely found any, I must admit that the questions I asked were scarcely relevant either. And as for contact just for the sake of knowing Him: It is very unpleasant and correlated with strokes, heart attacks and fainting. So, being omnibenevolent, He usually ignores such requests.

We have conscious agency in this world, it's our role, our relation to God co-exists with and presupposes it. Living beings have been evolving in it, in accordance with their conscious horizons, a plant just knows the becoming, an animal the nature of an interaction as well. We assess the state of the world. A plant prays for rain or sunshine, an animal for an encounter and all God has to do to answer it is to provide a telepathic hunch.

Good and evil don't enter the equation there. They do with our horizon. Yet we can sacrifice the nature that distinguishes us as human for our shared animal or organic nature and therein lies the fall of man, though it will always masquerade behind honourable notions of being rational. However, there's always something amiss, if not purposefully concealed. And practically, that what exists will simply claim nothing better could, and there is truth in that as well, in so far as we all have conscious agency.

Yet, God knows our true stature and hears its voice. Is He deranged then, as Philip Kindred Dick thought Him?

Not that I like killing mice either. Do we have to assume two Gods, one who made the world and another who listens to our prayers, as Zarathustra, the Gnostics (according to their own writings) and Mani at least in the occupational sense of made (What were you doing at ten o'clock? Oh, I made my plans for my vacation.) did?

If we did that, we would ascribe to God what originates in our discomfort with our nature, and thus, if our interest is in the likely truth of the matter, we won't pursue such explanations.

Well, we don't have to, monotheistic orthodoxy doesn't require us to. Its understanding has long since won the debate.