Free The End of Christianity by John W. Loftus Page A

intentions. They experience pleasure and pain. They know what they like; they have distinct personalities. (She was arguing that they should be treated kindly and not have their beaks cut off.)
    In an entirely different realm, Arthur D'Adamo's book, Science without Bounds , explores ontologies that have identified the ultimate reality (aka God) as a person and contrasts them with others that have not. His treatment is deep and nuanced, and I recommend it. 8 But his starting definition of personhood is remarkably similar to Brynn's. It includes awareness, intellect, and emotion. The personhood of God, Adamo argues, is at the heart of Abrahamic theism, including Christian belief and practice.
    Even when believers say that they believe in the more abstract God of the theologians, most don't—at least not completely. In their day-to-day lives (and in a laboratory setting) they talk and behave as if they were relating to a humanlike person. For example, students who say that God is outside of time will still analyze a story as if he completes one task and then moves on to another. 9 Our brains naturally incline toward interpreting stimuli—rocks, ships, stuffed animals, clouds—in anthropomorphic terms, and gods are no exception.
    Christian apologists, meaning defenders of the faith, argue for the possibility of the existence of a highly abstracted form of God that exists beyond the realm of human reason and the reach of science. But what they usually want is something more specific—to create intellectual space for their belief in the person-god of the Bible. They craft abstract arguments to protect belief in something more emotionally satisfying (and primitive and humanoid).
    In this regard they are similar to a wide range of religious believers. Humans in a monotheistic context ask four basic questions about God:
    • Does God exist?
    • What is God like?
    • What does God want from us?
    • How can we get what we want from God?
    In reality, the first of these questions tends to be interesting only in the context of the other three: God is interesting only if he is knowable and has “hedonic relevance.” By hedonic relevance, I mean that by understanding or pleasing God I can make my life better or worse.
    If God is defined at a level of abstraction sufficient to satisfy many scientists, philosophers, and modernist theologians, he becomes immediately uninteresting to most believers. Consider, for example, Albert Einstein's statements:
    I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.…I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own. 10
    Within Christianity, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a stab at making this vision personally relevant:
    I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and, to borrow a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be. 11
    Contrast this with the God of Evangelical Christians: “God loves me. I have a personal relationship with Jesus. If I ask from God in prayer I will receive. People who die are going to heaven or hell.”
    Understanding emotions is irrelevant to Einstein and Spinoza's god-concept because the God of Spinoza and Einstein is not a person and does not have emotions. The same is true of Spong's God. On the other hand, if one is trying to assess a more traditional/orthodox Christian view (for example, the Evangelical's god-concept), understanding emotions is highly relevant. In fact, one of the defining attributes of the orthodox God is actually an emotion: love.
    Evangelicals call themselves “biblical” or “Bible-believing” Christians. Many are