Michael Novak has a wonderful image of God very different Christopher Hitchens’ image of Him as a bad watchmaker.
Suppose that the Creator God deliberately made a world of probabilities and failures, of waste and profusion, of suffering and hardships and frustrations. Suppose that He loved the idea of an unformed history, slowly developing (almost like an organism), nearly everything good won the hard way. Suppose that He loved chance, crossing chains of probabilities, freakish accidents, wild and unnecessary profusion, contingencies of every sort–to keep even angels guessing. Suppose He desired a world of indetermination, with all its blooming, buzzing confusion, so that within it freedom could spread out its wings, experiment, and find its own way.
Hitchens is the latest atheist to challenge God, joining Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others in what Wired magazine calls “The New Atheism.”
