Dr Paul Allen

One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God. What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice? Facing such a serious diagnosis, Keller was forced to reexamine not only his “professed beliefs” but his “actual understanding of God.” He writes, Had [my ideas about God] been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life  should  go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may  feel  freeing—but it offers no...

I’ve been thinking about you,” we say to people we care about. Our minds naturally gravitate toward those we love, especially when they are in need. We want them to know that they are not forgotten, they are not alone, and we are praying for them. Even atheists, who have no faith in God and no belief in prayer, when times are tight, will speak of sending positive thoughts your way. In Psalm 139, David says, in effect, “God has been thinking of you.” In fact, you are never out of His mind. For some, such a concept fills them with dread. Christopher Hitchens, the well-known atheist, for example, once confessed: I think it would be rather awful if God existed. . . . If there was a permanent, total, round-the-clock divine supervision and invigilation of everything you did, you would never have a waking or sleeping moment when you weren’t being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death. . . . It would be lik...