Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in GOD: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace

An honest look at life and the universe. Life is painful and glorious filled with love and horror so how do we deal with the question of God? This book is not so much an answer as an exploration. I HIGHLY recommend it if your faith has been challenged by events or if the presence of love and beauty leads you to question a sterile atheism. Having finished this book, I am going to start reading it again.

First a technical note: Much to my chagrin, I just bought this book as a Kindle download because it was not available as a Nook book. Please B&N, fix this! (if you can) ... now on to the review: There is a great desire to bring reconciliation between our transcendent sense, our appreciation for love and beauty, with the death of gods. We kick against the prick of existential angst. --That's my line! If you steal it at least give me credit :) Schaeffer isn't trying to work some magic here. He doesn't offer us a philosophical solution, or guide us on our search for meaning. When he says things like "evolution teaches" and "God says" are "more or less the same thing" I cringe. However, you can tell his heart and head are in the right place. He comes off in many ways as an educated, gentle postmodern person. He poses a few questions about how evolution could "explain" our love of art, but I don't think that he feels that these black boxes require a Creator to open. Rather than appealing to ignorance in claiming himself justified to hold on to hope in gods / afterlife, he admits that the only hell we have is the one we make. A lot of ink gets spilled delineating camps neatly along their theistic divide. Schaeffer invites us to partake in subtlety, to appreciate nuance. There aren't "just" angry New Atheists and angry Republican / Teabag Fundamentalists. There is a spectrum of belief as shaded as human feelings about sport, art and science. I appreciate that Schaeffer feels out this complexity, and that he admits he embraces paradoxes as a non-Christian (just as Christians must who accept many traditional doctrines). He quotes an interview between Gutting and Wettstein from the NYT, and this line sums up a lot of the book: "The theism-atheism-agnosticism trio presumes that the real question is whether God exists. I’m suggesting that the real question is otherwise and that I don’t see my outlook in terms of that trio (p.14)." When I was a "young" atheist, I would've barked hard laughter at such a response. Now a bit more mature and Zen -- as well as sympathetic towards postmodern tendencies -- I completely understand. The important thing is not finding an answer to the "question" of God's existence, but in finding a way to live your life that makes that answer irrelevant. S. Daniel Morgan -- https://www.goodreads.com/sirdanielm