Make the world gooder!

At the Sydney University O-week I heard the atheists bleating the usual 'if God is so good why doesn't he make the world good'.

The trouble with this statement is that it doesn't entail a critique of its own basic premise.

What it wants is that God 'fixes' this world, as it is...atheists think that this question represents the fatal undoing of Christian belief. It does not; it demonstrates the flaw in the atheist world view.

The question is usually asked within terms of a materialist world view, and those asking fail to acknowledge this; they recognise the broken world problem, and having no answer they want to say that Christ has no answer. But they fail to understand that the problem is a relational one, between persons, and not a purely 'mechanical' problem where the 'god' that they imagine can just fix it, but leave them in their dis-related state with the creator.

That's not possible of course, and most Christian apologetic fails to deal with it effectively because it is based on a theology which has unexamined materialist foundations: it inadvertently posits a creation that is not from and only from the hand of a loving God, but one into which God intervenes but some other external 'principle' is entertained. It also fails to deal with the basic-ness of God as love; and love is about relationship.

So, the materialist cannot have their 'god' fix the world and remain out of relationship with him, because the 'out of relationshipness' is the cause of the problem. And God has fixed that in terms of the relationship itself.