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I have read Sam Harris' two books that question the very existence of God and challenges the useful purpose of any religion. He does raise questions that cannot be easily dismissed, such as why in all of human history, there is no record of God ever healing an amputee by regenerating a limb or changing a Down syndrome child to one of normal health. If God does or can intervene, it is only in situations that can be otherwise explained as natural phenomena? Or, deeper still, should we even think of a God capable of inserting himself into human experience? Is 'God' something else entirely?"

Your question is a primary and essential one and cuts immediately to the essence of theological debate today. Yet it is one that most people who identify themselves with evangelical Protestantism or conservative Catholicism seem to think they can either ignore or repress. They cannot. It is also a question that in order to address it adequately would take a book, not a column.

Sam Harris' criticism of popular religion is right on target. The weakness of his book is that he assumes that popular religion is what Christianity is all about.

The intervening, miraculous God is built upon the old idea of the record keeping Deity who lives above the sky and who swoops down on earth to split the Red Sea, or to rain heavenly manna on the starving Israelites in the wilderness. This is also the God who delights in sending plagues on Israel's enemies, the Egyptians, and drowning them in that same Red Sea.

This is also a God who apparently has not accepted the insights of Isaac Newton about how the world operates. It is a world, not of precise natural law, but of controlled chaos. Most theologians have long since abandoned such a deity.