OK, looking through the various responses I received - and it was a tough choice, because there were several good ones - you win the prize for the most apropos reaction to the article.
Damon Linker truly is an idiot who thinks he isn’t.
I am afraid this is what we have come to in our era. It bodes ill.
That last said, having looked over all the replies, there is a certain sense in which Linker is simply an honest observer. If it is true that the “natural man does not receive the things of God,” (1 Corinthians 2:14) Linker appears to be one who simply does not get what he is looking at, rather like a goldfish in the aquarium in your home doesn’t get what he (or she) is looking at when you shake food into the aquarium, simply stand there and look at him/her or just pass out of sight into the kitchen, which of course the fish cannot imagine, never having seen a kitchen, much less taken in the view from your kitchen window into the world.
The trouble with the human perspective is that, uninformed by one who has been in the kitchen, so to speak, that is to say, by one who has seen what is outside of this creation (see John 1:18), the notion of God is informed entirely and only by what has been seen and heard and experienced from within this creation (what is within the aquarium). To think of God as One who is above us, who is able to look into our aquarium with understanding, as we are not able to do looking at His blurry and dimmed image outside, is a reality we are not ready to entertain.
That is the human dilemma. That is also the plain teaching of the Bible for anyone who cares to hear or read it.
That is the bottom line for us.
And yet this One whom we all have at times presumed to sit in judgment upon, even though by our own natural powers do not and cannot know Him, “so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son ...” (John 3:16)
And that is, unfathomably, the bottom line for the God of, yes, justice and yet even more, of mercy who is ... whether we believe He is or not.
The task given the church by her Lord is to bring this otherworldly knowledge to a world obsessed with its own wisdom and understanding. That is the part Mr. Linker does not and cannot understand. He is not alone in this.
Thanks, and God’s Peace be with you.