A Proponent for the Profound Propitiation by a Pro-Life Prosecutor
Well Howdy! I decided to get with the new Post-modern age and get a blog. Ironically enough, I also started a Twitter today too (twitter.com/wbrettnewman). Anyways, I'm not really sure what Blogs are for. I guess it is to share my thoughts, but don't you think that is kinda conceited? I mean, I think I'm a cool guy, but why would you, the reader, or really anyone else, care about what I think? And unfortunately, I am not an English major, so there will most likely not be any beautiful symbalances of humanity in my words.
So whats the point?
Well, first and foremost, I want to journal for myself, so I can get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper. And since I type faster than write, I might as well type out my thoughts. You can say I'm going green. Secondly, I feel like, although I am severely and irreversibly flawed, there are things that I think through that might be of some redemptive value to the reader. So put these together, and the reason for a blog makes sense.
And to add a last disclaimer, like I have mentioned before, I don't want the reader to think what I write is truth for them. You might wholeheartedly disagree with me. If that is you at any point, lets talk it out. You will find that I am very responsive to others opinions. Just call me up.
So let's get to it, shall we?
Last night, at Parent's Breakaway, Ben Stuart spoke on Hebrews 2. I'm going to take out parts of this passage and unpack them, in my own words:
"Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him" (v8, ESV).
When I first saw this, I thought of the ever-present question to Christianity/Religion: Why do bad things happen to good people? Or to state it another way: If God is both all-powerful and all-good, how does evil exist in the world? Either God is not all-powerful, or he would stop the evil; or God is not all-good. Which is a legit question. However, it is a flawed question if you are looking to defeat the deity of God. (And by God, I mean the God of the Bible, Jesus Christ's Father) First, in order to ask this question, you are admitting that your standard of morality is a common standard for the whole world. And if an atheist asks this question, he cannot both agree to a common morality standard and say there is no supernatural deity outside this morality standard (namely, God). C.S. Lewis says it this way: "It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behavior, and yet quite definitely real - a real law which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us."- (Mere Christianity, p.20).
Which brings us back to the "problem of pain" question. Like I said earlier, to ask this question, you have to believe that your standard of morality is a common morality standard. The reason you have to say this, is because if this is not true, you do not have the right to determine what is good or not. To say what God is doing is evil, you are inherently proclaiming that you know what Good and Evil is. In connection with this, you also have to proclaim that you know the future consequences of every action in the world. Because suffering that produces sanctification later, is not considered evil, because you know the good that will come out of it. So to call something evil means that there is no good in it. If you can make that claim, then go ahead, but I will stay away from that and leave it to God.
-(a note) Since all things are coming back to God, who is perfect, you could use my reasoning to say that there is no evil in the world, because at some point all evil will turn into good. However, remember that this evil is only brought to completion by God, not be any human good. So I am free to call things in this world evil, because this world is separated from God. I wholeheartedly believe that injustice, lukewarm-ness, etc is evil.
So if you can truthfully say that your standard or morality is overarching, and that you can see the consequences of all things, then we are done with this discussion...
No?
Thats what I thought, so I guess I'll continue. To sum things up, I believe all evil in this world is brought upon humans by humans acting outside of God's will for them. So does that mean that God is not powerful to control all of his creation? Well, let me ask you a similar question: How do you walk your dog? hahaha..
You could choose to bind your dog to a strict leash, to where he/she has no choice but to walk by your side. Or you could take off the leash, and while little doggy might run away, how blessed do you feel when it comes back to you, to walk beside you, freely. Personally, I would rather be running in a field with my dog chasing after me, than me carrying my dog in a bag... How great the glory we bring to God when we decide to walk by his side, to chase after him in a field of distractions, when we have the complete opportunity to run away.
So when you accept that evil is from humans interacting outside the will of God, and that we can't determine what actions of God are evil or good, then we realize that God's purposes don't make sense to us, and that He has no obligation to explain his actions to us.
"At present, we do not YET see everything in subjection to him"...
But we will!!
I think that's all I will go into right now, but I still have some things to say about this passage, so hopefully this wasn't a one time thing...
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Bretski,
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read, there are several arguments that can be made for the existence of God. In "Mere Christianity," which you cited, C.S. Lewis makes the "Moral Law" argument. I have seen it as follows:
1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The question is: "are their objective moral values and duties that are independent of human opinion? "Or are moral values and duties merely conventional or subjective. Many in our culture promote that #1 is true. That if there is no God everything is relative. But then on the other hand, in regard to premise #2, people have a deep sense of the goodness of love, tolerance, fair play, and say the evilness of torturing a child for fun.
Going back to premise #1, "objective" is defined as valid and binding independently of whether any human believes in them or not. So here is an example of taking an objective position, saying that the holocaust was objectively wrong even though the Nazis that carried it out thought it was right. And it still would have been wrong even if the Nazis had won WWWII and succeeded in brain washing and/or exterminating everybody that disagreed with them so that it was universally agreed that the holocaust was good.
To say that objective moral values exists is to say that these values/duties hold and are valid and are true independently of whether anybody believes in them or not. A good many theists and atheists agree that if there is no God, then moral values are not objective.
If God did not exist, then it is very difficult to see that objective moral values and duties exists because from an atheist perspective we are relatively evolved primates and animals don't have moral duties. When a hawk takes a fish from the talons of another hawk, it takes the fish but it does not steal it because there is not moral component in either of these actions. From the atheists perspective, that is all we are. We are primates and therefore it is difficult to see why our actions or decisions would have any moral dimension at all.
Morals, in atheism, are just spin-offs of social and biological evolution and everything becomes relative.
Let's go to premise #2, moral objectives do exist.
Maybe the best way to understand this is to reflect on our moral experience. To ask non-believers "do you really believe that there is no moral difference between taking up a little child your arms and loving him and caring for him or a sexual predator slashing that child's face with a knife and raping that child?"
Virtually everybody understands there is a moral difference between those actions. All you have to do is probe a non-believing friend to help them see that they do believe in absolute moral values/duties.
They will be committed to the values of tolerance or love or generosity. They will regard certain things as evil such as religious intolerance. In the absence of God, we are reduced to being mere animals and animals are not moral agents or subjects. But given that we do comprehend objective moral values and duties, it follows logically that God exists.
Another way of putting this is that if a person says there is too much evil in the world for them to believe in God, how can they define what is evil without a moral reference point. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law giver and that is God.
The text above taken from a 2008 book by William Lane Craig called "Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics." I used it in teaching a Sunday School class on apologetics. Other arguments for the existence for God are the Teleological argument and the Cosmological argument.
Talk to you later,
Bert
Ravi Zacharias has a four part 15-minute series that was recently put out on his web site titled, "Is There Meaning in Evil and Suffering?" You can download these four 15-minute chunks by subscribing to his podcast site at http://www.rzim.org/rss/RSS-JT.aspx
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