I believe all these as well. I suspect, even if we disagree in our argument here, that we are much closer that such disagreement would imply.
I think this will largely turn into an argument regarding the existence of free will and how the universe would somehow be meaningless if it did not exist. I will try to sum up the main issues I see.
Assuming free will exists, how is it such a great good that it can override other goods? Would you allow a stranger to murder your children if he wanted to? What do you think you are doing to the strangers free will if you stop them? Do you think that a person who has free will and uses it to harm someone is infringing on that second person’s free will? Why is one person’s free will respected and the other’s not? What it boils down to is, how can free will (assuming the concept is coherent, which I don’t believe it is) justify acts of evil? You say you derive your moral sense from God. Would you allow a person with free will to torture a baby, if you witnessed it going on?
I’m really interested in knowing why open theists think God “permits” evil to be done. I do not see the difference in “permitting” evil and “causing” it to be substantial. In either case, God COULD DO something to prevent the evil, but chooses not to, and therefore effectively DOES cause evil to occur. It must be for some higher purpose then, or else he simply wills evil for its own sake, which would make him, well, evil. You and pog seem to me to think this higher good is free will. Is this so, and if it is, how do you reconcile that with the questions I asked in the paragraph above?
From my own perspective, I do not think having no free will makes the universe any less meaningful. There are things which are determined about us that do not bother us at all. It is a determined part of my organism that I will become hungry every day, yet that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a meal. I also do not find the view of determinism incoherent, like I do that of free will. I cannot imagine an act of will being made which is not preceded by an act of intellect or mental evaluation. X is chosen over Y because X is seen as better than Y. If Y is ever chosen, it is because Y is seen as better. While it is true that we may sometimes choose one and sometimes the other, I do not think it ever the case that we can, with pure will alone, “view” one option as superior than another without the intellect first “showing” our will that this is so. One could say, “but I can tell myself that I shouldn’t commit sin A when I really really want to, and if I bend my will hard enough, I will convince myself that sin A is not really what I desire.” Yes, this is so. But why did you want to refrain from sin A in the first place? There is some other good that the mind has valued as higher, say, pleasing God, or not wanting to feel regret after sin A was committed, which has ALREADY influenced the will. If we ever could do the opposite (choose a good with our will that our intellect had not already presented to it), it seems to me that that would imply that our wills would be merely random. If I did not know whether it was good to do X vs Y, how could I choose one over the other? Moreover, how could I be blamed for what I did(and personal responsibility is a big deal to free will - one is wrong because they COULD have done otherwise and knew they SHOULD have)? If I knew that X was wrong, my will, desiring to do good (unless it was made evil), would not ever want to do it. Therefore how could I? It seems to me that the will always has to have some reason for reaching out towards whatever it is that it’s reaching out towards, and that reason is something that the intellect has first presented to it.
The whole idea of free will to me is simply unintelligible.
I haven’t read your entire post – it’s too much for me to remember and respond to all at once, but I’ll go back and look through it when I finish. I realize you’re responding to Alec, so I hope you don’t mind my butting in here; it’s an interesting discussion.
This is a good point, and I don’t think many people who claim to believe in free will (or who see themselves as believing in free will) actually do believe in complete free will. Most of us (whether we realize it or not) believe in limited free will. If there was absolutely no free will at all, we could not be rational creatures, but would merely be reacting to the stimuli around us much as an amoeba might do. We could not claim to be created in the image of God, imo.
As you point out, you do not have the freedom to harm my child if I am standing by her to protect her. I will do all I can to stop you from exercising your free will. One, and probably both of us will have our free will abrogated to at least some extent. I will do my best to prevent you and will hurt you as much as is my need, and is in my power to do – though I do not wish to. You will attempt to prevent me and perhaps succeed to varying degrees, though it was not I you originally wished to attack. Similar situations can be pointed out of conflicts with nature though nature does not presumably have free will or any will at all. So it becomes obvious that we DO NOT have complete freedom of will.
The way I see this is that we are growing in freedom. A baby has almost no free will. When he has pain or hunger or discomfort he cries. He doesn’t choose to cry; he does it instinctively. Moreover he cannot force his needs to be met; that is entirely at the discretion of his caregivers. He cannot meet his own needs. He doesn’t even have the freedom to perform normal acts to keep himself alive, such as collecting food lying right next to him, or eating it if he could collect it.
As he grows, he becomes more free. He can put things in his mouth; he can pull himself up on the coffee table; he can crawl and then walk and then run. Before you know it he’s asking for the car keys or hopping into his own old clunker and heading out for a night of cruising without so much as a goodbye or an if-you-please. I think this is a picture of the development of a deeper freedom of the spirit as well as the flesh.
Jesus said that He had come to set us free, but the priests and Pharisees protested; “We are Abraham’s sons and have never been in bondage to any man,” but Jesus insisted that only " . . . he whom the Son sets free shall be truly free." We are all in bondage to sin. We were born into this bondage and those of us who follow Jesus are following Him into freedom. We don’t have free will (though we do have a degree of free will), but we are on our way into freedom. Father WANTS us free, but we cannot be free until we become good and joyful and obedient children of His house. Note: At this point we will not have to obey, but we will have been conformed into the image of His Son who, like Him, is love. Therefore we desire the same things He desires. In being developed into the image of God we have become both free and obedient. We could sin, but we WILL not because that will then be abhorrent to us. We’ll be in no more danger of sinning than of eating our own vomit.
At present our freedom is limited. I can go to the fridge and get a piece of fruit and eat it if I like because there’s fruit there. Or I can not. If I were starving I might not have as much choice because my need would compel me to eat whatever edibles I could find, but I am pleasantly neither hungry nor sated and I can choose. Do I want to bother? Or not? Do I feel like a peach or a mango, or maybe I’d rather have a glass of wine. It genuinely is my choice. Yes other factors influence that choice, but there is no compelling reason at this moment to go get that fruit or not to go get it. I do have a choice.
I can also choose to obey Jesus on this or that matter. If I couldn’t, all the injunctions in scripture to do this or not do that mean nothing. What do you do with Romans 12? What do you say to Jesus’ question: “Why do you call Me Lord Lord and do not do the things I say?” Presently I don’t have the freedom of will yet to live up to the Sermon on the Mount or the command to “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” I have a LOT more ability to do these things than I did ten years ago, or even one year ago, because He is setting me free. Free will is vital, but it is not a thing we have – rather it is a thing Father is developing within each of us.
Might it be worth differentiating between freedom and liberty? A prisoner has free will, but not liberty etc. Freewill is,IMHO, one of the most complex topics - I’m not sure anyone has really got a handle onit fully.
I welcome the exchange and am excited you show interest.
I’m not sure I understand the implication here. What does “rational creatures” mean to you, and how, specifically, do we cease to be them without free will? As far as I see it, in order to be “rational” we need only be able to possess a mind which can reason from premises to conclusions and can understand the ramifications of performing certain actions - i.e., in most simple form, if I do X, Y will occur.
Then the question becomes, why does God not stop someone from torturing a child? I’m trying to show here how the reason many open theists give for the allowance of evil (free will), is not something THEY actually value as much as they claim God does. If you would stop me from harming your child - if, indeed, you would do all that is in your power to stop me - why would not God? Or do you believe God has no power to stop me? You could say that God does have the power but chooses not to use it because he would have to violate my free will (or that he doesn’t have the power because he has “limited” himself), but then you’re back to square one and affirming a value of free will in God’s eyes that you do not yourself affirm.
One need not have free will to develop. In fact, the example of the growing baby can highlight this nicely. He certainly doesn’t “choose” for his limbs to grow, and yet grow they do.
I agree with all of his. When in heaven, we shall no longer desire to sin, and now we are held in bondage by that desire, a desire which Jesus came to free us of. My problem is that the notion of libertarian freedom is to me incoherent.
Are you a compatibilist? If you truly do have libertarian freedom, then you technically do have the ability to live up to the sermon on the mount, and, in a real way, it is totally up to you to do so. God cannot cause you to do it.
As far as passages like Romans 12 - perhaps you could be more specific? Are you asking how I interpret passages which ask why sinners are sinning or passages that give conditional statements like “turn and come back to me, and I will bless you”? What would they mean, if we truly aren’t ABLE to do otherwise?
The simplest way to put it is that I do not think having libertarian freedom in any way detracts from responsibility. I don’t think it’s necessary, metaphysically, to say that decisions are only “bad” or “unfair” or what have you, unless there was some contingent free choice maker inside a person. “The ability to do otherwise” doesn’t, so far as I see things, change the way God acts with respect to his creation in terms of punishment, purification, and education. Now, if punishment were given simply punitively, without any purpose to benefit the sinner - if punishment was something God wanted to do simply to punish for its own sake, maybe I could see some value in the “could have done otherwise” idea. But my understanding of God is such that he doesn’t act punitively.
I wasn’t going to bring Scripture up - especially Romans - but since you have I must ask you your position on it. Surely you are aware of the (at least seemingly) many references to God’s total sovereignty over human actions? As a matter of fact, the apostle Paul pretty much says word for word what I just did in the paragraph above in Romans regarding Pharaoh. He anticipates the question that seems to follow from what you implied when referencing Roman’s 12 and Jesus’ questioning: why does He (God) still find fault with Pharaoh, FOR WHO HAS RESISTED GOD’S WILL? So it seems clear that he understood the ramification of what no free will means. What do you make of this passage?
Hi Chris Guy! Good points and I’ll try to address some of them.
I think you are likely right here. Any theodicy I’ve seen is inadequate in many respects but going through the process can be very beneficial, I think. Anything I currently “believe” regarding theodicy is “written in pencil”, so to speak, and subject to modification or even to being discarded if it’s entirely inadequate.
Would agree that an argument about free will is probably futile in this case and it would be more interesting to take this in another direction. I would like to try and answer your points regarding free will, however.
Obviously I wouldn’t. Would I be infringing on the evil doers free will? Yes. The point of free will then from the divine point of view, would not be free will per se, but for creatures with free will to use that free will to choose to do good. For humans to choose to be loyal to their spouse, to choose to love God, to choose to heal the sick, to sacrifice themselves for others.(I just realized in giving these examples that some of the good done presupposes the presence of evil. The absence of evil would limit, in someways, at least the variety of good that could be done.)
I’m new to open theism but will give this a shot and Pog can correct any errors. Open theism, I believe, distances God to some degree, from direct responsibility for evil. As an analogy, think of God as a father. He chooses to have a child and bring him into our current world. If he knew the child would be a serial killer, wouldn’t that be immoral? If the child’s future was not known and not determined and the odds were low that he would be especially evil, it seems reasonable to have a child. Now this is where it gets tricky for me. Suppose God was an especially fruitful father bringing forth hundreds, thousands, millions of children. The odds of at least one of those children being evil would be more and more likely, almost definite. He wouldn’t know which would be evil, but almost certainly one or more would be. He doesn’t need them to be evil (for a higher purpose) and certainly doesn’t want them to be evil. He can anticipate the possibility of evil and use it for good in this life in some cases when it occurs for “soul-making”, but there will be situations as with the suffering and early death of an innocent baby when any good (at least for the baby) must come in the next life. Is God the author of evil in this scenario? I don’t think so but it could be argued that allowing the likelihood of evil is as bad as creating it.
A believer in free will might say that preventing all evil would make the world no longer free. If the bullet being fired turned to dust as it was fired to kill, or the knife being used to stab melted away as it touched the victim the possibility of free acts would no longer exist-at least free evil acts. Is there a difference between me or God intervening to stop someone from torturing a baby? I think so. In the latter case, a “good” act is being done and there is benefit for the rescuer and potentially for the torturer. The intervention of moral humans to stop moral acts may be one of the safeguards of God to limit evil and also a way in which he works to stop/prevent evil. As to why God doesn’t intervene himself to stop “horrendous evils”, that’s a good question. Free will may be an all or nothing proposition for God, I can also see the loss of “epistemic distance” if the work of God was too apparent. It may be also, as Greg Boyd describes, the limits of what evil God allows are simply greater than we, if we were God, would allow. He may actually be intervening in a non-obtrusive way to prevent even greater evils.
One last thing, in your post to Cindy, you said:
Does this mean that God is training or teaching us in a similar fashion to a human training a dog using operant conditioning etc. to improve behavior by recognizing what behaviors are rewarded and which are punished? Interesting thought…I can see much in this especially in humans whose moral sense is undeveloped or blunted…perhaps on the road to having true free will.
I’ve been thinking a lot about free will and trying to look at things from the more determinist perspective. A couple of observations:how much of the evil done by humans is by people we *might *consider don’t have free will; those that are victims of abusive homes, poor education, poverty, born into a culture of violence etc? Tom Talbott in The Inescapable Love of God discusses how incoherent it would be to refuse to be reconciled to God if one were fully informed.
I’m starting to get a glimpse of a world where creatures that are independent from God to are brought forth.(independent as far as existence is still possible) Because of that independence or freedom they are not initially aligned with God’s will, with pursuing what is best, but are pursuing what they see as best for them. Could this type of “freedom” be substituted in the standard Free Will Defense and have it still make sense? Hmmmm… Will have to think about that. God’s purpose then, would be to use whatever means he needs to draw his creatures to him (education, corrective punishment etc.) and make them see his purposes, values and goals as theirs while still remaining individual, free creatures. This process would usually not be complete in this lifetime but continue post-mortem in some fashion.
Just some thoughts there. You’ve piqued my interest and would love to have you outline what you see as the best theodicy from your viewpoint.
By a rational creature I mean a creature which can think and consider and respond as opposed to a creature which has no choice but to follow his predispositions. If we have absolutely no free will (of thought or deed) then we cannot be rational creatures. We are merely doing what we are pre-programmed to do.
Sometimes He does; sometimes He doesn’t. I’m not an open theist, or if I were, I would expect that God is brilliant enough to surmise what will come of actions that take place in the world. He does not often directly interfere. He must have a reason for this, and the reason is NOT that He is evil. (I have my own thoughts about how evil came about, but we’re talking free will here.) It’s my belief that He does value our free actions and interactions. He does not give us complete freedom of action. Sometimes we’re stopped by our inability to carry out the actions we may desire. Sometimes we’re stopped by fear of consequences were we to do some of the things we might want to do. Sometimes we’re stopped by other people. Sometimes (as in Ro 6) we’re stopped from doing the good thing we desire to do because of our bondage to sin.
I believe that God allows the unconscionable evils we see in the world today because that is the way the world had to be in order to gain the results He desires – that all people will eventually come to Him in saving faith. We can’t know how many other worlds He might have considered and rejected, in order to bring down to the absolute minimum the suffering experienced in the world because of the immaturity and recalcitrance of His (somewhat) free creations, while still actualizing a world in which all will be reconciled to Him eventually and in which the maximum bliss for ALL (including the sufferers) will be achieved.
We are talking about different types of development. Forget the baby; a plant develops perfectly well in that sense without free will. But a plant has no freedom of will that we can discern and never will have so far as we can tell. It is not the baby’s physical body I’m referring to, but the mind, the character, the heart. These aspects of our being do, I believe, require a certain freedom in order to develop.
Now please don’t misunderstand me. I do not for a moment believe that we have unlimited free will (I believe most refer to this as ‘libertarian,’ but I’m not certain of that. I don’t like tossing around terminology unless I’m sure it will be understood in the sense that I mean it.) I believe that we have free will within limited parameters and that as we prove ready, we are given greater freedom of will. I believe that observation of life will show that.
God can cause me to stand, though. I will to do those things but my will is not strong enough without Him to uphold me. When I was a tiny girl (and I actually remember this), I KNEW that my daddy would catch me if I jumped, no matter where in the room he might be. He never disappointed me though I’m sure it was close a time or two. I had the will to jump and I did jump, but whether or not I should be caught was entirely up to him. We cooperated in that he did not forbid me to jump, and he didn’t jump for me, but I jumped all on my own. It was he who caused me to succeed in my goal (which was basically that he catch me; I adored him.)
As I said and I think as I described (I hope I described it well enough), I don’t believe people have 100% free will – certainly not yet and probably not ever, if taken to the extreme. Satan didn’t have free enough will to defeat God and while he will, I believe, be redeemed at long last, he will still not have more power than God and were he to choose to attempt his coup a second time, would fail a second time. So no – not that free. Nevertheless free to do all that we desire as our desires are joined as one with His desires.
I confess I don’t know whether I’m a compatabilist. I’ve heard that term but I don’t remember what it means.
In Ro 12 we’re given a long list of things to do. Why bother telling people who have no freedom to do or not do – to DO anything in particular? The same with the SoM and any other passages in which commands are given. There’s simply no point that I can see if we have no more free will than a petunia. It will be what it will be; nurture it; water it; protect it from the cold, and it will probably produce flowers. It has no part in this; it’s a petunia. I don’t have a problem with people talking to their plants, but I’m pretty sure that if it does the plants any good, it’s only the excess CO2.
Regarding the rest of Romans, the Potter and the clay, Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, here is what I think. In the context of the Potter/clay reference, if I remember correctly, God is choosing whether to make this or that person for this or that purpose. The Israelites have been chosen; Pharaoh has not. Is it because Israel’s children are so much better than Egypt’s? No. God chose them for His own reasons, and it’s frankly none of our business as Paul points out. Father saw something about them more fit than other peoples for the producing of His Messiah. It does not appear to have been their moral excellence, either; nevertheless He did choose them. I don’t think it was arbitrary, but I don’t think it was favoritism either. It was just the way it had to be.
Likewise Jacob and Esau. But Jacob was chosen for the blessing of all who are not Jacob or his offspring, and Esau is a part of the ‘not-Jacob’ world. So Jacob has been chosen to be a blessing to Esau along with all others who are not-Jacob. I think it’s important to remember here what Paul was talking about in the book of Romans, and his major focus throughout the epistle is the relationship between Jews and non-Jews and God’s dealings with these two groups. A lot more than this comes in to play, but it all works through and toward the same theme. The only notion of election current at the time was the elect people, Israel, and the non-elect people, the nations/gentiles.
Regarding Pharaoh, the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that our idea of ‘hardening’ is not quite what the authors had intended by using the word. “Hardening” is also “strengthening,” I’m told, and perhaps strengthening is a better translation. So Pharaoh was strengthened in his heart of hearts to do that thing which he WOULD do if only he had the courage – the thing it was in his heart to do – which was the thing he did. I think a lot of us would be guilty of crimes we otherwise never commit if only we were brave enough to commit them. We are inhibited by many things, but Pharaoh’s heart was hardened/strengthened to do that which he desired to do. Saul, likewise, and most likely David as well on the matter of the censuses.
Yes, I believe that it WAS God’s will that Pharaoh do what he did, and that God DID raise up Pharaoh for that very purpose. Perhaps otherwise he might have been merely an ineffectual, nasty little man, governed by those around him (perhaps more wisely, perhaps not) rather than running the country by the power of his own will. How many of the people around us have it in their (or our) hearts to become monsters such as Hitler, yet have never had the opportunity nor would have the heart/courage to do it were we given the chance? I see this as God simply giving Pharaoh the nudge and the ability to become to history what he always was in his heart.
That’s my take on it. I cannot for the life in me understand the Calvinist’s insistence that God forces people to be evil, creates them as evil, and then punishes them for being evil. Your stance makes more sense than that in that you posit that God does it all for the purpose of blessing those same evil people by giving them a contrast so that they can appreciate the good. But for me, while the pot cannot legitimately say to the potter “Why have you made me this way?”, the potter who has just made a chamber pot cannot legitimately say to that chamber pot, “You wicked pot! How dare you be a chamber pot and sully my good name?!” – but as I said, I believe this is a treatise on why it’s okay that Jacob was chosen over Esau more than it is an explanation for why it’s okay for God to create evil people.
Hopefully that clarifies my position at least a little bit.
Like Cindy I’m a bit more right-brained, or at least when my brain is active.
To be honest, I haven’t studied much philosophy or theology in depth, so a lot of the stuff you guys are discussing here, though I may have heard about here and there, I am certainly no expert on. And I’ve only skimmed through the thread, and I don’t think I’ve got the mental energy to do that at the moment, as a lot of what you’re discussing is pretty heady stuff.
Questions about evolution and creation, about the problem of evil, about suffering and pain, about free will vs determinism, about the nature of humanity, about the character of God… these are deep waters for sure.
Of all the posts that I’ve read through in this thread thus far, the one that has resonated the most with me is that of my fellow right-brainer (and dear friend), Cindy, the one where she talked about how God had told her ‘I will restore the years the locusts have eaten.’
(Which reminds me just now of a snippet from the classic Francis Thompson poem, The Hound of Heaven:
Read the whole poem sometime. It’s powerful stuff, even if one may not agree with all the theology behind it.)
I think her post touches on something very important in this whole discussion, in these deep waters… trust.
I mean, we each have our opinions, our hunches, our speculations, we each have our perspective and viewpoint on different things great and small, but ultimately this is all a question of faith, and trust, for each of us.
Can we still believe in God, can we still trust God, in the face of all our questions?
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with trying to come up with answers to difficult questions, answers that help us to believe, that help us to trust, but sometimes we will hit a wall, and either we can believe in and trust in God without having all the answers, or not.
It’s hard, I know.
I’ve been through a lot of turmoil over the years, and some of you here have heard about before.
In the past I’ve wrestled deeply, in anguish, with existential fear and doubt, anxiety and uncertainty, about life and death, about myself, about others, about God…
I’ve had my share of curses and screams and tears and prayers in the night, I’ve had my share of borderline insanity because of the weight of uncertainties and unanswered questions…
I know others here have gone through the same kinds of struggles as I have. For people like us, we cannot help but think about the bottom line.
Is there something worth believing in? Where do we put our trust, our hope?
We don’t have a systematic theology or airtight philosophical reasoning, all we really have is the glimmers of hope, and of light, to keep us going, to keep us moving forward.
Though nowadays I don’t wrestle as intensely with uncertainties and unanswered questions, or with God, and in large part because of opening up to the hope of universal reconciliation a couple years ago, and becoming more open-minded in general, and unafraid to explore outside the confines of traditional Christianity, still I have my struggles.
I wrestle with the age old weaknesses of lust, anger, pride, and apathy, among other things, and my faith often feels so frail and fragile, my relationship with God so awkward and haphazard…
I have my high moments, and I have my low moments, and a lot of going here and there with only a half-baked idea of where I’m heading in between.
For me sometimes life is like walking under the sky on a moonless night… mostly you’re in the dark, and you can’t see much or very far, but you still have the stars, little glimmers of light, to keep you going and moving forward, to keep you putting one foot in front of the other, as you move, hopefully, towards the rising of the sun…
For me those stars, those hope-lights, candles in the dark, are the little miracles in my life, the things that have happened to me that I can’t explain away, nor want to, that tell me that I’m not alone, that everything is gonna be alright in the end; the stories that resonate with my heart, where the characters find what they’re looking for, find their way home; the beauty that I’ve found in art or poetry or music, and in nature; the love and support that I’ve found in and among other people, family and friends; those whispers in my spirit that I am loved, that all will be well; the painful and yet wondrous longing and aching inside that has sometimes arisen, and that I can’t deny…
These kinds of things, that are pocketed here and there in the night sky of my life and my heart, keep me going.
These kinds of things give me hope, and though my faith often feels frail and fragile, I believe with whatever faith I have that something more is going on behind the scenes, that this hope comes from somewhere, I believe that this hope comes from God.
I know, it all sounds kind of vague and ambiguous, and certainly not systematic or airtight, but it’s all I got right now…
Anyways, I think it all comes down to trust.
Do we believe in, do we trust, this God, this Presence, who is behind the scenes of our lives, and yet also near to us somehow, closer than the beat of our hearts, do we trust even when we don’t, even when we can’t, understand everything about life, about the flow of history, about the flow of our lives, or the flow of the human heart, do we trust even when we’re at a loss for words, and have no idea what’s going on, or why?
Do we trust that right now, we are loved, and so is everyone else in creation, that right now, we’re not alone, and neither is anyone else in creation, and that one day we will understand all the hows and the whys, that everything will be okay?
I don’t think such trust can be mustered by sheer desire and effort.
I think that kind of trust is something we need to learn, need to grow into.
Maybe the truth about evolution and creation is something wild, and yet beautiful, though right now we can only see through a glass darkly.
Maybe the truth about evil, and how that fits into what God is doing, where God is going, with all of this, is something that we will all understand fully one day, when we are all brought into the light, when will all see His goodness.
Maybe the truth about suffering and pain, though beyond us now, will someday be revealed, though part of its answer now is in the heart knowledge that God shares intimately in our suffering and our pain, and in the suffering and the pain of the whole world and all of creation.
Maybe the truth about man’s choice and God’s sovereignty is somewhere in between, but what matters most isn’t figuring these things out, but learning and growing in relationship, with one another, and with our Creator and Father.
Maybe the truth about the nature of humanity is something amazing, even if now we see so much brokenness, in ourselves and in this world. Maybe we are diamonds, even if now we are diamonds in the rough.
Maybe the truth about the nature of God is something awesome, even if now His face is like that in a clouded mirror, even if sometimes it seems easier to believe bad things about God than good things, even if trust now doesn’t come easy.
And maybe the truth at the core of life is something wonderful, despite everything terrible we may find in the midst of living it. Maybe everything terrible in life isn’t the last word, but only the next to last word…
Lately I’ve been watching some Batman cartoons, from Batman: The Animated Series (good show by the way, but I digress), and in one of the episodes, Batman says at the end, ‘where there is love, there is hope’.
Profound statement there, in a Batman cartoon of all places.
I think if we can believe in our hearts that God loves us, and all of us, and not in some fickle and conditional sense, but rather in a committed and unconditional sense, if we can believe that His love is real, and unfailing, for you and for me and for us all, if we can trust in His love, that His love is our strength, our refuge, and is the greatest power of all, then we can have hope, and even in the face of uncertainties and unanswered questions.
Of course that kind of faith and trust in God is not easy to come by, and it takes time to grow in the heart, but I believe that even when we are faithless, He remains faithful, and even when we have a hard time trusting Him, He remains trustworthy…
Not sure if I’m making any sense at all… been going on four or five hours of sleep all day, so I might be a little off, and may leave a few loose ends… but perhaps God may pick them up for me in the long run.
To wrap this up, I thought I’d share something with you guys. For those who don’t know, I try now and then to listen for God’s voice inside of me, and write down what I hear. It’s an awkward and haphazard process to be sure, but it’s surprising what comes out of it.
So here’s a letter from God, if you will, that I wrote down recently, addressed to me, and perhaps to you as well:
My posting of that very old and witty philosophical limerick was not meant to be an act of hostility to my Christian determinist brother and sisters. It was just meant as a cool down and have a giggle reminder of what systems of cast iron theological logic that deny human subjectivity can mean to some. For me – when the arguments have raged to and fro I’m always left with genuine transcendent mystery.
In terms of history of ideas I know that our Universalist forefathers Origen and Gregory of Nysaa were passionate defenders of freedom of the will, and with Gregory this had implications for him not accepting slavery as part of the natural order of things. During the Reformation Erasmus used Origen to argue for freedom of the will against Luther – although in the end Erasmus did believe in determinism as ‘mystery’ – he was simply anxious that a logic of determinism taught as a necessary part of saving truth would cause conflict and war.
The American Universalist Church – by way of contrast (at least in its early years – because its theology was influenced by James Relly’s Calvinist universalism) was often ultra determinist. Hosea Ballou went so far as to argue that God was the author of evil; however, in its social teaching the American Universalist Church always stressed human solidarity and was very progressive.
During the same period, Unitarian universalists in England were instrumental in some of the public health reforms that wiped out cholera while extremer sorts among the Calvinist evangelicals in Parliament called for days of public fasting and humiliation as the only remedy when serious outbreaks occurred. So from the point of view of history of ideas, what makes freedom or determinism saving, healing teachings is a difficult call. But there’s my two cents worth of history of ideas – an important if neglected perspective in these debates.
Really some wonderful posts here. Lots of great insightful points,Cindy; and, Matt, your letter from God really spoke to me. You truly have the soul of a poet! I loved your limerick (which I, for one, hadn’t heard before), Sobornost!
Nothing new to add, for now, some thoughts are (I hope) crystalizing but just wanted everyone to know how much I appreciate you all.
And what a wonderful missive from our Daddy to you and to all of us, I think. We can’t see the battle raging around and within us and that makes it all the more difficult a fight. And all the while we are battling, we feel in ourselves that we are cowards and weaklings and do-nothings. I think the ‘taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ’ is the hardest one of all. It IS a battle and when you fight it, dear dear brother, you are a mighty man of God – far greater than you appear to be, particularly than you appear to be to yourself.
Hey guys! Sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to you. I’ve just moved apartments and my computer has contracted a virus. It’s currently in the shop. Let me get right down to business and try to address some of these points.
The point you make here, alec, is I think the key to understanding the problem of evil - namely, that only in a universe with evil are certain (I do not say all) goods possible.
The analogy here, to me, doesn’t hold. According to open theism, the free willed actions of creatures are, to God, unknowable. If he cannot know them, I see no possibility to make a prediction regarding them either. Now WE, as humans, certainly do this. We know that it is not likely for random child A to be a serial killer. But this is only because we have observed thousands and thousands of children, none of which became serial killers. From God’s perspective though, open theists are committed to saying that he has no knowledge whatsoever of the free willed choices of anyone before they make them. Therefore, before he brought forth his entire creation, he had no idea what each would do. For all he knew, each WOULD become a serial killer. So combining the ideas of uncertainty with respect to God’s future knowledge and that of probability is to me incoherent.
It also doesn’t work because, theoretically, even if God didn’t know if child A would be a serial killer, it was still POSSIBLE. Now, you’re effectively back at the same point regarding God’s permission of evil. He still knew that evil was a possible outcome of going through with creation. So, unless you want to say that God had no idea of what evil was (an interesting thought, actually), then he still went ahead and created the universe anyway. In other words, he knew it was POSSIBLE to have a Holocaust. He even thought it were possible to have a far worse one than really happened. Yet he still made the universe. So the end still justified the means - “free will” still justified all these tremendous evils (even if they were only possible.)
And this is the point I was driving home. Here is a moral value you ascribe to God that you don’t have yourself. Why stop someone from murdering your child if you view the value of free willed choices in the same way that God views them in regard to the Holocaust?
Your last sentence is bingo. Although I wouldn’t say “as bad.” I would say however that the distinction between “causing” and “permitting” breaks down when you’re talking about God’s will. In either case, he is working towards goals and using various means to justify his end.
If I understand you correctly you’re saying above that God doesn’t intervene to stop free willed choices because that would prevent other people from intervening to stop them. While I do think that’s true, why wouldn’t God, when he saw that some people weren’t going to stop them, stop them? I agree that on the open theist view this may be sometimes impossible. But other times it would be perfectly possible. Driving down the interstate one day I saw a dog run out in the road and get hit on the hind end by a car going about 50 miles an hour. The car kept driving and the dog half ran half limped away towards the wood in terrible agony, howling. God COULD have prevented that. Unless you want to posit some sort of constant cosmic interaction of free willed spirits. But if that’s the case I don’t see how God could be doing anything at all ever. I can’t imagine a possible situation in which he COULD intervene without overriding something’s free will.
If this were so, would you not be giving up one of your initial propositions that all your moral intuitions come from God?
What I meant in that quote you have to Cindy is that I see no moral value whatsoever in the mere CONTINGENCY in a willed action. I think all the value comes from the DIFFICULTY under which the action is done. I think this is the ultimate mistake of the free will defense - it has subsituted the idea of contingency for difficulty. That is like saying if I flip a coin and it lands on heads, there is some moral quality about the heads landing versus the tails - as if heads is morally “better” than tails. I don’t think that’s true at all. After many years of reflecting on free will, I think that it is this conflation throughout the field of free will theology that is the most deep rooted. The confusion is understandable, because the experiences in our life of contingency and difficulty are so often linked, but I believe it to be a mistake to identify contingency alone as having any moral value whatsoever.
This is a very important question. It actually took me becoming an atheist (though I am one no longer) to understand this point and become, in a sort of way, a heathen or headonist. I was as Thomas Jefferson called himself “an Epicurean.” The idea of disobedience and obedience existing in God’s plan simply for the sake of punishment or reward became totally foreign to me. I just could not see how an all good God would invent such things for their own sakes. Surely people do actions because they think them good ideas, because they think they will have good consequences. In fact it is impossible to do anything otherwise; one HAS to see the good in an action they’re doing. So to think that God would command things to be done which his creation did not see the good in doing, at bottom, FOR THEMSELVES, would to think that God created creatures that he commanded to defy their very nature - an impossibility.
Yes, I think this possible. But the key is to really get the parameters on the problem of evil in most fundamental fashion. There are two points that must be kept before one’s mind at all time: that God does all good, and that he couldn’t do as much good unless he did as he did. In other words, it would be LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for do as much good unless he did as he did. Thinking this way eliminates the idea of superfluous evil. So, to delve deeper into your thought above, why wouldn’t God just create beings already perfect, or already overwhelmed with feelings of joy and perfection?
I think all evil is caused by God (either permitted or directly caused, the distinction breaks down when talking about the Almight’s will), and it is caused to bring forth goods that would otherwise be impossible. What sort of goods would not be possible without evil? The two the apostle Paul seems to speak most about when dealing with this problem: victory and salvation. Without evil we would have nothing to be victorious over, nothing which would give us a crown, and neither would we have anything to be saved from and to feel complete deliverance regarding. In life we see loved ones die and go we know not where. We are uncertain about the afterlife and, for as much as we say we believe, no one knows for sure. No one is free from doubt. Without such a great doubt, without such a great fear of never seeing our loved ones again, it would be impossible to experience the feeling of “death is NOT the final separation.” We could never understand what it meant to be saved from the worry of oblivion (and we shall never know this the way we need to to be maximally happy until the next life). The same goes for victory. We should never experience the joy in triumph, in overcoming, unless we experienced hardship here.
Now I think some people who hold this same position of mine err in that they say that we “must” know evil in order to know good. Some people say that without the contrast, no knowledge of good would be possible. I don’t believe this is so. I do believe that the contrast spoken of is a certain TYPE of knowledge of good, but not the only. There are certain goods which only evil will allow us to experience, as I’ve tried to explain above. But there are many others that don’t involve evil at all - a good meal, a beautiful sunset, sex. It is my position that God’s purpose is to expose us to a spectrum of goods and not to limit us to only one type. Think of all the different goods we experience, the substraction of any one of which would limit our experience of good in some way. So, while I do think we need a knowledge of evil to experience SOME goods, I don’t think for every good one must have experienced evil to appreciate it (I don’t have to eat mud to know that cake tastes good when I bite into a piece.)
I like the way that Don Miller (author of Blue Like Jazz) indirectly addresses the problem of evil, and this latest post reminded me of it. Don sees God’s activity as akin to writing a great story, in which we all have parts. In a good story, in order for the story to function properly, in order to have a protagonist, you have to have an antagonist. In other words, good would be meaningless unless there was a contrasting backdrop of evil; not for its own sake, but in order to drive the story forward, and make it a good story.
Libertarian free choice to me undermines the idea of rationality. When you make a decision, have you EVER made one for any other reason other than that you thought it was a good idea at the time? Now, you may have been short sighted, stupid, or lazy, but didn’t you prefer, at that very moment of choice, to be those things? LFW, the way I see it, implies that a person can see the goodness in an act and still not do it for NO reason at all.
I’ve never claimed I believe God is evil. I think evil is a moral action that comes from depraved motives. God never has depraved motives, therefore he cannot be or do evil. His acts TO US, seem evil, but what I’m really saying is that God causes us hardship or difficulty or pain.
Our entire interaction on this thread is revolving around how evil came about. Please - share!
I don’t object to any of this. Would you agree with me then that, fundamentally, God allows evil in order to bring forth greater good (i.e. the eternal bliss of the universe?) And that without the evil that there is, the end he is going to attain would be impossible?
The admonition is all part of God’s method of correcting his creation and saving it from evil.
I don’t think this detracts from anything I’m saying at all. We do not know exactly how things will be, but we know that evil actions will be punished, sin overcome, etc, and that knowledge is a motive for us to do good. Once the motive is strong enough, it will rule our thoughts so that we do not do such things, worry about such things, etc.
Perhaps it would be better if you explained to me what part about Paul’s admonition, given determinism, would be FALSE?
Do you mean that God, rather than actively hardening Pharaoh’s heart, simply allowed him to harden himself? And that God knew that God’s requests towards him to let his people go would only cause Pharaoh’s own free will to revolt against God, and, in this way, God “hardened him”? As if I said “I pissed Pharaoh off,” meaning, not that I MADE him pissed, but my actions (which could have been very noble, etc) caused HIM of his OWN to get pissed?
I used to think that - but (and I’m not an inerrantist, but you brought up Scripture) Paul’s logic to me is not this way at all. Indeed, one must strain the text exceedingly to make it say other than it says. The apostle is very explicit - God has actively CAUSED Pharaoh’s hardness of heart, in the same way he ACTIVELY has mercy on whoever he will. It seems to me that Paul is aware of the apparent implication in this idea - that there is injustice with God - and RESPONDS TO this objection by appeal to God’s ownership over creation. Now, since I do not believe in eternal Hell and I think that God uses all temporary evils to cause the greatest good for his creation - a good that would otherwise be impossible - and since I think Paul teaches this as well, particularly in Roman’s the appeal to divine authority is perfectly fine. He is effectively saying, as I read him, “Who are you to tell the All Knowing, All Good Being of the cosmos how to act? If he is going to bless each creature beyond measure, can he not bless them in the ways that he will?” If Paul did NOT think this then there would be a huge problem.
Actually, practically speaking, it may not make a difference the language used here - whether God “allowed” Pharaoh to harden his own heart or that he actively hardened it himself. I’ve argued elsewhere with alec that such a distinction is really inconsequential regarding God’s will and the existence of evil and sin. Even if you’re right and it was Pharaoh’s own LFW, he still KNEW that Pharaoh would do evil and bring judgment upon himself, and he still ALLOWED all that to take place, presumably for a higher purpose/good.
I really think we’re in much more agreement than may have before been thought.
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It’s currently in the shop. Let me get right down to business and try to address some of these points.