As I mentioned in my previous post, this past Sunday we at United Life spent some time engaging together the tragedy of Dong Yun Yoon. Specifically we looked at what responses were available to us in moments when we had cause to question either the goodness or power of God in the face of the reality of evil. Due to the natural limitations of every sermon, we were only able to cover a small part of the overall topic, something that bothered me all week as I was preparing to preach. So, in order for me to sleep well at night, I'd like to invite anyone who's got them to share your comments and questions regarding this topic.
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By the way, if you weren't able to see it live, or would just like a chance to review it, I've posted part of the sermon here. Unfortunately my camera gave out before the end of the sermon, so you miss about half. Sorry!
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I guess to start, I'd like to give a nod towards how important the topic of free will/pre-destination is when it comes to the topic of how God can allow evil to happen. Underneath the question, "How can God allow bad things happen to good people" is a whole host of other questions, one of the most central of which is whether we make our own decisions, or whether God makes them for us.
By the way (again), when trying to tackle this question any follower of Christ should recognize when they're giving it a fair shake, and when they're debating for debating's sake. I've seen too many Christians spend all of their energy fighting other Christians over this topic, while non-believers just sit and shake their heads wondering why people in churches don't just quit arguing and start feeding the hungry or taking care of the sick. My hypothesis: debating pre-destination is sort of the Christian version of the Huskies/Cougars rivalry (clearly defined sides, bitter emotional associations, and a whole country of people outside the state who have never heard of it).
Getting back to the original question, it is important to understand that some people who believe in God can only make sense of the reality of evil by arguing that God isn't actually all powerful, he's only very powerful. Epicurus posed the question concisely, "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent." Forced to choose between an evil God or a less than omnipotent one, I think most of us would want to choose the latter.
Allow me to argue, however, that this is an unnecessary dilemma. Though logic would force us to choose one or the other, logic itself has limitations. Not only is it too simplistic to make this into an either/or decision, there are also a number of agreements that we have to make before we even reach this dilemma, namely how we define the different terms and actors, not to mention what they can and can't do. Logic, though a clear and powerful tool of analysis, is, in the end, just a tool.
The fact of the matter is, whatever we believe about God or fate, every day we are faced with choices. No one can ever force us to do anything. Systems, families, friends, circumstances: these can all make certain choices more appealing to us than others, but in the end the choices are still ours, no matter what we believe about God. Even if we argue that all choice is an illusion, it doesn't really make a difference to us in our day to day lives. No matter what we believe (fatalist, Calvinist, Armenian, Atheist), every day we choose to do different things, from the basic tasks we do almost without thinking, to much weightier matters.
If you buy that, then allow me to go one step further. If God created us, in all of his sovereignty, with the ability to make choices, then we also need to take some responsibility for how those choices affect our world. Yes, we would all love to live in a world free of evil, but what does that really mean? As I asked this past Sunday, if God made you the master of time and space, what would your first step be to eradicate evil? Whatever plan we might have, it all seems to boil down to trying to control others. This is something that, if we were successful, wouldn't be our world, but a puppet show.
In the end, this dilemma goes back to a more basic (and more important) one: does God love us or not? We use the word love in a lot of different ways: we love our cars and we love our families. But in order for one to have a true loving relationship with something, that something must be able to make the choice to love us back. We can force our cars to move for us, we cannot and should not force or prevent a particular response from our loved ones.
I believe God does love us. I believe this on the one hand because he allows us the full scope of responses, no matter how much they hurt him...even if they lead to the brutal execution of his only Son on a cross. And I believe this on the other hand because, even after the cross, he returned to us on the third day, once again reaching out to save us.
20 comments:
wow this clears up like so many questions and debates i've had in the past in youth group... i remember this phase that i had where like 5 or 6 of us would sit downstairs in the old building on friday nights and just talk and argue and try and build our own ideas about God and what he said. But I think what we needed back then was a man of God, a person who knew the Word and studied it and could guide us, and now I think we have one =)
- Sam
thanks for the video!
i hope to talk to you about it soon.
Hey Ben! Love the topics you're covering here; very good in-depth analysis. I certainly agree with you about the practical compatibility of free will with determinism. Even though the universe may turn out to be deterministic on a very basic level (though in my opinion, this would be due to the laws of physics rather than the will of a supreme being), from our frame of reference as humans we are so far removed from this determinism that we really do have free will, within all frames of reference that could ever matter to us, and must behave accordingly.
However, I still believe that the so-called 'argument from evil' against the existence of a supreme being holds considerable weight. You propose a thought experiment in which, as supreme being, you find no way to eliminate evil without imposing on free will. But what if you take another step back and look at the relationship of god to the universe and us as a complete system?
If god's purpose in creating the universe, and us, was ultimately to give us the ability to freely choose to love him, then why not A) make the fact of his existence much more accessable to us, and B) make us beings incapable of killing one another?
Sure, there is something to the argument (though it seems a bit goofy regardless) that in order for our moral choices to have any weight, they must have real consequences, including bad ones. So perhaps we must be able to really choose "evil" in order for our choosing "good" to be significant in some way. But why make us able to remove each other as moral agents from the playing field all together? And why engage in such a game in the first place?
If what god really wanted out of his creation was other beings to seek out his love and companionship, why not create other beings who were his equal, or at least very nearly so? Why make us so feeble and incredibly removed from him in stature and experience, with no direct way to communicate with him or even prove his existence?
@baby daddy: incredible comment! I have a response...but I also have a sermon to write for this Sunday. I plan to reply by tuesday of next week.
until then, I hope you and your family stay warm, and thanks for the wonderful card!
oh, and Nico and I just did a trial run of the new axis and allies revised edition...it's a minor upgrade, gameplay wise, over the previous one, though the pieces themselves are a bit flimsier.
@BD: it sounds like you're proposing an alternative framework where:
1. God is more accessible.
2. We can't kill each other.
3. We are created as much more elevated beings created with much more God-like stature/experience from the get-go.
I don't know why God didn't use your framework or for that matter why He used the one He did.
I can say that at least from my experience as a dad with item #3, if I had a choice for my kids to come out fully mature and adults or as babies that grow up, I would choose the 2nd 100/100 times. It's definitely a colossal pain in butt sometimes, but OTOH, you get this amazing joy in watching your kids discover and learn and understand things. And your relationship with your kids grow in a similar way, where it's totally dynamic and fluid and changing and maturing all the time. I know there'll come times when they will break my heart and I break theirs...
But, the point is our having that journey together and what happens along the way; not starting off in this state where I'm a perfect rational sensible being and so is my child and we coexist in harmony.
There are definitely times when I wish they would just "get" what I'm trying to teach/do; but on the balance, I far prefer the growing process over one that is fully-formed and relatively static from the start.
Well put, Oliver. I agree with you, and you make some excellent points. I am also a father, and the joy of watching my five-month old daughter begin her journey of learning and development is incredible. I fully agree with the notion that some period of development is necessary to produce a sophisticated mind.
A mind capable of experiencing love and understanding and companionship is a tremendously complicated thing, and the idea of creating such minds fully formed out of nothing seems a bit like cheating for good reason. That's exactly why it's taken billions of years and countless cycles of star formation and decay across trillions of galaxies just to stumble across the right ingredients, followed by billions of years of the molecular soup jostling around on our planet until self-replicating molecules were formed, followed by millions of years of evolution by natural selection until our species has arrived on the scene. There's a good reason we don't find ourselves in contact with any intelligent extra-terrestrials; the necessary conditions for life to develop are extremely, extremely rare, and the timescales involved are truly mind-boggling.
But to return to the three points you identified: Yes, for number 3, a period of development and discovery may be preferable (and, in my opinion, necessary) for complex minds to exist. Upon further reflection, this seems like a logical revision to make to the third point. (There's a lot of other stuff in there with regard to what I mean by "stature and experience" to unpack, and I'm still mulling that over...)
At any rate, though, you mention making the journey together, with regard to your children, and I agree that this is preferable. But where has the presumed creator's guidance and presence been in our journey, both for each of us individually and for humanity as a whole?
If you want to point to the Bible as his way of guiding us, I can't help but feel that this form of communicating is woefully inadequate for a supposed creator of the universe. A book, written by various men in a small corner of the world over the course of a thousand years or so, full of inconsistencies, barbaric tales, and terrible primitive notions of existence? Even from the very beginning, Genesis gets us off to an incredibly inaccurate start on our journey of discovery of the universe. Seven days? Really?
This turns my focus back to points 1 and 2, which I think are more compelling anyway. To continue with the parent/child analogy; I'm certainly not going to watch my daughter grow up from behind a one-way mirror, or with only a mysterious book to guide her. It's tremendously important to me (and to her!) that my wife and I are able to interact with her directly, and directly express our love and guidance. And as for number 2; I may let her take a small tumble on the rug as she's learning to crawl, but I'm certainly not going to let her play with the kitchen knives. And placing her in a situation with other babies in which they could kill one another is obviously beyond even pondering. Why, then, is god so apparently careless with his children?
I'm thrilled by this discussion, and I've been looking forward all weekend for a few moments when I could find the time to hop back in.
So, here I come!
Let me begin by responding to Baby Daddy and Oliver's discussion points.
@Baby Daddy's first comment: Thanks for your evaluation of my analysis. I appreciate it. Also, I'm glad that we agree regarding free will and determinism.
I think I'll start (and perhaps end for now...this response is getting loooong!) by addressing a jump that you make that I don't when proposing my thought experiment. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that "god's purpose in creating the universe and us, was ultimately to give us the ability to freely choose to love him." In my study of theology and the Christian scriptures, I would say that one of God's primary purposes in creating the universe and us is to allow for the expansion of his love in time and space. This is kind of a strange thought if you believe in an eternal trinity, one which has an infinite amount of love in and of itself, and thus has no need for more (either beings or love). But I believe it makes sense in as much as love makes sense.
I don't know how much can be argued about the definition of love, but I understand it in terms of joyful self-giving. We love when we put the needs and lives of others equal to or even beyond our own. Before the creation of time and space, this characterized the nature of the uncreated and eternal trinity: eternal, unceasing, uncreated self-giving. By creating existence, however, with its own recursive ability to create new creations, God began beginnings, and thus the ability for love to begin anew, again and again, in different shapes and sizes, to be lived and enjoyed by new beings.
Again, why anybody would do this would only make sense if we accept love as the evaluating factor. The act of creation by an eternal, eternally content being, doesn't make sense if evaluated in terms of efficiency, profitability, or power. It does make some kind of sense, however, if we think of our own encounters with love. In those moments, when we either witness, receive, or act out real, joyful self-giving (not the kind of Hallmark/Tiffany's love that makes people money), I think it's in all of us to desire that it be shared and continued. In the Christian scriptures, in fact, Jesus argues that when we experience true love the desire for it to be continued is so great, it even exceeds the desire to survive.
Okay, I think I've opened up another can of worms for us to go fishing with, so I think I'll stop there, despite the fact that there is much else in your responses (Oliver...sorry I couldn't get to your post yet!) that I need to talk about as well. I promise, I do intend to address your questions specifically. Bringing up this difference is so important, however, because it allows me to clarify my perception of the character of God, something that I think is key to our entire discussion. By proposing that God's purpose in creating creation is to give us the ability to freely choose him supposes a God that is interested in seeing what our response will be to his test/game. This is not the God that I believe in. Instead, I see a God who created time and space in order that love may exist in it. This God is not interested in testing us, but in freely giving love, which is his essence, to us.
Looking forward to your response, and planning on responding more myself.
Ben; excellent response so far! I think I like where you're going with this. You paint a picture of a god who "is not interested in testing us, but in freely giving love, which is his essence, to us." I agree; this seems like an ideal sort of conception of god, and, unless I'm mistaken, a bit of a departure from the sort of god depicted in the Old Testament.
I'm very much looking forward to the rest of your response! Also, Merry Christmas Eve!
o man, this discussion is great.
BD stated a question that i would like to bring up again
To Restate: in terms of God's presence and guidance, where has He been?
I find that this touches upon the realm of spiritual experience and therefore cannot be explained from one individual to another. [I like how William James explains spiritual experiences: ineffability, noetic quality, passivity, and transiency] God's presence and involvement in out lives involves a certain level of faith, or a lack or reason [not science].
Also, I find it extremely difficult to find answers and guidance, because God usually tells me things I would never have thought of or things I dont want to hear. And with that said, [going forward to the post 'stuck'] I believe that God would never give us a frictionless hill and impede our free will. What explanation would we have for evil without it?
okay, I'm back. sorry about delaying the rest of my response for so long, but wrapping up 2008 was quite a bit of work.
So I responded earlier by arguing that I do not believe that God's purpose in creating was to test us, but rather out of pure, self-giving love. Stretching this a bit more, I argued that the reason why this was an act of love was because it allowed for the expansion of love: eternal self-giving, infinite love for one another allowed to flourish in time and space (something akin to infinity being found between the numbers 0 and 1). I would also be willing to argue that this is, in fact, the God of both the Old and New Testament, but that is a discussion that will have to wait for later.
BD's questions A and B thus undergo significant adjustment, though they don't disappear outright. This is how I would rephrase them, accepting my initial point:
If God created the universe out of and for the expansion of love, A) why doesn't he make his existence a much more easily accessable part of it, and B) why would he allow very unloving things to happen in it?
Going back to the discussion between BD and Oliver, I think we can continue to stretch the parent/child analogy a bit more before it breaks. Yes, no parent would want to watch their child grow up behind a one-way mirror under normal circumstances. Yet what if God remained unseen not to test us, but for our sake? Let's not forget that along with the great joys of parent/child interaction come lasting scars. Now I'm not saying that God would have to worry about traumatizing his children due to imperfect parenting. Rather, I'm thinking more of how different our existence would be with an all-powerful God constantly staying our hand from any wrong act. Yes, no competent father would let his child play with a knife, but no loving father would forever try to control what his child does either. That would be tyranny and coercion, not love.
Yet this is not to say that I agree that God is hiding behind a one-way mirror. If you take the bible to be a collection of writings by those who considered themselves God's beloved children, inspired by him to pass on their stories, then what you have is a rich narrative of interaction. No, I wouldn't argue that the bible is the place to go if I'm trying to pass my chemistry 101 final. But I would say that the writings we find in it paint a sometimes tragic, complex, and incredibly nuanced picture of being human, and the narrative of our engagement with God. Take the Psalms for example. Filled both with personal poetry as well as hymns sung in the Temple in Jerusalem, we find all of the ugliness of humanity (vindictiveness, racism, etc) along with some moments of great love (forgiveness, humility, self-giving, adoration). Not edited by old white men behind closed doors, the Psalms are instead the raw meditations and songs of a people of middle eastern farmers and herders on what it means to be human, and where God might be in the midst of it. Like reading a diary, this gives us a rich idea of who God is.
Finally (and I realize how woefully incomprehensive this response is...but I think it's where I've got to stop for now), part of what is found throughout the bible is the theme of God's ruach, or life-breath. Adam is brought to life when the ruach enters him, and it is the ruach that Jesus leaves with his disciples when he ascends into heaven. While I know that debating the spiritual realm is kind of impossible, I bring this up to clarify the Christian position on God's presence and guidance in humanity. The Christian texts argue, at least IMO, that God is constantly trying to aid and guide his people through this ruach. In John's account, Jesus describes this spirit as the "advocate", "helper", and "Spirit of truth." In other words, while many Christians stress the importance of the return of Christ, we have a member of the Trinity even now guiding, helping, comforting us.
Okay, I know there's much more to say, but let me stop there. I'm looking forward to your responses!
Happy New Year, Ben! Hope they managed to finally get the snow cleared off the streets out there in Seattle…
This little debate we have going here is tremendous fun, I must say. I missed out on this sort of thing around the campfire last summer!
Now, I’d like to respond to your response, of course. Let’s continue to look at the two points under examination, variously known as A and B or 1 and 2.
First, point A), the issue of God’s rather limited accessibility to us. Both you and Jonathan allude to an excellent point on this matter, regarding the subjectivity of spiritual/religious experience. Jonathon mentions William James, which is apt, and you bring up the idea of God’s “ruach.” Basically, the argument can be made that God’s presence and guidance can be felt or sensed in some way from within our own subjective mental experience (or rather, I guess the idea is that the phenomena of our subjective experience are not entirely “ours” after all!) If you say God speaks to you from within your own head, who am I to argue? All I can say is that, for me personally, I have never felt the presence or guidance of any supernatural beings impinging on my subjective mental experience.
To digress for a moment, I must admit that when I was younger I was at times willing to ascribe certain instances of happenstance to the will of a divine entity, but it’s quite clear that such beliefs stemmed only from wishful thinking coupled with an irrational worldview which has long since dissolved. In short, any thoughts I may have had which may have resembled “messages from God” can be seen to have completely natural psychological explanations, which I suspect to be the case for such thoughts in general.
With that being said, neither I, nor any of us, can speak for the contents of anyone else’s subjective mental experience, so the point may be beyond the realm of constructive debate. I might be willing to let point A/1 slide on the grounds of this sort of technicality! However, let me just say that the sort of presence which can be so easily confused with and/or explained by fairly simple psychological phenomena seems to fall short of what I’d expect from the creator of the entire universe. One would hope that such a being’s interactions with us should amount to more than the functional equivalent of a schizophrenic’s delusions.
So, let’s come at it from the other angle you propose, pointing to the Bible as being “the narrative of our engagement with God.” While you are certainly right that it contains an “incredibly nuanced picture of being human” I believe there are many other works of ancient literature from a variety of different cultures that do the same thing. In fact, if you were to take the entirety of human literature as a whole (not just the collected verses of a tiny subset) I think you’d get a much richer and more valuable picture of what it means to be human, complete with many valuable lessons, insights, and wisdom. Why focus only on the particular words canonized as the Christian Bible? To point to a Bible verse positing the claim that the Bible is the one and only book of “truth” would merely be to create a circular argument. There are plenty of ancient texts that contain claims concerning their own exclusive truthfulness, and from an objective standpoint such claims carry no weight whatsoever. Furthermore, the collection of books represented by the Bible has been selected precisely by “groups of old white men behind closed doors,” (the ecumenical councils of the Roman church in the fourth century onward), often for their own idiosyncratic political reasons.
Even if the particular words they selected give us a true idea of who the creator of the universe is, what are we to make of the instances in the Bible where God instructs the Israelites to sack cities, kill the men and children, and rape the women? Or the episode where God has forty-two children mauled by bears because they ridiculed Elisha’s bald spot? (II Kings 2:23-24) If this God is a God of infinite love, then why are his intentions for heretics that they be “tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb”? (Revelation 14:10) I could go on and on with this horrible stuff. The point is, it’s not just a gritty narrative of humans being nasty to one another that we find in the Bible; it’s instance after instance of the character of God himself perpetrating acts of awful cruelty!
Sure, many of the Psalms are uplifting. And Jesus definitely had some nice things to say in his sermon on the mount. But I just don’t see how the Christian Bible, in its entirety, depicts a God whose ultimate purpose is to bring about the eternal expansion of love.
Which leads me, in a roundabout way, to point B. And the first question I have, in that regard, is; can people in heaven kill one another? No? Why not? Doesn’t that entail God impinging on his creations’ free will? If not, then why not place the ability to kill beyond our capabilities all together?
Let’s pick this apart. According to the standard Christian doctrine of the eternal soul, humans have a consciousness that continues after their death. What happens at the moment of death is the interesting part; apparently, the consciousness is, at that particular time, “fixed” in one of two states; either the eternal happiness and communion with God that is Heaven, or the eternal torture and separation from God that is Hell. We’ll pass over the exceptionally odd way in which this incredibly important bifurcation is decided upon (that is, it is based on whether or not an individual accepts as true a particular Roman-era Levantine carpenter’s claims of divinity, and not on that individual’s actions or attitudes with regard to love and selflessness).
But why treat the moment of death as such a decision point at all? Why make the two options diametrically opposed and completely irrecoverable? Especially when we consider that the moment of death is not even, in most cases, chosen by the individual in question. The person may be murdered by another human, or killed by disease or natural disaster (is this God’s hand?)
Let’s also note that, according to the doctrine, humans are not able to damn each other to Hell, or confer salvation in Heaven, simply by willing it. Nor are we able to manufacture “soul guns” that do such things when we point them at each other. But we are able to end each other’s mortal lives! When you fall back on the defense that this is necessary to preserve the integrity of our free will, I can’t help but wonder what the situation is like in heaven (or hell, for that matter). It would seem that we shouldn’t be able to harm one another, or even think bad or gloomy thoughts, once we have attained our heavenly stature. But doesn’t this represent an incredible restriction on free will? Being in heaven is supposed to be better than being on earth. Yet our thoughts and actions, in heaven, would necessarily be confined to a subset of the possibilities available on earth. And what value would this confined state of pure happiness have, anyway? Doesn’t the whole argument about evil and suffering existing in the world have to do with the fact that the bad is necessary in order to give the good value? Conversely, shouldn’t a soul doomed to Hell for eternity still be free to choose love (and even God, Jesus, etc.) in spite of it all? Why would God ever make it “too late?”
The point is that the entire calculus of eternal life (as set up in Christian doctrine) seems both absurd and unfair to me. Again, it doesn’t seem like the sort of arrangement that would be favored by an omnipotent creator intent on fostering the eternal expansion of love. What it does seem like is a mythology dreamed up, in an emergent manner, by ancient civilizations in order to promote ethical behavior and social cohesion. The fact that we are able to kill one another seems not like the state of affairs that would be favored by a benevolent deity, but instead like what we should expect if we are in fact highly cerebral primates who have evolved over millennia in a world devoid of supernatural beings and eternal souls.
Man, this is a long post! My guess is that we end up crashing a server somewhere with novel-length treatises before we ever conclude this debate! (In fact, I doubt we’ll ever come to an agreement on all this, but it’s an interesting discussion, at least…)
And a Happy New Year to you!
The fun is being had by me as well. I’d much rather talk about this than about who to turn my receipts into for my expense reports (can you tell where I just came from?). By the way, will you be able to make some campfires with us this summer? Nico and I were thinking about having everyone come out to the Northwest. Plenty to do out here, as you already know.
Okay, let’s get started again. Addressing your thoughts regarding Point A, I understand your objection to the thought that the creator of the universe would make known its presence through phenomena that could easily be explained away through psychology or neuroscience. I agree that most, if not all, of my experiences with the numinous could also be explained from a purely secular perspective. Yet this is something that reinforces my belief.
Again, going back to the question of free will, evil, and the existence of God, if in our universe we had irrefutable evidence of the reality of God, then we wouldn’t truly have freedom, and we wouldn’t be fully human (we can debate about what it means to be human as well, but I think you know what I’m talking about). I hold this argument from what I’ve read in the Christian scriptures. There we see that, after creating the universe and giving humanity special status as “created in his image”, God interacts with humanity in non-coercive ways. God does not stay Eve or Adam, he doesn’t keep Cain from murdering Abel. Instead, God’s interaction with humans stays at a level where they can still deny him if they so choose. Even in the Old Testament, which is filled with God’s direct interaction with Moses, other prophets, and at times the entire people of Israel, that interaction does not exceed the capacity of those people to compare God with other deities. If God were to do otherwise, the people would have no choice, and thus not really be created in his image.
This holds true today. For us, especially those of us in the western world, if God interacted with humanity in pillars of cloud and fire, we would no longer have any grounds on which to deny him. Even miracles witnessed by many faithful (and sane) Christians are still deniable, and I think this is how God intended them to be. I’m not saying that God wishes for us to deny him, or that he is playing some sort of game to see who is worthy and who is not. My argument is simply that our existence (and our capacity as humans to act) would be drastically different if God interacted with us beyond our capacity to deny him. This difference would be, at least according to how I read the Bible, in opposition to the concept of the image of God.
Regarding the Bible, you pose several arguments, two of which I will respond to point by point (for the sake of clarity):
1. “I think you’d get a much richer and more valuable picture of what it means to be human, complete with many valuable lessons, insights, and wisdom. Why focus only on the particular words canonized as the Christian Bible?“
- I certainly agree, and in fact I think that the Bible itself never declares itself to be the only source of wisdom in creation. It is clear that truth can be found in many places, and I think it is every pastor’s duty to learn from these other sources as well. Yet it is also clear that at times one writing directly opposes another writing. Take the Koran for example. It describes Jesus as a divinely appointed messenger and prophet, but definitely not God incarnate. It also rejects the idea that Jesus was crucified. Where then should we go regarding our understanding of Jesus of Nazareth? How do we determine whether to believe one, the other, or neither?
Whether we are trying to find the truth about Jesus, or whether we are wondering about the meaning of the existence of evil, we need to have some means of testing differing claims. Everybody has these means, whether they find them in ancient wisdom and/or scriptures or more contemporary philosophies, teachings, and beliefs. I should add that the one place where we cannot find the means to test claims of meaning and value is science. While research can help us understand more about the archaeological and anthropological details of Jesus’ existence (or argue about that existence in the first place), it can never help us know what Jesus, or, for that matter, our own existence means. I say this not to denigrate science: it is a valuable tool that has served humanity well. But we shouldn’t expect it to do more than it can.
2. “Furthermore, the collection of books represented by the Bible has been selected precisely by “groups of old white men behind closed doors,” (the ecumenical councils of the Roman church in the fourth century onward), often for their own idiosyncratic political reasons.”
- I must categorically disagree with this statement. While it is true that the canon we have today was fixed by various leaders of the church, this was done internationally, over the course of centuries, and was really not that hotly debated. As early as the second century, the “memoirs of the apostles” were mentioned by Justin Martyr. By 160 Irenaeus cited almost the entire New Testament in his writings, leaving out only a few letters. The Muratorian Fragment, of which we have the 7th century Latin copy, is generally argued to be a 2nd century document (though this is still debated), and it contains a list of nearly all of the books of the New Testament. By the fourth century ecumenical councils, the canon was not even in debate: what people differed on during those councils wasn’t the books themselves, but the conclusions that they were making from those books.
By the way, this might be a good place to mention that most argue that by the time the aforementioned lists were coming out the Gnostic gospels were only just being written. In other words, regardless of what one may believe about Gnosticism as a belief, its central writings were “second-generation” in the sense that they were responses to the Christian gospels written half a century or more earlier, and the accounts of witnesses who lived more than a hundred years before the Gnostics.
In fact, this relates to a central fact about Christian scripture that is greatly misunderstood by both Christians and non-Christians alike: that the New Testament came together out of necessity, not fiat. The canonical gospels state of themselves that they are simply an “orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled…handed on…by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses…” (opening of Luke). In other words, they were not first written, then believed, but the opposite. They were written down some years after a core group of thousands either witnessed the events for themselves, or heard about them first hand, and this was done for the same reason any accounting of events is written: in order to keep exaggeration and human error in check (note that by the time Luke’s book came out, the Gnostic gospels were still fifty to a hundred years away). Any such accounts that came out were passed around from community to community, and their survival depended upon the agreement of these thousands of first-generation Christians (people who either knew Jesus for themselves or who heard about him through the Apostles). Only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John survived that rigorous test.
By the time of the first ecumenical council in Nicaea, the canon was not a debate topic. In fact, it is important to note that Nicaea was the first ecumenical council called by the church since the council of Jerusalem recounted in the Book of Acts. This means that for three-hundred plus years the church did fine determining on its own, in a manner that balanced grassroots belief with the leadership of democratically appointed church leaders, what writings were true to the original teachings and events of the life of Jesus. Nicaea was called because one such leader, Arius, differed with another such leader, Alexander, and the difference threatened to split the church. This difference was not over which books should be in the bible (this was not even a topic of debate), but over the conclusions each made from it. We can argue about whether politics played a significant role in the decision of the Council of Nicaea, but we cannot argue that it played a role in determining which books we now consider the Christian New Testament. That had been decided long ago by a consensus of thousands, and had been reaffirmed by subsequent generations of Christians in what I think is best described as a democratic and personal process.
Shoot. I didn’t even get to your point about the Christian “calculus of eternal life”, or the character of God as expressed in the Old Testament. My apologies. I’ll have to take a rain check on those (and I do have the capital to address those…just not the time right now!). Even so, I hope the three things I mentioned here added something to our discussion.
Novel length treatises indeed, but it sure doesn’t feel like work. As always, looking forward to your response!
"That had been decided long ago by a consensus of thousands, and had been reaffirmed by subsequent generations of Christians in what I think is best described as a democratic and personal process."
I think this statement gets pretty near the heart of a lot of skepticism. It wouldn't be outlandish to re-write the last part of it as: "in what I think is best described as the most powerful party ultimately controlling the message"; I've never seen an argument compelling enough from either point of view that I think would persuade someone with no predispositions.
For myself, the idea of a community of early witnesses codifying the truth over time leaves me uneasy. What (little) I've read about the early history of the gospels, for instance something as fundamental as the resurrection being added after the first generation of Mark, strikes me as very damning; that's at least partially due to my worldview, and I recognize that. A more apologetic account of the same process makes it sound like the most natural and reasonable process in the world.
I’d definitely be interested in doing some camping in the Pacific Northwest! I’ll have to keep my eyes on my amount of vacation time and available cash to make that happen, though… But back to the debate!
You make a lot of good points in your last post, and I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. You clearly slam-dunked me on the history of the Bible’s canonization! However, as Nick points out, there are questions about such things as how the gospels ended up the way they are that remain pretty hazy. I’m sure we could open up another can of worms if we started examining things such as the fact that the basic timelines of Jesus’ last days are inconsistent between the four different gospel accounts. However, I’d like to return my focus to a couple points from our last couple posts.
For starters, you began to address the issue but never actually answered the question of why to choose the Bible over the plethora of other options as a path to truth. You point out that the Bible and the Koran differ explicitly on certain matters. So why accept the Bible and dismiss the Koran?
And while it may be true that science has little to contribute when it comes to matters of “meaning and value,” at least in an existential sense, I believe science offers the only viable way to evaluate differing claims of truth regarding objective reality. The fact that the Bible conflicts with science on numerous points regarding objective, physical reality is, to me, all the more reason to discount it as a good source regarding existential truths. I believe that a philosophical search for meaning that starts with a solid scientific foundation is much more valid.
At any rate, there’s something even more interesting that you allude to that I’d love to explore some more. The idea that God would intentionally restrict his interactions with humanity in order not to exceed our capacity to deny his existence is a fascinating concept. Again, it hinges on the fact that the integrity of our free will is of the utmost importance, so much so that God essentially obscures his own existence in order to preserve our autonomy as moral agents. I think this is a pivotal concept, and possibly necessary in any conception of a benevolent supreme being that can even come close to making any sense given the reality we find ourselves in.
Still, I think it would be a failure of imagination to believe that there couldn’t be any alternative configuration. The problem lies in equating belief in the fact of God’s existence with some sort of morally coercive factor. This is a logical leap inherent in every theistic religion that I can think of (for good reason given the impetus behind inventing religion in the first place), but not a necessary one. If a creator neither promised reward nor threatened punishment, then proof of the fact of his/her/its existence wouldn’t be coercive at all.
This strikes at the heart of the matter. Belief or non-belief in the existence of a supreme being is irrelevant to morality. You point out that God, as you see it, purposefully refrains from offering irrefutable proof of his existence. Isn’t it obvious then, that if God exists, he shouldn’t care whether we believe he exists or not? What is important is our moral integrity and free will. God’s ultimate purpose may be to allow for the expansion of love through the exercise of his creations’ free will. What then, does the creations’ belief or non-belief in his existence have to do with anything? In fact, you seem to indicate that it is better the created beings not be given proof of his existence, in order that they not be coerced!
This leads to an interestingly inspiring picture of the cosmos. If there is a benevolent creator, he/she/it should be content to watch in obscurity in order that his/her/its creations be free to choose morality and create love in a completely un-coerced manner. There’s very little for me find fault with in such a cosmology. Indeed, the universe could be much as we find it, with no supernatural forces at work, and the greatest good flowing from a loving and moral agnosticism or even atheism. (Again, I must point out how vastly different such a picture is than the one painted in the Christian Bible!)
Anyhow, I’m looking forward to the rest of your response; I know you’re a busy man!
o man. there has been alot of progress [if i can call it that] in my absense!
Going back to Big Daddy's 'digression' I find that it is very similar to Freud's Infantality argument. I would like to propose this paradigm. As a child, one would not know the mechanisms of neither science nor religion, and yet, one was able to have a spiritual experience. In the later years, this would all be 'explained' but that does not mean that science is able to explain everything [yet. haha, one day, maybe]. So would God use the same style of language used for the child toward the adult? Personally, I believe that God does speak, but in a manner that is fit for the individual.
And to touch on the bible, I like to regard mine as comprehensive textbook. One in which all of the other texts have been summarized and restated.
The idea of death. ooo.
Before I get into that, I would like to ask a question.
How would one define religion?
-morals?
-based on a spiritual experience?
-death?
But I digress. I think that Bigdaddy has a very good point. I am still chewing on free will, and to couple that with death... [I need another winter break with lots of coffee and books] So for now, I'm going to put this out there. In terms of statistics, lets say the idea of heaven is infinity. The best place to go after death. All of the events leading up to getting there, would they not be worth the effort?
If a bet needs to be placed, then where would your bet go?
side note: not making a bet is equivalent to not answering a true/ false question on a one question exam.
And the idea about angels killing other angels.
I think that this thought comes from an idea of heaven that allows death after death. I would like to think of heaven not as a place without free will, but a progression in our growth. When we were infants, all we would think was 'i want food, i want to play, etc'. As adults we have the capability to think not only for ourselves but for others as well. I would like to propose a state in which we mature even more. Infathomable? Improbable? Possibly. But we will never know until it happens!
"I need another winter break with lots of coffee and books"
indeed. if only I had breaks!
much (good) progress to be sure, and I'm looking forward to responding...tomorrow. (I know I usually do my responses on Tuesday, but I'm working on a major project right now. Hope to get to this tomorrow!)
okay, let me start by apologizing to babydaddy and jonathan...I'll get to you guys in my next comment (hopefully tomorrow?). This one is just in response to what nick said:
@Nick – agreed. It wouldn’t be outlandish to say either, and both make sense depending on your predisposition. With that said, I think if Foucault had something to add to this conversation it would be to say that 20th century academic research on early church history has been dominated far too long by people with predispositions. Yes, it is important for us to recognize how much history is written by its winners, but reacting by ascribing those winners with more power than they really had is just bad history.
Even in Japan, where the empire’s sordid record during World War 2 is routinely ignored in their textbooks, the truth cannot stay hidden for much longer. Too many angry descendents of victims have raised their voices. Likewise, even though the Roman church rose to power with Constantine, there have been too many other denominations to let it get away with a pristine record. Even Arius, who was the loser of the first ecumenical council, maintained a strong following, and it was likely Arianism, not Nicene Christianity (which is what most mainline churches practice today) that flourished among the Goths Vandals. And let’s not forget who between them and Rome came out on top.
A small point, but I don't think your comparison of establishing Jesus's story to Japan's version of WWII is apt. Leaving aside the dramatic advances in documentary technology in the intervening centuries, it's easier to generate a new version of something with relatively few witnesses than to cover up something that, as you point out, negatively affected thousands people.
This is a footnote the the larger discussion between you and the others though, which I'm enjoying reading.
Ok, back to the campfire. By the way, while part of my delay has to do with good news (just got back from my sister’s wedding in LA. One Park down, two to go!), the other part has to do with the scope of this discussion. I think I'm just going to have to resign myself to smaller "bites".
With that said, my bite for today has to do with BD's phrase: "the entire calculus of eternal life (as set up in Christian doctrine)" (circa January 9th, 2009). To frame it within the larger discussion we're having, this has to do with a few different issues:
- the character of God (does he use reward and punishment as a means to encourage morality? This is also connected to my argument about God's restricting of his own "evidence" in our world)
- and free will and the meaning of our existence (I proposed earlier that the correct reading of the Christian scriptures -and here's yet another topic: why stick to the Christian scriptures?- meant understanding our existence not as a test of our ability to be obedient to God and live morally, but a chance for us to create love, his essence, and his invention, in time and space)
I'm sure there are more ways in which this "calculus of eternal life" relates to everything else we've been discussing, but I better get to it before I wander off too far.
To begin, I would argue that we need to clarify what is meant by eternity in the first place. As I stated earlier, the Trinity existed "before" time and space, before the very creation of existence. Our universe, which we still know so little about, has an age. It has a beginning, and may very well have an end. Eternity, however, is outside of it, and thus terms like "before" and "would" must be used with a grain of salt when in reference to God (at least in Christian doctrine).
With that said, the Christian doctrine of eternal life is, at best, difficult to delineate. Earlier Christian concepts, like purgatory and limbo, represent reductionist teachings that tried to defy the limits of what we can really know. The Bible, though often quoted in order to threaten people with eternal punishment, is decidedly non-temporal when it comes to life after death. What, for example, can a "fire and brimstone" preacher, demanding that his congregants make a decision or face the fires of hell say about this passage written by the Apostle Peter: "For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah" (1 Peter 3:18-20)? The Christian God, in other words, is not standing with an axe in his hand and an eye on the clock, but instead sends his son even to those who he wiped out in the flood.
A whole host of questions from that, I'm sure, but let me point out a few things. First, the bible is not clear about this "prison" that Peter mentions, and I think that is not an accident. Christian theologians and preachers go too far when they try to describe exactly what happens after or at the moment of death. While the bible argues that there is such a thing as heaven and hell (though even what we now read as "hell" in the bible actually represents several different concepts and words), it is not clear what happens at death. Do we immediately enter into eternity? Do we stay in time and space? There is even a strong argument that life after death will involve our physical bodies (this is part of what is behind Christian opposition to cremation), and that heaven will not be apart from the earth, but the transformation of the earth (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Revelation 21:1-6). In other words, the Christian bible just isn't that clear about the moment of death and the specifics of the after-life, and those who try to make it so go too far.
Second, this applies to our understanding of free will in heaven as well. As you can see, my understanding of Christian doctrine makes it difficult to say what free will really looks like in heaven. If we immediately enter into eternity, then we need to redefine some things: although there is choice in eternity, how we make those choices must be understood to be radically different in the realm that is beyond time and space. In eternity, there is no "what if?" or "should or shouldn't I?" There is only the eternal present, and I would think that that drastically affects what we mean by the presence or absence of free will in heaven.
Yet, if heaven means (and maybe I'm going too far by even trying to split these two apart) the continuation of time and space (i.e. the New Heaven/New Earth/New Jerusalem), then your original question is back on the table: how can heaven be a place both of eternal happiness and free will? Doctrinally, the answer has to do with baptism, which symbolizes for the Christian the death of the "old self." According to Christian doctrine, we war with our "old selves" as we try to follow Christ, but it isn't until our physical death that these old selves finally die. In other words, our free will on earth really isn't free: it isn't until heaven that we are freed to live and love the way we truly wish to. You don't have to believe in Christ to understand this: how often do we do exactly the opposite of what we wish to do or what we know is good and loving? How often do we hurt those we love, not to mention our enemies?
One last chew: the picture of eternity that I'm trying to present obviously implies a lot about my picture of the character of God. Christ's teachings about death and eternity, as I understand them, are not ultimately about the rewards or punishments God hands out to humanity. Christ was not interested in promoting a way of life, but in granting life itself. Let me put it this way: if, as I state at the end of my last paragraph, we are not truly free to do what we know is right and loving, then we are really dying a kind of slow death. While we may be moving and breathing, what kind of an existence is it if even our best intentions are flavored with self-preservation and self-interest? I argue that, for a follower of Christ, the idea of heaven is not a reward but a promise and a direction. That is, that God is leading creation back towards what he began in Eden, an existence marked by our looking out for the best interests of one another, marked by a relationship with him.
Again, I'm wishing that I could do justice to all of the topics that have been raised, but I had to stick to one! As always, looking forward to reading your responses.
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