Responding to Ivan, pt. 4 (or This House is Not Made of Glass)

This post is a part of a series:

Rebellion

Responding to Ivan, pt. 1

Responding to Ivan, pt. 2

Responding to Ivan, pt. 3

**Please feel free to join the discussion. Your comments will help me as I continue the series**

But back to my original point, I say that it is inconceivable to create a world in which some greater good is accomplished at the expense of even one little baby having to suffer and be killed. My moral code dictates that there is no end result that would be worth killing a baby. For what end result would you be willing to kill an infant? I hope that you wouldn’t do it for anything. You would declare the murder of a baby to be wrong. Is this not the point that so many pro-lifers appeal to? You claim that you know that this is wrong because you have a moral code, a law within, that came to you from God. You even go as far as to say that it reflects his very nature. Yet, in the very next breath you are willing to tell me that this same God that gave you your understanding that the murder of babies is wrong, is the same God who, at the beginning of time, determined to create a world in which babies would be murdered. Not only that, but a great many other horrors occur in this world which you say that he created. If there was a time when there was nothing in existence but God, and if he is then the one that brought everything into existence, then he is, in some way, responsible for that which was brought about. I do not believe your story because it does not make sense of the world.

My friend, you are still misunderstanding God’s relationship to evil. Let us look at it from another angle. St. Augustine once explained that evil is not a thing to be created. God is not the creator or author of evil because it is not a thing that could be made. You see, evil is the absence of good. What is darkness? How can you identify it? What does it taste like or feel like? These are silly questions because darkness is the absence of light.

Well, where there is light there is no darkness?

Right.

So, does that not then mean that God has abandoned us? I see a lot of darkness and I don’t see how your explanation has addressed it unless you are saying that God has fled the scene.

Certainly God has not abandoned us. He is at work among us even now. There is still evil present in the world. And evil is the absence of good, but you must think of it as a matter of degrees. Nearly everything has aspects about it that are good and things about it that are bad. However, there are varying degrees of goodness and varying degrees of evil in this world.

Allow me this loose analogy. Think of the world as a house facing east and think of God as the sun. In the dawn, those rooms in the front will be much brighter than the rooms in back of the house. The light could be so strong that one must look away. Other rooms will be more dimly lit. In these rooms there will still be some darkness. And still, other rooms, or maybe even closets, will be completely dark because the light does not reach them.

In some places it is very evident that God is good and this world He has created is good. Delicious food, companionship, well-composed music… these are just a few of the rooms in the front. Other things, say relationships, which can bring both pleasure and pain at differing times are the rooms in which there is a mixture of light. But there, in the dark corners of this world, you can see a pain and an evil that is so clearly a darkness that the light has no part of.

I do think that this is a rather clever explanation for the world we find ourselves in, but you have not explained why this is the world which God chose to make. If this world is a house and God is the sun, I can accept that. But there is still a problem. I can follow your idea that God did not create the darkness anymore than the sun creates the dark rooms of your house. But the trouble is that you also claim that God is the builder of the house. Do you not?

Yes, He is Creator, but that does not mean that He created the darkness!

Accepted. But why didn’t he make the house of glass? Why make a world in which the possibility of darkness might exist? This is the same question that I have been asking all along, yet you have offered no answer that satisfactorily addresses this fundamental question.

Incarnation, pt. 2 (or Luke 1:78-79)

"...the sunrise shall visit us
from on high
to give light to those who sit in
darkness and in the shadow of
death,
to guide our feet into the way of
peace."

In th Flesh

I just read a good post from Russell Moore answering the question of whether or not Jesus ever got sick. It is an interesting read and I encourage you to check it out. The Incarnation was and is such a startling thing.

Here's an excerpt:

"It just doesn’t seem right to us to imagine Jesus feverish or vomiting. But that’s precisely the scandal. It didn’t seem right to many to imagine Jesus as really flesh and bone, filled with blood and intestines and urine. Somehow that seemed to detract from his deity. It surely didn’t seem right to many to imagine the only begotten of the Father twisting in pain on a crucifixion stake, screaming as he drowned in his own blood. This was humiliating, undignified. That’s just the point. Jesus joined us in our humiliation, in our indignity."

Read the whole thing here.

Responding to Ivan, pt. 3 (or the Moral Law or Though You Cannot Tell from This Post, Augustine & Anselm are Two of My Favorite Saints)

This post is a part of a series:

Rebellion

Responding to Ivan, pt. 1

Responding to Ivan, pt. 2

**Please feel free to join the discussion. Your comments will help me as I continue the series**

I think that we are back to where we started. Tell me this: what reason could possibly be sufficient to make it alright to allow a little child to be starved and killed? Perhaps you are willing to say that it is alright because you have a distorted conscience. Perhaps you are mad. What sort of moral code allows for the death of an innocent so that some greater good might be accomplished? The idea that the end justifies the means has allowed for all sorts of atrocities throughout history and any decent man sees that such a stance is morally reprehensible. Your answer has done nothing to answer my question. It has simply shown that you hold your god to a low moral standard.

Ahh, you mention a moral code, but there you have a problem with your question. You appeal to a moral code – to a sense of right and wrong. You expect me to agree with you that the harming of an infant is wrong. Well, I do agree with you, but on what grounds can you say that it is wrong? To declare it to be wrong is to make a judgment that requires a standard of justice. For you, as one who does not believe in my God, you are speaking on borrowed capital when you reference the moral code or make any sort of statements about right and wrong. You want to have a law without a Lawgiver, but you cannot. Your effort to declare something as wrong works against you. It reveals that you have a concept of what is right and good.

But I object. I can have a sense of right and wrong. And I refuse to believe that it came from this God that you claim as your own. I also refuse to believe that it came from any other god. I can accept the Law because it is good for us, but I reject the notion of a Lawgiver.

But you cannot have the Law without the Lawgiver. That does not make any sense. There must be a source.

And God must be that source?

Yes.

And who gave the laws to God?

Nobody. God is the supreme being.

So, you are saying that the laws, or moral code, that we abide by must come from a source outside of us, but the laws by which God abides do not have an outside source? That is inconsistent. Why does God get to be the exception?

But you are missing the point of what it means to be God. He is the supreme being. St. Anselm described it by saying that He is that being of which no greater being can be conceived. St. Augustine baptized that grand idea of the philosophers of old and explained that God is the good, the true, and the beautiful. To be God is to be at the top. To be at the top is to be God. As such, He is source of all that is good. As Aristotle, and then St. Aquinas, explained he is the unmoved mover and the first cause. If a being gave God the moral code, then that being would be God. But let me explain another aspect that you have misunderstood. The moral code is not an arbitrary set of rules that God created or chose to enforce. Rather, they are a reflection of His nature. Everything that is good is that which is a reflection of His nature. Everything that is wrong is that which is contrary to His nature.

But God is not necessary in the picture that you just painted. You admit that if there were a being that dictated right and wrong to God, then that being would be the ultimate deity known as God. But you reject the notion of any such deity. Well, I just take it one step further. There is no need for your God. You reference the argument of the unmoved mover. That which is in motion must be put into motion. Yet, if I say that your argument then means that someone must have put God into motion, you will interject that it stops with God because it cannot continue ad infinitum. Well why not? The only reason that I can see that you would insist that it cannot continue ad infinitum is because it would make God unnecessary and that is not the conclusion that you want to reach. As quickly as you can make God the first cause I can make this world the first cause. And how can you tell me any different? Any reason that you give for why this world cannot be the first cause I can likewise flip to be a reason as to why God cannot be the first cause. This world contains order, someone must have ordered it… well, then who ordered God? If you stumbled upon a watch on the shoreline of a beach, you would understand that there had to be a watchmaker… well, who is the Watchmaker behind the watch that is God? A garden in the jungle, a jumbo-jet… there are a thousand manifestations of this argument but they all have the same problem. You say that all things must have a cause except for God, but why is God the exception? Because that is what it means to be God? Well just because you define it to be that way does not make it true. If it is fair for you to say that God is the exception, then it is fair for me to cut God out and just say that this world is the exception.

There where does you moral code come from?

I don’t know, but I don’t see that I necessarily have to know, especially if you are going to continue to affirm that it is alright for you to not know where God came from. Perhaps it is the result of evolution. Most of the moral code is good for the continuation of our species. If not that, perhaps we all have a bit of a divine spark within us that gives us our moral compass. Or perhaps I can borrow from you and say that is it simply a reflection of our nature. It is a part of who we are. If you don’t have to explain how it got to be a part of who God is, then I don’t have to explain how it got to be a part of who we are. I don’t have to know where it came from, I just need to know that it is.

But back to my original point, I say that it is inconceivable to create a world in which some greater good is accomplished at the expense of even one little baby having to suffer and be killed. My moral code dictates that there is no end result that would be worth killing a baby. For what end result would you be willing to kill an infant? I hope that you wouldn’t do it for anything. You would declare the murder of a baby to be wrong. Is this not the point that so many pro-lifers appeal to? You claim that you know that this is wrong because you have a moral code, a law within, that came to you from God. You even go as far as to say that it reflects his very nature. Yet, in the very next breath you are willing to tell me that this same God that gave you your understanding that the murder of babies is wrong, is the same God who, at the beginning of time, determined to create a world in which babies would be murdered. Not only that, but a great many other horrors occur in this world which you say that he created. If there was a time when there was nothing in existence but God, and if he is then the one that brought everything into existence, then he is, in some way, responsible for that which was brought about. I do not believe your story because it does not make sense of the world.

My friend, you are still misunderstanding God’s relationship to evil. Let us look at it from another angle. St. Augustine once explained that evil…

[To be continued…]