This post is a part of a series:
**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.
5 comments:
first, there needs more clarification of the definition of murder.
Look in Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1856 for the definition of murder.
http://www.constitution.org/bouv/bouvier_m.htm
Aside from this being clearly from a legal perspective, however though it very much is a legal term, this definition will raise some questions that I certainly would raise with your discussion about the purpose of evil and God's relationship to it.
Second, depending on the definition you choose and accept, the question of socially constructed ideas arises. For instance, you discuss your 'moral code.' How much of this moral code is socially constructed as opposed to or along with God's intention of a morality to exist? Are there universal truths? Is it universally accepted that murdering an infant is wrong? Might it be conceivable that God would somehow find a purpose to allow the murder of an infant to take place? I don't think it's conceivable to understand what God does, but I would find it conceivable to think that God has intentions far beyond our understanding.
Thus, there are things inherently limited of us, human beings, mainly in terms of our perception. Is it entirely possible that we human beings 'perceive murder' as a universally accepted truth to be wrong? This may be true because we have no concept of death.
Moving on, based on your argument thus far it may be even necessary to simply ask ourselves whether or not we can perceive of something we already know we cannot understand. Do we see taking someone's life as wrong simply because once that person no longer draws breath cannot then decide whether they wish to remain dead? At that moment they are now stripped of a inherent freedom to choose life. But, how do we know that a dead person after experiencing death wouldn't choose to remain dead? So, by taking a person's life we may without knowing it be giving that person an opportunity to leave this life for another.
If this is not the case, then argue me that we do not live in perpetual darkness.
Your are right that I did not define murder, and it is something that various people will describe differently. Dostoevsky's Ivan spoke of a child that was tortured to death.
And depending on how you define it certainly does affect what you might say about God's relationship to evil and whether or not it could even have a purpose. If there is murder then there must be a murderer and is that put on God?
But I think if you go beyond the case of the child that is tortured to death, or any other particular horror, the problem is simply that there is evil.
No matter what sort of murder we might use as an example (we could pick whatever definition we want from Bouvier... or anyone else), the question is still why God, if there is a God, would ever allow for such conditions to exist. It is hard to escape putting some sort of responsibility on him if he is the sovereign Lord of all things.
Going along with your comments about the moral code... I think that Ivan's argument still stands regardless of whether or not a person accepts any sort of universal moral law.
Even moral relativism implies that moral absolutism is wrong. So, if moral relativism is right, even at that point the question could be asked of why God would create a world in which moral absolutists exist and live in darkness.
But most people don't really think like that. Most live in terms of some absolutes. I think that is why we come up with answers to try to suggest that it might "be conceivable that God would somehow find a purpose to allow the murder of an infant to take place." That is what I was attempting to get at in pt. 2 it talking about Alvin Plantinga's "morally sufficient reason." Just the idea that it is conceivable to understand that much of what God does is inconceivable, but as long as he has a morally sufficient reason to do so, we need not worry about the problem of evil. If we are finite and he is infinite, then it is reasonable that we would not be able to perceive what the morally sufficient reason would have to be. I think Plantinga argues that we don't have to know.
To me it seems insufficient. It might be true, but if morality can be perceived (as Christians, and really most people, claim) then it can be understood. If morality is given from God, or flows from God, or reflects God, or whatever in connection to God, then why is it that there is this glaring discrepancy in that the one who can do all things has a world in which immorality exists? I think it is a fair question.
"Is it entirely possible that we human beings 'perceive murder' as a universally accepted truth to be wrong?"
I think that it is theoretically possible, but then the question simply becomes "why would God allow a world in which people could wrongly perceive that murder is wrong?"
Any kind of judgment that we make then allows for the question of why the opposite could exist. As long as we have categories of right and wrong, regardless of what is put in those categories, there is the problem of how the existence of the one category can be in light of the existence of an all-powerful being who is fully the other category.
[I wish the comment section was set up different...]
"If this is not the case, then argue me that we do not live in perpetual darkness."
I do not believe that is the case, and I do not believe that we live in perpetual darkness. But I do not believe that on account of any of the theistic proofs that are so popular among both Christian and theistic apologists. Really, I think those arguments all reveal how dark and muddled things really are. Perhaps they work for some, but they have not worked for me. But I do believe there is an answer to Ivan.
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