Morality and Reality: The Existence of God and Evil. (Of God's Love and His Logic Part 3)

This post hopefully takes up where the last Problem of Evil post ended.  We concluded with 3 ideas:
1. Morality is objective.  
2. Natural theories of morality do not give rise to objective moral systems.  
3. Divine Command Theory is a consistent, theistic moral theory allowing for and implying an objective moral system.  By this conclusion, we substantiate the claim that you must first presuppose God's actual existence in reality to even consider the moral value of the attributes that follow in this world.

From this point, we know that God must exist for there to be evil.  However, the question remains, "Even if God exists, how could he possibly be all-good (Omnibenevolent)?"  There are two matters which must here be considered.
The first matter is why God, in his perfect Justice, ever even allows our existence to persist.  In this way, the question then becomes, "how can God tolerate our heinous crimes and rebellion?"  Paul Washer explains it this way: 

 "God saved you from God. It was God who was arrayed in the armor and weaponry of a soldier. Coming after you. In His holiness, and His justice. God coming after you. To do vengeance against you. To cause you to pay for all that you have done against Him, and He is able to return His sword to the sheath now because Christ has died. Christ saved you from the wrath of an almighty God. Hell is just a revelation of that. I always tell people this. God saved you from Himself, God saved you for Himself and God saved you by Himself."

This first point doesn't answer 'why is there evil' but rather 'how does the presence of evil relate to God's perfect justice?'  Through our free choice, we've all sinned, as we explained in our "What is the Gospel anyway?" post.  By that sin, we are completely and entirely separated from God.  To be perfectly Just, God must punish wrong-doing.  How else would any wrong act that went unpunished be atoned for?  Through that lens of justice we can see that God would be and could only be perfectly just to punish each and every person for their respective transgressions.  However, we see action contrary to that conclusion.  In fact, He sacrificed Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only Perfect to ever exist, in order to perfectly atone for all of our wrongdoing.  By this means, Justice is preserved, and incredible, perfect love to humanity is shown.

The second matter is why does evil exist at all?  This question really can be answered in a number of ways.  With respect to human evils, it is sensible to understand them as actions according to our free will, especially in the beginning.  Having free choice is necessary.  The reason we were created was to exalt and glorify God, to love Him with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul (Matthew 23:27, etc).  Well it wouldn't be exaltation if we were mindless, forcibly coerced robots, would it?  Thus non-God options must exist.  Since God is the essence of Good, not-God is evil.  Thus evil is all that deviates from God.  God did not create evil, but rather his creation willed himself to do things against God's nature (satan) and thus a choice, too, was possible for humanity.  (and we chose wrong, all of us.)  However, Paul argues that when looking at life that evil is not even worth considering.  "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, ESV)

You as a believer may be thinking at this point, "Yes, it makes sense how God and evil can coexist, but how do I as a follower of Christ deal with the momentous pain of this life?"  This comes more to the problem of pain, which will be addressed soon, but for now here is a brief explanation.  Reread what Paul said: "So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal." (2 Corinthians 4:16-18, ESV)   

Lewis put it this way, "They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory."  This may seem like a cop-out.  But even Jesus was tempted and killed.  Surely that was bad.  Shouldn't we look at how he dealt with sin?  Since we are being conformed to his image, we should be becoming more like him.  The writer of Hebrews explains it this way:  "Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2, ESV)  Jesus was able to endure the scorn and pain of this life and the cross because he could see weight of glory which waited for him and us as his co-heirs.  In the end, this is how we learn to encounter and overcome evil. As we follow the example of our King, we can admit to the pain and scorn we sustain, but know that we are traveling to a better home and press on with confidence that our Lord has conquered. (John 17:14, Heb.11:14-16)


Disclaimer: Hey all, we just want to end every post with a reminder. These are our beliefs. We believe they are right and that’s why we believe them. It is not our goal to limit inquiry on these topics nor do we in anyway conceive our thought processes could always lead us to the right conclusion.  For example, we don't even agree about everything believed by the other. (Col 3:12-17)  It is our earnest hope this blog either helps or interests you, and we would love to discuss matters of questionable legitimacy or of great concern further.  As always, thanks for reading!!! Email theology.guys@gmail.com with any question, comment, or criticism whatsoever!

Grace and Peace,

Excelsior
Athanasius



P.S.  If one is particularly concerned with the existence of Natural Evil, please email us for our respective takes on dealing with this issue.  Specifically, Excelsior's account of the Problem of Natural Evil as explained by Molinism.  Molinism isn't necessarily correct, but it's explanation is (to some) consistent with Scripture and can give an account which satisfies the possible existence of an Omni-benevolent, All-Just God and natural evil.

The Problem of Evil - Does God Exist? (God's Love and His Logic Part 2)

What is the problem of evil?  It may sound like a big, impossible-to-understand philosophical question, but it can be simply stated, and once understood, answered.

There are a number of ways the Problem of Evil can be employed.  Some use it as an argument to show no such God (as the one described in Christianity) can possibly exist.  In this post, we aim to show that the Problem of Evil does not show that God cannot exist, but, in fact, gives us good reason to believe He does.  We will (in a subsequent post) further explain that there is no inconsistency between the Benevolence and Justice of Jesus Christ. 

One of the "four horseman of New Atheism" Daniel Dennet once remarked that the best way to establish a point is state the opposition's case as effectively as possible, almost having them remark, "Wow!  I wish I said it that well!" and proceeding to tear it apart piece by piece.



In this spirit, let us recount the famed "Problem of Evil."

     "One may suppose that God exists, an attribute to him the qualities of Omnibenevelence (all-goodness, James 1:17) and Supreme Justice.  Subsequently observing the world as is, this seems incredibly unlikely.  Everyday people are killed for qualities they are neither responsible for nor endorsing.  Genocide, rape, deadly, painful disease, and more, unimaginable atrocities exist, all in the presence of this "loving god."  Consider evils completely unrelated to human will: natural disasters, disease, and, perhaps most impeccably, the judgement of peoples for not believing in Christ as their savior (for they often live in situations and places that never hear, nor could they possibly be expected to believe something as crazy as a man's resurrection).  Is it just OR loving to allow such evils to exist.  Imagine, if you will, a world, just slightly better.  A world with, say, a cure for cancer.  Or perhaps a world where cancer doesn't exist.  The ease at which these "better" world are conceptualized implies, at a minimum, that the world is anything but "the best possible world."  These ideas, and more, beg the conclusion that no such God is possible to exist."

NOW the tearing.  This is an excellent time to reiterate the importance of presuppositions.  Many great Christian thinkers have noted that criticisms such as the Problem of Evil and ones like it beg the question of morality's existence.  You see, if there is no "morality" without God, how can one criticize God for being "immoral" or "unjust" if those very terms are meaningless without His defining and causing them to be?

The question, it seems then, is can morality exist without the existence of a just God?
The answer is, unequivocally, "there cannot exist and objective moral system without the existence of a just God."  Objectivity is the principle that an idea is unchanging based on the subject's interpretation; i.e. there exists things that are right and wrong.  If morality is subjective, then no act can be considered "right" or "wrong."  There would be no truth value to these claims, for each "subject" would interpret what is "right" by what is best for them given their situation.  You may be thinking, "this seems plausible, a morally relative world... Think about it, why can I judge another culture's practice just because of my experience?"  Interestingly enough, that rhetorical question is self-defeating.  For if one supposes morality is relative, what reason is their to prefer the benefit-of-the-doubt type thinking this relativist exhibits, as opposed to, say, me, who thinks it is perfectly alright for me to judge Lord's Resistance Army (think: Joseph Kony) as performing moral atrocities.  In a relative world, neither view is better, for "better" and other qualitative terms are meaningless.  In fact, carrying a morally relative world to its logical conclusion forces one to concede that there exists any merit for stopping or desiring to stop the Holocaust, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Rwandan Genocide, rape, child molestation, punching you in the face, etc.  If one has more power than another, and wills something so, then they ought to do it, for it is only as wrong as (and if) they perceive it to be so.

Again, I can guess what you're thinking.  That's a terribly obtuse mode of thinking.  Not only are we judging those attempting to be sympathetic in their understanding of others' opinions, but we're further implying that those particular people are implicitly supporting the destruction of a people for no reason in particular.  We express, as sincerely as possible, that this is not the case.  We know that these conclusions are egregious.  It is obvious you do not support the Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan, and yet both of these groups believed that what they were doing would make the world better and even save it from destruction.  In the world with no objective morality, there can be no judgement of these actions.  Consider with me for a moment the logical conclusions of such a world, a place where nothing is "right" or "wrong" but simply happens.  In such a world, the Nazis are no different from the Red Cross, and the KKK and AARP are equally moral.  In this world, there is no law, no morality, no hope of justice.  In short, it is an absurd world in which stable existence is impossible.

Our claim is that there cannot exist objective morality without God.  You may ask why can't a natural explanation give rise to an objective moral system?  In this regard, we have many examples of ethos, but we'll go straight to the top.  Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world's most prominent atheistic writer, claims, "life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."  Dawkins has, God bless him (and have mercy on him), taken Naturalism (the worldview in which all that exists is the universe and nothing else) to its logical conclusion.  Apart from intelligent and seemingly rational people subscribing to this atheistic view, it is not that hard to show how morality cannot be objective without God.  Objective, by definition, means "relative to a standard."  Humans, although relatively consistent in their morals (see Romans 2:13-15 for the reason) are all different, and therefore cannot function as such a standard of ourselves.  The standard cannot be the "societal optimum" as many suppose.  In such a system, morals are formed from social systems in order to organize peoples and improve livelihood.  This still doesn't warrant morals as "objective."  First, certain acts would be moral in certain time periods and immoral in others (like, for example, rape in societies that struggle to procreate).  Moral theories like Kantism (Immanuel Kant), Utilitarianism (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham), and Virtue Ehtics (Aristotle) are all either inconsistent for a number of different criticisms or, by definition, subjective. (we can explain why if there are questions)

Thus, we arrive at moral theories for God.  The best of these is Divine Command Theory.  Divine Command Theory, correctly formulated, consistently explains an objective morality in the world.  DCT explains God as "essentially good" meaning that in his perfection, it would be logically impossible to do something evil.  His nature subsequently becomes the standard by which we judge the moral goodness of actions.  In His creation of us, God made is such that "[we] show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while [our] conscience also bears witness, and [our] conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse [us]." (Romans 2). Thus we literally do make moral judgements based on innate principles, judging off the standard of God's goodness.  This explains why essentially no person thinks rape or child molestations is "right" or even acceptable behavior. 

For the sake of rigor, DCT's biggest criticism is the Euthyphro Dilemma.  Originally posited in Plato's Euthyphro, it questions the notion of God-defined principles.  Is an action "good" because it is moral by God's standard, or does the action align with God's standard because it is "good."  If the first is true, God could, hypothetically, ordain the slaughter of kittens as moral.  If the latter is true, God is unnecessary for moral action.  The flaw in this criticism is the first formulation.  The hypothetical is a ridiculous counterfactual, essentially formulated "if God is essentially good in all He does, could he ordain something as bad?"  Obviously, no.  Analyzing the axiom of DCT and saying it inconsistent by an illustration of Euthyphro's dilemma is purposefully contradicting the axiom, rather than actually realizing a contradiction. 

Conclusion: We have good reason to believe 
1. Morality is objective.  
2. Natural theories of morality do not give rise to objective moral systems.  
3. DCT is a consistent, theistic moral theory allowing for and implying an objective moral system.  By this conclusion, we substantiate the claim that you must first presuppose God's actual existence in reality to even consider the moral value of the attributes that follow in this world.

Hopefully, that makes sense to everyone.  If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for future posts; comment or email us at theology.guys@gmail.com!  Our next post will look at the problem from where we currently stand.  God and objective morality exist, but how can God and his objective morality be consistent with the world we inhabit?


God Bless!

Excelsior


Athanasius

God's Love and his Logic Part 1

In the church we often have a wrong mindset about how to deal with problems.

This comes many times from our inability to reconcile two seemingly impossible characteristics of God.  We believe that God is both the incredibly reasonable God of
Isaiah 1:18 who says "Come let us reason together," but also the God of 1 John 4:8 who tells us that "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love."

Over the next two weeks, we want to address the problems theological and apologetic related to this question.  Among the topics we'll be covering: The Problem of Evil, The Problem of Pain, Does God Love Everyone, and What was the point of Jesus death.  Today though, we will simply examine the incredible nature of God's love.

Because of the incredible magnitude of the Problem of Evil, etc, we aim to be rather rigorous in our explanation of both our understanding of God's love and the corresponding consistency with it and the presence of evil in the world.  This question of a loving and just God has plagued philosophers and thinkers for generations, so this is no small task.

We firmly believe that one cannot absolutely know the truth of God's existence, and can only be ultimately convinced through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  To many, the idea of God's existence, let alone a relationship with Him, may seem unprovable, untenable, or unimportant in conception at best.  With this in mind, we recognize each person has fundamental assumptions about the worldview to which they subscribe (i.e. Naturalism, Deism, Pantheism, Christianity, etc.).  Our contention is that the validity of a worldview is determinable by means of examining the consistency of the deductions that follow from a particular worldview's presuppositions.  Through this method we aim to show Christianity's superiority logically, so that each person can experience the love and confirmation of God's presence in their heart.  For Christians, our presupposition is the Word of God, or simply, the Bible.  Thus to address all problems evil, we must state the Bible's portrayal of God's Love and God's justice.  Because Scripture will function as our axioms, we will make continuous reference to this post in the following weeks.

God's love is the most incredible thing in and out of our Universe.  It is what gave birth to the Universe and knit us together as beings.  God's love is also seen as part of his Justice and vice versa. "Why boast of evil, mighty man?  The steadfast love of God endures all the day" (Psalm 52).  God's love does more than endure; it's of incredible power:
     So we come to know and believe the love God has for us.  God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.  By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgement, because as he is so also are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.  For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.  We love because he first loved us.  If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.  And this commandment we have from Him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:16-21)
This passage is rather self-explanatory about the purpose of and magnitude of God's love.  We love because He loves us, and by His love, we can abide in him.  There are great examples of His love as well.  The (in)famous John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son, so that all who believe in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life."  


Crash course in resurrection theology: we are all broken - separated from God in our original created nature - by our sin (Romans 5).  It is not necessarily a particular sin that separates us from God because all of sinned (Romans 5) and, more precisely, it is our very nature to sin (Romans 1).  We are unable to be reconciled by God by means of our works - that is, anything that we do - because of this separation ("but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear," Isaiah 59:2).  If we stopped here, life could not be a more depressing story.  There would be no hope.  How could a sinful creature look toward his creator?  However, this is not the end of the story.  His love for us is such that he refused to abandon us, and so by His grace we are saved ("For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them," Ephesians 2:8-10).  In order to punish sin, for God is Holy and Just, something needed done.  Our sin had to be paid for, but how?  In the Old Testament, God placed a symbol of this need.  Leviticus 16:6-10 details how a goat must be chosen, and that the High Priest will place upon it all the sins of the people for a year.  The goat will then be driven into the Wilderness and left to die.  This foreshadowing of our needed sacrifice is incredibly vivid.  (For more about Old Testament references, have patience.  We'll write on that later.)  Jesus is the scapegoat, the intercessor for our sin.  As He died on the cross, he carried upon himself all the sin for those would believe.  The holy son of God who never sinned was punished for our sin so we could be holy.  The theological term used for this is substitution atonement.  It is the idea that as Jesus died taking upon himself our sin, we receive his righteousness.  Because he was innocent, and died on our behalf, Christ rose again conquering where we never could have.  Thus, God's love and justice are both satisfied.  God has adopted all those who have faith in Christ's sacrifice as his sons and daughters. 


This is the story of his glory. We'll be make with more on it in a couple days



Soli Deo Gloria!

Excelsior

Athanasius

P.S. Sorry this post was late. Here are some sea turtles to make up for it.