Hulver's site || Comments || Oil changes, Dranges, Fortress America, Losing My Religion

maybe I'm missing it by sasquatchan (2.00 / 0) #1 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 02:43:10 PM EST

Is the short answer of: free will, sin, and man's break from God (the three go hand-in-hand), not sufficient to answer/reconcile (to a believer) the problem of a holy God and evil in the world ?

Words of faith are nonsense to a non-believer, so that audience would never be happy with any answer given to the question.

yes and no by gzt (2.00 / 0) #2 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 03:12:25 PM EST

On some level one really can be satisfied to just wave one's hands and say, "I freely choose evil and this freely chosen evil of mine contributes to the suffering of the world and forcibly removing the possibility of doing that would do violence to who I am." Or rephrasing the "problem" of evil as, rather, the knowledge that being, as such, is Good and that we are somehow estranged from this ontological goodness, and this difference between essence and existence isn't a reason to doubt that being, as such, is good, but rather to seek a return to the fount of Being [that broad arc is pretty ecumenical, but the Christian version is that God made the earth and called it "very good", but man rebelled against God and the goodness of His creation (seeking rather death and nonexistence), and so God became man in order that man might be united to Him again]. And that's fairly satisfying on most levels, certainly enough so that the skeptics' question isn't the one keeping me awake at night, but rather the existential questions. But you really do have to be able to say something to them, you know? There's a conversation, and to shut it up there is essentially the same as replying to any prodding with, "Thus saith the Lord." I suppose, in the end, any conversation will eventually have to find its way to that point, but, well, it's best not to lead with it.

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my only nit by sasquatchan (2.00 / 0) #4 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 03:29:26 PM EST

would be with "freely choosing evil." It may be trite, but the difference between a saint and a sinner is the saint knows s/he is a sinner, and the sinner thinks s/he is a saint. Paul understood that well, "wretched man that I am," and the vicious tongue twister of "...do what I don't want to do..."

But in re-reading you reply, I'm not sure this still addresses the existential question. But, back to the sidebar comment: if someone doesn't follow/believe in God through Christian norms, how can there be a conversation about it ? The two parties would be coming from different, non-connecting ends, no ? Or, if from a side that has faith, faith is not blind, for blind faith is not faith. And I'll diss Twain, faith is not "believing what you know to be false."

Maybe I'm not curious enough in those areas. I'll call intellectual laziness in some matters of theology (eg eschatology doesn't worry me much at all, yet plenty get worked up over it, but even then there's answers in it to these questions)

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: continued by gzt (2.00 / 0) #5 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 04:16:13 PM EST

There is some evil that is, for some definition of "freely", freely-chosen, in the sense that, by God, I know this is wrong, I know that I can avoid doing this wrong, but I'm just going to do it anyway and damn the torpedoes. We can argue about "bondage of the will" and "slavery to sin" and what-have-you, but there are surely enough instances of flat-out disobedience that one can call some as freely-chosen as what colour socks I wore today. St Paul's a far-better man than most of us who struggle with the slightly easier problem of wanting to do the wrong thing and then succeeding at doing it.
Well, I would also add that having a conversation or argument about the existence of God as such is a slightly silly thing, as though God were an object in a universe of objects whose existence can be determined like the existence of some hammer. It's just the wrong question to be asking. But I would just say that the strongest faith is in constant internal dialogue with skepticism of sorts (viz Mother Teresa for a popular example) and so would have something to say from that shared experience. For the Christian, Christ is the end of all existential ambitions, and the questions of the skeptic, properly phrased, are underlied by existential ambitions which find their end in Him. Not everybody will "deal" with these sorts of things so not everybody has to be concerned with them. St Paul was all things to all people, but you are you and I am me.
As a side note: most of what passes for eschatology is chicanery and idiocy. Pretty much everybody agreed on all the salient stuff (which is very light on detail, delving into detail generally being discouraged because of the spottiness of the material) between the years, oh, 500 and 1800. The variety of teachings is simply a case modern American Protestant bozos (as opposed to other modern American Protestants) being weird.

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that depends on how each of those are framed by lm (2.00 / 0) #3 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 03:19:40 PM EST

Drange's argument, assuming I understood it and recall it correctly, is that the Bible has many situations where God was willing to infringe upon the free will of men to a greater and lesser extent for example, in killing off those intent on doing harm to the tribes of Israel. Killing someone, after all, is a direct violation of the will of a person unless they are willing to die. Hence, he argues that God's unwillingness to violate free will in the same manner today suggests that, while capable of reducing the amount of evil in the world today, God is unwilling to have done something such as dropped a meteor on Hitler at an early age so as to avoid the holocaust.

Another approach Drange takes is advocacy of superior genetic engineering. It is possible, he argues, for God to have designed DNA such that cancer would not exist in human beings and, consequently, millions of human being would not have met premature deaths.

Drange seems to be following the notion that `if it is possible in thought, it is possible in actuality.' He doesn't explicitly say that, however, and I've not read closely enough to determine if that is one of his implicit premises. But it certainly seems like it is. If so, I think he tries to get off the train before it reaches the station so to speak. Another problem is that he doesn't really address whether or not his suggestions would actually make the world a better place. It's possible after all, that killing Hitler at a young age would have resulted in something far worse than the holocaust, perhaps involving the wholesale slaughter of billions rather than millions of Jews.

Which is why I'm interested in criticisms of Leibniz-style optimism. Hopefully, there is something better than the satire of Voltaire that doesn't really address the underlying issues so much as it mocks the idea with no real substance. Without a good argument that situation L is possible, I don't think the arguments against God from evil has a very firm conclusion.

There is no more degenerate kind of state than that in which the richest are supposed to be the best.
Cicero, The Republic
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: Criticism by ucblockhead (2.00 / 0) #7 Thu Apr 10, 2008 at 06:36:12 PM EST

My criticism of Leibniz is it essentially throws up its hands and claims ignorance. In the end, it asks us to assume an infinitely good God while simultaneously denying us even the possibility of using evidence to test this assumption.
It's not much different from "you can't prove God does not exist." Technically true, but not, I think, very useful. Leibniz gives a way out in that you can use "mysterious ways" to leave open the possibility that an infinitely good God might have His reasons that we do not know...but that only blocks at the level of complete proof. It does not mean we can't ask why the hell so much bad stuff happens to good people and use that as evidence that an infinitely good God does not exist. It just means we can't use it as absolute proof.
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