withallyourmind.net

Michael Horton was asked what advice he might give to an evangelical who is considering becoming Catholic or Orthodox. I think his answer, found in this article, is right on:

Here’s how I would counsel such a person: Start with the gospel. The gospel creates and sustains the church, not the other way around. If the Evangelicalism familiar to you has been a constant stream of imperatives and moral exhortation, whether in rigid and legalistic or warm and friendly versions, the antidote is not to follow different rules for attaining justification, but a constant, life-long, unremitting immersion in the good news that Jesus Christ’s obedient life, death, and resurrection are sufficient even to save miserable Christians.

That is what the Reformation was all about, and it is why we need another one, even in Protestantism as much as in any other tradition. If our salvation depends on anything done by us or even within us by the Spirit, then our situation is hopeless.

Despite their own differences, Rome and Orthodoxy are at one in telling us in their official doctrinal statements that this message is wrong, not just in emphasis, but in the doctrine itself. According to Roman Catholic teaching, it is a serious error, heresy, in fact, to believe that we are accepted by God in Jesus Christ apart from any virtuous activity on our part and while we remain in ourselves actually sinful. Our meritorious activity must play some part in our final justification, according to both Rome and Orthodoxy.

One might hear more of God’s grace in the Mass or in John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith than in a month of Sundays in many Protestant churches today, even some of our own churches that are confessionally bound to teach otherwise. But in Rome’s official teaching, not to mention in its popular piety, the doctrine that we are justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, apart from any inherent righteousness, remains anathema.

HT: Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds

In my last post, I looked at the “external” version of the problem of evil and also showed how the problem of evil actually implies God’s existence.

If I have satisfactorily answered the objections to the existence of God on the basis of evil in the world from a philosophical perspective, this may be of little comfort to the individual enduring great suffering in life. This we call the emotional, or existential, problem of evil. Ronald Nash points to two books written by the great Christian writer, C. S. Lewis as illustrative of the differences between the philosophical, or theoretical approach, and the emotional approach to the problem of evil. Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain to address the theoretical problem of evil. After his wife, Joy Gresham, succumbed to her battle with cancer, he wrote A Grief Observed. These books demonstrate how each approach differs. While undergoing suffering, one may have little interest in philosophical arguments, but instead needs comfort. This comfort may come in the form of silent support and friendship or from Christian teachings which portray God, not as a distant or impersonal force, but as a loving Father who cares for us. The Christian God, in fact, entered into this world in Christ’s human body and bore the sufferings of sins of all humanity. Indeed, it is only the existence of God that makes any suffering bearable. If God does not exist, one’s suffering is meaningless. God himself, therefore, is the solution to the problem of evil.

The Christian worldview, it seems, provides the only answer to the problem of evil or even provides a framework within which to even speak of the problem of evil. The problem of evil for the atheist or the naturalist is that he really cannot speak of evil as a moral entity. Furthermore, he has a problem of good in that he cannot speak intelligently of good in the world. Naturalistic and atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell well described the world from the naturalistic foundation:

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.

He further describes the world from a naturalistic perspective:

That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of the unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

The Christian worldview makes sense of both good and evil. The atheistic one does neither.

The classic story for the examination of the problem of evil is the story of Job in the Old Testament. Job, after enduring intense suffering, encountered the God who had allowed the many evils to transpire in his life. Here is the story as told in Job 42:1-6 (Holman Christian Standard Bible):

Then Job replied to the LORD: I know that You can do anything and no plan of Yours can be thwarted.
[You asked,] “Who is this who conceals [My] counsel with ignorance?”
Surely I spoke about things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.
[You said,] “Listen now, and I will speak. When I question you, you will inform Me.”
I had heard rumors about You, but now my eyes have seen You. Therefore I take back [my words] and repent in dust and ashes.

In conclusion, I repeat that which was stated earlier: God is the ultimate answer for the problem of evil. When Job encountered God, he took back his words, realizing both his smallness and finitude and God’s greatness and infinitude.

A couple of days ago Ben Stein was on Bill O’Reilly’s show talking about his upcoming movie about the heavy-handed and unfair treatment of scientists who question Darwinism. The movie, due to hit theaters in February, is called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Here is the clip of the O’Reilly interview.

Thus far, we have considered the logical and probabilistic versions of the internal problem of evil. The external version of the argument differs in that the Christian is not admitting the truth of the premises (unlike in the internal argument). This version would claim:

1. If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
2. Gratuitous evil exists.
3. Therefore, God does not exist.

The Christian would not deny that evil exists; only that gratuitous evil does not exist. The key premise is number two. So, what warrant can be offered for the premise that gratuitous evil exists? In the preceding posts, I have already shown this assertion to be faulty. It has been said that one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. By this we simply mean that the above argument can be flipped to state:

1. If God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist.
2. God exists.
3. Therefore, gratuitous evil does not exist.

Before addressing the emotional problem of evil in my next post, one more very important consideration must be mentioned. Moral evil actually proves the existence of God. Any argument that uses the existence of evil proves the existence of God. It can be convincingly argued:

1. If God did not exist, objective moral values could not exist.
2. Evil exists, therefore objective moral values exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

This argument certainly does not explain why there is evil in the world, however, it does show that the existence of evil in the world, rather than disproving God’s existence, actually implies God’s existence. If one denies the existence of God, one must stop using the term evil in any meaningful sense.

In my last post in this series on the problem of evil, I discussed William Lane Craig’s first response to the probabalistic problem of evil - that is, given the amount and kind of evil in the world it is improbable that God exists. In this post I will briefly offer Craig’s other responses.

Craig’s second response is that we are not in a good position to assess with confidence that God has no morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil in the world. Humans possess inherent cognitive limitations when attempting to understand the workings of a transcendent being such as God. For example, it is foolish to conclude that an object does not exist when we only have access to a fraction of the total area in which the object might be found. Likewise, to conclude God could have no morally sufficient reason for allowing the evils he allows is equally foolish seeing that we cannot possibly know the mind of God. We are in no position to assess those possibilities.

Stephen Wykstra calls the assumption that because we can’t find any morally sufficient reason for God allowing evils in the world there is no good reason a noseeum inference, as in, If we don’t see ‘um, they ain’t there. Assuming that a reason is not there just because we cannot see that reason is only justified if it is quite likely that we would see the reason if it was there. The noseeum inference is not justified in the case of discovering the reasons an omniscient being might have for allowing evil in the world. Given the limitlessness of God’s intellect and the finitude of ours it is not surprising that we might not find the answer if it is there.

Thirdly, Christian theism entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and evil. If these doctrines are true, one should not be surprised to find evil in the world. One example of such a doctrine is that, from the Christian perspective, the chief purpose in life is not happiness. Christians hold that the chief purpose in life is to know God. If moral and natural evils are the means by which people are brought to know God more deeply, then it is not astonishing that these evils are present in the world. Another Christian doctrine which increases the probability of the coexistence of God and evil is the teaching that mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and his purpose. The Christian actually expects evil in the world, given this belief. Additionally, God’s purposes are not limited to this life, but extend beyond the grave into life everlasting. It may be that certain evils which seem so horrible in this world that seem gratuitous from our limited perspective serve great eternal purposes.

Eleonor Stump offers an excellent illustration of this principle by examining the Old Testament story of Cain and Abel. She states that God’s…

overriding concern must be to insure not that (his creatures) live as long as possible or that they suffer as little pain as possible in this life but rather that they live in such a way as ultimately to bring them into union with God.

Finally, Christian theists hold that the knowledge of God is an incommensurable good. The sufferings of this life cannot be compared with such knowledge. Given these considerations, it is not improbable at all that God and evil coexist in the world.

Next, a look at the external version of the problem of evil.

As you might have figured out, I’ve finally had a chance to catch up on browsing through some of the blogs I frequent. Here is a 90 second visual lesson on the spread of world religions. (HT: Between Two Worlds)

Here is a useful website called the Linked Word Project which links the text of the Bible to the Hebrew and Greek words with detailed information on the word from the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament and the Theological Word Book of the Old Testament.

HT: Smart Christian

Kevin Moore, at Worshipful thoughts, has linked to a set of notes on metaphysics by J. P. Moreland. They are found at STR here. They look quite good!

This is the fourth post in a series examining the problem of evil. In the last post, I demonstrated that there is no logical incompatibility in the coexistence of God and evil.

What about the probabilistic problem of evil? It seems, at times, that the world is full of so much pointless and unnecessary evil that it is improbable that God could have a morally sufficient reason for allowing them. Even if it is not impossible for God to exist given the evil in the world, it is at least highly improbable. It can be seen that this argument is much more powerful than the preceding argument from logical impossibility. The burden of proof is not nearly as steep given that the conclusion is more modest. Craig, in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, provides several responses to this probabilistic version.

His first response is that God’s existence is probable relative to the full scope of the evidence. He rightly points out that probabilities are relative to one’s background evidence. If the only evidence considered in evaluating God’s existence is evil, then perhaps God’s existence is improbable. However, there is much other background information which makes the existence of God highly probable. The cosmological argument argues that since everything that begins to exist has a cause and the universe began to exist, therefore, God exists. The teleological argument looks at the ever-increasing accumulation of evidence for design in the world and concludes there must be an intelligent designer of it all. The axiological argument examines the innate moral intuitions which all have and finds that the existence of a divine moral law-giver is necessary to make sense of morality. The fine-tuning of the universe cries out for explanation which is found in the existence of God. Additionally, other examples could be offered. The point is that when the entire scope of evidence is considered, even with evil in the world, God’s existence might still be considered highly probable.

Next, a look at a couple of more responses to this probabilisitic version of the problem of evil.

Although I think I’ve gotten a pretty good education so far, I’ve always been a little insecure and a little upset about the fact that I never got to read so many of the classic texts that have influenced and shaped Western culture and the world. My belief in the general importance of this, and the deeper importance for my case since I hope to be a philosopher and an academic, has led me to compare various lists of the “great books” and compile my own, which I hope to read through over the next several years. Although I may add or subtract a few works, my list can be accessed here. I welcome anyone else to use it and read along with me.