This is the minutes to a Campus for Christ seminar on the existence of evil, suffering and God. The seminar was presented by Dr. Kirk Durston. I went to listen in hopes to pick up some apologetics material for the NNC workshops. He recommended that I check out William Lane Craig's website for apologetics questions.
Definition of God (by philosophy)
A being that is so great that it is not possible to be any greater. Maximally excellent.
Could it be that there is no God?
CS Lewis' (Christian apologist) arguments, summarized in Mere Christianity
- Universe seems to be cruel and unjust
- But how did I get the idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of what a straight line is.
- So evil is real? Evil is only real if there are objective moral law that are being broken. These moral laws must transcend societies and civilization. Where do these moral laws come from?
- Richard Dawkins: We are born selfish. To create a society of kindness and altruism, it must be taught, for human nature will not naturally lead to that. It is easy to see this, by looking at the news or following people around and listen to their thoughts.
- If there is no moral law, than evil is just a made up concept in CS Lewis’ mind
- Moral law is only useful to minds capable of performing moral deliberation, therefore a mind. You must also must be able to make decisions (free agent - ability to make decisions that is not influenced by other agents). Moral law must transcend time, so the consequences of breaking the law needs to be known in advance. But the only way that we would know the consequence ahead of time is if it’s from a being that transcend time. This being, then, must be perfectly good. Because if we say someone is not perfectly good, then there must be a perfectly good person that we are comparing any given person against. This is God.
- He must be all powerful (draft the law without influence) and all knowing (know the consequence of evil)
- The existence of moral law means God is interested in the moral behavior of humanity. But we all have violated the moral (God’s) law, we are all enemies of God. With this context, the message of Christianity makes sense (Jesus Christ)
- So atheism is too simple to explain all this. God must exist.
What should God permit?
Evil which God could have prevented without forfeiting some greater good or permitting some evil as bad or worse than the instance of evil being examined
- William Rowe (Atheist Professor of Religion)
Plantinga’s Free Will Defense
- The world contains free agent who can make decisions that are not determined by any antecedent conditions and who, for any decision, could have decided otherwise
- The actualize of a world “W” containing moral good is not up to God alone; it is also depends upon what the significantly free creatures of “W” would do if God created them and placed them in the situation “W” contains
- God might exist, given evil exist. But assuming that God probably doesn’t exist, considering the following:
- Situation 1: Fawn trapped in forest fire and undergoing several days of terrible agony before dying
- Situation 2: Young girl raped, beaten and murdered
- No good we know would be justified permit these situations. So Rowe argues that since we can’t think of justifications to permit these events, a good that could have prevented these events, must not exist.
- We tend to ignore events that do not have direct moral value. But these events could lead to events that could lead to moral events. Ie how Churchill’s mother fell asleep during Winston Churchill’s pregnancy, which lead to the creation of Churchill, who made major moral decisions in WW2.
- Worries from the above conclusion:
- Worry 1: Utilitarianism - happiness for the greatest number of people at the expense of the individual (so net moral value is positive). The solution would be the necessity of a ‘Judgment day’ that God would balance things out at the end and put a final end to evil
- Worry 2: Moral indecision - not sure the consequence of a moral intervention of someone else’s situation. The solution is that a free agent is only obligated to act on the basis of what that agent could reasonably be expected to know. We’re not omnipotent.
Should read:
- Butterfly Effect (apparently it's a book)
- Journal article: Kirk Durston, "The consequential complexity of history and gratuitous evil", Religious Studies, v36, pp. 65- 80
What is the point? If God knew we were going to mess up so badly, why even start the show? Or...if so much evil is the result of us misusing our freedom of choice, why does God permit it? Why not to erase free will so we do good all the time?
- God created us in His own likeness for the purpose of an eternal relationship. This requires that we have free will for the relationship to be meaningful. In example, I don’t want to program my computer so that it tells me it loves me regularly. That is meaningless.
Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.
- Revelations 3.20
- We massively underestimate the power and capabilities of humanity (Kirk Durston)
- We are created in the image and likeness of God, so nothing is impossible for us (Matthew 17). The world is where we determine our own eternal destiny
- A metaphor: AI androids
- Say we want robots with a lot of power, but also autonomous
- But what if they go bad? We’ll set up a training realm (with limited robotic abilities, so they don't do too much choas) for them and recommend them to follow a given moral code. They all go bad, but some decide that there is some merit in the code and reprogram their AI to follow the moral code
- So you collect the robots, deactivate all the robots that didn’t go for the moral code, and keep all the robots who follow the moral code and allow them to have their maximum potential
The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth's inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.
- Isaiah 24.5-6
- If you made the mess, you need to clean up your own room. It is not your mom’s job to pick up after you or to clean up your room
- So what if this world is training for the next one? Given the immense human suffering we have inflicted on one another in this world, in our mortal form, what would we be capable when we’re in our immortal form?
Q/A: How can God be omnipotent but humans still have free will?
- Omnipotent: Such a being is able to do that is logically possible (not necessarily impossible) to do
- It’s impossible to create a free agent where God can decide what he will do prior
- But since God is omnipotent, He can simply erase free will...
Q/A: Cause of evil could be from either God or the free agents in the world that God created. If God created the world to begin with, how could the creatures in it conceive evil?
- What is free will decision? There is generally rules governing a universe/thing. For example, if I buy a laptop, there is a proper way to use it. You generally don’t want to throw a laptop across the room or drop it in a puddle and still expect it to work.
- So a free agent in the world can chose to violate the rules. So is there a flaw with the free agent? But the definition of free agent is that any cause of the free agent’s decisions is completely from the free agent and not from prior influence
- One should note that evil is the absence of goodness (by Christian def)
- In Eden, why does the tree exist?
- In chemistry, we use catalyst to speed up reactions. The reaction will occur anyway, but the catalyst will help
- Durston suspects that the tree itself was not special. The tree was to test if humans would obey or disobey God or not. The tree was there to speed up this test. If the tree (catalyst) was not there, then the “Fall” event could’ve easily been something else, since if humans was going to be disobey, it could’ve been anything
Q/A: Existence of moral code
- If all humans are wiped out by aliens, is the purging of humans a bad thing? There must be a moral code that is higher than humans to enforce/endorse this code, since there is no more humans to defend against the purging of humans. This code must come from a higher being.
- But there is no logical argument that will prove God. The final step is a leap of faith. It is a two-layered thing.
Q/A: How could anyone justify events like 9/11?
- You and I are not in the position to know if God should/shouldn’t have prevented that event. We experienced the event, but don’t know the total impact of it. We would need to look at the impact of the event till the end of history and all the branches/consequences of event. We have no way of predicting how the net moral value would change if the event did not occur.
- Emotional problem of evil: You don’t want to explain this to someone who just had evil done to them. Even if God explained it to us, we might not be able to understand. As a result, Christians must take a leap of faith and have hope for the greater purpose.
- Conversely, for the atheist, the only reasoning is that “crap happens”.
Q/A: How can we compare different moral systems?
- There are certain principles that seems to be universal. Stealing, murdering, sleeping with your friend’s wife. If there is no objective moral law, some other society could just not think murdering or stealing is bad and you can’t do anything about it, as it is their culture. But if there is objective moral law, we can tell them that they’re wrong
- But the northern pike has NO moral law. They eat their young. Yet they thrive.
- Do you feel that there is an objective moral law?
Q/A: Do the free agents have inherent moral value?
What if the world got together and nominated you as “the loser”? But God came up to you and told you that He loves you? Then that matters more, since God is maximally perfect and valuable. So that matters more.
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