pez@mit-eddie.UUCP (Paul Zimmerman) (10/25/86)
[This article showed up with a subject "subject varies according to context." This appears to be added by some news system. If you submit things other than by directly mailing them to topaz!christian, you might want to tell me what title you intend. Otherwise, I'll make one up, or reject the article if I can't figure out what it is about. --clh] Jim Baranski wrote an article describing his problems with my views on God. He holds certain premises which I take issue with, and I will attempt to clarify my reasons for taking issue with them here. Jim feels that, since God ultimately ``created each human,'' this gives Him the right to use us as He pleases. I fail to understand this premise at all. I drew the analogy of God's relationship to humans in general as compared to a parent's relationship to a child, and showed that, just as most reasonable people would agree that it is wrong for parents to feel that they can use a child merely because they are his parents, it is equally wrong to assert that God can use humans as He chooses simply because He is God. Jim takes issue with this, claiming that He ``has the power and right to order our lives as He sees fit FOR OUR BENEFIT.'' In turn, I take issue with Jim's claim. First, I don't see how God's creating us (and I take issue with the ultimate truth of this as well, but that's another matter) gives Him this right. Furthermore, Jim uses the words ``for our benefit'' to describe how God is supposed to exercise this power and right. But certainly He has deliberately exercised it in other ways, to HIS ends and benefits, in fact, AGAINST our own benefit, to our detriment. For example, He deliberately instigated race hatred at the Tower of Babel, fomenting divisive groupings of people who had until then worked together, simply because they were working towards finding out more about Him! He slaughtered people and destroyed cities just because they interfered with His plans for Himself. The fact that He exercises His power against us proves His evil intent and nature. You also say that ``the reason that none of us has the right to judge God, is because none of us *knows* the *whole* story, except God. The only people with the right to judge a person, are God, and the person herself; and the only one with the right to Condemn, is God.'' You seem to take everything God says as true, and this of course is a great mistake. You would doubtless question the wisdom of someone who believed everything that Hitler said, everything that Nixon said, everything that their parents said, everything that any particular person did. Yet YOU accept at face value everything that God says! Think about that! If I am right about the nature of God, you have been doing much the same thing as someone who blindly accepted the words of people like Hitler and Nixon. But what is your ``proof'' that God is NOT that way? His own word! That puts you in an ethical bind, because your only proof of God's trustworthiness is His claim that He is trustworthy. To claim that the solution is simple and cut and dried, that it is obvious that God is simply the ultimate good and not worth questioning, is a philosophical nightmare. It seems to me that, given the way indoctrination towards belief in God takes place, the way it parallels the nature of fascist brainwashing that ``teaches'' citizens that the state is always right and never should be questioned, coupled with the way God behaves (and proudly boasts about it all in the Bible), we can come to no other conclusion other than God being evil. Even if God was the only one who ``knew the whole story,'' why does that give Him the right to do what He wants? You are assuming that omniscience and omnipotence can only be present where there is omnibenevolence, or else you are equating the former to the latter. But that's not necessarily true. Jim, you seem to misinterpret my points about ``sins of omission.'' We are often condemned for our sins of omission, for our failure to do good where we could have done so, according to the Bible. We are scolded by others for this behavior, this failure to do good, where ``good'' is often defined by the scolders. Yet God often deliberately fails to do good. Where is HIS punishment? Why isn't He as accountable for His sins as He would hold us to be? I have to wonder what motivates people who believe in the benvolent God to rationalize so elaborately and extensively for God and His behavior. Out of nowhere, you state that you ``don't feel like getting into the Salem witch Trials, as they have little to do with God, or Christianity.'' I and others before me have shown that the attitudes that led to the murdering of people by God whorshipers are rooted in the religion. I contend that God deliberately foments such hatred of those who are different for the purpose of creating an atmosphere of violence. But whether or not you agree with that, certainly the religion itself has taught people to fear and hate those who are different. Certainly this is a crucial issue regarding the nature of God and religion. If God deliberately foments race hatred and violence towards other groups of people than your own, while at the same time He tells each of the various groups of people the same story, that THEY have got it right and the others are misled, then we have on our hands a God worth despising. Certainly you are free not to discuss this issue if you do not want to, but please don't claim that your reason for not doing so is based on the issue not being related to God or Christianity. --- Be well, Paul Zimmerman (pez@mit-eddie.UUCP, pez@unirot.UUCP) [I do not want the entire, unedifying discussion between Christians and maltheists to restart on this group. However the above is a moderate restatement of an issue that I think is a serious one for anyone who takes God's responsbility for the world seriously. I advise anyone thinking of responding to pause very carefully to consider whether you are dealing with the real issue, which I take it is the basic one of theodicy: If God is responsible for the world, why is there so much evil in it, particularly among God's followers and in things that God is reported to have done or commanded others to do. By the way, in any future submissions, I will consider the word "whorship" to be a misspelling and correct it, unless someone can give me a definition that does not turn it into an ad hominem attack. I do not, as I have said before, accept submissions containing ad hominem attacks. --clh]
manis@ubc-cs.UUCP (Vincent Manis) (10/27/86)
It may be presumptuous of me as a non-Christian to post to this newsgroup, but I felt I had to reply to the posting which discussed God's fomenting of racial hatred. [There is no requirement that authors must be Christians, just that the subject matter must be relevant to Christianity. --clh] Anyone who accepts the principle of God's omnipotence is indeed driven to see God doing evil things, ranging from the confounding of the builders of the Tower of Babel through the Holocaust to the spreading of AIDS. All of these miseries are the work of God or God's creations, and surely an omnipotent, loving God would act to stop these. One possibility is that God does these things for some greater good. For example, God afflicts a baby with Down's syndrome so that its parents can learn to love. God does not prevent a drunk motorist from killing a fourteen-year old girl so that her sister can repent of her alcoholism. God gives a gay man AIDS to punish him for his violation of the Law as expressed in Romans. This view of God as a utilitarian is internally consistent, and has widespread, if selective, approval. Yet I personally find it so repulsive that I would rather not believe in a God at all than to believe in one who would choose to kill a million Kampucheans in order to demonstrate the evils of totalitarianism. The only other alternative has to be that we must deny God's omnipotence. God would prevent evil if it were possible, but for reasons both within and beyond our understanding, God is unable to do so. This then imposes a tremendous obligation upon us not only to take responsibility for our actions, but also to accept those situations where grief and pain occur unavoidably, and to call on God for help in enduring such situations. A non-omnipotent God is one who needs our help: in making ourselves one with God we attempt to determine as best we can the nature of good and evil, and we endeavour to choose the good. Sitting back and waiting for God to act is guaranteed to fail; not because "God helps those who help themselves", but because God *cannot* help someone who chooses not to act. Now, once I reconcile this with the Book of Job, I'll really have something...
public@wheaton.UUCP (Calvin Culver) (11/02/86)
[This is in response to the two postings that accuse God of being evil because he allows or causes so much evil in the world. I am omitting the specific quotations --clh] This is known in philosophical circles as the Problem of Evil and has been an argument against the existence of the Christian God for hundreds of years. Humbly, I would like to provide what to my mind seems to be an adequate response to the problem. However, I am not very good at organized philosophical discussion ad lib, so please bear with my ramblings. The traditional argument runs something like this (please, anyone, correct me where I'm wrong; it's been a long time since I had philosophy of religion): A: God exists, and is omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent. B: Evil exists. C: The existence of evil and an omnipotent, omniscient, omni-benevolent God and evil are incompatible. Therefore D: God does not exist (since evil obviously does). This is not the most eloquent expression of the problem but I think it'll do. For the purposes of the argument A is assumed. B is obviously true (unless you're a gnostic) so we won't argue that one either. The argument thus focuses around C, and runs something like the following: An omni-benevolent being always, within its power and knowledge, performs that act which produces the greatest good. God is omni-benevolent, therefore, he always, within his power and knowledge, acts for the greatest good. Now, in here somewhere comes the discussion of what is meant by "acting for the greatest good". For us mere mortals this brings to mind images of weighing alternatives to see which produces the greatest good (or alternatively prevents the greatest evil) and performing that alternative. For example, lets say I am a life guard at a public beach. Suddenly, before my eyes, three of the swimmers begin to drown. Of the three, two are fairly small (I could hold both of them in my grasp at once) and, in addition, are located nearby one another. The third swimmer, however, is physically larger and is located off by himself, away from the others. What do I do? I cannot rescue all three and must therefore let at least one drown. Conceivably, my choice would be to rescue the two and let the one drown as this would be doing the greatest good (saving two lives as opposed to one) or preventing the greatest evil (the drowning death of two individuals as opposed to one). An evil has still occurred (a person drowned) but I can still claim to have done good by rescuing the two. I have done all I could within my power (I could not be both places at once and in any case was not physically capable of rescuing all three even had they all been in the same location) and knowledge (no technique was known to me by which all three could have been saved. Perhaps one existed but I did not know about it). But, this sort of argument cannot apply to God since he is omnipotent and omniscient; that is, nothing lies outside his power or knowledge. (That is, nothing which is logically possible. Arguments such as Can God build a rock so large that even he couldn't lift it? don't count because they set up logically contradictions.) Therefore, claims of God allowing some evil in order to prevent a greater evil don't seem to work here, as it should be just as easy for him to prevent both evils as to prevent just one or the other, shouldn't it? Therefore, since part of the definition of omni-benevolence is that the being always acts, within the limits of his knowledge and power, to produce the greatest good or to prevent the greatest evil, and, since evil obviously exists, we are left with only three possibilities. Either God is not omniscient (evils occur, not because God doesn't desire to prevent them; he just isn't aware of them), or he is not omnipotent (he desires to prevent all instances of evil; it simply is not within his power to do so). Or, if he is both omniscient and omnipotent, then he cannot be omni-benevolent. One traditional Christian defense to this argument has been called the free-will defense and runs something as follows: A: God created man with free-will. B: Free-will involves the ability to make moral choices of one's own (by definition), that is, the ability to choose rightly. C: In order to be able to choose rightly, there must also exist the possibility of choosing wrongly. Therefore (sorry, I can't seem to come up with a nice, neatly packaged D), moral choice must include at least the possibility of choosing wrongly, and in fact much (Christianity says *all*--with one significant exception) of humanity *has* made wrong choices. It is these choices which have resulted in much of the evil which exists (man's actions against other men, against himself, and against the rest of nature) as man continues to make wrong choices. That is, man himself is responsible for much of the evil which exists, not God. As for the three propositions A, B and C, it seems to me that A is obvious (at least, if you're not a fatalist, it's obvious that man has free-will; the bit about God creating man is assumed here). B seems to be true by definition. C also seems to be intuitively obvious (after all, if someone gave me a choice of ice cream flavors consisting of vanilla, vanilla or vanilla, I can't really be said to be choosing my flavor; thus, I can't really be said to be *choosing* rightly if that's the only choice I've got). There are a number of choices that could be (in fact, have been quite frequently) raised to this. First, it might be said, this is all fine and dandy, but since God is omniscient he must have pre-known before he created anything that man was going to make wrong choices. So why did he still choose to create? Doesn't this still make him responsible for man's actions? I would respond that it does not, and would argue as follows: my wife and I decide to have a child. However, I know right now that any child I produce will at some time in his or her life make wrong moral choices (if anyone knows how to raise a kid who doesn't e-mail me!). Does this make me responsible for my child's mistakes? We don't seem to hold that this does (at least not after the child attains a certain age of responsibility). Each person, we believe, is responsible for his or her own choices. In the same way, God cannot be held accountable for his "children's" errors. Again, it might be argued, God pre-knows what each person is going to do, what choices each individual is going to make before he or she makes that choice. Why not, just before the individual makes the choice, pull a few magic strings and cause him to make the right choice? But then how can it be said the person has free choice? Or, instead, wait until a person makes a wrong choice, *then* reach down and prevent him from acting on that choice in order to prevent the evil that is going to be caused by the choice. But again, it's hard to see how the person could be said to have free choice under such circumstances. Again it has been argued (and this was the argument that I found most convincing), if God pre-knows each person's actions then why cannot he simply look into his crystal ball at the set of all possible individuals that he could create, determine which of all those individuals would only and always, by free choice, make only the right choices, and then create only those persons who would choose rightly? Thus, the world is such that all human beings will freely choose rightly. The response to this (as proposed by Alvin Plantinga) is simply "Maybe there aren't any." That is, maybe God looked in his crystal ball and couldn't find even one of all the possible persons he could create who would always choosed rightly. This discussion is obviously flawed in several ways. First, it only discusses those evils which man himself perpetrates. It says nothing about "natural evils"--those which are not caused by man, such as a fawn suffering and dying horribly in a forest fire, or a sudden wind shear throwing a jet to the ground, killing dozens of people, for example. That is another discussion entirely, and this is already terribly long. In addition, it is not thorough. Many objections more could be raised to the arguments I have made here. I have simply discussed the more common objections raised. I hope, however, that this will generate further discussion (at least from those who have persevered and read this far). Well, thanks for bearing with me. --calvin culver--