Board index ‹ Assorted Bible Questions

[Beef Eater]

Most Christians as I understand it believe that God has a perfect plan and all atrocities that occur on Earth are part of that plan and the justification is beyond human logic. But what will you do if you live a life for your Lord, die and meet him in Heaven and find that his justification simply is still not morally acceptable to you personally? Would you defy God in that moment and take your ticket to Hell for the sake of goodness or would you lower your own moral standards for your own benefit to continue on to eternity in Heaven?

[jimwalton]

> Most Christians as I understand it believe that God has a perfect plan and all atrocities that occur on Earth are part of that plan and the justification is beyond human logic.

No, we don't believe this. God knew we would sin, but all the atrocities that occur are not part of God's plan. The Bible is clear that Satan is the prince of the power of this earth, that things have gone terribly wrong, and that the world is out of balance and askew. There are many things that happen that are not part of God's plan.

Knowledge isn't causative. The knowledge of a thing doesn't make anything happen. I can be the smartest guy in the world (ha, wouldn't that be nice), but my knowledge could never cause you to do anything. Even omniscience doesn't cause people to do things. Only power forces people to do things.

God's omnipotence also doesn't qualify. There are many times he holds back his power or refuses to use it. He is selective with his use of power, so the atrocities that occur on Earth are not His doing.

Since your premises are incorrect, your questions at the end don't make sense.

[Beef Eater]

Firstly, as soon as you selectively choose not to know everything simultaneously you are not omniscient by definition. Secondly, the Bible explicitly says God is immutable which belies your argument that he modifies his presentation in any way. Finally, I've never actually heard a Christian say everything that happens is not God's will regardless of Satan's influence or not. And for clarity... you think naturally occurring atrocities like say cancer or an innocent accident are Satan?

[jimwalton]

> Firstly, as soon as you selectively choose not to know everything simultaneously you are not omniscient by definition.

First, I never said anything about selectively choosing not to know everything.

> Secondly, the Bible explicitly says God is immutable which belies your argument that he modifies his presentation in any way.

God's immutability doesn't affect that he has always chosen to use or withhold aspects of his power in various situations. God doesn't change in that he he always done it this way.

> Finally, I've never actually heard a Christian say everything that happens is not God's will regardless of Satan's influence or not.

Good. I'm glad you're finally hearing it. There's a lot that happens on this planet that is not God's doing. If it all were, then God would be responsible for Hitler, Stalin, the Rwandan genocide, and all sin and evil itself. It's not consistent with biblical theology to attribute everything to God. Even James 1 explicitly tells us that God does not tempt us to sin. Right there we have biblical proof that things happen here that are not God's doing.

> And for clarity... you think naturally occurring atrocities like say cancer or an innocent accident are Satan?

No, not at all.

[Beef Eater]

`So then some atrocities are God's will and Satan is more powerful than your God? Even if he is not, you are still creating a special pleading fallacy through a cruelty paradox of viewing lessor beings.....

[jimwalton]

> So then some atrocities are God's will and Satan is more powerful than your God?

No, and no. I don't understand where you got in anything that I said that "some atrocities are God's will."

"And Satan is more powerful than your God?" Absolutely not. I don't understand where you got that in anything I said.

> Even if he is not, you are still creating a special pleading fallacy through a cruelty paradox of viewing lessor beings.....

Please explain. I'm not special pleading anything. Fallacy? Cruelty paradox? I don't know where any of your comments are coming from, but they don't seem to be coming from anything I said.

[Beef Eater]

Your last sentence said you don't apply all atrocities to Satan. You are creating a situation where you are using special pleading to exempt God from the concept of cruelty. I'll make a parallel for clarity. Say I put together a fish tank, I have lots of nice fish in the aquarium and I take good care of it. I understand that relative to me, the fish are significantly less complex when it comes to mental processing. I know they fairly easily can be tricked by beings significantly more complex than they are.

Now lets say we have 2 situations running concurrently. Firstly, I have a little brother who likes to mess with my fish. He has a little contraption that flashes lights and if a fish investigates it, will be electrocuted blinding them. Secondly, my father decided to store a bag of chlorine on a shelf above the tank. Every day from just the natural jostling in the house, that bag slides a bit more towards the edge. I know that given enough time, the bag will fall in the water and kill 90% of my fish.

Now I as the fish owner can choose how to address these situations. In the first one, I am incensed that I would have some fish who would willingly go to the flashing lights even though I provide a glorious living environment so after they are blinded, I take them from the tank, scale them alive and then slow roast them over the stovetop, dip them in water to preserve their oxygen and repeat in perpetuity. I mean I knew full well that some fish would go to the flashing lights but I need to punish them for this quality which is core to their mental process. To the second point, I never move the chlorine bag. I could and save all the fish that can do nothing about it, but I won't. But I won't because if some of the fish survive by me saving them before they suffocate, they will appreciate my ownership more. The dead will be dried and put on a mantle above my bed to live with me eternally to show my love for them.

Now in both these cases I come across as monstrous and cruel. I am not directly the one who killed these fish, I am just "loving them" and their lives went according to what I knew would happen and planned to deal with. My brother was his own trickster entity, I do not control his actions and I was not required to move the bag. This is where your special pleading comes in. You would not hold your God to this same rational standard even though in your model you separate him from the situation in a similar way. If you as an owner were to protect your innocent fish from both these external influences, then you would be the moral superior to God in your situation. But the Bible by default describes him as loving and benevolent. So if you act like God to your fish, then you are cruel. If you act humanely, you become a moral superior to God hence the paradox.

[jimwalton]

> Your last sentence said you don't apply all atrocities to Satan.

Hmm. No I didn't. You asked, "you think naturally occurring atrocities like say cancer or an innocent accident are Satan?" And I answered, "Not at all."

Then you asked, "So then some atrocities are God's will and Satan is more powerful than your God?"

And I answered, "No, and no."

Natural "atrocities" are amoral, neutral natural occurrences that can't be classified as "evil" or "immoral". A tree falls; a volcano erupts (as it is in Hawaii right now). They are natural phenomena, not moral atrocities. "Atrocities" was your term, and I didn't accept it.

> You are creating a situation where you are using special pleading to exempt God from the concept of cruelty.

No I'm not. God didn't make the volcano erupt. These are natural cause-and-effect phenomena. It's science, pure and simple. There's nothing "cruel" about a volcano, tornado, earthquake, or any other natural occurrence. They are amoral events that are part of a dynamic planet.

I think we would all have to admit that the natural world is a dynamic environment, subject to variation and change, with a large number of systems (weather, gravity, water, land, wind) that interact, balance, and even depend on each other. Some systems seem to behave more randomly and chaotically (like the wind and land masses on fault lines), while others act more like order and purpose (the tides). It is within these two groupings that natural systems cause what people perceive as natural "evil" (tornadoes, fire, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.).

If you have ever tried to balance a salt shaker at a restaurant on one edge, or a chair on one of its four legs, you have discovered you might be able to succeed for a while, but eventually something (a jiggle, a breeze, or even your own movements) causes it to go off balance and fall. This principle was proposed by a meteorologist in the late 1960s who wrote a paper called, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" This thought was so significant we now know it as the Butterfly Effect. Even if we had delicate sensors in every square foot of the globe and its atmosphere, we would still not be able to faultlessly (100%) predict the weather. The "Butterfly Effect" would always be present to present a force we had not foreseen or a force we knew nothing about.

Our world seems filled with the "Butterfly Effect," not only the weather and geological phenomena, but even electrical impulses, the firing pattern of neurons in our brains, ecosystems, and the like. They behave occasionally in wild ways (the Zika virus, cancerous growths, plagues of disease). They also result in natural "evil," as previous mentioned. But "evil" is a misnomer. Unless they were purposely caused by a free agent, we cannot attribute the label "evil" to them because they are just natural occurrences.

Should God stop all of these phenomena from happening? Absolutely not. Such a dynamic world is essential for life as we know it. God would want to create this kind of world ( a dynamic one) if he were creating the best possible world. For instance, since both our circulatory system and nervous system are beneficial chaotic systems, there is strong scientific evidence proving that dynamical systems are beneficial to life. The heart can recover from occasional arrhythmias; the body can create new arteries; our brains can recover from some injuries because neurons can sometimes create new paths. Not only that, but if the brain were static, creativity wouldn't be possible. Natural processes (trees, snowflakes, clouds, shorelines, faces) couldn't produce novel outcomes.

While God might have created a static world, he would have at the same time eliminated all reason, creativity, and scientific inquiry. And if in his sovereignty he overrode all possibilities of evil, he would also be overriding all possibilities of good. As much as we detest suffering, this would not be a desirable world. Natural science, engineering, and education would be nonexistent; courage and excitement would be absent. Careful structural design would be meaningless (no earthquake or tornado would ever be allowed to hit a building, and God would stop any building from ever collapsing on a person). Medical arts wouldn't exist, since disease would never harm or kill.

Therefore, even an omnipotent God cannot make a dynamical world in which natural "evil" cannot occur. It is not only self-contradictory and absurd (He is incapable of both), but also ultimately intensely undesirable, if not impossible, as a form of existence. God can be loving and benevolent, and yet still have created a world that runs by scientific cause-and-effect.

[Beef Eater]

You literally just enforced my special pleading point by just making a longer version of the example I gave. In a nutshell, your God does not protect the innocent from abuses that he can easily intercede on; even worse he will allow and encourage the innocent to be abused and tortured to teach sinners to love him better. You're creating a special pleading fallacy because this would be considered cruel in all cases except for your God and instead of giving a demonstrable reason to do this, you use faith which is an unreliable pathway to truth and therefore does not create the reasonable exemption to escape the fallacy.

[jimwalton]

> your God does not protect the innocent from abuses that he can easily intercede on;

That's right, but you're incorrect to label it a special pleading fallacy. I have claimed nothing about God being exempt from the normal rules or ignoring aspects of the issue at hand unfavorable to theism or Christianity. Here’s the argument you’re suggesting:

1\. God exists

2\. God is believed to be omnipotent (all-powerful)

3\. God is believed to be perfectly good

4\. But evil exists, so we have a problem here.

OK, but these statements neither automatically create a contradiction or a special pleading fallacy. They may even be perfectly compatible. We won't know until we go deeper. What you seem to be saying is that the very existence of evil automatically contradicts any belief in the existence of God or the omnibenevolence of God. So you need to give me some evidence of that. I’m not sure you can, but I’m willing to listen.

Let's start here: we know that good is opposed to evil, but what you seem to be saying is that the REAL good always works to eliminate evil as far as it can. It's not necessarily so, and it doesn't logically follow.

When we say God is all-powerful, we are not claiming that there are no limits to what he can do. We ARE claiming that there are no non-logical limits to what He can do. We would say that there are things God can't do because they're not logical, such as, "Can God make a rock so big God can't lift it?", or, "Can God make a circle that is square?" These aren’t logical things, so we would never claim that God can do that. Therefore God being all-powerful doesn't mean he can do everything, including illogical things.

I don't agree with the idea that REAL good *always* works to eliminate evil as far as it can. For instance, we say that pain is evil ("your God does not protect the innocent from abuses that he can easily intercede on"), but wait a minute: when a doctor performs surgery, he causes pain, but he doesn't stop being good because he did that. As a matter of fact, the pain was part of the good he did, and you can't get rid of that "evil" without also getting rid of the "good" too. Right? So "good" and "protection from pain" aren't automatically contradictory. Same logic for humans and for God, therefore not special pleading.

Then, might you be saying it's only evil if it doesn’t produce a good that outweighs the evil? Well, but you've already admitted then that the existence of pain is not a contradiction to a person being good and allowing it.

OK, then. Maybe God is perfectly good only if he tries to eliminate every evil that he can without also eliminating a greater good? Bingo. God can be all-powerful and all-good, and certain evil can still possibly exist. That's what I’m saying, for sure. Sometimes suffering brings out the best in people, and they display nobility and courage in the face of it. Sometimes people get stronger by it, or learn important lessons. It’s very possible that good and evil together can be a good state of affairs. And that means that God can be all-powerful, and permit as much evil as he please without forfeiting his claim to being good, as long as for every evil he permits there is the possibility of a great good—as long as there is a balance of good over evil in the universe as a whole. That's exactly what the Bible teaches, so this isn't special pleading.

Just because God doesn't protect everyone from abuses doesn't mean God is not good. When we take your theory to the extremes, it doesn't hold up. What is the list of pain and suffering from which God will protect us? Just abuses, or also tragedies? Diseases? Accidents? Eventually God will have to take control of our bodies, negate the forces of nature, and even control our minds so that we don't hurt each other or get hurt by others. To what length do you expect God to go to steal away our humanity and negate science to protect the innocent from abuses?

All I’m saying is that it’s possible that God is perfectly good, and that God allows evil to exist in the world although he could prevent it. The point is there may be reasons he doesn't prevent it, but that doesn’t make Him not good.

But then you claim God even encourages the innocent to be abused. This is grotesquely false.

> You're creating a special pleading fallacy because this would be considered cruel in all cases except for your God and instead of giving a demonstrable reason to do this

I have not done this. It's a false accusation.

> you use faith which is an unreliable pathway to truth

I didn't even mention faith. Another false accusation. Where did this comment even come from?