Board index ‹ God

[QJ Blu-jay]

What is god doing now?

[jimwalton]

• He is sustaining all of creation (Heb. 1.3)
• He holds all of creation together (Col. 1.17)
• He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free (Ps. 146.7)
• He is continually working to reconcile all things to Himself (2 Cor. 5.19)
• He is continually working to draw all people towards Him (John 12.32)
• He is reconciling people to Himself (2 Cor. 5.18)
• He gives appropriate spiritual gifts to people (1 Cor. 12-14)
• He indwells His people and His Church (Eph. 2.22)
• He listens to and answers prayers (many, many many references)
• He is seeing His plan of salvation through to its conclusion.
• He is revealing Himself through His creation and to His creation.

[Druid]

I don’t believe there is a god but if there was, it appears he/she: is allowing war to ravage nations, allowing children to get cancer, ignoring the pleas of the homeless/less fortunate, allowing natural disasters to rip apart infrastructure/kill large amounts of people, not stopping greedy and evil politicians from screwing over people.

I suppose you will argue we have free will and god doesn’t intervene with the course of the world. Which one is is? Does he/she have the power to stop it but chooses not to? Or does he/she not have the power to stop it?
So either god is evil or he is not powerful?

[jimwalton]

Wow, so you have changed the subject completely. The question was, "What is God doing now?", and you've changed it to "So either god is evil or he is not powerful?"

Actually, this question has been dealt with hundreds of times through the millennia. I hope that if you're sincere about asking this question you have at least done SOME research and reading into the matter. I'll assume you haven't done any study, or you wouldn't have asked the question.

The question boils down to some salient points:

1. (from Plantinga) Evil accuses that theistic belief is self-contradictory, and that the problem of evil forces the theist to decide which relevant propositions he must abandon: (1) God exists; (2) God is omnipotent; (3) God is omniscient; (4) God is wholly good; (5) Evil exists. The first point to note is that these five propositions do not by themselves formally entail a contradiction. Something must be added for that. If a statement is added, it must necessarily contradict all five of the statements above, and all five of the statements must contradict it. No one has yet succeeded in producing such a proposition.

2. Natural evil must be distinguished from moral evil, because natural evil (disasters) aren't "evil" at all. Wind is not evil, neither is the ground.

3. God's omnipotence doesn't mean there are no limits to what God can do. That's not how ANYONE defines omnipotence. There are many things God can't do, like be evil or be self-contradictory.

4. God's goodness doesn't follow your sensibilities and your sense of logic. You're not the standard of goodness or wisdom.

5. The world is more complex than you are able to master. It's presumptuous of any of us to act as if we have all understanding to unravel all mysteries, and therefore we alone can be the standard of what is logical, practical, or good.

6. A dynamic world is not only superior to a static one, but is also necessary. It is necessary for all creation to be in flux. For God to stop all bad things from happening would also require that He stop all good things from happening, which is not an ideal state of affairs, nor even desirable.

7. Evil has a role to play. Good and evil can coexist as a desirable state of affairs as long as good outweighs evil in the grand scheme of things. This is exactly what the Bible teaches. Movie writers, the novelists and philosophers of our day, realize this truth even though they write fiction. The character Qui-Gon Jinn, in Star Wars I, said, “Greed can be a powerful ally.” In The Matrix movie trilogy franchise, when Neo visits the architect of the Matrix he discovers that anomalies are a necessary part of the computer program, and without them the system would fatally crash. The Hunger Games, like Snowpiercer, shows the relentless cycle of evil and good in the rising and fall of one administration after another and how the entity of good and the lack of good in what we call evil are both necessary for the persistence of life.

8. God can make use of evil without being personally unjust.

A sort of summary:

1. God cannot stop evil because that action would cause us to cease to be human. It would steal way all the characteristics and qualities that define us as human beings, including our free will.

2. God cannot stop evil because that action would also stop good.

3. God cannot stop evil because a dynamic world is better than a static one and is the only way life can function.

4. God will not stop evil because evil has just as much to teach us as good does. Some of the best things we ever learn can only be learned through suffering.

5. Therefore God is not cruel, less than omnibenevolent, or less than omnipotent to allow evil.

[X-Men]

What does innocent children dying gruesome deaths in wars teach us or them, what is the benefit of such an occurrence, pray tell?

[jimwalton]

"Pray tell"? I can see the smirk.

We know that some evil and suffering actually accomplishes some good, because there are times when suffering brings out the best in people. In the face of suffering and evil we may see love, caring, compassion, nobility and even courage. Sometimes people get stronger because of the pain and suffering, or learn important lessons that could not be learned in any other way. To illustrate my point, Phil Yancey writes, "Bishop Desmond Tutu, in South Africa, sat through the hearings of the crimes that whites committed on blacks in the name of God and the government. Yet after two years of listening to such horrific accounts, Bishop Tutu came away with his faith strengthened. The hearings convinced him that perpetrators are morally accountable, that good and evil are real and that they matter. Despite relentless accounts of inhumanity, Tutu emerged from the hearings with this conviction: 'For us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that laughter and joy, and compassion and gentleness and truth, all these are so much stronger than their ghastly counterparts.' … The tragedy in Newtown, CT, in December of 2012, tells a [similar kind of] story. There was an outpouring of grief, compassion, and generosity. ... There were acts of selflessness, not selfishness: in the school staff who sacrificed their lives to save children, in the sympathetic response of a community and a nation. There was a deep belief that the people who died mattered, and that something of inestimable worth was snuffed out on December 14."

If you've read any of the works of Alexander Solzenitzen, he tells similar stories. He talks about the courage, hope, and even spiritual life that came out of the Gulag in Soviet Russia.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that all suffering has this "good" side. My points were as I wrote them in my post.

[X-men]

I was having an expression of slight discomfort instead of a smirk in reality.

Instead of answering my straightforward question you gave me unrelated arguments and examples. Can you answer my question please?

Another question: What is an example of something that we can ONLY exclusively learn through suffering?

[jimwalton]

What's the question you want answered? Is it "What does innocent children dying gruesome deaths in wars teach us or them"? One thing that teaches us is to not be so barbaric as people. Another thing it teaches us is that selfish, proud, power-hungry people destroy innocent lives. Another thing it teaches us is that stupidity is contagious. It teaches us that if we only care about ourselves we can easily destroy the next generation. It teaches us that war really has no victors—it hurts everyone. It teaches us that there is a justifiable response of force that is sometimes necessary to stop violence. It teaches us that all that is necessary for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing. It teaches us that good can overcome evil if enough people get involved.

> What is an example of something that we can ONLY exclusively learn through suffering?

How painful a hot stove is.

[X-Men]

Do you genuinely believe that without so many children dying in wars people wouldn't know that such simple immoral concepts as what you've listed are, in fact, immoral? Can you not be taught such things without wasting innocent lives? Makes little sense to me.

I know that a hot stove is painful and I can relatively compare it to other types of pain even though I have never touched a hot stove, so what does it teach exactly?

[jimwalton]

You are not understanding. I didn't say suffering and pain were given to us so we could learn something good from it, or for our benefit. I said that despite the horror of suffering and pain, there were sometimes benefits that come from them. There's quite ai difference between the two ideas.

God's goodness doesn’t require that He eliminate evil at every opportunity. Every parent knows that sometimes the only way to get a splinter out of a child’s finger is to cause him or her pain in the process. Every doctor or oncologist knows that surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and even amputation at times are the path to healing. We know from our observation of parents and physicians that a moral being can not only allow pain but sometimes even cause it as the path to ultimate good. In other words, some evils cannot be eliminated without also eliminating the greater good. This would be true of pain perpetrated by a moral agent as well as suffering allowed by a moral agent. Allowing the evil to stand is at times the only way to arrive at the greater good. Therefore we can conclude that “good” and “pain” are not automatically contradictory, that moral beings can allow and even cause pain (with a beneficial and moral intent), and therefore there is no contradiction between the existence of evil in the world and the existence of a good and all-powerful God.

> I know that a hot stove is painful and I can relatively compare it to other types of pain even though I have never touched a hot stove, so what does it teach exactly?

You don't necessarily have to touch a hot stove to learn the pain of it; we are able to learn from the mistakes of others. But someone is burned along the way, and we all learn from that. That's all I'm saying. You asked, "What is an example of something that we can ONLY exclusively learn through suffering?", so I gave you an example.