This post is a continuation of my last one. This part discusses Christian responses to Japan's earthquake that I think we as Christians shouldn't give.
Free Will
Another influential response Christians have often given is the free-will argument. This argument has a certain dignity in the Christian tradition because of its long history, going back to the church fathers. Many people find this argument persuasive, and even philosophers who aren’t Christians, like Dr. Jitendra Mohanty (an atheist hindu philosopher) admits it’s a good answer to the problem.
Though this argument has a long history and many find it appealing, it also has a long line of Christian critics throughout history, starting with no less an authority than Augustine of Hippo. The Reformers, especially Martin Luther (an Augustinian monk) and John Calvin, were especially vitriolic against this argument. In a way, the Christian tradition is divided along Augustinian and non-Augustianian lines so there isn’t a true consensus on the issue. At the moment, the free will argument is enjoying considerable popularity. Nevertheless, I think it has some serious problems, and in my mind stands as an inadequate answer to the problem of evil and suffering.
The free will argument has several nuances, but if I were to apply it to the Japanese earthquake, it would go something like this:
Stating the Free Will Argument
In order to prevent the earthquake catastrophe God would have to either a) change the laws of plate techtonics so that they never occur wherever humans are, or b) Prevent humans from setting up shop on fault lines. Option a) would make geological science relative to the presence of humans, and would effectively undermine viewing the natural world as governed by predictable physical laws. In other words, for God to sustain a universe with no suffering, he would have to kiss science goodbye, resulting in a world without knowledge or predictability. Option b), preventing humans from setting up shop on fault lines, near volcanoes, etc, would involve God treating human beings as children and would effectively violate our freedom to act with meaningful choices. Since God has given us free will, he allows us to do what we want with it, including populate fault lines and do other foolish things and nasty stuff to one another.
The free will argument is also often buttressed with free will being necessary for virtue. God has given us the choice of doing good or evil: if he took away the freedom to choose act in evil ways or risky ways, that would rob the good choices we make of dignity. Virtue would be an automatic impulse, and we would be robots: without the choice to do wrong, the choice to do right loses its meaning. Love that is forced love is not truly love.
It’s kind of a thoughtful argument, isn’t it? Anyone who wants to object to the existence of evil, whether willful evil or natural evil like earthquake disasters, has answer the question: “What’s your alternative?” This inevitably leads us to conclude that for God to make an evil-free world, he would have to ditch this whole free will thing and natural law thing in some way, which we humans rather cherish. So take your pick: the present world with freedom, meaning, knowledge, and choice, or a coercive, neutral, irrational, compulsory world. Which would you pick? Anyways, the free will argument looks something like the above, although bear in mind the topic has been given much more ink and depth than how I have briefly put it.
Six Objections to the Free Will Argument
The first problem I see with the free will argument is that it argues that God in some way needs evil in order to have goodness in His world. I find this to be a pretty big challenge to the Christian concept of God, for God as creator of all things is independent of His creation. He is and has always been and always will be perfectly good and loving, and no creation of His can change that. But if the free will argument is valid, then God is not independent: He needs evil to exist, for without it, He could not create goodness.
Also, the bible says that God cannot do evil. (James 1:13) If evil is necessary for goodness, then how is God good? Does he need the devil in order for Him to be good? The free will argument argues that virtue and love are not genuine unless there is a genuine choice to the contrary. Consider what this implies for a God who is so good, choosing evil is not possible for Him. I find this argument leads to the conclusion that human love has more virtue than God’s, because unlike Him, we have the ability to choose evil.
Another objection to note is that this argument doesn’t show up in the bible anywhere. That itself doesn’t mean it’s wrong -lots of good and valid arguments about many things aren’t included in scripture. However, the bible does address this question, and it gives a consistent answer every time -never the free will argument.
I used to accept the free will argument, but it was always frustrating reading the book of Job which exhaustively discusses the problem of evil for 42 chapters, and never hints at anything remotely close to the free will argument. You can’t imagine the frustration involved in reading a holy book addressing this question all the time thinking my own answer to this question was better than God’s.
Job argues at one point; “The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He (God) covers the faces of its judges, if it is not He, (who gives the earth over to evil) then who is it?” (Job 9:24) Why didn’t Job’s friends here tell Job that God has too much respect for free will to prevent evil? Here Job says God is the cause of evil, -if it isn’t God, who is? The notion that God is not causing Job’s suffering does not even register as an option in the book of Job. Unlike many contemporary apologists, the biblical authors insisted that God must be involved in suffering every step of the way, and no human choice is ever done without the supervision of the divine hand. “The plans of the heart belong to man, but the Lord directs his steps.” (Prov 16:9)
There is also the charge of inconsistency in Christians who use the free will argument. Two of the most popular devotional verses in the bible are Matt 6:26 and Romans 8:28 .“Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?” and “We know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
Christians regularly find comfort in these verses whenever they go through trials and sufferings. We affirm that God knows what’s going on even if we don’t, and nothing is happening by chance, but for a purpose. Essentially, it is a reminder that everything that goes on is in God’s mind and hand. This theme is repeated in almost every book of the bible. Yet if we then reply to the suffering of Japan with “it’s just natural laws and free will, don’t blame the Lawmaker for this.” What are we doing? We are drawing attention to natural laws, we’re looking at effects and causes and drawing attention away from the willful, intelligent presence of God. We are making two mistakes: a) we are contradicting our own practice of what we tell ourselves when we suffer and b) Denying that God was aware of and involved in the earthquake in the present tense. Was He too busy counting sparrows to notice the Nuclear reactor meltdown?
Lastly, to argue that God values free will so highly that he will not intervene to stop it, no matter what is being chosen, seems to be a pretty bad ethical misjudgment. Just like the eco-terrorists who value animals above humans, so the free will argument makes a glaring mistake in placing free will at the pinnacle of a value scale. For the free will argument to work, free will has to be elevated to such a high value that what is chosen becomes subservient to the act of choice itself.
Consider applying this to the Darfur genocides: God values the free will of the Sudanese government and the Jenjaweed so much that He doesn’t see fit to intervene to prevent them from dismembering men, women and children with machetes because that would violate free will. “Nope” says God, “Free will is too valuable, I cannot prevent this genocide. Choice itself is too precious.”
The struggle to understand evil is based on this moral truth we all intuitively know: evil choices aren’t worth a rat’s ass! The very worthlessness of evil actions is what goads us into asking how such worthless, wasteful, wicked events could possibly be permitted in the first place. The existence of suffering violates our sense of a proper priority of what is good and valuable.
It is the Christian’s most Spiritual prayer to say; “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Not our will be done, but God’s. Our own will, so ignorant and prone to make stupid, impulsive and selfish choices is exactly what we pray to have God curb, transform, and remove. We don’t want sinful choices because they are rock-bottom on the value scale.
So in a nutshell, the following criticisms are raised by the Augustinian/Calvinist side of the Christian tradition:
1. The free will argument demands that God needs evil, making God dependent on His creation.
2. The free will argument makes (chosen) human virtue greater than God’s (eternal) virtue.
3. This argument is nowhere advanced by God, his prophets, or apostles.
4. Is inconsistent with Christian devotional practice.
5. It denies sufferers the comfort of God’s presence, and avoids talking about what we do believe: that God is sovereignly directing all events.
6. The Free Will argument elevates choice itself to be the greatest good.
For the above reasons, I found I had to abandon the use of the free will argument.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Monday, March 21, 2011
Some Theological Reflections on Japan’s Earthquake part 1
In the midst of Japan’s national catastrophe, I find myself pulled in two directions: to speak, or not to speak. On the one hand, Jesus taught us that the proper response to suffering is to "mourn with those who mourn”. Suffering demands the response of compassion. In the midst of that, speaking alone can do more harm than good. Stories abound of suffering people who have been brought theories as a remedy to their pain, rather than comfort. Therefore, I’m inclined to keep practical and quiet.
Yet, suffering does raise the question of theory, especially in regards to God: where is He in the midst of suffering? There is also a large crowd of atheists in the blogosphere who have been very quick to point out that this earthquake is a very strong argument against the existence of God. This is a theoretical question, and needs a theoretical response. In way, we can say that we are theoretical creatures: when suffering happens, we plug those events into our network of understanding of how the world works. We need theory to make sense of our lives, and so we theorize rather intuitively. It's part of being human.
As one final excuse to write about this when I kinda feel rude doing so, I would like to confess that though bringing a big plate of theology to the disaster scene offends some, it also comforts some. In fact, in my own darkest hours of suffering (when I almost lost my wife several years ago) I found theology one of the greatest comforts available. God was the solid rock in my own personal tsunami. He is real, and what we think about Him does have a significant bearing on how we react to our suffering.
Addressing the Atheist
I have no particular atheist in mind here, but “atheists in general” have been quick to jump on this quake as a salient demonstration of the non-existence of God. Atheists as people have every right to raise this excellent objection. However, they do not have the right to raise it as atheists anymore than a man has a right to raise the question; “How may I relieve my menstrual cramps?” Atheism simply lacks the proper equipment to make sense of the question. Unfortunately, they have raised the question of evil so often that it is no longer apparent just how ridiculous atheism looks doing so.
For a Christian, human beings are made in the image of God, and the suffering of God’s image-bearers is a palpably bad thing. However, humans only have this value placed on them because of their relationship to God. If you remove God from the picture, humans lose their value. It is no understatement to say that no philosophy or worldview in the world gives human beings the honor and dignity that the bible does, and this high view of humanity is what generates the problem of human suffering. This worldview provides ample equipment to legitimately criticize any mistreatment of humans, and provides the framework necessary to ask questions about the justness of their suffering. The question of suffering is thus an explicitly Christian (or Jewish) question, for it is a question that is raised by our view of the world.
By contrast, atheism has no such resources. A bunch of hairless hominids decided to build a country near a major geological fault line -end of story. Suffering cannot be related to the dignity of humans, for theoretically, they have none. Suffering is the activity of nerves that send unpleasant signals to our brains when tissue is damaged, or social relations are terminated by death and disaster.
Other than the new atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens who resolutely avoid this question, this is plainly acknowledged by more responsible atheists themselves: Kai Nielsen and Jonathan Shook are good examples of intellectually honest atheists who have freely confessed their lack of ability to explain the existence or nature of what we call “good and evil”. Notice it’s not just the inability to explain its existence, they don’t even know what it is! This is why atheism looks ridiculous asking this question; if you have no idea what the subject under discussion is, how do you figure you have anything coherent to say about it?
Let me be careful to note that I am addressing atheism as theory: as theory, the question is incoherent coming from within atheism. However, the question is valid for atheists as people, for they are made in the image of God. Though their worldview doesn’t equip them to make any rational sense of the dignity of humans, they nevertheless know it, for God has put that knowledge in us all. This simply needs to be pointed out to them, because most atheists have a high regard for evidence.
Here it can be said that the strength of a theory depends on its ability to account for a wide array of evidence: in science, the more a theory can regularly account for the data, the better the theory is. This criteria can likewise be applied to philosophy, and here atheism is the philosophical equivalent of flat-earth science. It is unable to account for a massive array of data. The entire field of ethics is, en masse, unexplained. People and society cannot function without ethics: we need ethics in the workplace, in politics, in our hearts. Atheism thus remains ignorant about matters that pertain to almost every area of life. How much less then, does it have anything to say about suffering caused by earthquakes.
Addressing the Christians
Christians I’m afraid, haven’t always done the best job of addressing this question either, but at least we can claim that is it our question, and we have a right to ask and answer it: we are consistent in doing so. Let’s look at some of those answers, because some of the answers often given could use some internal criticism.
The "Natural Law" Answer
One answer I heard a few nights ago on the radio came from the influential Christian apologists and former US politician, Chuck Colson. Basically, he gave a Christianized version of the atheist answer: “Rational image-bearers of God built a country on a faultline, and God has commanded us to take account of the order of creation and act accordingly: in this case, we took a calculated risk. Now that choice has resulted in catastrophe, and our ethical response is compassion.” (My rough paraphrase) Colson is right as far as pointing out that the Christian worldview provides the rational grounding for the existence of earthquakes, but this seems to me to be avoiding the question of why a good God permits such suffering.
Basically, the answer to suffering is this: “The earthquake was caused by natural laws that God designed.” Sure. But we’re not questioning physical laws, the question is: “God being all-powerful, why would he deliberately create a universe with suffering?” or “Why doesn’t he intervene to prevent those laws from causing suffering?” Colson’s answer points to the mechanism of suffering, but fails to even address the nature or purpose of suffering. It is a non-answer, being roughly the same answer a thoughtful atheist gives: "natural laws caused this, let's get on with practical matters." The only difference is that for the Christian, God made those laws, whereas for the atheist, the laws just exist.
I have more to say about Christian answers to the problem of evil but due to length, I will save it for the next post.
Yet, suffering does raise the question of theory, especially in regards to God: where is He in the midst of suffering? There is also a large crowd of atheists in the blogosphere who have been very quick to point out that this earthquake is a very strong argument against the existence of God. This is a theoretical question, and needs a theoretical response. In way, we can say that we are theoretical creatures: when suffering happens, we plug those events into our network of understanding of how the world works. We need theory to make sense of our lives, and so we theorize rather intuitively. It's part of being human.
As one final excuse to write about this when I kinda feel rude doing so, I would like to confess that though bringing a big plate of theology to the disaster scene offends some, it also comforts some. In fact, in my own darkest hours of suffering (when I almost lost my wife several years ago) I found theology one of the greatest comforts available. God was the solid rock in my own personal tsunami. He is real, and what we think about Him does have a significant bearing on how we react to our suffering.
Addressing the Atheist
I have no particular atheist in mind here, but “atheists in general” have been quick to jump on this quake as a salient demonstration of the non-existence of God. Atheists as people have every right to raise this excellent objection. However, they do not have the right to raise it as atheists anymore than a man has a right to raise the question; “How may I relieve my menstrual cramps?” Atheism simply lacks the proper equipment to make sense of the question. Unfortunately, they have raised the question of evil so often that it is no longer apparent just how ridiculous atheism looks doing so.
For a Christian, human beings are made in the image of God, and the suffering of God’s image-bearers is a palpably bad thing. However, humans only have this value placed on them because of their relationship to God. If you remove God from the picture, humans lose their value. It is no understatement to say that no philosophy or worldview in the world gives human beings the honor and dignity that the bible does, and this high view of humanity is what generates the problem of human suffering. This worldview provides ample equipment to legitimately criticize any mistreatment of humans, and provides the framework necessary to ask questions about the justness of their suffering. The question of suffering is thus an explicitly Christian (or Jewish) question, for it is a question that is raised by our view of the world.
By contrast, atheism has no such resources. A bunch of hairless hominids decided to build a country near a major geological fault line -end of story. Suffering cannot be related to the dignity of humans, for theoretically, they have none. Suffering is the activity of nerves that send unpleasant signals to our brains when tissue is damaged, or social relations are terminated by death and disaster.
Other than the new atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens who resolutely avoid this question, this is plainly acknowledged by more responsible atheists themselves: Kai Nielsen and Jonathan Shook are good examples of intellectually honest atheists who have freely confessed their lack of ability to explain the existence or nature of what we call “good and evil”. Notice it’s not just the inability to explain its existence, they don’t even know what it is! This is why atheism looks ridiculous asking this question; if you have no idea what the subject under discussion is, how do you figure you have anything coherent to say about it?
Let me be careful to note that I am addressing atheism as theory: as theory, the question is incoherent coming from within atheism. However, the question is valid for atheists as people, for they are made in the image of God. Though their worldview doesn’t equip them to make any rational sense of the dignity of humans, they nevertheless know it, for God has put that knowledge in us all. This simply needs to be pointed out to them, because most atheists have a high regard for evidence.
Here it can be said that the strength of a theory depends on its ability to account for a wide array of evidence: in science, the more a theory can regularly account for the data, the better the theory is. This criteria can likewise be applied to philosophy, and here atheism is the philosophical equivalent of flat-earth science. It is unable to account for a massive array of data. The entire field of ethics is, en masse, unexplained. People and society cannot function without ethics: we need ethics in the workplace, in politics, in our hearts. Atheism thus remains ignorant about matters that pertain to almost every area of life. How much less then, does it have anything to say about suffering caused by earthquakes.
Addressing the Christians
Christians I’m afraid, haven’t always done the best job of addressing this question either, but at least we can claim that is it our question, and we have a right to ask and answer it: we are consistent in doing so. Let’s look at some of those answers, because some of the answers often given could use some internal criticism.
The "Natural Law" Answer
One answer I heard a few nights ago on the radio came from the influential Christian apologists and former US politician, Chuck Colson. Basically, he gave a Christianized version of the atheist answer: “Rational image-bearers of God built a country on a faultline, and God has commanded us to take account of the order of creation and act accordingly: in this case, we took a calculated risk. Now that choice has resulted in catastrophe, and our ethical response is compassion.” (My rough paraphrase) Colson is right as far as pointing out that the Christian worldview provides the rational grounding for the existence of earthquakes, but this seems to me to be avoiding the question of why a good God permits such suffering.
Basically, the answer to suffering is this: “The earthquake was caused by natural laws that God designed.” Sure. But we’re not questioning physical laws, the question is: “God being all-powerful, why would he deliberately create a universe with suffering?” or “Why doesn’t he intervene to prevent those laws from causing suffering?” Colson’s answer points to the mechanism of suffering, but fails to even address the nature or purpose of suffering. It is a non-answer, being roughly the same answer a thoughtful atheist gives: "natural laws caused this, let's get on with practical matters." The only difference is that for the Christian, God made those laws, whereas for the atheist, the laws just exist.
I have more to say about Christian answers to the problem of evil but due to length, I will save it for the next post.
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