The Problem of Evil

The most popular and long-standing objection to God's existence is a modus tollens argument that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent then evil should not exist in the world. The standard Christian response has always been that there is a big battle going on between good (those on the side of God) and evil (those on the side of the Bad One), and that thanks to God's awesomeness good will eventually triumph over evil. What they mean is that God is opposed to evil but that for now He will allow Satan to corrupt creation until Kingdom comes.

God will be the ultimate victor over Satan (as the book of Revelation explains), but if God is so opposed to evil why does He allow it to happen when He has the power to stop it? The question becomes even harder when we dig deep into the Bible and find not just that God doesn't discontinue evil, but that at times He seems to actively encourage its appearance. The story of Job tells us how God allowed Satan to subject Job to all kinds of hardship, including taking away his possessions, killing his family and afflicting his body with sores. Later on God also allows Nebuchadnezzar to rule a Babylonian Empire that subjected the disobedient people of Judah and Jerusalem to all-conquering torment and hardship.

The answer to the question of why if God opposes evil He allows it to happen is apparently that He will use all things, including evil, to show us His love, grace and goodness. Even the cross, which is the primary exhibition of God's love, grace and goodness, is the result of God allowing evil to subject Christ to torture and death.

Consider when Shakespeare writes a tragedy, like Macbeth or King Lear, that pits goodness against badness. Shakespeare writes badness into Lord and Lady Macbeth's characters to demonstrate, among other things, how the selfish pursuance of power and ambition corrupts those with little self-control. Similarly, Shakespeare uses the badness of Edmund, Goneril and Regan in King Lear to show the goodness of Cordelia.

The difference between God and Shakespeare here (well apart from the fact that Shakespeare is a flawed human and God is perfect) is that while we never see Shakespeare make an appearance as himself in his plays, we do see God make an appearance in His own creation story in the person of Christ. So it's not just the case that God allows evil to happen in the world, it's that He allows himself to be subjected to it through the person of Christ for our salvation.

Christ being the light that allows Himself to be subjected to darkness may well be a good metaphor for why God allows Satan to run amok in these present times. Without darkness we would have only light, and no way to distinguish the light as being distinct from an absence of light. If it is the light of Christ that enables us to know God, it is the darkness that enables us to see the light of Christ.

Church-Sponsored Expensive Bulls**t

Whenever you hear people tell you that you're making too much of a fuss about young earth creationism, and that you're wasting too much of your time arguing against it and trying to expose the nonsense of its adherents, you might like to know this little bit of news I found out (by accident).  

Answers in Genesis labels itself a “Christianity-defending ministry” with a $20 million budget - and its primary focus is on exposing “the bankruptcy of evolutionary ideas.” Yes, that's right - a ministry set up entirely to argue against standard scientific facts has a budget of $20 million with which to propagate its falsehoods.

Its Creation Museum in Kentucky, which depicts humans living alongside dinosaurs, employs over 300 people - and in order to market their fundamentalism as successfully as possible, Answers in Genesis apparently pays some of its key front men as much as $900,000 a year (as of 2013).

And if all that didn't depress you enough, today I read about the life-size Noah's Ark Theme Park called Ark Encounter that exceeds $100 million, and makes a showcase out of deceiving children and their credulous parents. This is a disgrace - to evidence, to logic, to facts, to reason, and to truth - an absolute disgrace.

When you think of the numerous ways that Christians can use the church's (God's) money for social good - let's say, buying Bibles to give to countries that are short supply of them, helping feed and clothe homeless people, investing in the charity sector either at home or aboard, to name but three - this AIG-sponsored vanity project of bulls**t is a very ghastly use of funds.

It is for reasons like this that we never ought to be complacent in just letting these inward looking ill-informed blockheads get away with such shameful and financially wasteful distortions of facts and truths.

Putting God In The Dock

Unless other Christians aren't like me on this matter (which I happen to doubt), I think there are things we are not telling you regarding how we feel about our faith. You see, we get that God is an awesome, omnipotent, omniscient, creative genius who loves us without measure - and on good days this is all very well. And I'm sure that even on the bad days all that is still true - it's just that, for me, those bad days are more likely to bring about the tendency to put God in the dock a bit more.

It's in those bad times that my mind alters a bit - not that I'm deliberately any less pious or fervent, but just that I start to ask questions from the gut about how I'm supposed to feel according to this awesome, omnipotent, omniscient, creative, loving God. For I have to be honest; there are plenty of times when the Christian message that we're to be so worshipful towards this awesome God, that we're so very unworthy and undeserving, and so humbly penitent for all the times we've screwed up, and such hopeless wretches compared to Him does begin to grate a bit.

It's not that I suddenly lose sight of these things; it's that I get to a point when I feel like saying to God "Hey, don't you have a bit of explaining to do too?" or "It's alright for you out there, but couldn't you have made things just a little easier at times?". And I think that's allowed - at the very least it shows a genuine introspection and an honest pursuit of further understanding. I mean, for the most part of our human history our species has had to incur the most atrocious living conditions, and it's only in the last 0.1% of the passage of time that we've managed to get past our plight, and only in the past 0.01% of that time that fewer than half the population of the world have been in absolute poverty.

When you add to that the tremendous personal struggles we all have to encounter, and the frequent emotional contortions required to continually say to ourselves "It's ok, I know you're silent and in control of things, God, but couldn't you just do a teensy weensy bit more to make it clearer what it is I'm doing so wrong, or why life has to be this tough?", it's unsurprising that we feel despondent at times - it's not like we looked at the world beforehand, weighed up all the conditions, and made a conscious choice to be in it (although personally I'm still delighted to be in it).

I have no problem with the notion that my overall understanding on this is pants compared to God's, and that the gulf between His mind and mine is so great that I couldn't even conceive of such a distance - but there comes a point after a lot of soul searching about wanting to feel the things you'd like to feel (and told we're supposed to feel), and a lot of supplication in the hope of having more of the Holy Spirit working inside of us, that we resort to putting God in the dock.

And to repeat, I think that's okay, providing the motives are sincere and the application reverent. So if you find yourself in a similar position and worry that what you're doing is some kind of outrage against your faith, I want to reassure you that you definitely are not alone, and that far from being an outrage, at the very least it shows the mind is actively engaging in parts of the experience it finds intractable.

The Difference Between Biblical Facts & Biblical Truths

When scientists learned about the atom, electromagnetism, and genetics they were learning things that had been true of nature long before humans understood them. By a similar measure, Mount Everest had been the tallest mountain and the Nile the longest river long before we existed to name and identify them thus.

The Christian accounts recorded in the New Testament are accounts that convey powerful truths about Christ and about God's love that apply to all time. But equally, the fact of the Incarnation where God became a man in a human body and subjected Himself to pain, fear, temptation, upset, detachment, torture and death for us is not something that would have been a fact in, say, 350BC.

This is the distinction between New Testament facts and New Testaments truths. The facts are things that happened in history and would not have been facts a few hundred years previous, whereas the truths are truths that exist outside of the linear nature of time. The Bible is a book that uses facts as a mirror to reflect God's eternal truths.

The Resurrection Seems The Most Likely Historical Truth

When I read the New Testament, and surrounding works by 1st century writers, it seems a lot easier to believe that the resurrection actually happened than it does the contrary view that it didn't. One big reason why this is so is because the account of the resurrection occurred in the backdrop of two ruling groups, the Jews and the Romans, who would have wanted with all their will and might for it not to be true.

That is to say, the resurrection was a huge threat to their power and sovereignty. The Christian movement proclaiming Jesus is Lord would do a lot to undermine the Jewish authority, as lots of its proponents were from among their ranks. Similarly, the Romans had every reason to be concerned about rebellion as proclaiming Jesus as Lord undermined their allegiance to Caesar as the object of deification.

The easiest and most convenient way for the Jewish and Roman authorities to derail the emerging Christian faith would have been to produce the dead body of the crucified Christ, and proclaim the resurrection false to all the eyewitnesses of the time. But nothing of the kind was done. Couple that with the sheer number of Christians who underwent torture and death to secure the truth of Jesus' divinity, and the historical argument becomes even more compelling.

 

Why would so many be willing to be martyred for their faith and refuse to renounce it when doing so would have made their lives easier? We all know people who die for what they believe to be true, but I know of no one who has died for something they believe to be false. And why did they believe Jesus' resurrection to be true when there were so many opportunities and incentives to falsify it by so many self-interested people? The most likely answer, for me, is that it is true.

The other thing that's clear from reading both the Old and New Testaments is that although there is Divine choreography overseeing the proceedings, there is also the granting of quite a free hand in the writing process. The free hand afforded in the years after Jesus' resurrection and ascension would have very much been based on the oral traditions of the time, and as time passed there would have been the increased freedom for mistakes and discrepancies. The further from the event we travel in time the higher the probability of inaccuracies, both honest mistakes through memory loss, and dishonest corruptions of the texts.

But what we actually found was that as time went on the cohesive narrative became not less strong, but stronger, in fact - precisely as you'd expect to see if the incarnated Christ is the pivot around which all else in creation revolves. Naturally, distant history takes us beyond the realm of proof, but for me it does offer us grounds for reasonable faith and trust in Him.

 

Happy Easter!