Further answer for Anonymous Bill

 

The guy says his name is Bill. To demarcate which Bill (I know a couple) I just call him anonymous Bill, nothing insulting intended. He made some comments in response to my post on Wednesday. I did make tentative responses but after thinking about it more I want to say a couple of other things. I hope the readers understand becasue there are a couple of things here that I feel are important to my whole blogging career ("career," "mission," "hobby"--whatever).

Forgive me if I oversimplify, but as best I can determine, your premise is basically that the world is what it is (or perhaps is to be considered the best of all possible worlds) and God is handling things as mercifully and lovingly as is possible given the situation. Is that correct? I don't want to straw man you here.

I wouldn't say the best of all possible worlds because we have the fall. While I don't accept that as a given point in history, such as literal garden of Eden, I think it is a valid category and that's what the garden story was about, understanding and dealing with the tendency of us all to fall from the grace of innocence and learning to rebel.

My problem with that premise is accepting that the nature of things is beyond god's control. If you accept the mythology of heaven and heavenly hosts and whatnot, god obviously is capable of creating a climate (heavenly realms) in which beings are brought into a perfect reality with direct proof of god's existence and sovereignty while still maintaining free will (those rebellious angels). Furthermore, a situation has supposedly existed since near the beginning of time in which god tolerates sin without allowing it to offend him to the point of resolution, so I don't see any reason why it couldn't continue in such a state.

It's not that it's not beyond God's control. Of course God is in control but there are other factors that have to be considered. God could make thing be anyway he wanted, but if he wants mutually constradictory things he has to alter the situation in a way that mediates between the contradictions. He was us to have free will and be free from sin. Tha'ts practically impossible because with free will we will chose at some point to go our own way. If we don't have free will we can't make moral decisions and love wont be real. If you program a robot to love you it doesn't really love you. Where's the real love value in a relationship where the one saying "I love you" is only saying because it's a wind up doll that has to say it? We have to free will to mak free decisions and love for real. Then with free will we will go our own way at some point. So God makes a way for us to come back from rebellion and choose the right path again. Our pride wont always let us admit we are mistaken.

What you call entitlement, I call common decency. If I have the capability to lay my newborn down to sleep in a clean, safe crib and instead lay him down on a bed of nails, what does that say about me? If I place that child in a wagon and roll it down an incline toward a ravine, will the DHS applaud me for giving him a fun ride?

We are not new born. Analogies don't prove things, we have to move beyond the unreal of an analogy and face what the analogy is really about. We want to be independent and want to make decisions for ourselves but then we don't want the consequences of making the wrong deicsion. God allows us to become like new born again spiritually, but he can't just stop the world and say "Ok everyone make the right choice now."

God puts it in us to understand what is decent. We have that desire and the tendency to find the indecent repellant, becuase God put it there. We have to choose the right path to exercise it fairly and unselfishly. We have conflicts within ourselves and with others. We are all at different levels of growth and maturity. We are all selfish and we are different stages in our ablity to mediate selfishness with decency. Of cousre this is going to make for a rough edged world. God does protect us. He does give us the strength and ability to cope if we turn to him for that strength. He can't just stop the world and make it all even becuase that would negate the free chosen of those who have not been through the learning process yet, which is most of us (including me).

I can't really jibe with the Niebuhr thesis because by this logic, self-transcendence should only lead to sin when the subject's needs aren't being met. Per your example, sin wouldn't have occurred if you weren't hungry and cold to begin with, or if you were given adequate ability/resources to pay your rent honestly. 

 That's because the world can't be made even. It's always going to be filled with people who are different stages in development because we have different ages and different rates of maturity. It takes some of us longer to get the message. You should have seen me the other night. The cowboys did it again! they are up to their old tricks. why can't ever get it together!?? It's Jerry Jones it's all Jerry Jones. The woman I was watching with kept saying "It's not important it's just a game." Just a game! You don't undersatnd, the Cowboys aren't good anymore! It's a catastrophe of epic proportion. I'm going to start building a boat. You start rounding two of every kind of wine and beer.

The anxiety of spoke of is always present and stems from self transcendence. That process is not just about need that's just the example. You are assuming God could just give us everything and make it all good we have no trials. Then you can't understand why I call that entitlement? We have a higher purpose that is not based just giving me a good life. You are acting like that's some kind of catastrophe to think that way. That life is not about my happiness is not a catastrophe. Happiness comes from fulfilling what you are made for not from just always getting what you want. We have higher callings than just saying out of harm's way. So we have to live in a world where people are searching for truth and working on the decision making process in contemplation of God's reality. That means a world where people are free to abuse their decision making process and make other people miserable.

If you hadn't been put into a hostile climate that demands shelter, or if you'd been given the means to provide for your basic needs, or if god had zapped the rent money into your account, or if god had inspired the landlord to mercy, or any number of alternate scenarios would have made sin unnecessary. If god is aware that sin is the result of need and sets you in an environment of need, who's responsible for the sin?

 Sure but all you are really saying is that life should be about your happiness and fulfilling a higher purpose is wrong it means you have to suffer. That's what I call entitlement. I guess you call it "having a good life."

Something is going on in the universe. There's more to living than just getting your way and being safe and being happy. That's a big catastrophe and some people never forgive God. that's just the same as saying "why didn't taht big mean old God make me God? Until God gives up and makes me God I'll hate him." OK then you die having God. The study data proves that we are happier when we seek God and find his purpose for our lives rather than demanding our own way. I say that because the studies show religion is the number one factor in well being, that those who have had religoius experiences (of the kind known as "spiritual" or "mystical") are happier and better adjusted.


 Religion is the most powerful Factor in well being.

Poloma and Pendelton The Faith Factor: An Annotated Bibliography of Systematic Reviews And Clinical Research on Spiritual Subjects Vol. II, David B. Larson M.D., Natiional Institute for Health Research Dec. 1993, p. 3290.

Quote:

"The authors found that religious satisfaction was the most powerful predicter of existential well being. The degree to which an individual felt close to God was the most important factor in terms of existential well-being. While frequency of prayer contributed to general life satisfaction and personal happiness. As a result of their study the authors concluded that it would be important to look at a combindation of religious items, including prayer, religionship with God, and other measures of religious experince to begin to adequately clearlify the associations of religious committment with general well-being."

(5) Greater happiness


Religion and Happiness

by Michael E. Nielsen, PhD

Many people expect religion to bring them happiness. Does this actually seem to be the case? Are religious people happier than nonreligious people? And if so, why might this be?

Researchers have been intrigued by such questions. Most studies have simply asked people how happy they are, although studies also may use scales that try to measure happiness more subtly than that. In general, researchers who have a large sample of people in their study tend to limit their measurement of happiness to just one or two questions, and researchers who have fewer numbers of people use several items or scales to measure happiness.

What do they find? In a nutshell, they find that people who are involved in religion also report greater levels of happiness than do those who are not religious. For example, one study involved over 160,000 people in Europe. Among weekly churchgoers, 85% reported being "very satisfied" with life, but this number reduced to 77% among those who never went to church (Inglehart, 1990). This kind of pattern is typical -- religious involvement is associated with modest increases in happiness

Argyle, M., and Hills, P. (2000). Religious experiences and their relations with happiness and personality. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 10, 157-172.

Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Nielsen, M. E. (1998). An assessment of religious conflicts and their resolutions. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37, 181-190.

Nielsen again:

In the days before research boards reviewed research proposals before the studies were conducted, Pahnke devised an experiment to induce people to have a religious experience. On a Good Friday, when they were to meditate in a chapel for 2.5 hours, twenty theology students were given either psilocybin or a placebo. The students who were given the psilocybin reported intense religious experiences, as you might imagine. Their levels of happiness also were significantly greater than the control group reported. But what is especially interesting is that these effects remained 6 months after the experiment, as the psilocybin group reported more "persistent and positive changes" in their attitudes to life than did the placebo group.

 Poloma and Pendelton The Faith Factor: An Annotated Bibliography of Systematic Reviews And Clinical Research on Spiritual Subjects Vol. II, David B. Larson M.D., Natiional Institute for Health Research Dec. 1993, p. 3290.

Quote:

"The authors found that religious satisfaction was the most powerful predictor of existential well being. The degree to which an individual felt close to God was the most important factor in terms of existential well-being. While frequency of prayer contributed to general life satisfaction and personal happiness. As a result of their study the authors concluded that it would be important to look at a combination of religious items, including prayer, relationship with God, and other measures of religious experience to begin to adequately clarify the associations of religious commitment with general well-being."

 There's a bigger picture to consider.  It's not just about me it's about everyone in the world and our need to seek truth. That brings into play my theory on Soteriolgoical Drama.

I've posted about that many times. It's my answer to the problem of pain and evil. Please read it again. It's not that i think that's the answer. It's a theory and it indicates this a logical answer to why God allows the kind of world we have. It may not be the answer I give but the logic of it suggests the possibility that there is a logical answer.

Theodicy: Problem of Pain and Short Lives

If you are coming over from the CADRE blog, I apologize for the duplication.I meant to post this here and I thought I was in the Metacrock's blog section but I was in the CADRE section and posted there by mistake. Rather than take it out i thought well those guys could use it too. I'll just post in both places.


Yesterday I had a discussion with atheist on theodicy problem. That's the problem of pain and evil. Why does God allow it. There are two questions there but I think the answers to both are related. My classic answer is my own version of the "Free Will defense." The thing that makes my version different is the twist I put on internalizing the values of the good. This my version from Doxa and here's how it plays out. I call it "Soteriological Drama." Soteriology means the study of salvation. I am saying there's a drama, not entertainment but the kind of real drama one finds in life, concerning the pursuit of salvation. God has designed a serach into the process because it is only by searching that we learn to internalize the values of the good.

Basic assumptions


There are three basic assumptions that are hidden, or perhaps not so oblivious, but nevertheless must be dealt with here.

(1) The assumption that God wants a "moral universe" and that this value outweighs all others.


The idea that God wants a moral universe I take from my basic view of God and morality. Following in the footsteps of Joseph Fletcher (Situation Ethics) I assume that love is the background of the moral universe (this is also an Augustinian view). I also assume that there is a deeply ontological connection between love and Being. Axiomatically, in my view point, love is the basic impitus of Being itself. Thus, it seems reasonable to me that, if morality is an upshot of love, or if love motivates moral behavior, then the creation of a moral universe is essential.


(2) that internal "seeking" leads to greater internalization of values than forced compliance or complaisance that would be the result of intimidation.

That's a pretty fair assumption. We all know that people will a lot more to achieve a goal they truly beileve in than one they merely feel forced or obligated to follow but couldn't care less about.

(3)the the drama or the big mystery is the only way to accomplish that end.

The pursuit of the value system becomes a search of the heart for ultimate meaning,that ensures that people continue to seek it until it has been fully internalized.

The Actual Argument:

(1)God's purpose in creation: to create a Moral Universe, that is one in which free moral agents willingly choose the Good.

(2) Moral choice requires absolutely that choice be free (thus free will is necessitated).

(3) Allowance of free choices requires the risk that the chooser will make evil choices

(4)The possibility of evil choices is a risk God must run, thus the value of free outweighs all other considerations, since without there would be no moral universe and the purpose of creation would be thwarted.


This leaves the atheist in the position of demanding to know why God doesn't just tell everyone that he's there, and that he requires moral behavior, and what that entails. Thus there would be no mystery and people would be much less inclined to sin.

This is the point where Soteriological Drama figures into it. Argument on Soteriological Drama:


(5) Life is a "Drama" not for the sake of entertainment, but in the sense that a dramatic tension exists between our ordinary observations of life on a daily basis, and the ultimate goals, ends and purposes for which we are on this earth.

(6) Clearly God wants us to seek on a level other than the obvious, daily, demonstrative level or he would have made the situation more plain to us

(7) We can assume that the reason for the "big mystery" is the internalization of choices. If God appeared to the world in open objective fashion and laid down the rules, we would probably all try to follow them, but we would not want to follow them. Thus our obedience would be lip service and not from the heart.

(8) therefore, God wants a heart felt response which is internationalized value system that comes through the search for existential answers; that search is phenomenological; introspective, internal, not amenable to ordinary demonstrative evidence.


In other words, we are part of a great drama and our actions and our dilemmas and our choices are all part of the way we respond to the situation as characters in a drama.

This theory also explains why God doesn't often regenerate limbs in healing the sick. That would be a dead giveaway. God creates criteria under which healing takes place, that criteria can't negate the overall plan of a search.

On Doxa I designed into the presentation an answer to the issue of babies dying:

One might object that this couldn't outweigh babies dying or the horrors of war or the all the countless injustices and outrages that must be allowed and that permeate human history. It may seem at first glance that free will is petty compared to human suffering. But I am advocating free will for the sake any sort of pleasure or imagined moral victory that accrues from having free will, it's a totally pragmatic issue; that internalizing the value of the good requires that one choose to do so, and free will is essential if choice is required. Thus it is not a capricious or selfish defense of free will, not a matter of choosing our advantage or our pleasure over that of dying babies, but of choosing the key to saving the babies in the long run,and to understanding why we want to save them, and to care about saving them, and to actually choosing their saving over our own good.

In deciding what values outweigh other values we have to be clear about our decision making paradigm. From a utilitarian standpoint the determinate of lexically ordered values would be utility, what is the greatest good for the greatest number? This would be determined by means of outcome, what is the final tally sheet in terms of pleasure over pain to the greatest aggregate? But why must that be the value system we decide by? It's just one value system and much has been written about the bankruptcy of consequentialist ethics. If one uses a deontological standard it might be a different thing to consider the lexically ordered values. Free will predominates because it allows internalization of the good. The good is the key to any moral value system. This could be justified on both deontolgoical and teleological premises.

My own moral decision making paradigm is deontological, because I believe that teleological ethics reduces morality to the decision making of a ledger sheet and forces the individual to do immoral things in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number." I find most atheists are utilitarians so this will make no sense to them. They can't help but think of the greatest good/greatest number as the ultaimte adage, and deontology as empty duty with no logic to it. But that is not the case. Deontology is not just rule keeping, it is also duty oriented ethics. The duty that we must internalize is that ultimate duty that love demands of any action. Robots don't love. One must freely choose to give up self and make a selfless act in order to act from Love. Thus we cannot have a loved oriented ethics, or we cannot have love as the background of the moral universe without free will, because love involves the will.

The choice of free will at the expense of countless lives and untold suffering cannot be an easy thing, but it is essential and can be justified from either deontolgoical or teleological perspective. Although I think the deontologcial makes more sense. From the teleological stand point, free will ultimately leads to the greatest good for the greatest number because in the long run it assumes us that one is willing to die for the other, or sacrifice for the other, or live for the other. That is essential to promoting a good beyond ourselves. The individual sacrifices for the good of the whole, very utilitarian. It is also deontolgocially justifiable since duty would tell us that we must give of ourselves for the good of the other.

Thus anyway you slice it free will outweighs all other concerns because it makes available the values of the good and of love. Free will is the key to ultimately saving the babies, and saving them because we care about them, a triumph of the heart, not just action from wrote. It's internalization of a value system without which other and greater injustices could be foisted upon an unsuspecting humanity that has not been tought to choose to lay down one's own life for the other.

The connection of the two issues:

The two issues are of course, evil and disaster, or pain not connected to decision making. We can't call disease or weather or problems of accident "evil" because they are not tied ot anyone's personal choice. Moral valuations such as "good" and "evil" only apply where a choice can be made. One could try to charge God with evil in saying that it's his choice to allow it. This is would be foolish since there is no standard of Good if the creator is evil. Then evil would be the original concept, and good would be the fall from evil. That's can't be because evil is not constructive. Evil doesn't build but tears down; evil is rebellion against a standard not the establishment of a standard. Yes it does bother me as an old "red" from the 60s to support "establishment." I tell myself the establishment of this world is the rebellion against the establishment of life.

Thus the connection between evil and disaster is that God can't forestall disasters every time they occur and still expect us to conduct a search. No one searches for what he knows to be the case. The search is the search for truth, the answer to the big question, what are we doing here? what's the point of it all? No one searches if he knows the answers. It would be a dead give away if every time something almost happened some miraculous force stopped it. So there has to be what we might call a "normal world" that runs on its own steam. God can stick his finger in and change things, but there have to certain rules he put in place for doing that, like faith for ex maple, otherwise he's going to have to do it all the time, that would sort negate the need for searching.

This searching aspect is what angered this atheist. He was extremely indignant about it. He accused me of being selfish and self absorbed because I'm letting God off the hook for my desire to learn things and have personal fulfillment. I think what made it so unnerving was the way he spoke as though he knows God is real and just hates him anyway. I am not saying all atheists think that way, just this one guy. It's not that I expect this little answer to really satisfy someone who has lost a child. Of course I do not, and for anyone who has lost a child my deepest sympathy. Had I lost a child myself I would certainly not be content with such answers and I don't blame anyone who is angry at God. That will be a short term anger. One can't let the hurt create a life-long bitterness and negate being able to re-unite if such a thing is possible. Yet I am here to lecture people in what they "should feel."

I find it gulling that this guy tries to abrogate my right to explore life. He wants to control my reactions to pain as though only he has a right to feel and only he knows the right way to feel. I am here in life wondering what it's all about and I have as much of a right to wonder as anyone. I am still doing my own search. I do feel I have the right direction. I have every right to feel that I do since I've been searching all my life. No one has a right to mock or ridicule the answers I"ve found. After all I'm not tryign to impose anything on anyone I'm just offering my little warped ideas and holding up my little end of the conversation.

I don't imagine this answer will make anyone feel good I do think intellectually it's the best answer. Over time when people heal a bit they might be able to see that. The answer is that we have to have a real world. God has to let it go as a real world under its own steam even though that means pain and torment and problems. As Jesus said "in the world you will have tribulation but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." "All things for together for Good for those who love the lord" (Paul said that). In the end it will be worked out. those who seek will find.

If I could think of any more cliches I'd use them.

Theodicy and Divine Nature

The irony was not lost on me that I just finished writing the piece about the two cops (the parables of 12 views of God) which was actually an atheist allegory of the theodicy problem, and no sooner had a finished then I turn over to my aol greeting page and see that one of my favorite modern heroines, Benazire Bhutto, had been murdered. She was assassinated in a manner not unlike that of Sadat. Arab terrorists like to go out with big bangs. Another meaningless act of violence against a heroic individual who gave her life to make the world a better place. Yet I cannot agree with the atheists who would use this as another opportunity to try for the big magic King’s X God beater argument. We live in a screwed up world. Either it’s fallen or it’s just crap from the get go, but we do live in a world that more resembles The Marquis de Sade’s circus of pain, rather than the creation of a kind loving God. The problem is, this is one of the great oceanic questions. People have been writing about these questions for thousands of years. Why am I here? What is life about? Is there a God? Why do we suffer? Why is there evil in the world? The atheists want to reduce these to oversimplification: these things prove there is no God, they are just accidents and random chance, that’s it end of story. But these questions lend themselves to easy solutions. This is one of the reasons Sartre thought life was meaningless and absurd. These questions remain important even when we try to sweep them away and dismiss them as just “that’s the way it is.” They don’t disprove God; they demand that we think about God because we know instinctively that somehow God is necessary for the answers. Try to reduce them and dismiss them, their importance cries out, try to resolve them too neatly with a fundamentalist formula and they lash back and become theodicy problems.

There are three major answers to theodicy usually employed by theists:

(1) free Will

(2) mitigate the harms of pain

(3) defining God's nature in such a way as to explain pain

The first is free will. The reason free will keeps popping up in theodicy is because it is often put forward as a mitigating factor that allows God's loving nature to be circumvented in therms of allowing pain. Of course atheists are always quick to disvalues free will as though it has no meaning and they gladly do without if only they didn't have to live with the ambiguity of God's problematic existence. But, that is really a strange state of affairs for people who fancy themselves "free thinkers." Could a gaggle of rebellious libertines who hate to be told they need to accept God's laws really be happy as robots, created to obey with no alternative? I've seen atheists argue that God would have been much more kind and much more intelligent to make them unable to object to his will so that there could be no pain in the world. I have seen them go so far as to argue that free will is non existent and meaningless. What then is the value of "free thinking?"

atheist reduce this to utter simplicity by taking out the reasons for it. It is represented by no 1 in the Vuletic article (see 12 angry stereotypes:"I thought about intervening," said the first officer, "but it occurred to me that it was obviously better for the murderer to be able to exercise his free will than to have it restricted.



The second is mitigate the harms of pain. The most familiar of these is "pain builds character." This one is so idiotic even Vuletic didn't model it in his twelve officers. The closest he comes to it is no.12: "Oh, well it was just a test. Ms. K and I had been dating for some time (no offense, I didn't know she was someone else's property), and one beautiful night she finally told me she loved me." But seriously, we can dismiss this one ourselves. Pain huts. It's bad. IN a sense it builds character but only if you stop it in time. After a point it just wears you down more. So it destroys character too. I can't really blame the atheists for all of their mocking, or rejection of these answers. Some of them are pretty flimsy. I especially hate the mitigation of pain answers. I am totally against using them. But one version of harm mitigation is the "God will make it up to us" answer. This was mocked in no 9: "Moments after Ms. K. flat lined, I had her resuscitated, and flown to a tropical resort where she is now experiencing extraordinary bliss, and her ordeal is just a distant memory." Of course that would be idiotic for a cop to say. Not quite so idiotic to believe that God would take her spirit to a celestial paradise. Although I don't find that an inspiring answer because it does sound like just an excuse and it doesn't answer the problem of the injustice in this life. But I do not rely on the joys of heaven as an answer to the pain of life, however, there is a specific use to this line that atheists don't think about. That use is in answer to the question of about God having created in the first place; Why would God create anything at all knowing that a world of pain and injustice would result? My answer has been that God alone would see how the positive nature of creation, pain and all, outweighs the negative. Only God could understand how creation is worth in in spite of the torment and anguish that is felt in life. The Vuletic article reduces this to "God will make up for it in heaven."I can't really say that he's dealing with my answer in particular, on the other hand, I think this hedonistic calculus God style is a good point to make. It is not an answer to the problem of pain per se, but it is a good answer to questions about God's rational for creation.

The Vuletic parody of this answer is in no.3: Ms. K's rape and murder admittedly seems pretty horrible when taken in isolation. But when you put it into context with the rest of life, it actually adds to the overall beauty of the big picture. Ms. K.'s screams were like the discordant notes that make fine musical pieces better than they would have been had all the notes been flawless." But he's missing two crucial things here: (a) I have never said pain is beautiful; non of my answers include any sort of attempt to turn pain into a good thing. (b) It doesn't place the answer in its proper context. My view is a comparison of isolated paint to some big picture in which pain becomes some enhancement to pleasure. My view is merely a start cost benefit analysis. I am not pushing for some mystification of pain such that it turns out to be some sort of enhancing element. I mere argue that it doesn't weight the good that results from creation. And that only God can make do the math because it requires an all knowing mind. We can and should assume that if God is real then God has done the math. Now many atheists have objected that this is circular, I've assumed God before God is proven. No that is a childish understanding of logic. Of course I am assuming God, that's my belief system. I'm not using this a proof for the existence of God so it's certain circular. It's merely a rational assumption given the nature of my belief. Only if I tried to use this as an argument for God would this be a problem.

The Third option is to redefine the nature of God;to monkey around with your understanding of God's nature. Most Christians are not going to argue that God can't stop pain, or that he is helpless to control events on earth. Most Christians are not going to argue that God can't understand our pain, and the more we de claw God in one the intervention area the less God's loving fatherly nature means anything. If God can't relate to our pain he cant' really relate to our love either. If God can't understand our pain then he can't comfort us and all the reliance upon assumptions of God's love would be moot. Thus this is a moot option, except for process theology. Process theologians deny that their view of God is impersonal but it is. Their impersonal God can't act in stop pain in the world because he is only potentially God in one pole, and evolving with the world in the other. (monkey around, get it? evolution, process, never mind).

There's another way understand the nature of God and change God's recreation to the problem of pain, without reducing God to some impersonal force that can't relate to our pain. That is by understanding that God is more than our understanding includes. God is consciousness in some sense, the source of consciousness. But that doesn't mean that God's understanding is limited to ours. Now there are two problems atheists face that this point: (1) they can't believe that our understanding is limited. I've debated a lot of atheists and it's my experince that most of them have a hard time even getting this concept. Most atheists seem to believe that science knows everything. Anyone who really understands science knows how far from the truth this is. (2) atheists reduce the notion of God t a big man in the sky. The Vuletic article casted God in the role of a policeman. If the only rational view of God is that of a big cop whose job is to prevent law breaking and problems, then atheists are right. Of course there is no God of that sort. The basic formulation that atheists want to make, if pain, then no God, is obviously true if and only if this is the only sort of God there can be.

In my view this is a juvenile proposition. God as a big king on a throne is a metaphor not a reality. God as a big policeman is an extension of that metaphor. As a serious theological proposition, its the comic book version. My own view of God is mystical; and by that I mean God is beyond word, thought or image. We cannot understand God. Now when I say that, the first thing people want me to do is define God. But I'm saying we can't do that. Go is not a thing in creation. God is not alongside other things. God is off scale, we can't understand God. This means that my theology is largely apophatic, meaning, we cannot show the hole in the donut, so we show the hole by describing the donut around the hole. We can't say what God is so we say what God is not. Now my view is not entirely apophatic, because I do think there are some positive things we can know. In that snese my view is more existential. Here's what I mean by that:


Paul Tillich speaks of the ancient Dichotomy which is found thought theological history of the West, that between the essential and the existential. This is found in History of Christian Thought a compilation of lectures he gave in 1968. The dichotomy is between the essentialist (Agusutine--Platonic view) and the existentialist (Aquinas--the Aristotelian view). But he says his own existentialism is based upon the essential. This is because while the essentialist is static and non active, and the existential is al action and dynamism (the real issue between the two is not forms vs particulars but stasis vs change) the existential must play off of something, change without substance to change is nothing. Since I have based my view of God upon Tillich's notino of God as Being itself, and there we can see the essentialist basis, being, stability, always existing, stasis, there is a dynamism inherent in the nature of being as well. Being is always fomenting the beings and thus an evolutionary and developmental process is always unfolding in a dynamism out of the stability of eternal being. Heraclidus is known for his view of the world as constant flux but most people forget he saw this flux as taking place in a larger framework of stasis. Thus God is a sort of dynamic stasis or a self revealing mystery. We can get some of it, but the real understanding comes through experience which is beyond words. It cannot be communicated because that would require words. Attempts at communication always lead to botched understanding.

Thus in my view God is as analogous to a principle or the laws of physics, as to a big mind. I do not rule out consciousness on God's part. but I am prepared to understand it as a sort of Consciousness the likes of which is totally beyond our ability to understand. I try to juxtapose images of the personal God with images of the impersonal in order to remind myself that God is beyond our understanding. The Bible does this too. The Hebrew God is imaged as a whirl wind, a storm, a burning bush, but the bush talks (without a Texas Ancient). God is seen as a woman giving birth and a mother bear an mother eagle, as well as a king on a throne. All of these images suggest that God is beyond our understanding, cannot be pinned down to one consistent metaphor. For this reason I don't like to use the iea of "personality." I prefer to speak of God as conscious or "consciousness itself" rather than "personality." Personality theory in psychology is all about why we are abnormal and what's wrong with us. Personalities have quirks. God would not have personality hang ups. But consciousness can be anything. All we need for that is self awareness and the I-thou distinction. Consciousness can be beneath us, or far above us. We see a reddish discoloration in the sink, some form of mold of fungus. We assume it's not alive and doesn't think. In our sense it does not. Now I'm not saying I talk to discolorations in my sink, I'm not making new age assumptions; but from a philosophical stand point, we can't say it's not conscious. Of course it wont learn the alphabet but who can say that on the scale of molds, that it is not a fungic bard reciting the reddish tribe's version of the Iliad? We could go to the opposite extreme as well. We are the fungus compared to God.. Not that God can't understand or care for our pain, but he understands so much more than that we can't fathom his reasons for things. No this is not to say that pain is beautiful or that we can conduct a symphony while women are being rapped. It means God has reasons we don't know! Reasons we can't relate to. This is because God can see a much larger picture than we do. I shot a bird with my bb gun when I was ten. It didn't' die and I found it wounded in the back of the house. I felt ashamed and sorry and vowed never to shoot birds again. I tired to nurse it back to health in a shoe box, but it died the next day. How could I possibly explain to the bird why I shot it and how sorry I was? The fact that I could not explain doesn't mean that I did not have those feelings.

God understands the issues of life in a different way, on a different level. That is not to reduce the importance of pain or to deny the agony of suffering, but in thinking about why we have the the kind of world we do and what that really says about God, it says more, with more possibilities than just "God doesn't care." God does not manage the world. God is not a big building contractor in the sky, nor a policeman, nor a judge, nor a king. He's not watching every move to police all events.For one thing its not likely that thinks as such. All the issues of an undetermined universe could be played through as hypothetical senerios in God's mind in a single nanosecond. God has no need to deliberate or plan. There no reason to think that God uses ratiocinations. The major perimeters can be put into place in the same basic act of creation that establishes the very first existent. Whitehead's understanding was more analogous to a stage director in the performance of a play; ushering actors (actual entities in Whietheadian parlance) on and off the stage. But this would not be analogous to the kind of macro management that atheists and fundamentalists imagine. This would be at the subatomic level. God's connection with the universe can be a lot more organic, less like a child moving about his toys and writing the major action of his characters.

Of course all of these ideas are hypothetical and theoretical. My Soteriolgoical drama is theoretical. I don't know anything about God's nature or his aims. I'm only guessing but then this wold be the major thrust of answer to theodicy:

(1) soeteriological drama: God's major aim is to create free moral agents who willingly choose the good. Toward that end we must live in a real world in which one must undertake a life long search for truth, because that is the only way to internalize the values of the good. Thus the world must be neutral in terms of the obviousness of God's existence. There are enough clues to make a leap of faith but not so compelling that all must give assent.

(2) God understands values at a higher level: God understands the bigger picture in a way that we can't. Even though he cares and loves he doesn't do social engineering and doesn't base creation upon a utilitarian premise.

We can also understand God's love by understanding the human capacity for love. We should assume that the basic human capacity for decency and love is a reflection of the divine; indeed we can do no more than that. Atheists are willing to assume that human love is just an emotional state arising from chemical reactions, and a buy product of consciousness, which is in itself a side effect of having a brain. There is actually no way to leverage the proof one way or the other. But it seems unnecessary from an evolutionary view point. Now one can show utilitarian functions of love, but love in the sense of agope, charity, the willingness to according the other basic dignity and value, can also get one in trouble. Love is not a practical device for the survival of the tribe. It could easily get the tribe wiped out. Our moral value systems are ultimately a extension of our capacity to empathize with others, and this is a basic form of love in the agopic sense. That's as close to something divine as we can knowingly come and it is universal to all human culture.

Atheist assumption is that God is all knowing and can anything he wants. Thus to create at all is to pre determine a world of pain and suffering, thus God is guilty of causaing all pain and suffering. On the blog Debuncking Christianity right now Lee Randolph has a piece that argue this very thing.

first few premises:

* God is omniscient.
* God is timeless.
* God Created everything.
* God Chose how to create the world and knew how it was going to react after he made it.
* God Chose how to create people and knew how we were going to react after he made us.
* If he knew what was going to happen to us, then before we were made, our destiny was recorded.
* If he made us with free will, and he knew what was going to happen to us before he made us, then any exercise of that free will was already known by him and was really only the appearance of free will.
* In the course of our life, because we can not know the future, it appears to us that we have freewill.

God is a big man, and understandings things they way we do and purposely makes everything happen and knows exactly every little move we will make so we can blame God for everything we do.


Just because there are great oceanic questions that are not easily answered hardly means that there is no God. This is not the great God beater argument because they hang in the balance, with inferences drawn from the nature of the world on one side, and unanswered God arguments on the other. If we try to argue from the nature of the world to the nonexistence of God, open the door to design arguments. That’s the reason for rejecting the design argument (no undesigned universe to compare it to), but try to use it for theodicy and we have to accept the design things. On the other hand, if we rule out design on the grounds that we can’t reason from the nature of the world to God without pre judging the outcome by the same token we can’t make the same assumption on the other side. We cannot reason from pain and suffering to the lack of a God. That is going to require that we know something before hand about the nature and purpose of God. For this reason atheists are always trying to read in the most austere and comic book version of God; they want us to believe in a God who is a big guy in the sky because its easier to judge a big guy who is just like us, only more powerful and maybe smarter, than it would be to compare to a grate unknown