#theproblemofevil

Thought for the Day – 1 September – Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971) The Problem of Evil “According to St Augustine, great good can come from the evil which God permits.In the first place, God displays His infinite goodness and mercy.Even though He permits us to offend Him out of respect for our human liberty.He is always ready to forgive us, even as He forgave the penitent…

Does God Create Evil?: Answering the Calvinists

By Award-Winning Author Eli Kittim

——-

Calvinism Has Confused God's Foreknowledge With His Sovereignty

Dr. R.C. Sproul once said:

There is no maverick molecule if God is

sovereign.

That is to say, if God cannot control the smallest things we know of in the universe, such as the subatomic particles known as “quarks,” then we cannot trust him to keep His promises. But just because God set the universe in motion doesn’t mean that every detail therein is held ipso facto to be caused by him. God could still be sovereign and yet simultaneously permit the existence of evil and free will. This is not a contradiction (see Compatibilism aka Soft determinism). It seems that Calvinism has confused God’s foreknowledge with his sovereignty.

Calvinists often use Bible verses out-of-context to support the idea that God is partial: that he plays favorites with human beings. They often quote Exodus 33.19b (ESV):

I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious,

and will show mercy on whom I will show

mercy.

But the only thing that this verse is saying is that God’s grace is beyond human understanding, not that God is partial and biased (cf. Rom. 11.33-34). By contrast, the parable of the vineyard workers (Mt 20.1–16) promotes equality between many different classes of people. One interpretation of this parable would be that late converts to Christianity earn equal rewards along with early converts, and there need be no jealousy among the latter. This can be understood on many different levels. For example, one could view the early laborers as Jews who may resent the Gentile newcomers for being treated as equals by God. Some seem to get more rewards, others less, depending on many factors unbeknownst to us. But the point of the parable is that God is fair. No one gets cheated. However, in Calvinism, God is not fair. He does as he pleases. He creates evil and chooses who will be saved and who will be lost. This view is more in line with the capricious gods of Greek mythology than with the immutable God of the Bible.

That’s why Calvinism speaks of limited atonement. Christ’s atoning death is not for everyone, but only for a select few. You cannot look an atheist in the eye and tell them that Christ died for you. You’d be lying because, according to Calvinism, he may not have died for them. So the story goes...

But that’s a gross misinterpretation. Romans 8.29-30 doesn’t say that at all. It’s NOT saying that God used his powers indiscriminately to influence Individuals in some cases, but not in others. Nor does it follow that God played favorites and decided at the outset that some will be saved, and others not (tough luck, as it were). Not at all. All it says is that God can *foresee* the future!

God doesn’t CAUSE everything to happen as it does, but he does SEE what will happen. So, insofar as God was able to “see” who would eventually submit to his will (and who would not), one could say that God “foreknew” him. In Romans 8.29, the Greek term προέγνω comes from the word προγινώσκω (proginóskó), which means “to know beforehand” or to “foreknow.” It doesn’t imply determinism, the notion that all events in history, including those of human action, are predetermined by extraneous causes, and that people have no say in the matter, and are therefore not responsible for their actions. It simply means to know beforehand. That’s all. Case in point, Isaiah, Daniel, and John the Revelator saw the future; but they didn’t cause it.

God would never have predestined some people to be eternally lost and some to be eternally saved. That would not be just. Similarly, Romans 8.29-30 is only referring to those individuals whom God “foreknew” (προέγνω) that would meet the conditions of his covenant, those are the same he predestined (προώρισεν), called (ἐκάλεσεν), justified (ἐδικαίωσεν), and glorified (ἐδόξασεν)! Otherwise, how could God have possibly predestined those who he foresaw that would NOT meet the conditions of his covenant?

The Greek term προώρισεν (proōrisen; predestined) is derived from the word προορίζω (proorizó), which means “to predetermine” or “foreordain.” In other words, those whom God could *foresee* in the future as being faithful, those same individuals he pre-approved to be conformed to the image of his son. So, by “predestination” God simply means that he’s “declaring the end from the beginning” (Isa. 46.9-10 NASB). It’s not as if God was the direct cause of their decision or free choice. He simply foresaw those who had already chosen to be conformed to the image of his son of their own accord. Notice that in Rom. 8.29 (Berean Literal Bible), the text says that BECAUSE God foreknew them, he predestined them. This means that the *foresight* came first. Since God could see the outcome, he “foreknew” who would be lost and who would be saved:

because those whom He foreknew, He also

predestined to be conformed to the image

of His Son.

——-

Does John Piper represent Biblical Christianity?

Theologian and pastor John Piper cites Acts 4.27-28 (ESV) to prove his point that God determines everything that happens:

for truly in this city there were gathered

together against your holy servant Jesus,

whom you anointed, both Herod and

Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and

the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your

hand and your plan had predestined to take

place.

Piper says, when you understand the complete sovereignty of God, that is to say, how he is behind everything, that he is implicated in every aspect of existence, you’ll go crazy. Why? This occurs, I suspect, because the person you thought was your best friend turns out to be your worst enemy. How can you trust him? Piper says,

He [God] governed the most wicked thing

that ever happened in the world, the

crucifixion of my savior.

Piper says that there is no randomness in the universe, and that God is behind the Tsunamis and everything else that occurs on our planet. That would imply that God is behind the earthquakes, the hurricanes, the train wrecks, the airplane crashes, the massacres, the terrorist attacks, the racist attacks, the rapes, the violent riots, the Holocaust, the Third Reich, the Manson murders, the serial killings, cannibalism, the world wars, the abortions, the beheadings, the heinous crimes, the shootings, beatings, & stabbings of the elderly, and the filicides and genocides of history. God’s behind it all. And if you contemplate this idea, it will drive you mad, says John Piper. So, in order to stay sane, he suggests that we focus on the Cross. We have to believe that God nevertheless loves us and that he was behind the murder of Jesus for our salvation. This will keep us safe from harm; from going mad, that is. Really?

In other words, God’s dictatorist regime or tyrannical authority works much like the Mafia, a secret organization or crime syndicate which controls everything from the street corner thugs to the highest levels of government. God is like a mafia boss who puts out a contract to “whack” somebody but, instead of killing him himself and taking the blame, he orders an underboss (Satan) to do his dirty work. In other words, he hires accomplices to kill people on his behalf because he’s such a coward that he doesn’t want to take the responsibility and do it himself, or to be seen as evil, yet he’s the real cause of everything, good and evil. A literal or fundamentalist interpretation of the Old Testament will no doubt lead to that conclusion (cf. Isa. 45.7). This is also the god of the Gnostics, the inferior creator-god (or demiurge) that was revealed through Hebrew scripture, who was responsible for all instances of falsehood and evil in the world!

But is this a sincere, honorable, and reliable person whom you could trust? Or is this a vile, dishonest, and despicable person who pretends to be something he is not? Does this god deserve our worship? Is he not a liar? Is this a truly loving, Holy God, or is he rather a cruel, deceitful, and merciless beast that hides behind a veneer of righteousness, much like the mafia bosses and the corrupt heads of state?

Then, after depicting a gruesome picture of a cold blooded killer-God who would order a hit on women and innocent children (cf. 1 Sam. 15.3), Piper cites Isa. 53.10:

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him

[christ] with pain.

He concludes:

Therefore the worst sin that was ever

committed was ordained by God.

Piper exclaims, “The answer is yes, he controls everything, and he does it for his glory and our good.” This is the God of Calvinism, fashioned from the pit of hell itself, which depicts God’s rule as a deep state or a totalitarian government, “A celestial North Korea,” in the words of the critic Christopher Hitchens.

What ever happened to the attribute of omnibenevolence, the doctrine that God is all-good, sans evil (cf. Ps 106.1; 135.3; Nah. 1.7; Mk 10.18)? Isaiah 65.16 calls him “the God of truth” (cf. Jn 17.17), while Titus 1.1-2 asserts that God “never lies.” Psalm 92.15 (NIV) declares:

The LORD is upright; he is my Rock, and

there is no wickedness in him.

So, there seems to be a theological confusion in Calvinism about what God does and doesn’t do. Predestination is based on foreknowledge, not on the impulsive whims of a capricious deity. To “cause” is one thing; to “foreknow” is quite another.

At a deeper, philosophical level we’re talking about the problem of evil: who’s responsible for all the suffering and evil in the world? Piper would say, God is. Blame it on God. I would say that this teaching not only contradicts the Bible but also the attributes of God. If hell was prepared for the devil and his angels (Mt 25.41), and if God is held accountable for orchestrating everything, then the devil cannot be held morally responsible for all his crimes against humanity. Besides, doesn’t scripture say that Christ “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil”? (Acts 10.38 ESV). Yet, according to Calvinism, God not only creates evil but is himself ipso facto evil! Thus, neither John Piper nor Calvinism represent Biblical Christianity! Rather, this is an aberration, a contradiction, a false doctrine. 1 Timothy 4.1 (CEV) warns:

God's Spirit clearly says that in the last

days many people will turn from their faith.

They will be fooled by evil spirits and by

teachings that come from demons.

In the following video, a question was posed to Calvinist pastor John Piper:

Has God predetermined every detail in the

universe, including sin?

To which Piper replied:

YES!

Therefore, in Calvinism,

God has become Satan!

Thought for the Day – 1 September – The Problem of Evil

Thought for the Day – 1 September – Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971) The Problem of Evil  “In his second letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul speaks of the Anti-Christ, “the man of sin … the son of perdition, who opposes and is exalted above all that is called God…” “Already,” he says, “the mystery of iniquity is at work” (Cf 2 Thess 2:3-7).From the beginning of the…

Thought for the Day – 1 September – The Problem of Evil – Part One

Thought for the Day – 1 September – Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971)

The Problem of Evil – Part One

“In his second letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul speaks of the Anti-Christ, “the man of sin … the son of perdition, who opposes and is exalted above all that is called God…” “Already,” he says, “the mystery of iniquity is at work” (Cf 2 Thess 2:3-7). From the…

Thought for the Day – 1 September – The Problem of Evil

Thought for the Day – 1 September – Meditations with Antonio Cardinal Bacci (1881-1971) The Problem of Evil  “In his second letter to the Thessalonians, the Apostle Paul speaks of the Anti-Christ, “the man of sin … the son of perdition, who opposes and is exalted above all that is called God…” “Already,” he says, “the mystery of iniquity is at work” (Cf 2 Thess 2:3-7).From the beginning of the…

I’d like to look a little more closely at my last example: if your tribe is leading you into conflict with a person of integrity, should this not be a signal that you have gone off the rails? If we are known by the company we keep, we hold each other’s values and integrity in trust. I depend on my community to notice when I stray and pull me back, and vice versa. Despite all our individual failings, and recognizing that any of us can stumble, still we are moral touchstones for each other.

(Fifth in a series that starts >here<)

Someone in my community was once complaining about how Richard, a friend of ours, was doing them wrong in some way. My response was, “If you have two explanations for a situation and one of them is that Richard is doing something nefarious and the other is anything else at all, go with the second.” I didn’t really need to hear the details. Richard had built up enough credit that the presumption of integrity was on his side.

I always felt that that should have been Obama’s response about his pastor Jeremiah Wright. Stephanopolous asked, “Do you think Wright loves his country as much as you do?” (Embarrassingly stupid question.) Obama’s answer should have been, “Jeremiah Wright served his country in combat as a pastor in the army. Since then everything he’s done has been in service to his community. He has lived his entire life in service to his country. I don’t think I have standing to question his patriotism. And neither do you.”

Or Desmond Tutu, in the debates over ordaining gays in the Episcopal Church. I had my own arguments about the rights and wrongs of that controversy back when it was burning hot; but ending up on the same side as Desmond Tutu gives me confidence I haven’t wandered too far from the straight and narrow.

Same with Mueller. Here’s a man who has spent his life fighting bad guys. He’s universally praised for his integrity. He led the FBI under Democrats and Republicans with honor. In a healthy country, attacking him only because you don’t like his current investigation—assigned to him within the past year—should make a laughingstock of his attacker, not of him. In a healthy country, great people would be recognized, honored, and given the credit they’ve earned. (And by “great” I mean the ordinary, everyday greatness that is all around us but under-recognized. A lifetime of service. The adulation of peers not out of friendship or toadyism but because they recognize quality.)

This requires a healthy dose of humility—the willingness to look to others for guidance. Ulysses S. Grant, in his memoirs, talks of how he has never taken great pride in showing off his uniform since the day he first got it, wore it everywhere, and was made fun of. The people making fun of him were not important—a street urchin and a groom—but he was willing to use their mockery as a corrective to his own behavior.

I can’t help but connect his behavior here to his thoughts about the Mexican-American war (“the most unjust war ever waged”) or on slavery. There’s an element of empathy here—of emotionally connecting with other humans to see them as equals, at some fundamental level. That empathy acts as a corrective and also provides an opening for sympathy.

We live in a crude age. The ability to recognize greatness and honor it without making the person in question a god or insisting they must be perfect is, for the most part, beyond us. Because, as someone said, all your heroes betray you sometime. No one is perfect always. Slavishly following a great man or woman is just as bad as slavishly following a tribe. But the cynical inability to recognize and celebrate the virtues of others might well be worse.

So much of our woldview is determined by the tribe of which we are a part. Disagreeing with your tribe is difficult and painful. So if on the Left they decide that we can’t sing about “standing up” against injustice because it’s ableist—not everyone can literally stand up—and I think that’s stupid, it creates a disconnect. Same with my martial arts friends on the Right—I like you, I like working with you, but your ideas are bonkers. It’s hard to feel community in those circumstances.

(Third in a series that starts >here<)

But if the tribe I choose influences my worldview, it’s still the tribe I chose. So a critical element of all this is, how did I choose? Why is the society of nerds congenial but the society of sports fans or frat boys less so? What are the attractive elements of the tribe and what are the dealbreakers that will prevent my joining?

Take the Right. There’s a lot in the espoused values of the Right which I find attractive. Personal responsibility, the worth of the individual, not looking for a handout but making it on your own—all these fit me well. 

But there are dealbreakers for me on the Right as well. The absolute inability to appreciate the experience of those less fortunate or marginalized. Taking individualism to such an extreme that it justifies letting people die in the streets rather than help them. (Which this is not exaggeration. This is the actual, literal consequence of policies pushed by the Right these days.) The authoritarianism. The lack of empathy and imagination. Carrying water for plutocrats.

That list got a bit out of hand. And what I keep coming back to is, I can make all the rationalizations I like but the fundamental issue is one of the heart. I don’t like the worldview of the right. I grew up reading Heinlein and found a lot to like in the libertarian perspective. But I never bought it. I never adopted it as my worldview. On the other hand, I read The Dispossessed and accepted Le Guin’s perspective immediately. One of the characters prepares a list of who will get food and who will not in an expected famine, based on their usefulness to the group. The protagonist comments, “There is always somebody willing to make lists.” Yeah, and don’t be that guy. My recognition was immediate and visceral.

A person is known by the company they keep, because that shows where their soul is. Not the heart, which is a fickle organ. The soul is much more foundational.

And yet the match is never exact, in the first place, and in the second: tribes drift. Often, their self-reinforcing nature makes them become more extreme. What starts as a harmless exaggeration becomes lunacy—a disconnect with the facts of the world as they are.

To choose this political moment as an example, there’s always been some tendency towards conspiracy theories on the Right. On the Left, too—but at one time the conspiracy theorists on Left and Right were equally kept on the margins. The John Birchers and Area 21 people were both fringe elements with no access to or control over policy. They were pandered to sometimes, by more mainstream politicians—but forgotten as soon as their votes were in the bag.

What changed is that Republicans decided they could not do without these people to win elections. First was the opening created by the Democrats embracing civil rights—the Southern Strategy was an explicit decision to appeal to racists on racist grounds. Then came Reagan, giving a still-civilized voice to the same people. Reagan invented the welfare queen not just to make the case against welfare—he used her to make the case for Americans to turn against Americans, for those with little to be suspicious of those with less. And more than that, she made the case that government itself is the enemy, giving your hard-earned money to those who never worked a day in their lives.

And if government is the enemy, what else will it not do? Gingrich brought a whole new class of Republicans into power, who did not have the restraints of the previous generation. They led their tribe to a new place. Vince Foster didn’t just commit suicide, he was murdered; and he wasn’t the first or last; there are dozens of murders to the Clintons’ account. But the government is the enemy, so it’s perfectly logical that the FBI is in the Clintons’ pocket which just explains why they got away with it. So when Trump is accused of collaborating with the Russians, who are you going to believe? The FBI, who are already compromised? Or the people in your tribe who will explain to you how it all works?

Having bought into the worldview of this tribe and having followed it through its evolution from the 80’s to today, this all makes sense. Everything in the bubble is justified and proved by everything else in the bubble and there is no external reality to set perspective—because anything outside the bubble is lies anyway.

Summing up, choosing a tribe (or several) is almost inevitable and my initial choice has to do with my innate characteristics. In what tribe available to me is my soul most at home? That is where I will gravitate. The tribe becomes my community and its discourse sets the parameters for how I see the world. And the more committed to my tribe I am, the more that is so. Though I chose the tribe, the tribe then becomes my guide, my framework, and the lenses by which I see the world. But even if the tribe was healthy at the beginning, there is no law of the universe that says it will remain healthy. And if it develops a sickness, it is likely to take me with it.

My task as a human then is to live in my tribe, and yet not be bound by it. To be a member of my community and yet still be myself.

One of the ways we choose between good and evil is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking.

(Second in a series that starts >here<)

Turning to evil as an Individual is one thing, but most of us aren’t as individual as all that. Most of us join a tribe somewhere along the way. If I’m a technical nerd, I join the other nerds. We talk jargon to each other. We drill deep into odd issues that no one else cares about. We tell obscure jokes to each other and laugh out of proportion to the joke.

The same politically. If I’m on the Left, I have a set of attitudes which attracted me to the Left in the first place. But then it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. I make a community with others on the Left. We tell jokes and communicate opinions to each other. If my opinion reinforces our mutual world view, others praise me. I like that—it shows me that I must have been right, and it feels good to have my community hold me in high regard. So my opinion is reinforced. My people seem even more right, and people with opposing views seem even more wrong. The epistemic circle closes.

This just happens. It’s how people operate. So we can ask how to break out of that circle—and as fully realized human beings it’s our responsibility to work to do so—but the more interesting question for now is, how did we choose our tribe in the first place? What are the values of the tribe and are they helpful? If my tribe wanders down some dark alley (anti-Semitism, slavery, authoritarianism, you name it) I’m very likely to go with them. So choosing a tribe becomes critical because their values are likely to become my values. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. With which dogs shall I lie?

Nerds value information, facts, and connections between facts. Knowing it all and getting it right. Scientists, who are generally nerds, value objectively provable facts. Sufficient commitment to these values can even cause people to change opinions, which is notoriously difficult to do. There’s the case of the statistician who was convinced that climate change was wrong and that the ecologists who were promoting the theory were simply bad at crunching numbers. He went deep into the climate science and came out convinced that not only were the ecologists right, but they were actually understating the problem.

So I could argue that nerds have a built-in immunity to evil (to the extent that evil is unnatural). I could argue they would see that obviously blacks are people, that Jews do not own the global financial system, that Russia is behind the hacks into our systems.

But that does not seem to be true. Many on the Right are total nerds. I know these guys. They’re not stupid. They’ll bury you in supposed facts pulled from Fox News and right-wing blogs. They’ll explain how these “facts” correlate, building up to some giant conspiracy or hidden explanation for why the world is fucked up. And they’ll be totally impervious to actual facts, choosing to disbelieve those because of their source. Because they don’t come from their tribe.

Loyalty to the tribe—or better, identity with the tribe—outweighs other values. And so we march with our brothers and sisters to perdition.