Apologetics 6 - The Problem of Evil

We’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks talking through what is surely the most significant challenge to Christian belief and undoubtedly one of the questions that casts a shadow over all of human existence. The problem of evil has occupied the brightest philosophical and theological minds for most of recorded history so there is not much point in trying to come up with an original angle. But what follows is a brief summary of the approach that seems best to me.

At the outset it is important to note that while evil is undoubtedly a theological/philosophical problem it is first and foremost an existential problem. All of us are far more interested in coping with actual experiences of suffering than we are in whether or not the problem is ’soluble’ intellectually or spiritually. Evil is above all something that is suffered and only secondarily something that can be explained. Jurgen Moltmann puts it well:

[Evil] is not really a question at all, in the sense of something we can ask or not ask, like other questions. It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living with this open wound (The Trinity and the Kingdom, 47,49)

Nevertheless, we have to make some kind of attempt at an answer (and that is all that can be offered, in my opinion), especially those of us who hold to belief in the providence of a good God. My own approach to the problem is based on two key convictions that have shaped many historical Christian responses to evil.

The first is that the world was originally created in freedom and that human freedom is part of what it means to bear the image of God. This is not freedom for its own sake but freedom as the prerequisite for genuine love. Christians believe that God is love. God does not happen to be loving (as compared to some other standard), God defines love and is the source of all human love as a result. This freedom to love defines God and this freedom to love has defined what he has created out of the overflow of that love.

The second conviction is that evil has resulted from a corruption of that freedom to love. While the origins of evil will always remain a speculative and mysterious subject, a Christian view holds that it originates in a corrupted will, a will that has misused the freedom to love. This is the view depicted in the Genesis 3 account of the fall of humanity, a fall away from original goodness. It is from within this ’space’ created for free creatures that the possibility of evil must have emerged.

So evil, in the Christian understanding, must always be described as corrupted goodness. C.S. Lewis famously remarked in Mere Christianity that there is no such thing as being bad for the sake of ‘badness’ but there is the distinct possibility of doing good for its own sake. What he calls badness always emerges from the right goals pursued through the wrong means.

Having said all of this, Christians are still open to the question, “Was the price of human freedom worth paying? Should God have not seen the misery that would come with the gift of freedom and decided against it?” This is an argument that has a certain force. Who, after all, can look honestly at some of the horrors of history and not wonder whether such a terrible gift was worth the price.

At the end of the day, however, it is a profoundly moral argument. And an argument against God that depends on a moral foundation like this seems doomed to fail. How, after all, can you argue against God’s existence based on what kind of a world God should have made when the word ’should’ itself implies a moral standard that must be accounted for.

As a Christian, I confess to an ongoing sense of bewilderment and grief at the extent of innocent suffering and senseless violence that plagues our world. I am forced to admit, however, that the choice to make this kind of a world was not mine and that my vision is very small and very limited. This compels me to think that the possibility of goodness and love, however partially realized, is itself a ‘problem‘ that demands an explanation because, like our revolt against evil, our attachment to goodness, love and beauty points to a memory of a world and of people better than what we see around us.

Go Read This

This is a fascinating read on parenting, mortality and the way we seem incurably drawn toward a lasting hope. It sort of reminds me with a conversation Julie and I had the other day about whether or not she had to become an adult some day. The upshot of the conversation was that she was OK with being an adult as long as we could all still live together. There’s something about as that wants to preserve and make permanent the relationships and experiences that matter the most.

Ht: Ryan

An Interesting Irony?

I’m starting to wonder about the possibility of a very counterintuitive truth. What if we evangelicals are among the more secular folk around? Even as a I write it, this is a question that seems odd. Evangelicals are known for their historical opposition to secularism and evangelicalism (if it can be defined) is often defined by individual piety and the priority placed on a vital personal relationship with God.

But the more I think about it the more I’m suspicious that many of key markers of this ‘relationship’ could best be understood as accommodations to secularism. This could lead to the ironic conclusion that much of what is generally pointed toward as evidence of spiritual vitality could be deeply secular in nature.

The historical secularist concern was to uncouple the church from its long-held position of public privilege and influence. This separation of church and state is now so much a part of our understanding that it is taken as axiomatic that religion has no place beyond the subjective experience of individuals who find that sort of thing helpful.

It seems to me, looking at how a life with God is conceived of an practised within the circles I have spent much of my life, that we have largely accepted the secular assessment of the role of religion. I see this in a number of areas, primarily the persistent priority given to individual experience as the barometer for measuring spiritual health.

Phrases like ‘hearing God’s voice’, ‘discovering God’s will’ are just two examples of ways of relating to God that, at first glance, seem external but are conceived of mainly as private exercises in which individuals ’sense’ what God might be saying or doing. This, coupled with the unspoken assumption that the church exists for the purpose of nurturing individual relationships with God and meeting the spiritual needs of its members are so much a part of the vocabulary and DNA of evangelicalism that it can be very difficult to see life with God in any other terms.

In short, it can be very difficult to see that the categories and expectations that we operate with are largely secular in that they take as given the notion that God is to be sought, experienced and followed primarily (exclusively?) in the realm of the private, subjective experience of the individual. While there is an irreducibly subjective element to life with God, it seems to me that there is something very secular about ‘relating’ to God in such a privatized way. Worse, I fear there may be something very misleading about this kind of a presentation of what should be expected of a life lived with God.

Apologetics 5 - Questions of Science

Having discussed some of the theoretical issues, we’re now dealing with a succession of challenges that are often made by inquirers and critics of the Christian faith. The first of these has to do with a cluster of issues that could fall under the heading of the perceived conflict between science and religion. The issues here are quite broad and could easily consume a course on their own but I’ll summarize a few of those that seem most significant from my perspective.

At the outset I think it is important to emphasize that the perception of tension between science and religion is based on a misunderstanding. The suspicion of science within some Christian circles is rooted in the notion that as scientific discovery progresses, God will become an unnecessary hypothesis.

The link between the advances of science and secularization has become an unquestioned article of faith for many and it is only recently that proponents of this thesis have been forced to admit that the story hasn’t played itself out along these lines (Peter Berger is one of the most significant voices to have backtracked on this belief in secularization).

In class I tried to distinguish between philosophical naturalism and science and argued that we would be far better off identifying some of the problems we have with the former without unnecessarily denigrating the latter. It would be utter foolishness, in an age of laptop computers, suspension bridges and transplant surgeries to deny that science has contributed immeasurably both to the quality of our lives and to our understanding of the world in which we live.

By ‘naturalism’ I simply mean the basic conviction that ‘what is, is all there is’. The belief here is that explanations of causal relationships within the natural realm (what ‘is’) will eventually uncover answers to the most persistent questions that human beings wrestle with, including those questions that have historically been answered by religion.

It is this totalizing confidence in the universal applicability of the scientific method that I think we have cause to be uneasy with. Because it is at this point that the very real benefits of a particular method of investigation are elevated to the level of an ideology and voices that insist that there are very real (and fundamental) questions that cannot be answered in this way are dismissed out of hand (see here for some of my earlier thoughts on the problems of this kind of reductionism).

This introduction obviously fails to address some of the most prominent areas in which the tension between naturalism and Christianity is highest. From my observation the issue that has caused the most angst is the question of the origins of life and how science has allegedly overthrown religious explanations of how we got here. Yet it is precisely this issue that illustrates some of the confusion I’ve talked about above.

While there are, for those of us who take the book of Genesis seriously, a number of hermeneutical issues raised by the scientific consensus in this area, these issues seem to have distracted people from the far more basic questions about the origins of life itself (in the face of massive improbabilities) and the ways in which purpose and structure seem to be hardwired into the fabric of reality. These are the questions, of course, that matter the most and these are the questions that are obscured by the battles that continue to be fought over secondary issues.

So it seems most productive to me to put the emphasis where it belongs: on the real and fundamental differences that exist between naturalism and Christian faith, and point to the various ways in which the assumptions that underpin them make all the difference when it comes to the conclusions at which we arrive.

Apologetics 4 - Naming the Mystery

The title of this post is somewhat misleading but it speaks to the difficulty of making a positive case for the existence of God. I don’t mean to simply categorize all of the mystery inherent within human experience and then apply the name ‘God’ to it but an apologetic interest in the question doesn’t really allow for the option of appealing to the Bible to make the case.

Those who have followed my train of thought thus far will not be surprised to discover that ‘proof’ (understood in the language of rationally guaranteed certainty) is not something that is available to us on this question so the issue becomes how to describe how faith in God illuminates or explains reality more plausibly than the alternatives.

The book I am using for this course is C. Stephen Evans’ Why Believe? and in it he points to three fundamental mysteries that point toward the reality of God. These mysteries are the mystery of existence, the mystery of moral order and the mystery of human personhood. None of these are original approaches to the question but they are, in my opinion, persistent reminders that there is more to be explained than cause-effect relationships, that there are genuine ’signals of transcendence” that point beyond reductionist explanations of reality.

The mystery of existence can be summarized concisely as the question of why there is something rather than nothing. It is easy for us to imagine that things it could have been otherwise, that the brute fact of existence itself is something that cries out for explanation. This mystery is felt even more acutely as science has revealed how astronomically improbable a universe like ours is and what the odds against there being creatures like ourselves actually are.

The mystery of moral order has been a cornerstone doctrine Christian apologists, from C.S. Lewis’ ‘Law of Human Nature’ to N.T. Wright’s ‘echo of justice’. Again, the mystery is quite simple: why is that we feel a sense of ‘ought’ when it comes to our (or more tellingly others’) behaviour.

In contrast to the ‘laws of nature’ which are descriptive of how things really behave, the Law of Human Nature points to how we should behave and this fact, for many, points beyond itself to a transcendent source. There are, of course, persistent efforts being made to explain this moral impulse in other ways but these seem to be attempts to avoid the uncomfortable conclusions that biological determinism seems to point toward.

The mystery of human personhood is in many ways deeper and more profound than either of the previous two. Most of intuitively recoil at a suggestion like Francis Crick’s Astonishing Hypothesis that “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

This mystery is sometimes talked about in the language of ‘consciousness’ but it encompasses all of the things that Crick appears to be explaining away above. It would also cover the unique ability that we have to transcend ourselves, to be self-aware and to freely choose between a course of options with an imagined future in mind. How do we explain these realities that are so obvious to most of us that we rarely stop to ponder them?

Lewis comments in Mere Christianity that the better ’stuff’ a thing is made of the greater its capacity for good and the greater its capacity for evil. The human race has provided ample evidence to back up this claim. We alone are capable of awe-inspiring heroism, artistic wonder and acts of selflessness. We alone are capable of barbaric cruelty and soul-crushing inhumanity and violence.

To summarize these three mysteries, consider the following three questions: Where are we? How are we? Who are we? The answers to these questions, from the perspective of faith in the Christian God, is that we find ourselves in a world God made, with a built-in knowledge of goodness and evil as a result of being created in image of God.

We are obviously nowhere near associating the God who accounts for these mysteries with the God revealed in Jesus Christ but this is a bit of a look at how some of the basic questions that all of us confront can be approached from the perspective of Christian belief.

The Sound of Silence

“Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.”

Frederick Buechner

Secrets in the Dark

What He Said

I just discovered that John Stackhouse has been posting on some of the themes I’ve been musing on over the past few weeks. They are grouped under the heading ‘Do You Have to Choose Between Your Brains and Your Beliefs?” and his latest discussion of the relationship between faith and knowledge is a more concise summary of what I think I meant all along.

A sample: “Life demands that we go beyond our comfort zones–even, and especially, our epistemic comfort zones–to risk… not stupidly, to be sure, but not in perfect safety, either. Welcome to the real world.”

Apologetics 3 - God As a Human Construct

Before getting into some (in my opinion) useful questions that point toward God’s existence, we went through some of the reasons why belief in God has come to be seen as less likely over the past few centuries. Here I borrowed from Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism which presents a helpful survey of the historical development of the God question (although the title is a bit misleading given the resurgence of atheism over the past few years).

For McGrath the contemporary objection to God has its origins in three historical figures, Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, each of whom presented some variation of the same argument. Our belief in God is something other than actual contact with a God who is out there. Instead it is either a psychological (Feuerbach and Freud) or social (Marx) phenomenon that has its origins in some feature of our human experience.

In the first case, belief in God is some form of ‘projection’ where we take our deepest desires and longings, project them on to the blank canvas of the universe and call them ‘God’. So if we have a desire for immortality, a longing for transcendent meaning or a need to ground morality in something absolute, we take these desires, these features of our experience, imagine a notion of God that corresponds to those desires and come to think of it as real.

Marx had a more cynical view of religion, namely that it was used by those in positions of power to reinforce the social hierarchy. Religion, Marx argued, was a useful way to keep people in their place. Convince a poor peasant that his reward is in heaven and you can get him to put up with his miserable state and dissuade him from revolting against the wealthy and the powerful (often the church).

It is, of course, possible to read the evidence in either of these ways but what I find confusing is the notion that it necessarily follows that belief in God is rendered less credible. For example, the idea that there is a psychological link between human desires and faith in God could be used to argue both sides. Either belief is merely a psychological phenomenon or our psychological makeup is what it is because of the possibility of our desires actually being met.

Moreover, it seems that if belief in God was some kind of projection of human desire then it would be far more likely that we would ‘project’ a more agreeable God. The God of the Bible certainly fulfills many of the deepest desires and wishes that we have but there are also facets of God’s character that seem directly opposed to what many of us would wish for.

All this to say, the alleged dethroning of God in light of our increased understanding of both human psychology and the social construction of reality may be exaggerated. It seems to me that we’re still left in position of making sense of ambiguous evidence and making a commitment with partial knowledge.

Apologetics 2 - The Goal (Reconsidered)

Given the previous discussion on what kinds of knowledge are available (personal and impersonal) and the implications that this might have for our understanding of truth and how we might approach it, it is important to return briefly to the goal of apologetics (at least as I’m conceiving it).

For me the question of whether or not this is a discipline that can prove central Christian beliefs is a non-starter. Of course it cannot. So the question is not whether or not we can prove Christianity to be true. The question is: Does beginning with the gospel and evaluating what life looks like from this perspective illuminate and explain human experience? Beginning here (where else could we who call ourselves Christians begin?) is it possible to build a powerful cumulative case for the plausibility of the Christian faith?

This will obviously seem like a huge assumption, a huge leap to begin with. Yet I don’t think that it’s possible for Christians to begin anywhere but here. As Newbigin puts it, “To look outside the gospel for a starting point for the demonstration of the reasonableness of the gospel is itself a contradiction of the gospel, for it implies that we look for the logos elsewhere than in Jesus.”

The objections are obvious (some of them are even my own). Newbigin himself was aware of how this would sound. He goes on to say, “To regard this as cognitively inferior to the rational demonstration of supposedly certain truths is to assume that the ultimate reality with which we have to deal is not personal but impersonal. In the investigation of impersonal realities we may ask for the kind of indubitable certainties that the Age of Reason demanded… But if the ultimate reality with which, or rather with whom, we have to deal is the being of the Triune God, then the response of personal faith to a personal calling is the only way of knowing that reality. To rule this out as unreasonable is to make an a priori decision against the possibility that ultimate reality is personal.”

This will no doubt frustrate some who wonder how such a commitment could be made prior to the fact. I feel that frustration myself but I confess that I can’t see a way around it. It seems to me that every option on the table begins in the same place. It is only from this place that we can begin the conversation on how the world looks, how we ourselves look, if we take a look from this perspective. And I think the best place to start is with the honest admission that this is where we all begin.

Apologetics 1 - Personal Knowledge

So where to begin a course that aims to demonstrate the plausibility of the Christian faith? It seems to me that any discussion of whether or not Christianity makes sense, whether or not God can be known (indeed whether or not God even exists) must start with a theory of knowledge. What kind of knowledge are we talking about? What kinds of criteria should we be using?

On questions like these I depend heavily on Lesslie Newbigin’s Proper Confidence, a powerful little book that makes a strong case for the idea that the noun ‘knowledge’ ought always to be modified by the adjective ‘personal’. What does he mean? Newbigin basically argues that the idea of ‘objective knowledge,’ the notion that we can stand as detached observers making objective judgements on truth and falsehood is largely an illusion.

Knowledge is irreducibly personal because all knowing involves a subjective self (with biases, limitations and assumptions) confronting an external reality that is at least partially hidden. All knowledge requires a knower and this knower brings a lot of baggage to the process before the fact.

Recognizing this forces us to admit that there is a level of personal risk and commitment involved with truth claims because it is not possible to resolve all doubts before making a choice (especially in the so-called ultimate questions of meaning and purpose). The refusal to commit for fear of being wrong is a failure of nerve. Faith, far from being a weak form of knowledge, is a prerequisite to knowledge.

The commitment, the leap of faith that we must all make concerns the question of whether reality as we experience it is at rock bottom personal or impersonal. If reality is impersonal then rational explanation of cause and effect relationships would be sufficient (since what is is all there is). If we could explain the machine we would have succeeded in what we set out to do.

But if reality is, in fact, personal then something new is introduced into the equation, that being the possibility that there is some kind of relationship between the knower and the known. Some kind of personal response is required and like all relationships, this would involve a level of risk.

The point is that there is no way of adjudicating between these two options. Reason alone will not explain reality if that reality is somehow personal (the notion of purpose is key for Newbigin - how do we account for the pervasive reality of purpose in the universe when it is only persons that can entertain purposes?). To argue that ultimate reality submit exclusively to the bar of empirical proof is to have already made the decision in advance.