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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: Theodicy and The Fall
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Foxymoron
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# 10343
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Posted
I recently read David Bentley Hart’s “The Doors of the Sea”, which is a response to the problem of natural evil in the context of the 2004 Tsunami.
He discusses Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother’s Karamazov” at length and rejects the idea that God is responsible for every evil that afflicts the world, or that He inflicts evils upon us as part of some unfathomable Master Plan. Bentley Hart concurs with Ivan Karamazov that any God who is responsible for or makes use of unbearable suffering as a method of achieving their goal cannot be respected, whatever the final outcome. Instead he argues that death, cruelty and suffering are the result of a Fallen World in a Fallen Cosmos, and that consequently the suffering and untimely death of the innocent is every bit as horrifying and objectionable to God as they are to mankind. However he also maintains that despite this God will ultimately and inevitably redeem the world and bring death, cruelty and suffering to an end.
My question is, how do we fit the biblical account of The Fall with what we know of natural history? It’s plain that arbitrary death and suffering existed well before humanity arose. I’ve googled around for various interpretations, and there are numerous "Did Death Exists Before The Fall" articles taking the position that death had always existed but with the Fall came the possibility and awareness of *spiritual death*.
This kind of makes sense, but doesn’t really get round the problem of suffering and cruelty. How can The Fall be understood if the world already contained all the necessary ingredients for mayhem and horror - natural evil, at least - millions of years before humanity appeared on the scene?
To clarify somewhat, below there's a section from the essay David Bentley Hart wrote that was the seed of his book "The Doors of the Sea", followed by a blog post reviewing the book and asking the same question as I (but more eloquently):
quote:
Voltaire’s poem is not a challenge to Christian faith; it inveighs against a variant of the “deist” God, one who has simply ordered the world exactly as it now is, and who balances out all its eventualities in a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Nowhere does it address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. But Ivan’s rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees -- and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality -- that it would be far more terrible if it were.
Christians often find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament -- to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ’s triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty -- wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God’s determination of Himself or purpose for His creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness. Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent -- though immeasurably more vile -- is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.
There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality -- in nature or history -- is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of -- but entirely by way of -- every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator’s design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.
I do not believe we Christians are obliged -- or even allowed -- to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.
As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Tsunami and Theodicy
First Things
May 8, 2008
David B. Hart
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2008/05/tsunami-and-theodicy
quote:
An important point in Hart’s answer to Ivan Karamazov is the emphasis on the Augustinian view that evil is nothing in itself; it is simply the privation of the good. “Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all.” That is, although in some isolated cases, suffering might be “explainable” as being necessary or even good, we should not expect this to always be the case. Suffering and evil, in general, do not make sense.
In that case, we might ask, why do suffering and evil exist at all? Hart’s answer, not surprisingly, is a version of the free-will defense. Creation as we see it is not how God intended it. “[I]n the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death.” Hart insists that God’s will “can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance,” and that “there is a kind of ‘provisional’ cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other.”
Hart, therefore, rejects both the “best of all possible worlds” view under which every single good and evil event is perfectly accounted for in a gigantic mathematical equation, and the Reformed view that everything that happens—including sin—is perfectly in accordance with God’s divine will. So he is able to agree wholeheartedly with everyone, believer or unbeliever, who feels instinctively that the horror of the tsunami is totally discordant with what God wills for us.
Many Christians, of course, will be unable to agree with Hart’s position on free will and divine sovereignty. What I personally find more frustrating about Hart, however, is that he never fully addresses the question of the mechanism by which the fall of man caused the physical universe to “languish in bondage to the powers and principalities of this age.” Does he accept, in broad outline at least, the current scientific understanding of the history of the physical universe? If so, then presumably the fall of man happened very late in this history. Did the fall of man change Maxwell’s equations? Or did it affect the laws of physics from the beginning of time, by backwards causality of some kind? Or is there something fundamentally flawed with the very concept of “laws of physics”? There are various options here, none of which is easy to defend. Hart does not seem to sense the difficulty, perhaps because he is untrained in science. Evil that arises from human volition can be accounted for at least partially by the free-will defense, but the whole point of a natural disaster like the tsunami is that it seems to have nothing to do with human will. If, despite appearances, it does have something to do with human will, then this surprising connection demands further explication. Unfortunately, Hart is of little help here.
Review of 'The Doors of the Sea' by David Bentley Hart
" target="_blank">http://www-math.mit.edu/~tchow/reviews/hart.html[/QUOTE]
[ 27. December 2014, 18:10: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
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tclune
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# 7959
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Posted
Those are pretty long quotes. We worry about violating copyrights around here, so I would caution you to keep quoted material down to a paragraph or so in the future. Posting a link to extended material is fine, but try to limit actual quotes as much as possible.
--Tom Clune, Purgatory Host
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shamwari
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# 15556
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Posted
I dont go with a "Fall" in any sense. Even less with a Fall in nature.
The world as created was not created risk averse.
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mousethief
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# 953
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Posted
It's only in a dangerous world with fixed laws that we are capable of being free moral agents.
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
I recently read David Bentley Hart’s “The Doors of the Sea”, which is a response to the problem of natural evil in the context of the 2004 Tsunami.
He discusses Dostoyevsky’s “The Brother’s Karamazov” at length and rejects the idea that God is responsible for every evil that afflicts the world, or that He inflicts evils upon us as part of some unfathomable Master Plan. Bentley Hart concurs with Ivan Karamazov that any God who is responsible for or makes use of unbearable suffering as a method of achieving their goal cannot be respected, whatever the final outcome. Instead he argues that death, cruelty and suffering are the result of a Fallen World in a Fallen Cosmos, and that consequently the suffering and untimely death of the innocent is every bit as horrifying and objectionable to God as they are to mankind. However he also maintains that despite this God will ultimately and inevitably redeem the world and bring death, cruelty and suffering to an end.
l
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Open theologian Greg Boyd has been working along these lines for some time. His latest book is a very detailed and well-thought out explication of this pov.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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shamwari
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# 15556
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Posted
Meant to add that J. Hick Evil and the God of Love is good on this topic.
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Squibs
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# 14408
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Posted
I was impressed enough with his essay Tsunami and Theodicy to pick up a copy of The Doors of the Sea.
To be frank, while I really wanted to like this book, I was ultimately disappointed in DBH's conclusions. Yes, his talents as a writer were on display (see the last paragraph of his essay, for example) but the heart of his argument was lacking.
Death must have been present before the fall. There is no evidence to suggest that the universe suddenly became finite, or that predation just happened, or that tectonic plates and volcanoes appeared after the fall. Again, death, pain and suffering must have been around before the fall.
Perhaps it makes more sense to distinguish between agents of death. Meaning that we view death as either a consequence of a natural, and essentially random, process (e.g. a volcano taking a dump on your head) or an intentional act of evil (e.g. The Holocaust).
It seems to me that Creation was never perfect; Genesis contains many references to God declaring his work as good. All of this suggests to me that, irrespective of sin, the universe in its current state was never the final stage in the project.
As far as I am concerned, it is unquestionable that the potential for death and some form of suffering existed as the finite universe began to exist. As life began this potential was realised. With this in mind, perhaps instead of stating that death happened as a consequence of the fall, we should be describing the type of death that exists in a world of sin.
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
I was impressed enough with his essay Tsunami and Theodicy to pick up a copy of The Doors of the Sea.
To be frank, while I really wanted to like this book, I was ultimately disappointed in DBH's conclusions. Yes, his talents as a writer were on display (see the last paragraph of his essay, for example) but the heart of his argument was lacking.
Death must have been present before the fall. There is no evidence to suggest that the universe suddenly became finite, or that predation just happened, or that tectonic plates and volcanoes appeared after the fall. Again, death, pain and suffering must have been around before the fall.
Perhaps it makes more sense to distinguish between agents of death. Meaning that we view death as either a consequence of a natural, and essentially random, process (e.g. a volcano taking a dump on your head) or an intentional act of evil (e.g. The Holocaust).
It seems to me that Creation was never perfect; Genesis contains many references to God declaring his work as good. All of this suggests to me that, irrespective of sin, the universe in its current state was never the final stage in the project.
As far as I am concerned, it is unquestionable that the potential for death and some form of suffering existed as the finite universe began to exist. As life began this potential was realised. With this in mind, perhaps instead of stating that death happened as a consequence of the fall, we should be describing the type of death that exists in a world of sin.
I think part of the problem here is your thinking of the fall in rather literalistic terms, even though (I'm guessing) your understanding of creation is more figurative (i.e. theistic evolution). For Boyd, "the fall" is a figurative event that occurred in the very beginning (i.e. prior to or concurrent with the Big Bang)-- it is the way Satan (however you want to configure that) "corrupted" creation-- from the very beginning. So, yes, death and suffering would have been part of creation from the very beginning--or at least what WE would think of as "the beginning". But that doesn't mean it is part of the ideal. Indeed, Boyd presents a good biblical argument that draws on the imagery of "lion laying the lamb" etc. to show that the way things are now is not the way it is meant to be.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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Foxymoron
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# 10343
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Open theologian Greg Boyd has been working along these lines for some time. His latest book is a very detailed and well-thought out explication of this pov.
Sounds right up my street. Would that be "Satan & the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy"?
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
Open theologian Greg Boyd has been working along these lines for some time. His latest book is a very detailed and well-thought out explication of this pov.
Sounds right up my street. Would that be "Satan & the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy"?
Yes. I haven't actually had a chance to read it yet, but attended a professional seminar (Open & Relational Theology Subgroup of AAR) where he was the keynote speaker & presented a paper based on this work (prior to the publication of the book), and had a chance to talk with him afterward. I was most impressed with the work he was/is doing in this area.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
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W Hyatt
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# 14250
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
It seems to me that Creation was never perfect; Genesis contains many references to God declaring his work as good. All of this suggests to me that, irrespective of sin, the universe in its current state was never the final stage in the project.
It seems to me that Creation was never perfect in the way we would like it to be, and that God declared it as very good because it was perfect for his purpose, which apparently was not for it to function as an idyllic paradise.
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
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sanityman
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# 11598
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Posted
quote:
Foxymoron:
[David Bentley Hart] ...rejects the idea that God is responsible for every evil that afflicts the world, or that He inflicts evils upon us as part of some unfathomable Master Plan ...Instead he argues that death, cruelty and suffering are the result of a Fallen World in a Fallen Cosmos, and that consequently the suffering and untimely death of the innocent is every bit as horrifying and objectionable to God as they are to mankind.
quote:
Squibs:
...death, pain and suffering must have been around before the fall ...It seems to me that Creation was never perfect; Genesis contains many references to God declaring his work as good. All of this suggests to me that, irrespective of sin, the universe in its current state was never the final stage in the project.
quote:
W Hyatt:
It seems to me that Creation was never perfect in the way we would like it to be, and that God declared it as very good because it was perfect for his purpose, which apparently was not for it to function as an idyllic paradise.
I'm seeing a common theme here, and it's along the same lines as I've been thinking. If I may summarise:- The fall of man is not responsible for natural evil. Death was in creation from the start, either through Satan's agency (however defined) or because creation is an ongoing process, and imperfect because incomplete.
- God abhors the suffering and cruelty caused by natural evil, but does not intervene to stop it. However, this is not because some divine master plan makes it necessary for humans to suffer in this way.
It seems that, accepting these positions, you either are forced to deny God's omnipotence (Epicurius' argument) or affirm with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Is there another option? And is it necessary to invoke a third party (Satan) to get God "off the hook"?
- Chris.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
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Dafyd
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# 5549
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Posted
It seems to me that the effects of the Fall aren't temporally linear. So that they stretch back before the Fall happened (whatever it actually was - I am disinclined to believe that there was a single event involving a concrete piece of fruit and a literal talking snake). Creation's relation to God is non-temporal, God being outside time, so that the fall of creation as a whole from God is also non-temporal affecting creation at all time.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Squibs
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# 14408
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I think part of the problem here is your thinking of the fall in rather literalistic terms, even though (I'm guessing) your understanding of creation is more figurative (i.e. theistic evolution). For Boyd, "the fall" is a figurative event that occurred in the very beginning (i.e. prior to or concurrent with the Big Bang)-- it is the way Satan (however you want to configure that) "corrupted" creation-- from the very beginning. So, yes, death and suffering would have been part of creation from the very beginning--or at least what WE would think of as "the beginning". But that doesn't mean it is part of the ideal. Indeed, Boyd presents a good biblical argument that draws on the imagery of "lion laying the lamb" etc. to show that the way things are now is not the way it is meant to be.
Yes, I accept evolution but I don't feel the need to put "theistic" in front of it.
Boyd's argument -- at least as you have explained it -- throws up some difficulties. For instance, if sin (or the fall) existed before we did, or even "before" the universe was created, then humans are just hapless victims of some battle that is utterly beyond our control. It suggests to me two things. Either God needs our existence, and consequently our suffering, to remove sin. Or knowing that blueprints were flawed (before the material universe began to exist) he was unwilling to redesign things.
Even if one does not accept the Genesis creation accounts as a blow-by-blow history, I think that Boyd's interpretation -- or what I understand of it -- is entirely incompatible with the general thrust of the stories: creation came to exist, it was good but then something went wrong, and God through Christ did something about it.
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Squibs
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# 14408
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
I'm seeing a common theme here, and it's along the same lines as I've been thinking. If I may summarise:
- The fall of man is not responsible for natural evil. Death was in creation from the start, either through Satan's agency (however defined) or because creation is an ongoing process, and imperfect because incomplete.
I would agree with this. I don't think there is anything in Genesis to suggest that the author(s) believed Adam and Eve (doesn't matter if one thinks them as representative of humanity, a large group or actual individuals) were immortal. Indeed, in Gen 3 the concept of death is already understood by Eve.
- God abhors the suffering and cruelty caused by natural evil, but does not intervene to stop it. However, this is not because some divine master plan makes it necessary for humans to suffer in this way.
I don't agree that pain is necessary, and despite my disappointment about the heart of DBH's essay and book, neither does he. There seems to be a contradiction in your words. If God abhors suffering then one would imagine he did and is doing something about it, even if it isn't exactly what we would expect. Perhaps replacing "necessary" with "consequence" would be more helpful. Earthquakes are a consequence of living in this universe just as sound is a consequence of music.
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:It seems that, accepting these positions, you either are forced to deny God's omnipotence (Epicurius' argument) or affirm with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Is there another option? And is it necessary to invoke a third party (Satan) to get God "off the hook"?
- Chris.
I don't think that you are forced to deny God's omnipotence. However, one must think that God limits himself in some ways in deference to our free will and the limitations of a finite material universe. In other words, God's will runs through the maze of our future and our history towards his inexorable goal.
As for the best of possible worlds... Well, maybe I agree with this but only up to an extent. We live in a finite universe -- as stars are born and die and as galaxies gradually slip away from each other leaving only void it seems that creation is on the road to an agonisingly slow and cold death. The clock is winding down. Still, it must be said at this point that if one accepts "the fall" then the world we live in isn't the best of all possible worlds, it is a corruption of something that was better. Something happened and creation suffered because of it. Romans 8:22 hints at this suffering but also provides hope of new creation - the next phase in the project.
quote:
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
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Belle Ringer
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# 13379
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Posted
I once read an argument that much (not all) natural event pain is caused by our sin in the sense that, if we know there are such things as tsunamis, why are we living in areas where they can harm us?
Not a totally satisfying answer, we also "know" Yellowstone is going to blow some day, but that's a geological some day, it's a geological overdo, could be tomorrow could be 50,000 years from now.
Still, there are communities living on the sides of volcanoes known to be alive, does it make sense to live there and then complain if it blows?
I do know people who live in California saying they know the risk of a big one but it's worth the risk to live there. They are acknowledging a choice to live somewhere safer and rejecting that choice.
There is also the related issue of people seeing natural events as something to explain accusingly ("Katrina hit New Orleans because of the evil there") instead of as calls to get busy helping relieve some of the pain of the victims.
I keep thinking pain is optional in the sense that God can make use of the painful incident ("all things work for good") but doesn't need it, there are alternative ways that would have gotten us to the same good.
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Foxymoron
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# 10343
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I think part of the problem here is your thinking of the fall in rather literalistic terms, even though (I'm guessing) your understanding of creation is more figurative (i.e. theistic evolution). For Boyd, "the fall" is a figurative event that occurred in the very beginning (i.e. prior to or concurrent with the Big Bang)-- it is the way Satan (however you want to configure that) "corrupted" creation-- from the very beginning. So, yes, death and suffering would have been part of creation from the very beginning--or at least what WE would think of as "the beginning". But that doesn't mean it is part of the ideal. Indeed, Boyd presents a good biblical argument that draws on the imagery of "lion laying the lamb" etc. to show that the way things are now is not the way it is meant to be.
Positing the fall as a corruption or distortion that was present within creation from the beginning does solve the problem to a certain extent. The free-will defence must apply equally to angelic powers (e.g. Lucifer) as it does to us.
It reminds me of Tolkien’s account in The Silmarillion of the creation, in which God creates a race of angels (the ‘Ainur’) and teaches them a great theme to sing together. The song forms the first part of the creation of the world, a kind of platonic vision. Melkor the most powerful angel weaves his own themes into the melody to increate the glory of his part within it, and causes discord all around him. Later when the world is being formed by the angelic powers according to the great design of the theme, Melkor wars with the other angels and spoils as much of their work as he can, producing unstable extremes of heat and cold that make the world a far more dangerous place than it might otherwise have been.
In another more obscure piece of his work, (Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (The Debate of Finrod and Andreth, in Morgoth’s Ring) which is a theological discussion on the fates of elves and men when they die, Tolkien suggested that originally the nature of man was to be immortal like the elves, with the difference that when eventually they died they would physically leave the world with their bodies, as in the biblical assumption of Mary into heaven. But this original nature was warped by contact with Morgoth so that humanity subsequently suffered the natural deaths we are familiar with. This was Tolkien’s way of imagineering a solution to the puzzle of the origin of death and our unfallen nature.
quote:
Squibs in response to cliffdweller wrote:
Boyd's argument -- at least as you have explained it -- throws up some difficulties. For instance, if sin (or the fall) existed before we did, or even "before" the universe was created, then humans are just hapless victims of some battle that is utterly beyond our control. It suggests to me two things. Either God needs our existence, and consequently our suffering, to remove sin. Or knowing that blueprints were flawed (before the material universe began to exist) he was unwilling to redesign things.
Perhaps we are responsible for moral evil but not natural evil? The fall of humanity may have been a separate event from the spoiling of creation (although perhaps influenced by it) – a later ‘flowering’ from the same initial spoiling of creation.
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
Why think creation is spoiled in any way? Just because it doesn't always work out for us doesn't mean it's not good.
Tsumanis, eartquakes and floods are no more evil than flowers, butterflies and sunsets. They are just the way the world is. If humans cared more for each other we would have much less to fear from natural events, building earhquake-proof houses and keeping development away from flood prone areas etc.
I think only humans are capable of evil. There is no evil in animals or nature - and that we never 'fell' but often 'fail to become' the best that we could be.
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Squibs
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# 14408
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
Perhaps we are responsible for moral evil but not natural evil? The fall of humanity may have been a separate event from the spoiling of creation (although perhaps influenced by it) – a later ‘flowering’ from the same initial spoiling of creation.
But there must be some interface between the two. For example, this Mosque, including its delicate minaret, remained standing after the '99 earthquake in Turkey. You can't see from this particular image (I'm unable to locate a wider shot) but most of the other modern buildings that surrounded the Mosque were raised. Here is another stark image from Indonesia after the tsunami.
While one can't get God "off the hook" for deaths associated with tsunamis and volcanoes, the point I'm making is that humans are often responsible for much of the death and misery that follows in the wake of natural disasters. Whether this trough incompetence: not addressing impending problems -- inadequate defences in New Orleans, for example; Greed: the scourge of poverty or penny pinching developers skimping on quality building materials or whatever else; or inaction: governments and aid agencies unable to coordinate their efforts -- see the mess that was the initial aid response in Haiti.
You might find [http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/resources/NZ%20White.mp3]this[/URL] talk by Prof Bob White interesting. It entitled Natural Disasters: Acts of God or Results or Human Folly? It you go to the media section of The Faraday Institute you will find loads of interesting talks on a range of issues. There was also a really interesting documentary aired a few days back called Surviving Haiti. (Sorry, it's UK only.) It might give you an idea of the greed, incompetence and inaction that an already poverty stricken country faces post disaster.
Posts: 1124 | From: Here, there and everywhere | Registered: Dec 2008
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Belle Ringer
Shipmate
# 13379
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Boogie:
If humans cared more for each other we would have much less to fear from natural events, building earhquake-proof houses and keeping development away from flood prone areas etc.
I read that most of the damage Haiti suffered wouldn't have happened if buildings had been built to their required standards, but most of the the contractors cheated on materials. So what caused all that pain, nature or human sin?
So often we suffer from the sins of others who aren't seeking specifically to hurt us but are just focused on their own immediate profit.
Still, the earth is still "forming" to the geologists. Or it's "alive" in some sense, changing, and sometimes violently. That may not be sin but it causes pain. If not all pain is sin-caused in some fundamental sense then we have to deal with whether God invented pain.
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Foxymoron
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# 10343
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
Perhaps we are responsible for moral evil but not natural evil? The fall of humanity may have been a separate event from the spoiling of creation (although perhaps influenced by it) – a later ‘flowering’ from the same initial spoiling of creation.
But there must be some interface between the two. For example, this Mosque, including its delicate minaret, remained standing after the '99 earthquake in Turkey. You can't see from this particular image (I'm unable to locate a wider shot) but most of the other modern buildings that surrounded the Mosque were raised. Here is another stark image from Indonesia after the tsunami.
I'm not sure I understand the point you are making. What do you mean by "an interface between the two" e.g. natural and moral evil?
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
While one can't get God "off the hook" for deaths associated with tsunamis and volcanoes, the point I'm making is that humans are often responsible for much of the death and misery that follows in the wake of natural disasters. Whether this trough incompetence: not addressing impending problems -- inadequate defences in New Orleans, for example; Greed: the scourge of poverty or penny pinching developers skimping on quality building materials or whatever else; or inaction: governments and aid agencies unable to coordinate their efforts -- see the mess that was the initial aid response in Haiti.
That's true now, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history we didn't have the resources or knowledge to make those kinds of judgments. We were helpless in the face of nature's arbitrary wrath, not just in terms of tsunamis and volcanos but also infectious diseases, parasites, predators etc etc. Bentley Hart argues that there can be no 'reason' that explains and justifies this: it is morally unintelligible that God would make us endure such harsh environments for some unfathomable greater good.
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Foxymoron
Shipmate
# 10343
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
Sorry, messed up that link to the Bob White talk.
http://www.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/faraday/resources/NZ%20White.mp3
If you head to the main website you can download the talk as opposed to stream it.
Anyway, this is all probably an aside to the debate at hand.
No, thanks for the link. I may already have heard it, but I'll check. I've downloaded a number of talks from there for listerning to in the car.
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cliffdweller
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# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
[QUOTE]I'm seeing a common theme here, and it's along the same lines as I've been thinking. If I may summarise:- The fall of man is not responsible for natural evil. Death was in creation from the start, either through Satan's agency (however defined) or because creation is an ongoing process, and imperfect because incomplete.
- God abhors the suffering and cruelty caused by natural evil, but does not intervene to stop it. However, this is not because some divine master plan makes it necessary for humans to suffer in this way.
It seems that, accepting these positions, you either are forced to deny God's omnipotence (Epicurius' argument) or affirm with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Is there another option? And is it necessary to invoke a third party (Satan) to get God "off the hook"?
- Chris.
Open Theists (eg Boyd) would want to tweek your statement just a bit to say that the position to say that they are not denying omnipotence, but rather are affirming that God voluntarily self-limits omnipotence to allow for freedom. Process theologians like Hick might be more comfortable with your configuration.
I think it's necessary to invoke a third party to explain natural evil if you want to avoid:
1. logical inconsistency
2. falling back on mystery
Not saying that you SHOULD avoid either of those two things. There are certainly far worse things that one can do than be inconsistent or affirm the transcendent divine mystery.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Squibs:
[QUOTE]Yes, I accept evolution but I don't feel the need to put "theistic" in front of it.
Boyd's argument -- at least as you have explained it -- throws up some difficulties. For instance, if sin (or the fall) existed before we did, or even "before" the universe was created, then humans are just hapless victims of some battle that is utterly beyond our control. It suggests to me two things. Either God needs our existence, and consequently our suffering, to remove sin. Or knowing that blueprints were flawed (before the material universe began to exist) he was unwilling to redesign things.
Even if one does not accept the Genesis creation accounts as a blow-by-blow history, I think that Boyd's interpretation -- or what I understand of it -- is entirely incompatible with the general thrust of the stories: creation came to exist, it was good but then something went wrong, and God through Christ did something about it.
Your caveat is probably a good one, I'm most likely not doing justice to Boyd, especially since I'm relying on the earlier form of his work (the paper presented at the seminar I attended) rather than the finished product in book form.
You seem to be switching the discussion from natural evil to human sin (admittedly, bringing the term "the fall" into it lends itself to that confusion). But in terms of theology, they're really quite different. Those who are open to a fairly generous or Arminian view of human freedom, in particular open & process theologian, have never really had much trouble explaining the existence of sin or even suffering that can be tied to human sin (e.g. starvation or genocide). They can be easily tied to God's radical commitment to human freedom. The much more difficult problem for theologians has always been, as the OP indicates, natural evil, which is really what we've been talking about here. That's where Boyd's work is really much more ground-breaking. And it's why his configuration of "the fall" needs to encompass more than just human sin, but really the entire "system"--the way the world works.
I don't see a problem accomodating Boyd's view with the Genesis accounts as long as you're not seeing them as literal history. Even though you preface your concerns by acknowledging a figurative interpretation, your hang up still seems to be chronology. But those who give them a figurative interpretation are generally not bound to chronology (which doesn't work for Gen. 1 any more than it works for Gen. 3). I actually think Boyd's/Open theism's understanding of Gen. 3 fits the text better than the traditional Augustinian "original sin" interpretation, because of the emphasis on human freedom. The element of choice seems to be prime in the biblical narrative.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
Positing the fall as a corruption or distortion that was present within creation from the beginning does solve the problem to a certain extent. The free-will defence must apply equally to angelic powers (e.g. Lucifer) as it does to us.
...Perhaps we are responsible for moral evil but not natural evil? The fall of humanity may have been a separate event from the spoiling of creation (although perhaps influenced by it) – a later ‘flowering’ from the same initial spoiling of creation.
Yes, exactly. That would, I believe, represent Boyd's position (as well as my more humble one)
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
[QUOTE]That's true now, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history we didn't have the resources or knowledge to make those kinds of judgments. We were helpless in the face of nature's arbitrary wrath, not just in terms of tsunamis and volcanos but also infectious diseases, parasites, predators etc etc. Bentley Hart argues that there can be no 'reason' that explains and justifies this: it is morally unintelligible that God would make us endure such harsh environments for some unfathomable greater good.
Exactly. And there is also, as Boyd points out, the whole area of animal suffering (something we know God cares about from the last ch. of Jonah, among other places). The way nature itself "works" is dependent upon animal suffering in a distinctly (at least from our perspective) amoral if not immoral way: e.g. a lion cannot survive w/o preying on the weak. In fact, a lion is uniquely formed in such a way that it is basically a killing machine-- muscles, body, teeth, claws all perfectly formed for that function. That reality-- the suffering of other, smaller, weaker animals at the hands of large predators-- is a reality whether or not humans are on the scene.
Boyd solves that by suggesting that we don't know what a "pre-fall* lion" looks like.
*maybe it would help to use a different term, since "fall" seems to imply human sin, perhaps better to say "pre-corruption" lion.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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Squibs
Shipmate
# 14408
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron:
I'm not sure I understand the point you are making. What do you mean by "an interface between the two" e.g. natural and moral evil? [/QB]
That probably has to be unpacked a little. I mean that one feeds off the other. Earthquakes generally don't kill people, it's things like falling buildings that do. If humans decide to inhabit an area on a known geological fault then it seems only reasonable to construct building that can resist severe quakes. This wasn't the case in Sichuan province and hence many children died.
quote:
Originally posted by Foxymoron: That's true now, but for hundreds of thousands of years of human history we didn't have the resources or knowledge to make those kinds of judgments. We were helpless in the face of nature's arbitrary wrath, not just in terms of tsunamis and volcanos but also infectious diseases, parasites, predators etc etc. Bentley Hart argues that there can be no 'reason' that explains and justifies this: it is morally unintelligible that God would make us endure such harsh environments for some unfathomable greater good. [/QB]
True! I'm not saying that there isn't a point where we say, "What the hell was that about, God?". At this point I guess I would fall back on the idea the the word was made good but it got knocked off kilter against his will.
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Lyda*Rose
Ship's broken porthole
# 4544
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Posted
Boogie: quote:
If humans cared more for each other we would have much less to fear from natural events, building earhquake-proof houses and keeping development away from flood prone areas etc.
Tell it, sister!
If all the energy we spent on animosity, wars, and even just engrossing, selfish pursuits were put to improving the world, we'd probably have built Paradise all around us by now. But for whatever reason, we don't pull it together. Original sin? Inherited "wisdom"? Archaic evolutionary tendencies?
But that's another thread.
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"Dear God, whose name I do not know - thank you for my life. I forgot how BIG... thank you. Thank you for my life." ~from Joe Vs the Volcano
Posts: 21377 | From: CA | Registered: May 2003
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W Hyatt
Shipmate
# 14250
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
I'm seeing a common theme here, and it's along the same lines as I've been thinking. If I may summarise:
Seeing how you identified me as part of the common theme, I'll take that as an excuse/opportunity to jump back in here. ![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
quote:
- The fall of man is not responsible for natural evil. Death was in creation from the start, either through Satan's agency (however defined) or because creation is an ongoing process, and imperfect because incomplete.
- God abhors the suffering and cruelty caused by natural evil, but does not intervene to stop it. However, this is not because some divine master plan makes it necessary for humans to suffer in this way.
It seems that, accepting these positions, you either are forced to deny God's omnipotence (Epicurius' argument) or affirm with Leibniz that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Is there another option? And is it necessary to invoke a third party (Satan) to get God "off the hook"?
Personally, I'm in the camp that claims that there is no such thing as natural evil (because I think evil can only be predicated of human decisions and actions). Creation is an ongoing process, and perfect partly because it's dynamic and constantly changing. I think that a world without plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanoes, storms, etc. would be a completely dead world.
I agree that God abhors the suffering caused by natural disasters, but does not intervene to stop it. I believe he has made it collectively our job to mitigate the suffering (per Boogie's post) and cannot do our job for us without compromising our eternal happiness. He does not require us to suffer at all, but suffering is a natural consequence to our collective decisions (in a very abstract sense) and he cannot completely shield us from those consequences (again, without compromising our eternal happiness).
I actually have no problem envisioning humans living in almost perfect peace and prosperity with the world being just as we know it today because all it takes is one simple change in our relationship with God to avoid all the pain and suffering from so-called natural "evil." If we had the kind of relationship with God that he intended for us and wants for us, it would be trivially easy for him to warn us about impending danger by sending his angels to let us know what we had to do to avoid it. In our fallen spiritual state, though, with our modern civilization and incredible scientific knowledge, most of us are in no position to be receiving messages from angels without loosing our freedom to continue with the kind of life we have collectively chosen (and we are all in this together).
To your last point, I do see God's omnipotence as applying only to his ability to do good things for us (and I firmly believe that he never fails to do every possible good thing for each of us) but that the primary good thing he does for us involves protecting our freedom to believe in the appearance that our lives are our own for each of us to live as we choose. (Is that denying his omnipotence?) I think the perfection of creation can only be seen with that caveat in mind. So I don't think a third party is necessary, because I think God's absolute and total respect for our freedom is sufficient.
So do you want to reconsider including me as part of that common theme? Now's your chance to denounce me!
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
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sanityman
Shipmate
# 11598
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Posted
W Hyatt, you'll have to excuse me for trying to find rules everywhere! Sorry if I was being a bit Procrustean on a nuanced issue.
I take you point about 'no such thing as natural evil' - in that an earthquake can't really be said to be evil, it just is. However, I have real difficulty not thinking of the consequences of an earthquake as evil when I see pain, suffering and the death of innocents. It's obviously exacerbated by human evils (overcrowding, poor building etc), but I don't think that can ever explain it all. You/Boogie are right about us being the instruments of God's will to bring good out of the suffering.
As to this being the consequence of humanity's estrangement from God - ok, even if I'm a little unsure about your angels argument! Does that cover things like genetic abnormalities, cancer and parasites though? I call them evil because the alternative seems to imply that God/I think they're somehow ok.
Airbrush yourself out of the photo if you want ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
- Chris.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
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Boogie
Boogie on down!
# 13538
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
I take you point about 'no such thing as natural evil' - in that an earthquake can't really be said to be evil, it just is. However, I have real difficulty not thinking of the consequences of an earthquake as evil when I see pain, suffering and the death of innocents.
Awful, horrendous, dreadful, appalling - yes. But not evil. 'Evil' implies intent, I would think.
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Garden. Room. Walk
Posts: 13030 | From: Boogie Wonderland | Registered: Mar 2008
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W Hyatt
Shipmate
# 14250
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
Does that cover things like genetic abnormalities, cancer and parasites though?
No, it doesn't. I have no pat answers for those cases.
And I can easily see why you would label the resulting pain, suffering, and death as evil.
[ 21. August 2010, 20:38: Message edited by: W Hyatt ]
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
OK, instead of "evil" call it "natural suffering". The problem is still the same.
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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W Hyatt
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# 14250
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Posted
Yes, the problem is still the same, but I do prefer calling it natural suffering instead of natural evil because I think that the latter implies that the problem lies in the cause and is therefore inherent in nature and comes from God, which I can't accept. I don't think God causes the slightest bit of suffering in any way. He allows it to occur, but it is always counter to what he desires for us.
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
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cliffdweller
Shipmate
# 13338
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by W Hyatt:
Yes, the problem is still the same, but I do prefer calling it natural suffering instead of natural evil because I think that the latter implies that the problem lies in the cause and is therefore inherent in nature and comes from God, which I can't accept. I don't think God causes the slightest bit of suffering in any way. He allows it to occur, but it is always counter to what he desires for us.
OK, but again, the question remains of how do you explain natural suffering. You can't blame horrible, painful birth defects or the predatory cycle of life in the jungle on human sin. So how do you explain it?
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"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." -Frederick Buechner
Posts: 11242 | From: a small canyon overlooking the city | Registered: Jan 2008
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W Hyatt
Shipmate
# 14250
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Posted
OK - I'll give it a shot, but I need a lot more time than I have at the moment. Writing is painfully slow for me, although I do enjoy having to figure out exactly what I think so that I can put it into words.
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
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IngoB
Sentire cum Ecclesia
# 8700
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Posted
The main difficulty with the fall appears to be understanding it as a temporal event, with regular causation forward in time. However, God is not temporal, but eternal, and hence can act non-temporally but causally. That is to say, God can act on both what we call past and future due to some event that occurs in what we call the present.
In fact, there is already a non-temporal but causal Catholic dogma, namely that of the Immaculate conception (and it is likely no accident that this dogma concerns a related issue). Mary was born free of original sin by virtue of Christ dying on the cross. Clearly this is causation backward in time. The usual paradoxa of time travel are avoided because the causation is happening by an external agent, God.
For Adam and Eve, the consequences of their actions were in the future - since they were temporal creatures. This does not exclude God from re-arranging the entire universe across all time, non-temporally, so that is causally consistent with their choice. There is in fact no logical contradiction in assuming that before the fall of Adam, there was no death in the universe, and after the fall of Adam there had been death in the universe for billions of years. All that is necessary for making this happen is an all-powerful non-temporal Agent, and this we call God.
Now, perhaps all this seems less absurd once you consider Einstein's relativity. For in most regards, time does appear like just another spatial dimension. It just happens to be the case that we, and all things bound by entropy, can traverse this dimension only in one direction. But from this perspective a Being that can traverse this time dimension just as freely as the spatial ones is certainly not absurd, just outside of the grasp of entropy (as God must be if He is to create).
So I think basically Adam and Eve triggered a moral phase change of the universe, which spread across all spatiotemporal dimensions like the ice crystals do in this movie. And New Creation will be yet another such phase change, one back to the old state in a sense, except that history will play a role this time. (One can imagine as physical analogy that some parts have formed bounds with other elements, and hence are not free when the front of phase change hits.)
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They’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true; thou’lt have me whipp’d for lying; and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace. - The Fool in King Lear
Posts: 12010 | From: Gone fishing | Registered: Oct 2004
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W Hyatt
Shipmate
# 14250
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by sanityman:
As to this being the consequence of humanity's estrangement from God - ok, even if I'm a little unsure about your angels argument!
Yeah, messages from angels would be a last resort kind of scenario. A more pedestrian part of the solution would be that the more we live in harmony with God, the more we live in harmony with nature and the more sensitive we are to signs from nature (e.g. by watching animal behavior) and from God (e.g. in dreams). And the less likely we would be to live in large structures that kill people when they collapse.
quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
... the question remains of how do you explain natural suffering. You can't blame horrible, painful birth defects or the predatory cycle of life in the jungle on human sin. So how do you explain it?
I realize that many Christians think of the world prior to the Fall as being a perfect paradise, with no death, no disease, and no decay - nothing unpleasant or negative or stressful - everything perfect, good, free, and abundant. And of course this requires a belief that the laws of biology and the physical world were different then. But I see it from a completely different perspective that allows me to stick to a belief that the world operates now the same as it always has and always will, with no need for extra-temporal causation or for the idea of a world with different rules.
[PREAMBLE]
To explain, I have to go back to what I believe is the whole purpose of creation. I think that God is, at to his essential nature, pure and infinite love. To have someone to love, he created humans with the ability to freely receive his love and freely return it, and in doing so experience joy and happiness.
In order for us to receive absolutely everything from him and yet still feel joy and happiness as our own and not as God's joy and happiness coming from outside us, he needs us to feel like our life is our own, and to freely choose to use that life to receive his love and return it. So he designed creation to do two things for us: first to help us make a free choice about how we want to respond to him and second to allow us to enjoy the most possible joy and happiness from our decision. By separating those two steps, he allowed the first step (life in this world) to be only temporary and the second step (life in heaven) to be unconstrained by the requirements of the first step.
The first step is not designed so much for experiencing the most possible joy and happiness like the second step is. It's designed instead to be an opportunity for us to experiment with our freedom and decide who we want to be, to make that decision in countless small steps over our whole lifetime and see the consequences of each step as we go. But since the process of decision making is not as conducive to joy and happiness as being able to follow through on those decisions and simply live them, the first step is only temporary.
So the physical world is designed to help us decide who we are and to force us to make that decision over and over until it accumulates into a choice that is beyond accident or ignorance or whim. The limits of time and space make it so that it takes some effort for us to be nice to each other. And because it takes effort, we have to really think about it and struggle with it repeatedly, but in the end we make our choice with a strength of commitment that can't be matched in a one-time decision made in one short duration of time.
[/PREAMBLE]
So I see a straight line going from God being infinite love, through his purpose in creation, to the world as we know it today. To me, the question of why God allows natural suffering is simply a matter of degree. Instead of being a perfect paradise for us, I think God wants the world to impinge on us a little bit, to make us have to deal with obstacles, to make us a little uncomfortable from time to time, and to make us have to think about what we're doing. But only just enough to help us really commit to our decision to love him with all our heart and mind, and only for a limited amount of time.
In the course of history, though, I think we as a species have gradually chosen to live less and less like God wants us to, to the point where almost none of us can have any direct communication with God or angels, where our modern civilization is built on large and vulnerable structures and on dangerous machines, and where we regularly expose ourselves to all sorts of chemicals and pollutants. The result is that we are so far from God that he can no longer protect us from our environment the way he wants to. Our environment no longer just challenges us, it kills us. Disease and birth defects occur far more often and to a much greater degree. We no longer experience just a little bit of a struggle, we can experience unbearable suffering and crippling pain. Death is no longer just a peaceful transition from one stage to the next, it's often a long and absolutely miserable experience.
But it's not because the world was once free from all death, disease, and decay and is now broken, it's because we've abused our freedom in the extreme. But it's still a system that works the way it's supposed to: we each have to choose who we want to be and we have to make that choice repeatedly in the face of resistance from the world we live in. It will only get better as we each decide to turn back to God and to help each other. It won't be all fixed and restored to some pristine ideal in a miraculous event because it has never been broken to begin with.
What's broken is our relationship with God and his creation, and the result isn't God's punishment, it's just the natural consequences of the way we've chosen to live, without regard to which individuals actually made the decisions or when. If God were to shield us, or even just the innocent victims from those natural consequences, he'd just be encouraging us to continue making the same bad choices. Instead, he allows each of us to make our choices and allows all of us to see and learn from the results. It's not at all what he would most like us to have, but it still works the way it's supposed to.
As far as animals go, I don't think any animals have self-awareness the way we do. And not being self-aware, they simply receive life from God passively so that even though they experience pain and suffering, there's no individual inside them to be aware of that pain and suffering. I understand that such a view will not sit well with some people, and I do struggle a bit to accept it myself, but it makes sense to me intellectually to the point where it isn't enough of an issue to really bother me.
So that's my take on natural suffering - sorry for the long background, but I'm very aware of how unusual a view it is. I look forward to any and all responses.
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A new church and a new earth, with Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life.
Posts: 1565 | From: U.S.A. | Registered: Nov 2008
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
IngoB, that is the most imparsimonious thing you could have possibly said, that can possibly be said, although you do consistently say it along with high Anglican Alan in that shared Bender hadron.
At least you are on the Roman Catholic side of the Augustinean dualist coin, infinitely preferable to the Islamic-Calvinist.
But still completely pagan.
Their are enough entities in the Trinity without Plato's and Ptolemy's.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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sanityman
Shipmate
# 11598
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Posted
Wow. Thanks for that reply, W Hyatt. As usual it takes a lot less effort to throw hard questions around than to attempt an answer. I must read what you and IngoB said more slowly, and think about it.
Cheers,
- Chris.
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Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only the wind will listen - TS Eliot
Posts: 1453 | From: London, UK | Registered: Jun 2006
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Squibs
Shipmate
# 14408
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Posted
BTW, next Saturday Unbelievable? will be running a show about The Fall. The normal format will be dispensed with as a "seeker" who says he is very close to becoming a believer asks some difficult questions of a couple of theologians. The names of the latter didn't mean anything to me so I have no idea about their stance on things like evolution or Open theology or anything for that matter. Still as the show is usually of high quality it might be worth checking out.
http://www.premier.org.uk/unbelievable?
Posts: 1124 | From: Here, there and everywhere | Registered: Dec 2008
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Squibs
Shipmate
# 14408
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
The main difficulty with the fall appears to be understanding it as a temporal event, with regular causation forward in time. However, God is not temporal, but eternal, and hence can act non-temporally but causally. That is to say, God can act on both what we call past and future due to some event that occurs in what we call the present.
In fact, there is already a non-temporal but causal Catholic dogma, namely that of the Immaculate conception (and it is likely no accident that this dogma concerns a related issue). Mary was born free of original sin by virtue of Christ dying on the cross. Clearly this is causation backward in time. The usual paradoxa of time travel are avoided because the causation is happening by an external agent, God.
For Adam and Eve, the consequences of their actions were in the future - since they were temporal creatures. This does not exclude God from re-arranging the entire universe across all time, non-temporally, so that is causally consistent with their choice. There is in fact no logical contradiction in assuming that before the fall of Adam, there was no death in the universe, and after the fall of Adam there had been death in the universe for billions of years. All that is necessary for making this happen is an all-powerful non-temporal Agent, and this we call God.
Now, perhaps all this seems less absurd once you consider Einstein's relativity. For in most regards, time does appear like just another spatial dimension. It just happens to be the case that we, and all things bound by entropy, can traverse this dimension only in one direction. But from this perspective a Being that can traverse this time dimension just as freely as the spatial ones is certainly not absurd, just outside of the grasp of entropy (as God must be if He is to create).
So I think basically Adam and Eve triggered a moral phase change of the universe, which spread across all spatiotemporal dimensions like the ice crystals do in this movie. And New Creation will be yet another such phase change, one back to the old state in a sense, except that history will play a role this time. (One can imagine as physical analogy that some parts have formed bounds with other elements, and hence are not free when the front of phase change hits.)
I appreciate the attempt to perceive the fall from the perspective of an atemporal being, but what do you suggest happened on the ground, so to speak? What was it like from the perspective of a one directional temporal being?
Posts: 1124 | From: Here, there and everywhere | Registered: Dec 2008
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
My response to W Hyatt is to say 'Thank you'.
And also to say that it is not that unusual or 'way out' as he might suppose.
Earlier in this discussion I made mention of John Hick's book "Evil and the God of Love" and it seems to me that much of what W. Hyatt says is compatible with the thesis Hick advances. The terminology is different as is the basis on which the thesis is argued.
Hick works with the classical theological responses to the problem and contrasts the Augustinian view ( traditional) with the view of Irenaeus which he sees as being compatible with an evolutionary, scientific view. This latter was unknown to Irenaeus.
So I am comfortable with what W. Hyatt has expounded and he need not feel isolated in propounding his theodicy.
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
WHH - God needs no one to love as He has always been content in that eternal, perichoretic, internal, triune dance.
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
WH - sorry for the stutter - God is a metaperson of three persons and needs nothing. He certainly made us to love us to love. And of the increase of His government there will be no end.
If He needed us how come He managed for eternity without us ?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
By the way, you've got shamwari on side, well done!
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
What's His name ?
And does He know if it's going to rain tomorrow ?
[ 22. August 2010, 21:32: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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