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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!duke!mcnc!amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson)
From: amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Good and evil
Message-ID: <447@ihuxq.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 30-Dec-83 11:07:53 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxq.447
Posted: Fri Dec 30 11:07:53 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Dec-83 01:00:19 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 163

Larry West, in his recent article on "Can God Change?" says:

>>	Why shouldn't God change?  Is he incapable of learning?
>>	(That question assumes a belief in something resembling
>>	``free will'', such that God doesn't know what people
>>	will do;....)

I don't really understand the comment about free will.  When I
first read it, it seemed to imply that God might not have free
will, which is ridiculous.  About people having free will, the
orthodox Christian answer is that yes, we do, otherwise the concept
of sin is meaningless.  Whether or not God knows what we do is
beside the point.  We choose to do certain things or not do certain
things, and God's foreknowledge of what our choices will be has no
bearing on our making of these choices.

Larry also touches on the problem of good and evil, to which I want
to make my major comments.

The world is a beautiful and wonderful place, but, as Alphonso X of
Castile (surnamed "The Wise") put it: "Had I been present at the
creation, I could have made a few suggestions for the better
ordering of the universe."  What is sauce for the gander is also
sauce for the liver fluke, the cancer cell, and the loan shark.  If
God is running this show, then he has a great deal of explaining to
do if he hopes to maintain his reputation as the original Good Guy,
and God has steadfastly refused to explain.

Many theologians have not done very well either.  More often than
not, they have set up the problem of evil in a way that makes their
attempts at theodicy--at justifying the ways of God--seem
ridiculous and even cruel.  Some of them, for example, solve the
problem by saying that God allows evil in order to teach people
useful lessons and make them beter persons.  You know; there is
pain so we could learn to keep our hands out of the fire,
disappointments to teach us perseverance, unkindness from others to
help us grow in charity, and so on.  The trouble with that is the
and so on: torture, to teach us what? cancer, to help us grow how?
earthquakes, to advance civilization in what way?

It simply won't wash.  For a few great souls, poverty may be a
blessing; for most, it is a curse.  Now and then a terminal illness
enobles; most of the time, it is far from being even the best of a
bad job.  To set up God as an instructor who uses such methods is
to make him the wardn of the worst-run penitentiary of all.  The
atheist who would rather have no God makes far more sense than the
pietist who takes this sort of injustice lying down.  The atheist
at least sounds like Job, the pietist sounds like hell.

Let me say that there is ultimately no way of getting God off the
hook for evil.  Let me also make a distinction between evil and
badness, reserving evil for deliberate perversions of being by
creatures with free choice, and badness for all the other
collision, contretemps, and disasters in the world.  Even that
distinction helps only slightly.  It enables us to blame voluntary
evil--sin, if you will--on other persons than God; it does not, of
course, exculpate God from the responsibility for making free
beings in the first place.  Sure, my brother-in-law is the one who
got drunk and punched me in the nose; but then, why is God so
all-fired insistent on preserving my brother-in-law's freedom to
mess up other people's lives.  Sin is possible only because God
puts up with sinners.

The quick retort that I object only to other people's freedom--that
I find my own precious, and will defend it against all comers--is
true enough.  It is not an answer to the question of why any of us
should be free in the first place.  It says only, perhaps, that I
am enough of an opportunist to agree with God in my own case--that
I like this man-made-in-God's-image business when i profit from it;
it sheds no light on the mystery of why he should keep such a shop
when he knows it is, at least half the time, a losing proposition.

The last gasp in this line of defense is to say that the fact that
he keeps backing such a bad show proves how highly God regards
freedom.  And on a good day, when the sun is shining, when my
bowels are not in an uproar, and when my brother-in-law has phoned
to say he can't come to my dinner party, it sounds pretty good.
But in the stormy season, in the thick of other people's sins and
my own, it is only one inconvenient mystery used to cover another.

God is still firmly on the hook.  (That he is literally on the
hook is, of course, the Christian answer to the whole matter.
According to the Gospel, he hangs himself on the cross with the
rest of his free creation.  If you believe that, it can be a great
comfort; it is not, however, one bit less of a mystery.)  There is,
therefore, no untying the knot of freedom.  Even in the relatively
simple case of moral evil, where you cn find someone else besides
God to blame for what is wrong at the party, it remains true that
things go wrong only because of his stubborn insistence on keeping
the party going no matter what.  Theodicy is for people with strong
stomachs.

If the case for moral evil is difficult, the case for natural
evil--for what I choose to call badness--is postively distasteful.
There is, of course, no question that bunny rabbits are cute.  But
to allow one's theology of creation to rest content with paeans to
all that is cuddly and warm is to ignore at least half of creation.
 The rabbit is indeed good, and, in his own way, he aggressively
affirms his goodness.  The coyote is good, too.  But when he is in
the process of affirming his own goodness by contemplating the
delectability of the rabbit, it turns out to be a little hard on
the rabbit.

The world of delight which God holds in being is a rough place.
Everything eats everything else, not only to the annoyance of those
who get eaten, but to their agony, death, and destruction.  Man is
certainly no exception.  Modern children probably think that
turkeys are not killed, bled, and plucked; they are mined from
supermarket freezer cases.  Man has more than a lion's share of the
world's blood on his hands.  What to say, then, about the goodness
of a God who makes a world so full of badness?

Wrong solutions come to mind at once.  Paying attention only to
what is lovely simply ignores the problem.  A more serious error
comes in trying to fob off all the killing and eating on sin--to
tie natural badness to moral evil, and to say that, if it hadn't
been for sin, all the animals would have been vegetarians.  That is
a bit much.  It involves, as someone once observed, the
saber-toothed tiger waking up in the morning after his creation and
wondering why the God who designed him to eat grass gave him such a
confoundedly awkward set of choppers.  Such gambits never solve the
problem of theodicy, they simply arrange to have someone else's ox
gored.

Furthermore, even a vegetarian creation is no answer.  It is only
our animal chauvinism that is satisfied when literal bloodshed is
ruled out.  The lettuces still, in their own way, take a dim view
of having to cease being lettuces; as best they can, they fight it.
One of the deepest mistakes in theology is to start our discussions
of the major activities of creation too high.  We act as if only
man were free, only man had knowledge, only man were capable of
feeling.  This is not only false, it is mischevious.  It makes man
a lonely exception to the tissue of creation, rather than a part of
its hierarchy.

Finally, it is not at all apparent, in such a solution, just how
sin managed to bring about the debacle of a bloody creation.  It
was bloody long before the only available sinner showed up.  To
argue that man's work was to be the reformer of that
destructiveness and that, by sin, he welshed on the job is
possible.  It is not easy to see how man could be able to do much
about weaning coyotes away from their taste for rabbits.

To repeat, it won't wash.  However much we may be able to make a
case for the lion's lying down with the lamb in the eschatological
fullness of time, no wise lamb thinks much of the idea right now.
No, the atheist, once again, is right and the pietist is barking up
a tree that never existed.  Nature is red in tooth and claw.  The
badness of creation is inseperable from the goodness of creation.
It can, indeed be argued that moral evil, sin, perversion--the
willful twisting of goodness towards nothing--is not necessary to
the shape of the world; but there is no way of getting the simple
badness out of the act.  The world is a rough place.  If it exists
because God likes it, the only possible conclusion is that God is
inordinately fond of rough places.

Part 2 of this will be along in a few days.

				John Hobson
				AT&T Bell Labs
				Naperville, IL
				(312) 979-7293
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