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From: amigo2@ihuxq.UUCP (John Hobson)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Good and Evil (part 2)
Message-ID: <459@ihuxq.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 5-Jan-84 11:22:17 EST
Article-I.D.: ihuxq.459
Posted: Thu Jan  5 11:22:17 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 6-Jan-84 02:46:38 EST
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 165

(First, an aside.  Various people have come up with comments on my
first article on Good and Evil, none of which I really answer in
this one.  I am not ignoring you, I just want to continue with what
I was saying.  I will answer shortly.)

What is the relationship between God the Creator and the comings
and goings of the universe?  Most theists would say that God is not
simply the initiator of creation, but that he holds all of creation
in being right now.  You also have the assorted creatures he holds
in being drinking tea, making love, rabbits or plankton, as the
case may be, and generally doing what they please and/or can get
away with.  What is the connection between the act of God which
makes them be and their own acts as individual beings?

The answer must be twofold.  To be utterly correct, in the
Christian framework, one has to say that the connection is real but
mysterious.  For all practical purposes here, however, it will do
quite nicely to say that, by and large, there is no connection. 
Unless you are an Occasionalist, that is, one who thinks that God
is the only actor in the universe and that the whole history of the
world is just a puppet show put on by him, then you must grant
that it is the rabbits who make rabbits--and for entirely
rabbitlike and non-divine reasons.

Consider the stones of the seashore, how they lie.  Why is this
oval white pebble where it is?  Is it there because God, in propria
persona, reached down with an almighty hand and nudged it into
place?  No.  God knows where it is, of course, and holds it in
continual regard.  He also knows what it does.  But he is not the
cause of its doing its own thing.  The pebble lies in its place
because of its own stony style--and because the last wave of the
last high tide flipped it two feet east of where it is now, and the
right hind leg of a passing dog flipped it two feet west.  It is
not there because God, either in person or by means of some
pre-programmed evolutionary computer, has determined that it should
be there.

The pebble, in short, lies where it does freely.  Not, of course,
in the sense that it has a mind and will and chooses as a person
chooses; but in the sense that it got there because of the random
rattling around of assorted objects with various degrees of
freedom.  The waves are free to be waves, to be wet and to push. 
The pebbles are free to sink and to collide and to break.  The dog
is free to run around and chase birds.  This whole mixed concert
then comes together and makes whatever kind of dance it can manage.
God may be the cause of its being, but he is, for the most part,
only the spectator of its actions.  He confers upon it the several
styles of its freedom; it is creation itself that struts its own
stuff.

In other words, any realistic view of freedom has to start way
below humanity.  It has, in fact, to start with the smallest
particle of actually existing reality.  No matter how restricted
anything is--no matter how deaf, dumb, and determined it may be--it
is at least free to be itself, and therefore, by the creative act
of God, free from direct divine control over its behaviour.

Needless to say, such a position doesn't sound particularly
religious.  And, in fact, it isn't.  Religion is one of the larger
roadblocks that God has had put up with in the process of getting
his messages through to the world.  The frequent religious view is
that God has his finger in every pie, and, as the infinite meddler,
never lets anything act for itself. People bolster such ideas by an
appeal to scripture, pointing out things like the walls of Jerico
falling down or Elijah starting fires from wet wood on Mt. Carmel. 
That won't do however.  To be sure, I am not about to make a case
that God can't do miracles--that he can't from time to time stick
in his thumb and manufacture a plum if he feels like it.  Nor am I
going to maintain that he can't answer the prayers of those of his
free creatures he said he would listen to.  All I want to insist is
that most of the time he doesn't meddle; that his customary policy
is: Hands Off.

Obviously, it is just that policy that produces the roughness of
creation.  On November 1, 1755, in the midst of one of the most
theologically optimistic centuries of all history, the great Lisbon
earthquake occurred.  At that time, most Christian believers had
come to hold a theory of the relationship between God and creation
which assured them that God took care of every contingency and was
especially diligent about arranging for the safety and welfare of
the elect.  Likewise, most unbelievers had nursed themselves to the
conclusion that the world was about as perfect a piece of machinery
as was possible and would go on functioning smoothly forever.

In either case, the Lisbon earthquake came as a shock; the
philosophical tremor was as great as the geological one.  How,
everyone asked, in a world so well run by God or nature, could such
a disaster occur?  Why, the theologians wondered, didn't God take
care of his elect?  What had gone wrong?

The answer was that nothing had gone wrong--with the universe. 
What had happened was that the theological theories had been
formulated without paying enough attention to the facts of
creation.  What happened in Lisbon was indeed assignable to God,
but not for the reasons people then advanced.  Some said that it
proved there was no God; others hunted for evidence of wickedness
sufficient to warrant so fearful a punishment.  The trouble with
all such attempts  to understand was that they went beyond the
evidence.  First of all, in spite of a few episodes in Scripture
where God slapped down sinners, he nowhere promised to be a
universal moral policeman.  Too many scoundrels died in their beds
and too many saints went out in agony ever to permit such a notion
to be advanced realistically.  In fact, Jesus resolutely refused to
judge anyone.  Far from being on the side of the police, Jesus
ended up being done in by the very forces of righteousness who were
supposed to be God's official representatives.

Secondly, if God's role in the world was to be a perpetual Mr.
Fixit, it had not, to say the least, been particularly
self-evident.  Once again, Jesus did a few miracles; he calmed a
storm or two, healed a handful of the sick, and fed two crowds by
multiplying short rations.  If I am being realistic, I cannot hold
that these things were an announcement of a programme for the
management of creation.  They were signs to identify the
manager--and they were evidence of the compassionate direction he
intended his management to take.  But as a programme, they were a
flop.  Too many uncalmed storms still remain, too many unhealed
sick, too many hungry.  Indeed, when Jesus did his consumate piece
of managing, it turned out to be the ultimate act of
non-interference: nailed to a cross, he simply died.  Whatever else
that was, it was the non-interference policy in spades.  

No, the Lisbon earthquake was not God's fault for any of the
reasons assigned to it by unrealistic theologies.  It was God's
fault simply because he made the earth the kind of thing that it
is.  If he had made it out of one solid homogeneous block of monel
metal, then it would not have developed a surface condition liable
to crack and shift.  But since he made it out of molten slush--and
set it out to cool, not in an annealing oven, but in frigid
space--it was liable to develop a somewhat unstable crust before
its centre cooled.  Again, if he had not made trees and grass,
sheep and oxen, men and women free to wander about the earth, each
in accordance with its own style of freedom, he could no doubt have
arranged for the site of Lisbon to be unoccupied by anything likely
to suffer from earth tremors.  Obviously, he had no such
restrictions in mind.  Everything was left, barring miracle, to
fend for itself with what freedom it had.  It was indeed horrible
for so many to die, it was not horrible for the crust of a
partially cooled casting to crack a bit under the circumstances.

The world, insofar as we can see, is not stage-managed by God. 
Neither is it a place in which a few free beings like men fight a
lonely battle against armies of totally determined creatures like
lions, sharks, and mountains.  It is rather a place where all
things are free within the limits of their own natures--and in
which all things are also determined by the way in which the
natures of other things impinge upon them.

There is no badness except by virtue of the goodnesses which
compete with each other in the several styles of their freedom.  I
have not, therefore, solved the problem, I have merely descended to
a deeper level of consideration.  The question now is:  In a
situation so radically out of God's control (apparently because he
likes it that way), how does he bring it all around in the end?  If
he has power--and uses it as he claims--why does it look as if he
has none?

Part 3 along in a few days.

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