Thanks to the wonders of Technorati, last night I came across a blog by a guy who’s taking Telford’s Fuller extension course, and posts his answer to a Scholastic Theology assignment on the problem of natural evil. Maybe it’s my vanity, but I can’t help wondering if I was an inspiration for the hypothetical in the assignment, given how relentlessly I pounded Telford on this subject two years ago (though I don’t remember dragging the earth’s molten core into it!) .
Also, Beth might be interested to know that the other poster on the blog did a U2-related sermon not long ago.
Thanks Camassia.
It would be interesting to know how many sermons have been preached using that lyric.
Surely in the hundreds.
Comment by Beth — April 7, 2005 @ 1:47 pm
I don’t think that’s a good answer. Several times he refers to suffering as necessary to God’s plan, which I think is a big mistake. Suffering does not grab us out of our self-centeredness and make us love God and neighbor more. It might, but I’d say just as often it makes us more self-centered, bitter and alienated from God and neighbor. (I’m assuming we’re talking about suffering natural evil and not suffering as a result of taking up the cross and following Christ). The sentence “it’s hard to imagine a world in which people love and serve God but doesn’t contain death and suffering†is mind-boggling. I surely hope we can imagine the kingdom of God, since that’s the world we’re promised.
I think David Hart’s essay in First Things last month on the tsunami was a much better answer:
“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…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.â€
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0503/opinion/hart.html
Comment by Jennifer — April 7, 2005 @ 1:52 pm
I wasn’t thrilled with the answer either, but I would say in defense of Mr. Blip that I don’t think there is a good answer to the question, or at least one that’s going to satisfy everybody. (Theodicy is kind of like a too-small blanket — when it covers one person it exposes somebody else.) In any case, the assignment wasn’t to come up with a good answer so much as a properly Thomas Aquinas-like one. Whether it succeeded I don’t know, since I’ve read nothing but a few excerpts of that stuff.
Comment by Camassia — April 7, 2005 @ 2:35 pm
Jennifer – I’m with you (and Hart) on this one. But how do you account for the presence of evil without adverting to a literal “fall” at some point? Or do you think there was a literal fall? (Though not necessarily exactly as decscribed in Genesis). Hart seems to hang quite a bit of his natural evil theodicy on the idea. But I still have trouble wrapping my head around it.
Comment by Lee — April 7, 2005 @ 2:37 pm
I don’t know, Lee, but it’s a great question. What do you mean by literal fall? I don’t believe Adam and Eve literally existed, but I think we need some story to explain why the world isn’t as it should be, and I don’t believe suffering and death are part of God’s original plan. Which has us back at the question – what happened to that plan?
Comment by Jennifer — April 7, 2005 @ 3:18 pm
Camassia, I really like your analogy of theodicy as a too-small blanket. Perhaps because the topic of evil is so broad it’s just impossible for our over-worked neurons to come up with a blanket big enough to cover every aspect of it.
Anyhow, let me give a bit of defense about natural evil being in some ways inherent to our world. In reflecting on the fact that so many aspects of our world contain the potential for evil I have a hard time imagining a world in which absolutely no natural evil is present. In other words, is it really possible for God to have created a world, even in a pre-fall state, that could support human life but not have tectonic plates? Or a world in which no plants or bacteria died (which Genesis seems to say was a part of Eden since Adam and Eve were given the plants to eat)? If tectonic plates, dying plants, and bacteria were part of God’s original good creation then it would seem that the death and potential evil they allow for (i.e. earthquakes) must be accounted for in some way. My way of accounting for it is to say that God created the best of all possible worlds. That it isn’t logically possible for a world to exist which can support human life but has no death or potential evil (well, perhaps a big padded room might qualify, but that’s hardly the kind of world that would make us into the people God wants us to be!).
Mr. Blip
Comment by Jason — April 7, 2005 @ 5:29 pm
Jennifer – And I was sure you’d know the answer!
I cut my teeth on the Reinhold Neibuhr school of thought that thought “original sin” was a useful symbol or “myth” that pointed to the allegedly universal human tendency toward evil. But after a while it occurred to me that this is just slapping a label on the phenomenon rather than explaining it. The Neibuhr position collapses, I think, into identifying sin with finitude as such, which is surely a no-no (creation – good!). To save the goodness of creation it seems like you have to posit some kind of “cosmic cataclysm” – though what this means exactly and how we reconcile it with what we think we know about the natural history of the universe & humankind remains a mystery to say the least.
Comment by Lee — April 8, 2005 @ 7:48 am
Well, Jason, you’re presenting what I think of as the “God of Laws” argument — God for whatever reason operates by certain laws by which the universe runs, and which he will not or cannot violate. It’s an intellectually respectable position, but as I pointed out here, it presents some eschatological problems. We have lots of examples in the Bible where God seems to violate the laws of physics, particularly the Resurrection, which we are told is a forerunner of a general remaking of the world. It seems inconsistent to say God could not have created a better world and that, nonetheless, he will create one. (Plus, it makes God seem more attached to his rules than to actual people.)
Comment by Camassia — April 8, 2005 @ 8:23 am
You’re right, Camassia, in pointing out that if God is more attached to rules than people it makes events like the resurrection a wierd anomaly instead of the fulfillment of humanity’s true telos. Additionally, it seems to make God into a legalist which doesn’t fit with the story I hear told in Scripture (especially in the prophets where God is willing to come back to the people despite the fact that they’ve broken the covenant).
All that to say, I would still argue there is a difference between God having to adhere to rules (presumable rules God made) and God having to adhere to logical possibilities. What I want to argue is that perhaps it is no more possible for God to create a world that fosters human life but is not dangerous than it is for God to create a round square. Admittedly this argument comes out of the best of all possible worlds argument (propounded best, perhaps, by Alvin Plantinga). And maybe this position is too tied to this idea of “logical necessity” to be tenable for some, but it is at least plausible to me.
Comment by Jason — April 8, 2005 @ 8:58 am
But like I said, if you say this is the only world God could have created, how do you account for heaven? How do you account for instances where God seemed to do the physically impossible? It seems to me that figuring God is limited by what is logically possible in this universe leads us to a position not much different from scientific materialism, or at best like the Hindu universe where we’re stuck in endless cycles of birth and death.
Comment by Camassia — April 8, 2005 @ 9:49 am
Camassia – I think what most people who deny that God can do the logically impossible would say is that it just doesn’t make sense. If we ask, e.g. “Can God make an object that is entirely red and entirely green?” or “Can God make something that is both completely round and completely square?” what would that even mean? As Vizzini from the Princess Bride would say: “Inconceivable!”
That said, I’m not terribly confident that we can specify with any great degree of certainty what is and is not logically possible w/r/t the basic structure of the physical world. That is, I don’t put much stock in what I can imagine being the case in some world with radically different physical laws.
Comment by Lee — April 8, 2005 @ 10:56 am
God, Science, and Natural Evil
A while ago I wrote a theodicy in relation to natural evil in the form of a scholastic question. Camassia responded with the objection that my theodicy made God subject to a higher rationality or logic (On a side note I discovered this problem of God…
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