“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” -J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of SecretsIt has been named "The Problem of Evil." This is one of the atheist's most common daggers aimed at the heart of Christianity. If God is truly good and moral, they claim, then He would not have created a universe in which the possibility for evil exists. This seems like a reasonable claim—certainly, God has the ability to create a universe where there is no possibility of evil, so why didn't He?
Despite its apparent substance, however, this is actually one of the less complex atheist challenges, but for some reason it has persisted, likely due to the popularity of arguments made by people like Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens loved to use this argument against Christianity because of its capacity for emotional appeal and because there is really no counter-argument which can similarly seem to disprove atheism. In spite of its popularity, it is easily dealt away with by one of the basic concepts of Christianity: Free Will.
It is the Christian's position that the very existence of free will must necessarily allow for the possibility of evil. And this is actually quite an excellent explanation. But the atheist's next question should be, "Why is free will a necessity?" This is a question which Christians often gloss over, not out of neglect to the subject, but primarily because they are too busy explaining the idea of free will and answering the original question of the Problem of Evil.
Love & Other Options
The idea of Love and its implications is often thrown out as a reason for Free Will, but it is hardly ever fleshed out in terms that seem adequate. The purpose of this post is to explore whether or not Free Will is actually necessary in order for Love to exist. Christians claim that without the possibility of disobedience, Love is not possible. But is this true?
For argument's sake, let's assume it is not. Let's imagine a world in which humans simply acted out of an irresistible compulsion toward a certain action. Maybe they have even been imbued with some sense of "wanting" to take that particular course of action. But overall, they have no real control over what they are doing. Essentially, these people are "robots," for lack of a better term. They follow their programming to the letter, without really having a choice in the matter.
Can these people really love? What even is Love, to begin with? First of all, love is a preference. This does not just signify that someone happens to like something a little more than something else. It means that they choose to act in the interest of one thing at the cost of everything else. In this sense, these "robot" people can never really love. Love requires acting of one's own volition in the the interest of something, even if that thing is the self. Without Free Will there is no choice, without the choice there is no Love. And God is a God who would only invoke a universe where He could love and be loved by His creation, because "God is love." (1 John 4:8)
Alternative Appeal
There is a corollary to this argument which is hardly ever put forth, but which I believe has a huge impact on the Christian defense against the atheist claim of the Problem of Evil. This is the fact that in order for Love to exist, the other options available to the creatures must be somewhat similar to each other. If there are two choices, but one is made a thousand times more attractive than the other, the result is much the same as the robots in the previous section. A man who elects to spend time with a co-worker instead of being locked in a cage with a wild boar hardly shows any affection for the co-worker simply because of his decision. It is only when the relative appeals of both choices are on the same "order of magnitude" (to use a math term in the absence of better terminology) that the love of one person or thing for another can be fully revealed.
This fact is why I consider the idea that God created the universe at all to be a risky endeavor. But Love is willing to take risks, so here we are. Still, the fact remains that in the end, there was always a chance, and not an insubstantial chance, that somewhere along the line someone would make a choice that contradicted God's Will for them. And you probably know that it only took until the third chapter of Genesis for Adam and Eve to drop the ball.
Can you blame them? I mean, "the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom." (Genesis 3:6) There was definitely an up-side to sinning. But the fact of the matter is, God had told them explicitly not to eat the food. Therefore, a decision had to be made, and the humans had a chance to show unequivocally that they loved God. As we know, they chose to act on other impulses and misinformation, and death entered the world. The wages of sin is always death. (Romans 6:23)
The Fix
It is precisely because of our capacity to love, borne out by God's decision to grant us Free Will, that we have such a pronounced capacity for evil. As I hope to show in a future post, Evil is corrupted Good, nothing more. The pain and suffering which occur in this universe are either artifacts or direct results of humanity's sin. God does not bring suffering on people unwarranted; Satan and those who follow him are to blame for that.
It is no wonder that God should wish to rid the world of evil. In order to help His creation escape the death due them, He devised a plan whereby they would be resurrected into a new creation which lacks the corruption of this present life. However, the ability to achieve this new creation is only available to those who choose to love God in this life. As fallen humans, we lack the wisdom to always act out of this Love to God, but thanks to Him and the Spirit He is willing to give us, we are able to cultivate this wisdom even in our present lives. "For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live." (Romans 8:13)
God has given us Free Will. He has also shown us His Will. And life has provided us with many alternatives to it, each seeming to be almost as appealing, depending on our circumstances and information. It is because of this that there is such a strong potential for evil to happen in this world. However, it is also precisely because of these facts that we are able to love Him and each other. Without the choice, there can be no Love. Thankfully, He chose to love us, too.
I leave you today with perhaps my favorite passage in the entire Bible. John does an excellent job of expressing just what the implications of God's Love are.
"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.
"Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him." -1 John 3:1-6
Some concerns:
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the entirety of your argument revolves around the idea that love requires freedom of will to be real love. Your defense of this claim is essentially claiming over and over again that love requires free will. No arguments for that claim, no arguments to show you’ve even addressed someone who is against that claim, no intellectual progress made. While your definition very well may be true, have you even taken seriously other possibilities? What if love is just an instinctual habit of ours? Like a lioness ‘loves’ her cubs, if it was ingrained in our nature, wouldn’t it seem there were things we preferred because we ‘objectively’ saw them as better when we were actually predisposed from the start? This certainly seems to be in line with experience; how often do we make choices free from all compulsion? The smoker freely chooses to light up another cigarette, but that’s certainly not a free choice based upon two equal options, it’s a free choice heavily influenced by addiction. The fact is, we are not free and rational beings acting on objective analysis, we are animals with genetic predispositions and internal chemistry begging to fulfill one need or another. Love might be based upon free will, but I am not convinced that it is as self-evident as you believe.
Also, is the fact that we are unable to choose God freely not a cornerstone of Christianity? The doctrine of original sin, the belief that we are naturally bent towards choosing Not God (which by your definition means we are not freely choosing anything) is the whole reason Christians claim that Jesus needed to die for those sins. The whole language of being free in Christ is pretty ridiculous if we were free the whole time.
Secondly, your definition of love, ‘they choose to act in the interest of one thing at the cost of everything else’. That’s a pretty bold statement to throw out there without any qualifications. If I have a report due at work first thing in the morning, and I choose to work on that all night instead of spending time with my wife and children, do you think I love work more than my family in that moment? That’s obviously ludicrous, but your definition of love, and thereby this entire post, seems to hinge on you saying, ‘yes, if you have a job you don’t love your family as much as you would without that job’.
Finally, your use of free will is pretty dangerous, theologically. If I am understanding you correctly, you posit that God needed free will to exist for us to love him, and for us to be free we need multiple, equally attractive choices. You say that evil is a privation of good, but you talk about it as though it was an independent existence; like it was a real option to choose. If life is just one big choice between God and not God, well one’s obviously more attractive. So God had to tempt us into sinning by creating something particularly enticing and particularly Not God, so our love would be meaningful…but James 1:13 says God doesn’t tempt anyone. So either the Bible is wrong or your understanding of the situation is wrong, and as a Christian I’m sure that puts you into a very awkward position.
However, all this is beside the real issue. The real issue is not just that bad people exist; no matter how painful evil people can be and how troubling it is that God wouldn’t interfere, most atheist can conceptually separate God’s actions and people’s actions. I think natural evil and animal pain are far more troubling and damning for belief in God. In a general sense, the fact that hurricanes and tornados destroy lives is tough to swallow. What is worse is that it seems as though this cycle of destruction is what the entire physical universe is founded upon. The Universe itself came about through violent explosions. Then on this little planet called Earth, life arose, and the entire story of that life is the struggle between killing and avoiding being killed. Then, Millions upon millions of years ago, a giant asteroid crashed into the planet, an event we know as the KT catastrophe, and killed every large animal (dinosaurs) on this planet over the course of ten years. You want me to accept without qualification that this universe that promotes the suffering of all life in it as a result of free will? How can I justify that God killed the dinosaurs through suffocation and starvation (and explosions) because 65 million years later I would have the option to choose him and I didn’t? The real issue is not ‘how could God allow people to do bad things’, the real question is, ‘why did God create a world that wants to kill me and everything else in it?’ If you answer ‘free will’ to that, you have clearly missed the point; couldn’t God let me choose freely in a nice universe?
ReplyDeleteI look forward to your responses
Thanks for reading my post! I think you make some vary compelling points, and I definitely am glad of the opportunity to clarify myself somewhat. I really believe that human love is intrinsically different than animal affection. Animals (including humans) do seem to have an inborn compulsion to care for their own families and perhaps even the species as a whole. Call this evolution or whatever, that really isn't the point here. But the human capacity to empathize and care for each other even when it does not necessarily increase our fitness is something I do not see present anywhere else in the animal kingdom. I think our capacity for love is greater, just as I think our free will is much more real than animal "choices." There are certainly other compulsions besides love which vie for our attention, and these I believe might be more in common with animals, but there is still a choice involved.
ReplyDeleteI did make an argument for my claim, one that a logician would call contraposition. It is a common logical tenet that if a logical statement (if A, then B) is true, then its contrapositive (if NOT B, then NOT B) is also true. My statement is that free will is required for love to exist (if love, then free will). What I did in the second section of this post is to examine the contrapositive (if NOT free will, then NOT love). And my conclusion was that preference without free will is not tantamount to love. If the contrapositive is true, then the original statement is as well. Now, you may disagree with my argument, but I did back my assertion. Also, I really considered the third section of this post to be more important, so I sort of dusted over a fairly common apologetic argument on my way there. My apologies.
I think my conception of original sin is different than yours (and perhaps different than the traditional church view). There is a certain propensity of humans toward sin, but I do not think it is insurmountable or unfair. We still have the choice not to sin. Christ's sacrifice frees us from the consequences of our sin, and it also allows us access to a Spirit which helps us to better discern the outcomes of our decisions. I do not know if I would say that we are "unable" to freely choose Christ. But no one does. The capability exists, though it is never fulfilled outside of Christ. (Romans 3:21-26)
Moving on.... You are right, my statement that people choose to act on love at the cost of everything else may have been misguided (or at least an exaggeration). It is certainly possible to love more than one thing. I would say that the effort you put into your job can show how much you love your family. Or it could show how much you love money, or a host of other things. The actions themselves do not necessarily reveal the recipient of the love. This brings me to your question of theology. The hardest choices in life are not between good and bad, but against two good things. The entire creation was good when God created it. (Gen. 1:31) It is not the creation which was evil. What God does is to give the humans a choice. He tells them that they are not to eat of a certain tree. The command and the tree are both good things. And the humans finally have a chance to show their love for God based on their choice not to eat the fruit. You are right to quote James 1:13, but I wish you would have gone ahead and quoted verse 14 as well, because this clears things up a little. "...[B]ut each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed." We do have desires that are evil- essentially meaning that they are contrary to God's will. The desires themselves can be good in many contexts. For instance, the desires for wisdom and good food that Adam and Eve exhibit when confronted by the serpent would not have been sinful in almost any other context. But because they chose based on Satan's misinformation to act on those (otherwise) good desires and disobey God's good command by eating the good fruit, they sinned. God is not at fault anywhere here. He does not create evil or tempt them to sin, but it happens nonetheless. This is the best way I know to answer your question right now, unless I have misunderstood you somewhere.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the suffering of animals is a difficult problem in this idea of free will, and I do not claim to have all the answers here. I will say that I'm perhaps not the best person to answer you specifically, because I am a young-earth creationist (I can hear the trolls already). For one thing, let me say that death is not the ultimate evil. As far as Christians are concerned, there are things far worse than pain and death, so the fact that things die, while tragic, is not proof against God. In the Christian tradition, there are other created beings besides humans which are given free will (known as angels), and some of these also choose against God. Demons could explain the fact that suffering has existed since before humanity, because they seem to interact with time differently than we do. Also, I'm not so sure that we can say that animals experience suffering in the same way as humans do. These answers are not well connected, mostly just odds and ends of arguments that are bouncing around in my head. Since you obviously do not take Genesis literally, it's admittedly a little difficult for me to know how to answer your question. I would say that I believe that suffering and evil entered the current world through the original sin, and that these natural disasters are evidence of evil in the world. The very fact that this violent universe was gentle enough to see life in the first place, however, is evidence of God.
C.S. Lewis has an excellent book titled The Problem of Pain which contains a chapter that addresses this very issue. I think you would find it worth reading. At any rate, I hope this answers at least most of your questions. If you still have more you would like for me to answer, feel free to comment again, or you can e-mail me or message me on Google+. Thanks!
I appreciate the response.
ReplyDeleteIn the interest of keeping things more focused, I will reiterate that my primary concern in your post is the claim that libertarian free will is a prerequisite for love. Please keep that in mind as you read the rest of this section and if you reread my previous comment.
First of all, you explanation of basic logical principles felt condescending, from here on out please assume that we are of equal intelligence and equal education. I am aware of contraposition; I am claiming you provided no evidence for your contrapositive, apparently believing it to be self-evident. I tried to show through my post that it is not self-evident that ‘If we do not have free will, then we cannot love’. Your only argument that free will is necessary is claiming that love is a preference. Once again, in the interest of dissembling your argument, I tried to undermine this vague definition. I did this by trying to show two things, that love need not be defined that way, and that love is not inherently attached to libertarian free-will.
As I threw out the possibility of instinctual love, I used a lion as an illustration. However, perhaps I should not have done so since it was unnecessary. If you want to focus on what is unique about human love, fine, because the ubiquity of human love is enough to show the point. I do not have to work very hard to show that there is apparently something is ingrained in us that compels us to love and desire to be loved. Call it the divine spark, call it instinct, I don’t care. Either way, no one that I have ever heard of had to decide that love is something they would desire to give and receive, they seem naturally drawn to it. I anticipate that you will respond that all humans are drawn to love because we recognize the objective goodness of it. Once again though, our ability to recognize what is good and not good, and be able to accurately judge between the two, is an ability that no human has chosen to have. We have apparently been predisposed towards a certain conclusion.
Now, let’s return to your concept of original sin. I did not bring this up so that we could have a calvanism/ arminianism debate. I bring it up to say this; the grand narrative of the Bible is the story of God choosing us despite our not being worthy. The reason this insistence on libertarian free will is dangerous, is because when you place the entire emphasis on what we do, you lose sight of what God does. No one asked God to create, no one forced God to continue having patience with his people, no one asked Jesus to die, and no one asked God to create a Church and use people in his mission, he just did those all on his own initiative. To claim that we overcome sin (and in the case of a creationist, every bad thing in the world) through our own choice, ignores the fact that God was the one that actually overcame that; our role in this dance is simply to follow his lead. (Since its apparent you like CS Lewis, I thought I’d throw in that “The Great Dance” reference for you, which Lewis got from St Gregory of Nazianzus).
In regards to your clarification about Love being a preference, I won’t say much else, since I do not entirely disagree now that you’ve toned it down. I will only say that I still think that your idea of love is minimalists and incomplete. I would add more about what it is to be Human and what that means for our relationship with God. These are not necessarily at odds with the idea of preference, but since preference is ill defined, I thought I would comment.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to my comments about animal pain and a world that induces suffering, I won’t say much since your creationist stance is too fundamentally at odds with my own understanding of reality to address here, so I’ll let that go. The only remarks I want to make on that end is that I think it is extremely unhelpful that the essence of your response is that evil isn’t really a problem; the problem is only my perspective. You say ‘I’m not sure we can say that animals experience suffering the way that humans do’, well I’m not sure they don’t. Argument by appealing to ignorance is pointless.
But if you don’t want to talk about animal suffering then let’s keep it to humans. Humans still get eaten to death by animals, killed by weather, and suffer from disease. There is no self-evident link between these things, and God allowing them so that we could freely choose God or Not God; I want you to provide that link if you are going to endeavor to engage the problem of evil. You claim that there are things worse than death; that’s true from a Christian perspective, but does that render suffering and death as benign? Of course not. There is still the problem of the world wants to kill me and I have to actively ensure that it does not (by doing things like staying away from bears and going to my basement when a tornado comes through).
Finally, let me note that I have said nothing about proof against the existence of God. I do not think evil is a proof, I think it is a problem; The Problem of Pain agrees with me on that end. The reason it is a problem is how it affects people and their ability to come to God. If you dismiss this as not really an issue, you will not only fail to convince any skeptics that you actually understand their points, but you will fail to remove any roadblocks that inhibit one’s ability to come into relationship with God.
I have spent some time thinking about our conversation today and I have a request.
ReplyDeleteThe reason we have debated free will is because of how it relates to the problem of evil. To be perfectly frank, the difference in our beliefs on the free will is not the difference of black and white, but of black and charcoal; we believe much of the same things. The only reason I am spending so much time critiquing your subtly different stance on free will, is because I do not think free will is an adequate answer to the problem of evil.
So while that is the focus of this post and our discussion that has followed, I have realized through this exchange that there is also room for a very healthy debate between us (and your readers) about the nature of free will and salvation; a rehashing of the Augustine-Pelagius debate. My request is this: could you make your next blog post be about the power of the will and how it relates to original sin/salvation? Or if you have already made a post like that, could you point me to it and engage with me there? I think it would be beneficial to both of us and allow us to stay focused on the problem of evil here.
I'm sorry if you felt that I was being condescending; that was not my intention. I just felt it was a little unfair to say that I did not substantiate my claim at all. Also, I should clarify that this was not the central thesis of this blog post. The arguments for free will being a prerequisite of love have been around for a long time. The main point I was trying to get across was the second-to-last section, which I think has been covered less by apologists. Yes, I did gloss over the argument against the Problem of Pain, since I was trying to get on to my next point. I think that we are still misunderstanding each other in a handful of ways, likely due to the fact that I'm trying to keep these responses concise. I think our stances are much more alike than it seems at first glance. Also, I'm not sure I am quite equipped to answer all of your questions, but I'll give it my best shot.
DeleteI will try to do a post on that subject in the near future, but I already have some plans for the immediate future. I like to plan these posts out ahead of time. Also, the next few weeks are going to be very busy for me, so I am going to keep the next couple of posts more light-hearted. Thanks for the suggestion (and for being respectful and level-headed), and please keep reading and thinking about these subjects! I will start working on your response as soon as possible.
In my last post I intentionally decided to not address your claim that in order to maintain free will, there had to be multiple options on the ‘same order of magnitude’ (pop pop). In the interest of addressing one point at a time, I chose to attack your foundational argument first, thinking that if I could convince you that complete and libertarian free will, devoid of unfair external and internal influence, might not be a prerequisite of relationship, then it might be unnecessary to address your solution. However, since it appears as though this exchange is coming to an end, I will finish my points.
ReplyDeleteI agree that some degree of free will is a necessary component of real relationship. I agree that God created this universe to be a medium for relationship, a neutral grounds for physical creatures to interact with a metaphysical God. I use the word relationship instead of love here very intentionally, for relationship is what God wants with us. So I assume we are on the same page up to this point.
You used the example of a man given the choice of hanging out with a co-worker and being locked in a cage with a wild boar, concluding that choosing the co-worker had no significance because the option was so obviously terrible. Here’s an example of what I mean; I’m given the option of being locked in a cage with an angry boar, or I can spend time with my wife. That would be an easy choice as well, but does that take away from my love for my wife? No, it just means my life has interesting crossroads. Another hypothetical example: There is one piece of pie left in the house and my wife has asked me to save it for her. I get hungry, I eat the pie. Is it because I don’t love my wife? No. Was that decision less meaningful, since my temporary hunger is not on the same order of magnitude as my love for my wife? No, in this case it is actually more meaningful that I chose pie over my wife, since she is on such a higher order of magnitude.
The point I want to make is two-fold. 1) equal and similar options are not necessary for the type free will we need to have relationship (my wife and pie are not equal or similar, and neither are God and Not God), and 2) the exercise of the will is not a purely rational activity, and is far more influenced by unwilled desires and no account of sin that understands it purely on rational terms is inadequate (my momentary desire for pie overrode my rational knowledge that I ought to save it for my wife and my free choice followed my inferior desires). The fact of sin in this world only needs human desire to exist, just as a relationship with God can also follow from pure desire for God; this is one of the many reasons the problem of evil is so tricky.
(I realized this morning that the second half of my final response to you did not get posted with the first. Here is the second half. If it does randomly appear after I've reposted it, now you know why.)
ReplyDeleteHow this relates to your thesis: That anything would be of the same order of magnitude as God, or that God would manufacture a world where it appeared as though Not God was on the same order of magnitude, is bad theology and contrary to the Bible, and I say the Bible and not a particular verse because it is a theme that flows from Genesis to Revelation. Aside from theology, I think the idea that this sort of world is necessary for meaningful relationship is misguided, for relationship does not require that extreme of a rationalized free will, nor does it require significant or equal options. The fact of the matter is that I can imagine a world where humans could be free and choose God without any real option to do otherwise; it’s what we all call heaven. I know you will claim that this world is the way it is because sin entered the world, which may be true, but I do not think it had to be that way, and the fact that it could have been otherwise IS the problem of evil.
I know you are sincere in your pursuit of God, so please at least consider my critiques. I know your very first blog post invited debate in the name of growing faith, so please know that I am coming to you from that perspective. My first comments were more reactionary that they should have been and made you defensive, for which I apologize. I value you as a member of the Church and wish you luck in your future.
As always, thanks for the comments! I think you make some very compelling points, though I'm not sure I agree at every juncture. That being said, I will continue to think about and process these points, and I hope to make a post in reply before too long.
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