The complaint of the skeptic is often "God isn't fair! People die!" Okay, that's shorthand. But even Christians find themselves lost in this argument. If God is good and God is powerful, why do bad things happen?
There are answers, of course. Sure, the skeptic will toss them aside, but it's not like they don't exist. But I got to thinking. What would the world look like if the God that people complain about existed rather than the God that actually exists existed. I mean, what if God was what they wanted God to be? What would it be like? Of course, I can only guess because most skeptics (or even hurting Christians) are able to tell you what they don't like but not what they would actually expect. But I think I can make some reasonable guesses.
The first thing you'd notice if you stepped suddenly from this universe to a parallel universe where the-God-that-people-approve (TGTPA for short) existed would be that everyone was happy and no one was sad. Of course. This TGTPA being wouldn't allow any sadness. No cause for it. No one ever suffers. No one ever dies. It's all good, quite literally, I suppose. There would be no sickness, no losses, no aging. Now, I have to admit I'm not sure how any of that would work. I mean, isn't aging essential to happiness. "Oh, come on, now, Stan! What kind of stupid ...?" No, really! I would hate it if I never aged beyond fetus stage. That would make happiness elusive. Apparently, then, there would be aging, but only to some sort of optimum stage, as if happiness cannot occur before or after that stage? "Growing old together" wouldn't happen since too much aging is sad and, of course, leads to death. I don't know. Sounds complicated to me.
Someone else will have to work out the mechanics of a universe where no one and nothing ever dies. How soon does it become too populated? If nothing ever dies, what do they eat? What do they wear? How does this universe support itself given that no one and nothing ever dies, so the draw on resources only increases? I don't even have a hint of an idea of how any of that could possibly work.
Before long, however, you'd start to notice some ... problems. Apparently the people that inhabit this universe don't have free will. They can't, since they do not have the capacity to choose anything that would produce sadness, sickness, sorrow, or sin. I suppose you could call it some measure of "free will" in that they can choose only those things that make them happy, but it has to be limited.
If you talk to these people, you find a complete loss of certain commonly understood concepts from our universe. They have no conception of "justice", for instance, since no one ever faces it. No one does anything wrong, so no one has to be made right. Their TGTPA God isn't holy, righteous, merciful, or gracious. Well, if He is, they'd never know it since these concepts require contrasts to be grasped. "Good" requires "bad" to be known. If "mercy" is the quality that doesn't punish and no one ever deserves punishment, mercy cannot be grasped. No pain, no gain? No way.
And this is just the beginning. Just a few paragraphs. This "ideal" world would lose many of the things we consider "ideal" such as justice, free will, mercy. The task of taking up where others went before would be lost since they'd still be there. And a God who wished to demonstrate all of His attributes of justice, mercy, grace, holiness, omnipotence, and so on would not be capable of doing so in a world without contrasts. This kind of universe run by the-God-that-people-approve wouldn't be much like paradise. At least, not to me. It seems to me that we gain a lot from the contrasts of sin and salvation, trespasses and justice, death and birth, suffering that strengthens and so on. Say, skeptics, are you sure you know what you want from the God that people approve?
12 comments:
I think the god that most people really want is one who never created them.
"God isn't fair" is just a cop-out for agnostics and atheists. They just don't want to be confronted by the Truth, so they deflect it with nonsense, without really thinking about what it would mean.
I'm pretty sure that almost none of those who complain about the God who is have really thought about the God who they would find acceptable.
“Someone else will have to work out the mechanics of a universe where no one and nothing ever dies. How soon does it become too populated? If nothing ever dies, what do they eat?”
What about photosynthetic organisms that can walk and talk? They would need sunlight and some minerals from the soil to thrive.
“No, because the energy flux from sunlight on their bodies would not be sufficient to power locomotion,” you may say.
“So have them hibernate for periods of time while they soak up sunlight and build up a store of chemical energy for later use. Or of course He could just create a much hotter (or closer) star to power them.”
“But then they would overheat,” you may say.
“So He could provide them insulation or just make them tolerant to high temperatures. Or to go a completely different way, He could make animal biochemistry such that soil and stones are digestible.”
“But they would exhaust the soil by eating it up,” you might object.
“He could arrange for Earth’s core to keep making more of the stuff and sending veins of it up to the surface in outcrops or geysers.”
You and Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraaff believe that you will spend eternity with physical bodies having skin, fat, bones and organs. Will you be able to order a sirloin steak in Heaven? If so, does that force God to kill a cow in Heaven? I can’t imagine you will answer “yes” to that last question. You will say that you deity is so clever that He has a way of producing a delicious morsel of food without killing anything. Well? Could He be that clever in arranging how things work on our planet?
As to overpopulation, that is just you looking at our finite planet and thinking about it with your finite mind. Because YOU can’t imagine a three-dimensional manifold containing the phenomenon of unceasing growth, you attribute that same lack of vision to your deity. But if you insist on having it your way regarding that possibility, how about we imagine He simply bypasses the matter by eliminating reproductive organs as well as the circuits in the brains of mammals and birds and fish and reptiles that give them the urge to engage in reproductive behavior?
“Isn't aging essential to happiness?”
Do you believe you will age in Heaven? If not, do you think it will make you unhappy to not age there?
“Say, skeptics, are you sure you know what you want from the God that people approve?”
Did you pray that God would bring the missing Colorado girl (in the news the last couple of weeks) back to her home unharmed? Now that law enforcement says she was abducted and murdered, are you asking God to reveal the name and address of the perpetrator to you? Or do you think it is part of His plan that more children become victims?
Are you praying that Iran will not use a nuclear weapon on Israel? Or are you praying that He will cause them to do so, and that the world will learn some kind of lesson from it?
One more question on the matter of justice. Do you believe that the Christians on a jury always come up with the correct verdict? Would you like the law to be changed so as to allow only Christians to be jurors? Or would that be a matter of God using Christians as robots?
"... does that force God to ...?"
Really? You think that I might think that God's creation might force God to ... do anything?
It would appear that your version of a just and righteous deity would be that he cater to your whims. "I value cows too much to allow any to die. If god is good, he'll feed me without harming my beloved cows."
It is, indeed, the running theme of your demands. "If god is good, he'll justify himself to me in terms and on terms that I approve. He'll tell me what I want to know. He'll explain himself and, if I approve, he can then act. If not, of course, his choices are null and void. Incumbent in all of this is the absolute necessity that no human and no animal ever suffer or die ... at least, not without my prior approval." That is, from all appearances, the only god that you would consider just would be ... you.
But, seriously, that whole series of questions at the end ... do you actually think that I would answer them? Do you actually posit them as valid questions to determine if God is good or not? Is there any universe in your mind in which there would be a God that did not answer to you and still be good? And in your mind, is it mandatory that all followers of such a God be infallible as well? Seriously, that whole series of questions there makes no sense to me.
I wouldn't mind hearing from the atheist in the room, why are you so hostile to religion? You (atheists in general) are working tirelessly to debunk religion and deny God. To what end? Stan mentioned in another post that all religions have thing in common, a set of mores that cause to live...better. Without God, what reason is their to live rightly? Without God, at best we could hope for is pragmatic hedonism. While there have been bad things done in the names of religion, the bad done is grossly surpassed by the good done AND the bad prevented. What do you stand to gain from denying people their faith? Theism can be directly linked to the development of science. Theism produces a fear of the ever-after, causing people to consider how they live now. Theism gives hope. Why deny hope? Without God, there is no real reason for morality, except for what I say is right or wrong, or if I don't want to be shunned, what my society says is right or wrong. And since society is fluid, what is wrong today could be right tomorrow. How is that helpful to the lost, the weary, the down-trodden? Religion has produced some of our worlds most beautiful artwork and music. How dark would our world be if noone had hope? Why do you hate religion?
I never cease to be impressed that Stan takes the time to address issues that I feel are crucial when looking at belief systems, so as always, thanks for that. I guess I have sent in hundreds of comments over the years, and Stan has decided to not print maybe only three or four of them. I wonder if the average Muslim or Hindu would be as patient. The Muslim suppression of free expression of skepticism in the parts of the world they dominate sickens me. It is a feather in the cap of Christianity that Christians are not doing that type of thing.
David wrote, “Why do you hate religion?”
I like something that somebody (not me) wrote at a discussion board when debating a Believer who claims God is tri-omni: “I'm not sure how many others here share my own experience, but I am a former believer. The reason I'm not a believer any longer partially stems from the fact that, in order for me to have continued in belief, I would have had to keep defending Christianity by glossing over the internal inconsistencies and making arguments that I knew to be flawed, and using special pleading to avoid the glaring failures of Christianity… I never desired to lose my faith, but honesty was more important to me than using arguments that I knew had been refuted and buried.”
Call that attitude “hating religion” if you wish to.
Interesting. So it is your belief that the only way that one can believe in God or Christianity is to gloss over internal inconsistencies? And it is your conviction as well that your approach does not gloss over any of its own internal inconsistencies?
Interestingly, as long as you've been commenting here, I've been asking the same two questions without any genuine, rational, or consistent answers. 1) Is it necessary that for God to exist He would need to conform entirely to your version of what is or is not good? (And, of course, if yes, is that even rational?) 2) On what do you base at all any notion of "good" given that you've dislodged any sense of the divine? Why would your version of "good" be better than mine ... or God's?
The complaint has always been "God doesn't do what I think is good" without ever supplying any basis for "what I think is good". It seems ... I don't know ... internally inconsistent.
What one person calls inconsistencies, another might call not comprehending. As Christians, and any religion that believes in a deity, we must have some amount of faith, because we are natural trying to understand the supernatural. There are always going to be gaps in what we know because we are flesh and He is Spirit. But, science and atheism is not alone in their inability to answer questions. Many of the answers they have are based on assumption, not verifiable fact, aka faith. There are just things people have to believe without fully understanding because we can't know everything, EVER. If humanity were to continue a billion years, we'd still not have all the answers. Surely, we continue to strive for answers, but if our foundation is secure, the unanswerable questions will not bring our house down.
“Is it necessary that for God to exist He would need to conform entirely to your version of what is or is not good?”
Allow me to modify that question with words shown in all caps before I give an answer.
“Is it necessary that for God to BE WORSHIPED BY YOU He would need to conform entirely to your version of what is or is not good?”
My answer to the modified version of your question is Yes. I wish I could remember the source of a quote that goes about like this: If God exists, the one thing He cannot compel me to do is to worship that which I perceive to be evil.
“Why would your version of ‘good’ be better than mine ... or God's?”
Pardon me for again modifying your question.
“Why is Stan’s version of ‘good’ better than God’s?”
Here’s why. If Stan finds out that InterUnion Foods Corp is now selling beef that was slaughtered not by a bullet to the head, but by sending cattle into a combustion chamber and burning them to death, Stan would stop buying that company’s beef products. Stan might urge others to quit buying those products as well. But a sovereign God, if such exists, feels free to burn a porcupine to death in a wildfire and seemingly feels no shame over it, because He will be doing it again in the future.
The Bible commands us to kill rebellious youth by stoning them. Stan would urge us to NOT kill rebellious youth by stoning them.
Jesus commands that a spouse seek divorce only in cases where adultery has been committed. As best I can glean from Stan’s blogs (and it is possible I am wrong), Stan believes that there are other grounds for divorcing.
I urge anyone who is interested in such things to search at YouTube for a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza January 26, 2009 and listen particularly to Hitchens around the 32-minute mark.
“The unanswerable questions will not bring our house down.”
David, in the church of my youth there were a few points of disagreement between congregants. For instance, some thought the Bible allows a head pastor to be female, and others said it does not. Both sides could and did quote scripture to support their view. (Stan thinks the Bible clearly forbids it.) If you read the Bible and still feel like you are not clear on some theological point, and if you pray sincerely to ask that God speak the answer to you so that you will know, for the rest of your life, what the right answer is, can you come up with any good reason why God should remain silent toward you?
I can see why a Christian might come up with a reason why God would not tell him what stock to buy and when to buy it (though I can also see a reason why that would in fact be a good thing from a Christian point of view, related to the Christian’s ability to tithe generously), but I am not clever enough to come up with a reason why God would withhold from a Believer a clarification of some theological issue.
Interesting. You do not appear to notice the internal inconsistency of your position. In your view, the only "God" you would worship is one that conforms to your personal definitions of good. Or, to put it another way, the only "God" you would worship would be ... you or something less than you. It doesn't seem to occur to you that you might not have a good grasp on what is good or evil, that your perceptions of these may be faulty. As such, the ultimate "lawgiver" -- that which establishes morality -- is "that which I perceive" ... you. Indeed, this position -- "I will be like the Most High" (or "Did God say ...?") -- is the same one you keep using as your "go to" proof of the non-existence of a deity. He doesn't meet your standards of good. He doesn't meet your standards of communication. He doesn't tell you what you want to know. He doesn't measure up or submit to your demands. Oddly enough, in my estimation that is part of the definition of God.
And we still don't know upon which you base your definition of good and evil. It appears to be your own perceptions. You can see, I imagine, since you are apparently an intelligent person, that this is purely relative and subjective, right?
And I would be cautious about suggesting that my positions of what is good or bad are not God's positions. My perceptions may vary from His (because I recognize my fallibility and my sin nature), but if God commanded us to stone rebellious youth (which, by the way, He hasn't), I would concur.
(By the way, I went to the 32 minute mark and it was D'Souza talking, so I don't know what you're talking about on that YouTube reference. I actually don't have a free 2 hours to listen to an atheist and a Catholic apologist debate the existence of God.)
Anonymous,
First off, thank you for being so polite. There are many other atheists who come off as just angry.
I think I read in your posts that you were once a believer (which I'd challenge because if you were you still would be)...but I'd just like to urge you to reconsider your position.
You need a saviour just like all of us. I understand that the problem of evil is a weighty matter. But your objections, when they come down to it, seem...well...nit picky. God has to jump through a lot of hoops for you to worship Him. Don't find yourself on judgement day holding onto some of these positions you are putting out there.
God is God, whether or not he chooses to burn up a porcupine. Anyway, I say things things out of genuine concern. I pray right now for you (even at the risk of you thinking I'm coming across of overly pious). So...repent fellow sinner!
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