The Case for God

Click HERE for audio recording of Pascal's Wager and the Anthropic Teleological Principle

2008-03-22T15:29:00.001Z

2008-03-16T14:15:00.002Z

WEEK 7

PASCAL’S WAGER AND THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE, FOLLOWED BY THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

Pascal’s Wager Arguments

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and author.

Pascal wrote as follows:

1) I should be much more frightened of being wrong and finding out that Christian religion was true than of not being wrong in believing it to be true (Pensees 6)

2) According to the odds, you must take the trouble to seek the truth, because if you die without worshipping the true principle you are lost. “But”, you say, “if he had wanted me to adore him, he would have left some signs of his will.”

3) There are only three kinds of people: those who serve God having found him; others who spend their time seeking him who have not found him, and the rest who live without seeking him nor having found them. The first are reasonable and happy, the last are lunatic and unhappy, those in the middle are unhappy and reasonable (Pensees 192)

4) “God is or He is not”. But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here…A game is being played… where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions. Do not then reprove for error those who had made a choice; for you know nothing about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”
Yes, but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and the two things at stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He is.” (Pensees 680)

Dr Ravi Zacharias points out that this is not proof for the existence of God but rather,

“The argument is directed at the sort of person who, not being convinced of the proofs of religion, and still less by the arguments of atheists, remains suspended between a state of faith and one of unbelief.”

Ravi Zacharias says that the atheist ruling out the possibility of their being a God is really the one that is taking the step of faith:

“All judgements bring with them a margin of error. But no judgement ought to carry with it the potential for so irretrievable a loss that every possible gain is unworthy of merit. The atheist makes precisely such a hazardous judgement. It is an all-or-nothing gamble of himself, thrust into the slot machine of life. It is a faith beyond the scope of reason.”

Pascal says that the HEART must be engaged as well as the head.

Williams writes:” Pascal is not proposing that apologetics should be carried out by making belief appealing at the detriment of reason. He is pointing out that apologetics must be addressed to the whole person, heart and mind, and that the mind will never convince the heart until the heart loves truth more than it loves its own rebellion against its maker.”

Therefore the “passions” are the obstacle to belief in God, according to Pascal.

Williams writes: “If we find ourselves wishing that we could believe in God, and we lack conclusive evidence either for or against his existence, it seems rational to give ourselves the best possible chance of coming to believe. We can attempt to do this by praying, going to church, listening to appropriate music, watching films with a Christian theme, spending time with believers, reading the Bible and books written by believers.”

Is this “brainwashing”?

The Moral Reformulation of Pascal’s Wager

Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli have thought this up
“If there is a God of infinite goodness, and he justly deserves my allegiance and faith, I risk doing the greatest injustice by not acknowledging him.”

Williams writes “This version of the wager does indeed appear to be morally superior. If God as traditionally conceived within Christian theism exists, then we ought to worship Him. If there is the slightest possibility that God exists, then it would seem that our minimal moral duty would be to demonstrate a willingness to render what we genuinely intend to be acceptable worship to our creator, to put a reasonable amount of effort into seeking to know Him through prayer, looking with an open mind at purported revelation, engaging with arguments for His existence, and so on.

In other words – seek to find him if you think there is the remotest possibility that he might be there.

FINALLY THE “ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE”

This has close parallels with Design arguments – indeed it is really another form of a Design argument

ANTHROPIC TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

A teleological argument, or argument from design, is an argument for the existence of God or a creator based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design and/or direction in nature. The word "teleological" is derived from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose. Teleology is the supposition that there is purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature.
The argument
Although there are variations, the basic argument can be stated as follows:
X is too (complex, orderly, adaptive, apparently purposeful, and/or beautiful) to have occurred randomly or accidentally.
Therefore, X must have been created by a (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.
God is that (sentient, intelligent, wise, and/or purposeful) being.
Therefore, God exists.
X usually stands for the universe; the evolution process; humankind; a given animal species; or a particular organ like the eye or capability like language in humans. X may also stand for the fundamental constants of the universe like physical constants and physical law.
Williams writes
“The fine- tuning” of the laws which allows life to exist is called the “anthropic pinciple”. This says that if you were to select a set of values for physical laws at random from all the possible variations, the likelihood of making a selection which would result in anything as comlpex as life is extremely small. “Don N Page of the Instititute for Advanced Study in Princetown, NJ, recently calculated the odds against the formation of our universe and the figure was one on 10,000,000,000 to the power of 123, a number so large that to call it astronomical would be to engage in a wild understatement.”
In the formation of the universe, the balance on matter to anti-matter had to be accurate to one part in ten billion for the universe to arise.
If nuclei were bound together slightly more weakly or slightly more strongly, the universe would lack a chemistry. If the electric force were slightly stronger than it is, evolution would not reach organisms before the sun went out. If it were only slightly less, stars would not have planets, and life would be unknown.
Entropy has been increasing ever since the Big Bang, which means that the early moments of the universe must have been a time of extremely low entropy when the state of the universe was extremely highly ordered. The Oxford mathematics professor Roger Penrose has considered the entropy of the early universe and just how special it had to be. He estimates that of all the possible early universes, it had to be special to the tune of one part in 10 to the power of 123.

SOME ARGUE THAT THIS IS THE ONLY WORLD WE KNOW, THEREFORE WE READ TOO MUCH INTO CREATION, PERCEIVING ORDER AND DESIGN WHERE THERE IS NONE

Richard Swinburne tells a story that illustrates why it is rational to look for an explanation of the way the world is. Suppose, he says, that a lunatic kidnaps someone and locks them in a room with a card shuffling machine. The machine shuffles ten packs of cards, draws on card from each pack, and then exhibits all ten cards. The kidnapper tells his victim that the machine will soon go to work and make a draw. Unless the draw consists of an ace of hearts from every pack, the machine will simultaneously explode, killing the victim. As a result of this explosion, the victim will not see which cards the machine drew, unless they are all the ace of hearts. The kidnapper leaves and the machine makes its draw. To the victim’s relief, it draws ten aces of hearts cards, and doesn’t explode. The victim naturally believes that there must be some explanation for his amazing good luck. Perhaps the machine was rigged to pick the cards it did and this has all been some fantastic practical joke. However, the kidnapper returns and pours cold-water on this suggestion. He says that it is not at all surprising that the machine drew the only safe selection of cards, for the victim would not be alive to see any other draw. That draw is a precondition of the victim seeing any draw at all. However, the kidnapper is clearly wrong.

It is the unlikeliness of those cards being drawn which is the issue – not the fact that the kidnapped person was around to witness this amazing draw.
“There is indeed something extraordinary in need of explanation in ten aces of hearts being drawn. The fact that this peculiar order is a necessary condition of the draw being perceived at all makes what is perceived no less extraordinary and in need of explanation. The theist’s starting-point is not that we perceive order rather than disorder, but that order rather than disorder is there.”

Williams writes: “Take this book. How did all that ink come to be arranged in words in a meaningful order on sheets of paper bound together in sequence between covers? Here are two possible explanations 1) An author wrote the book and a publisher had a printing press mass-produce it for sale 2) A terrorist caused an explosion in a printing press, and this explosion caused ink and paper to fly about the place, and the ink just happened to fall on the paper in the form of words, and the paper just happened to flutter down together in an order that made sense of the words, and the sequenced sheets of paper landed in an appropriate cover and glue was fortuitously in the right place at the right time to stick the sheets into the covers. Which explanation would you choose? Both are logically possible.”

IMPORTANT QUESTION: COULD THIS JUST BE ONE AMONGST MANY TRILLIONS OF UNIVERSES AND THAT THIS UNIVERSE WAS THE ONE WHERE BY CHANCE EVERYTHING CAME TOGETHER?

Swinburne writes

“To postulate a trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of the universe, seems the height of irrationality….for the postulation of God is the postulation of one entity of a simple kind…The postulation of the actual existence of an infinite number of worlds, between them exhausting all the logical possibilities…is to postulate complexities beyond rational belief.”

John Polkinghorne says

“The many universes explanation of anthropic fine tuning is metaphysical in character, depending upon an appeal to the existence of worlds of whose being we can have no direct, scientifically motivated knowledge. It is a metaphysical guess that might be there.”

Williams adds

“It doesn’t really help to say that given enough time, or enough different universes, or both, the evolution of life was bound to happen, and that this therefore explains why we exist. It doesn’t help because it isn’t true. It is wrong to think that, given enough chances, every possible world must exist or come into existence eventually. Of course it is possible, but it isn’t logically necessary by any stretch of the imagination.
Even if there was an infinity of universes it would not be inevitable that this or any other one should be among them. All one can say is that as the number of universes proceeds towards infinity the probability of a difference between the actual distribution and the probably one diminishes to zero…Infinitely many orderings may never yield the significant ordering.
Think of it like this: if you shuffle pages number 1 to 1000 over and over infinitely many times, then the chances of not getting the pages into the order 1 to 1000 falls. However, there is no guarantee that the pages will ever appear in the order 1 to 1000.

Swinburne adds
“The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause of that order.”

Williams concludes:

If many or all possible universes exist, and if there is a possible universe which is created by God, then, far from doing away with God, the hypothesis that many or all possible universes exist opens up at least the possibility, and perhaps the certainty, that God exists! Unless the very concept of “God” or of a “Universe created by God” is incoherent, it is a logical possibility that a universe created by God exists.”

Click HERE for latest talk "Arguments from desire and absurdity"

2008-03-11T14:44:00.000Z

Week 6 Arguments from Desire and Absurdity

2008-03-05T16:05:00.001Z

WEEK 6 ARGUMENTS FROM DESIRE AND ABSURDITY

Different between “Apparent goods” and “Real goods” (Aristotle)

Mortimer J Adler writes:“We may actually desire what we ought not to desire, or in fact fail to desire what we ought to desire. That which is really good for us is something we ought to desire….But that which only appears to be good for us….may be something we ought not to desire….even though, at the time we want it, it appears to be good because we want it.”

Aristotle divided “means” from “ends”

Money is always a “means”
“Even the miser who hoards money does not see the possession of money as an end, but as a means to feeling secure, or powerful.”

But ends are to do with eventual states of being

Williams writes:“The Christian answer to Aristotle’s question about the good life is that “the good life is one built around a reciprocal love relationship with God within the community of people who love God because he first loved them.” Love of God is our summum bonum, and it directs us towards our totum bonum. Both begin in this life, and flourish in the next. This end is an unlimited and normative real good because it involves knowing and loving God and neighbour for eternity as God intended from the foundation of the universe. As Ravi Zacharias puts it “Man’s primary pursuit should be God himself, and all secondary and tertiary pursuits fall into place.””

Williams continues, “Hunger can be calmed only food, for hunger is the desire for food. Likewise, only God can meet man’s spiritual hunger, for man’s spiritual hunger is a desire for God…..
That is the hypothesis. If the evidence verifies the existence of a hunger that cannot be met by anything which we know is not God, then, by elimination of the alternatives, this is verification of the hypothesis that God exists.”

In other words – meeting and knowing God is satisfying an innate desire deep within us and this desire is a pointer, if not a proof, towards God.

C S Lewis writes: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world.”

To reject this understanding of human desire would force us to take a gloomy view of life as ultimately unfulfilling.

Pascal wrote:“What does this greed and helplessness proclaim, except that there was once within us true happiness of which all that now remains is the outline and empty trace? Man tries unsuccessfully to fill this void with everything that surrounds him, seeking in absent things the help he cannot find in those that are present, but all are incapable of it. This infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite, immutable object, that is to say, God himself. He alone is our true good. From the time we have forsaken him, it is a curious thing that nothing in nature has been capable of taking his place.”

Ecclesiastes 2.10-11
“I denied myself nothing my eyes desired:I refused my heart no peace.
My heart took delight in all my work,
And this was the reward for all my labour.
Yet, when I surveyed all that my hands had done
And what I had toiled to achieve,
Everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
Nothing was gained under the sun.”

According to Dr Ravi Zacharias, the Christian finds fulfilment in the most astonishing way

“His conscience responds to the holiness of God; his mind is nurtured and nourished by the truth of God; his imagination is enlarged and purified by the beauty of God; his heart, or impulses, respond to the love of God; his will surrenders to the purpose of God.”

Complaining about life raises an interesting question – why do we complain? Is it because we think there should be something better?

Williams writes “We do not complain about two and two equalling four. We do not complain about squares lacking roundness. In other words, we do not complain about things that cannot be other than they are.”

Williams writes
“I think there is enough evidence to conclude that God really is the answer to people’s need for meaning, direction and so on; and that it is the lack of God which therefore causes these desires. The evidence comes from those who say their experience of God meets those deep needs, and from the fact that these needs are just what we should expect people to have if God exists and they are not correctly related to Him. The desire for God is not a misplaced desire, it is the search for the real answer to a real need. It’s our endless, out-of-proportion wishing for more money, possessions, popularity, fame, sex, drink and drugs that are the misplaced desires.”

Drugs v Faith

Williams outlines the similarities and differences – wish for transcendent experience, communal activity, spiritual high. But he also shows how people’s lives are empty when left in a neutral non-drug induced state and how this differs from religious experience.

This is similar to the Freudian linkeage between the Womb and Heaven as a theory behind the desire for religious experience
The argument being that we want to go back to the womb.
But “Eternal life involves receiving forgiveness, engaging in communal activities, worship and moral struggle; none of which find an easy parallel in womb-life.”

Augustine wrote “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

Williams writes “The person who feels that life is meaningless, suffers from an unfulfilled desire; but their suffering reveals their need and, if they allow it to, this need can lead them to the discovery that God answers their need.”

Faith in God helps to answer the big question – What is the meaning of life?

William Lane Craig writes “Since the Enlightenment, when he threw off the shackles of religion, man tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible”.

Williams writes “We are the accidental and unintended by-product of time plus matter plus chance. There is no purpose that our existence fulfils and our destiny is the grave. So runs the received wisdom of secular belief.”

Modern-day atheist Peter Atkins writes
“I’ve always thought that I was insignificant. Getting to know the size of the Universe, I see just how insignificant I really am! And I think the rest of the human race ought to realise just how insignificant it is. I mean, we’re just a bit of slime on a planet belonging to one sun.”

Bertrand Russell wrote “Man is the product of causes that had no foreknowledge of the end they were achieving…his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves, his beliefs, are but the outcomes of accidental collocations (placings side by side) of atoms….(while) the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins….Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation, henceforth, be safely built.”

Now let’s move on to Absurdist theory.

Nihilism – the Absurd World-View

Williams writes
“An absurd universe is one which does not form a coherent whole. If there is a divorce between the demands placed upon humanity by the universe and what humanity can achieve, or between the needs of humanity and what the universe has to offer by way of satisfaction, then life is absurd. As Stephen T Davies writes:
“Camus’ basic assumption was that life is absurd…We long for some sort of meaning in life, but there is none….We want there to exist a kindly, loving God, but no such being exists…We hope for life after death, but death is the end of our existence. We long for some sort of grand, over-arching explanation of life and history and human existence, but no such over-arching explanation is available.”

Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl wrote
“The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of hereditary and environmental factors – or, as the Nazis liked to say “of blood and soil”. I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz…were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other in Berlin, but…in lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”

Atheism in Williams view describes an absurd universe

The nihilist’s universe is one in which

1) Human existence has no objective purpose
2) There are no objective moral values
3) Human beings have no objective or instrinsic worth
4) We are the accidental by-product of impersonal forces that place within us the mere feeling that objective moral values exist and oblige us to purse the summum bonum.
5) Ultimate reality is impersonal and so does not share in this project.
6) There is no guarantee that “good” will triumph over “evil”.
7) Each life ends in death and humanity is doomed along with the universe to extinction.
8) Nothing we do, as individuals or as species, has anything but a temporary, subjective value.

What do you think????

2008-02-23T19:58:00.004Z

WEEK 5
ARGUMENTS FROM COMMON CONSENT, AUTHORITY AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Introduction

Here follows the notes from a talk that will be given at All Saints Church (not the Hall) on Monday. Please note that some of this is in note form.

Also, please do listen to the rerecorded talk from last week (scroll right down to beneath this talk). Apologies it is a little quiet! It is marginally better than my effort on the night, which was not my best by any stretch of the imagination.

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The Times Higher Educational Supplement in 1997 found that 98% of Americans believed in God.

The percentage of the world’s population that is atheist or agnostic is certainly smaller than the percentage that believes in God.

Williams writes
“This minority may be smaller than it seems. It may be true in one sense that many people profess not to believe in God, but…given the right circumstances, a much wider group will betray a deep, latent, almost built-in belief in God. What are the first words out of an atheist’s mouth when they go through a horrifying experience or narrowly escape death? Isn’t it something like “O my God!”? What does almost every person do when someone they love is suffering from some terrible illness? They pray. To whom? To God.”

People under pressure often believe in God – the Falklands chaplain I met at school testifies to this

Just wishful thinking or something inherent in humanity? What about when I ask children from a secular school to pray? They all seem to know what to do! What does that tell us?

BELIEF THROUGH HISTORY

“Anthropological research has indicated that among the farthest and most remote primitive peoples today, there is a universal belief in God. And in the earliest histories and legends of people all around the world the original concept was of one God, who was the creator. An original high God seems once to have been in their consciousness even in those societies which today are polytheistic.” Paul Little writing in “Know why you believe”

Quite a number of philosophers down the centuries have believed in God

Rene Descartes was a “rationalist”, John Locke an “empiricist”, George Berkeley an “idealist” but they all agreed that God existed.

IT IS NOT TRUE THAT BELIEF IN GOD IS A SIGN OF A LACK OF INTELLIGENCE!!!

Williams writes:“There are bright minds on both sides. You can read the debate between atheist Kai Nielsen and Christian J P Moreland; with contributions from the likes of atheist Anthony Flew and theist Dallas Willard (“Does God exist? The Debate between Theists and Atheists (Prometheus Books, 1993). You can read the debate between the Christian philosopher J J Haldane and atheist J J C Smart (J J C Smart and J J Haldane “Atheism and Theism” (Blackwells 1996))
We see the atheism of scientists like Richard Dawkns and Peter Atkins, and the Christian beliefs or R J Berry and John Polkinghorne.
Belief in God can’t be dismissed as belonging only to the ill-educated. Of course I’d have to admit that disbelief in God has nothing to do with lack of intelligence. Belief or disbelief in God depends more upon how you use what intelligence you have than on how much intelligence you have. You don’t need a degree or a PhD to believe in God, but plenty of highly qualified people do believe.”

Two Oxford scholars, Gilbert West and Lord Lyttleton, were determined to destroy the basis of Christianity. West was to demonstrate the fallacy of the resurrection and Lyttleton was to prove that Saul of Tarsus (St Paul) had never converted to Christianity. Both men came to the opposite conclusion and became followers of Jesus. Lord Lyttleton wrote “The conversion and apostleship of Saint Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be Divine Revelation.” Josh McDowell, “Christianity, A Ready Defence” p.454

English journalist Frank Morrison, an expert in putting together information to form a picture of events, had a similar experience. Morrison set out to prove that the story of Christ’s resurrection was nothing but a myth, but he ended up believing it. He went on to write a famous book on his findings called “Who moved the stone?”
Morrison writes “The opportunity came to study the life of Christ as I had long wanted to study it, to investigate the origins of its literature, to sift some of the evidence at first had, and to form my own judgement….I will only say that it affected a revolution in my thought. Things emerged from the old-world story which previously I should have thought impossible.”

THE PHENOMENON OF RELIGIOUS AND SUPERNATURAL EXPERIENCE

Many people experience some sort of transcendent religious event in their lives

The Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford has found that “ a large number of people even today possess a deep awareness of a benevolent non-physical power which appears to be partly or wholly beyond, and far greater than, the individual self.”

C S Lewis in “The Problem of Pain” writes about our experience of the “Numinous” and the “Moral sense of compulsion” as pointers towards God.

Williams writes
“In the gospels Jesus says “Ask and it will be given to you,; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you, “ (Matthew 7.7 and Luke 11.9). The Bible also reports Jesus as saying , “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me.” (Revelation 3.20). The experience of feeling God “knocking” on the door of one’s life as one considers Jesus in the pages of the Bible or the words of a preacher, and opening that door to positive results, therefore constitutes an experiential verification of the Christian world-view, and hence of the existence of God.”

The experience of Saul is a powerful one

“As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied, “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” (Acts 9.3-6).

Millions of people have had similar experiences today. I will share something of mine at the talk on Monday 3rd March.

Is it just wish-fulfillment?
Listen to St Paul “I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea. I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles, in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked” (2 Corinthians 11.23-27)

Are Believers deluded?Why not ask the question are Atheists deluded?

Williams writes:“Psychologist Paul Vitez has investigated the psychology of atheism. After listing several psychological factors (such as personal convenience) which may contribute to a rejection of belief in God, Vitez argues that “in the Freudian framework, atheism is an illusion caused by the Oedipal desire to kill the father and replace him with oneself.” Noting that many prominent atheists had poor opinions of their fathers, Vitz proposes a “Theory of Defective Father” whereby a defective father may contribute to a person’s rejection of God the “heavenly Father”.
Defective fathers may be “weak, cowardly and unworthy of respect, “physically, sexually or psychologically abusive” or “absent through death or by abandoning or leaving the family.” If an earthly father is absent, or perceived as weak, or untrustworthy, these concepts tend to carry over into our view of God.
For example, Freud lacked respect for his father who failed to stand up for himself against anti-Semitic abuse. Karl Marx did not respect his father, who converted to Christianity out of a desire to make life easier for himself and was the first in his family not to become a rabbi. When Feuerbach was thirteen, his father abandoned the family to live with another woman. One of America’s best known atheists today is Madalyn Murray O’Hear. For some as yet unknown reason, she reportedly attempted to murder her father with a ten-inch butcher’s knife. She failed but screamed, “I’ll see you dead. I’ll get you yet. I’ll walk on your grave!
Vitz writes that “Many children interpret the death of their father as a kind of betrayal or act of desertion. In this respect it is remarkable that the pattern of a dead father is so common in the lives of many prominent atheists.” Bertrand Russell’s father died when Russell was four years old. Nietzche was the same age when his father died. Camus lost his father as a one year old. Satre lost his father before he was born.” Paul C Vitz “The Psychology of Atheism” in Truth Journal

WHAT SORT OF GOD WOULD HUMANS INVENT?

Would a God that people chose to invent be a Holy God and would the sayings of Jesus about wealth and putting others first belong to such a divinity?

Pascal wrote “There is enough light for those whose only desire is to see, and enough darkness for those of the opposite disposition.”

Click HERE for audio recording of the Argument from Design (Audio)

2008-02-23T13:58:00.002Z

The Argument from Design

2008-02-09T13:52:00.000Z

Please do try some of the earlier weeks too - including a rather poor quality recording of last week's talk. You can find the recording at the bottom of this post - first click on the drop down menu on 9th Feb, which will bring this text up again, and then scroll down to beneath this text.

THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

This talk will be given on the 18th February at 7.45pm at the All Saints Church Hall, Church Street, Whitstable. It is produced now to give course participants an opportunity to think about the issues before the evening. New people are still welcome to come along. It is free of charge.

Thomas Aquinas said that the Universe expresses an “underlying intention”.
He wrote
“An orderliness of action to an end is observed in all bodies obeying natural laws, even when they lack awareness. For their behaviour hardly ever varies, and will practically always turn out well, which shows that they truly tend to a goal and do not hit it by accident. Nothing, however, that lacks awareness tends to a goal, except under the direction of someone with awareness and with understanding….Everything in nature, therefore, is directed to its goal by someone with understanding and this we call “God”.

If everything is “random” and “by chance” why do the laws of nature remain the same? Why do they do not also keep changing if they came into existence by mere chance?

Williams writes: “If the universe really is the product of purposeless chance, then why should nature obey elegant mathematical laws? If you think that the universe has its origins in chance, doesn’t it make sense to think that its existence and form of existence will be equally chancy?”

The Revd Garth Barber, Anglican Chaplain at the University of East Anglia, is a member of the Society of Ordained Scientists. He wrote a letter to New Scientist magazine that read
“If a complete explanation for the origin of the Universe in terms of natural laws and mathematical equations is ever found then the question could still be raised: “Who is the author and guarantor of those laws?” Or as Stephen Hawking himself vividly asks: “What breathed fire into the equations?””

Theologian Keith Ward wrote this
“The continuing conformity of physical particles to precise mathematical relationships is something that is much more likely to exist if there is an ordering cosmic mathematician who sets up the correlation in the requisite way. The existence of laws of physics…strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures that the physical realm conforms to them.”

Does evolution challenge the theory of intelligent design?

Williams is not anti-evolutionist in his argument. He says that the theory of evolution is not a threat to belief in God. I would agree.

Williams writes
“Evolution may account for the existence of complex arrangements of matter such as eye-balls; but evolution is itself a complicated process involving raw material being worked upon by the laws of natural selection (the mutation of genes, survival of the fittest, and so on). Evolution does not destroy the analogical design argument, it merely pushes it back a step, from the objects that make up the world, to the substances and processes that make the objects that make up the world. Evolution cannot account for ultimate origins or the existence of order, because its operation requires the existence of entities with certain possible behaviours in an environment that works upon those entities in an ordered way”

It's rather like the argument from last week's course in this respect:

“Any sort of evolution of order of any kind will always presuppose pre-existing order and pre-existing entities governed by it. It follows as a simple matter of logic that not all order evolved. Given the physical world – how much of evolution it may or may not contain – there is or was some order in it which did not evolve….We come here upon a logically insurpassable limit to what evolution, however it may be understood, can accomplish.”
Dallas Willard “Does God Exist?”

People are quick to say that science explains things that God once used to explain, but it is not as simple as that. Science cannot answer certain questions:

For example - Why is the water boiling?

A scientific answer will include lots of chemistry and physics, talk of thermodynamics and so on. What it will not mention is that the water is boiling because I want a cup of tea.

The Greek Philosopher Aristotle and the Four Causes

Material cause
Formal cause
Efficient cause
Final Cause

What causes a house to be built?

Material cause – the bricks that make up the house
Formal cause - the way the materials are arranged to make up the house
Efficient cause – who puts the bricks in place – the builders
Final cause – the purpose behind why the house was built in the first place

The scientific and religious explanation are both true – just on different levels or in different spheres of understanding. They do not rival one another.

Williams writes this:“If I asked a scientist why anything exists at all, could she give me a scientific answer? No. She might say that “there is no reason” but that wouldn’t be a scientific answer. That would be her metaphysical interpretation upon the existence of the universe; that it lacks explanation. Science cannot rule out the opposite interpretation because science is a discipline that works by excluding personal explanations in the first place (her personal view that there is no reason is just a person point of view and cannot be proven).”

FURTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT EVOLUTION

Williams is not a literalist when it comes to Genesis 1, showing that Augustine and other Christian thinkers saw it as symbolism with a deeper meaning.

Williams argues that there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest evolution has been at work in the planet, but that there are still clear signs of God’s hand at work in creation.

DNA
His classic example is to do with DNA.

He writes “How are we to account for the coming together of nucleotides and amino acids in the precise arrangement of proteins, DNA and RNA? Sir Fred Hoyle notoriously argued that the emergence of life from the random shuffling of molecules is “as ridiculous and improbable as the proposition that a tornado blowing through a junk yard may assemble a Boeing 747.” Hoyle calculated the likelihood of life beginning through the “chance” combination of twenty component amino acids into two thousand enzyme molecules as one in ten to the power of forty thousand.”

Paul Davies comments: “The main reason why the origin of life is a puzzle is because the spontaneous appearance of such elaborate and organized complexity seems so improbable. If I shuffle a pack of cards and then deal them to four players and find that each player has received an exact suit in correct numerical sequence, am I to suppose a miracle has occurred to interfere with the physical process of shuffling? It is certainly possible that ordinary “natural” shuffling will produce an exactly ordered sequence of cards, but because the odds are so small, the occurrence of such an event would arouse deep suspicion that something had happened to interfere with the randomness of the process.”

So the intelligent complexity of it all speaks of the possible existence of God.

Freeman Dyson writes “I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”

Quote about DNA
Williams writes “The crucial thing about DNA is that it has to exist before there are intelligent creatures, and yet it has the character of encoded information which can only be produced by an intelligence.”

Just consider how complex creation is!
A single cell of the human body contains as much information as all thirty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannia – three or four times over!

Williams writes
“At the present time, the appeal to some as yet unknown physical process which will account for DNA is just as much an act of faith as the suggestion that “God did it”. The fact that science has sometimes managed to explain things that once seemed scientifically inexplicable does not mean that everything must be scientifically explicable.”
Also what cannot be explained scientifically is the origin of the information encoded in DNA, even if we arrive at understanding the physical make up of DNA.

Williams writes
“The “primeval soup” is like a bag of randomly shuffled scrabble pieces (nucleotides). To spell out words (codons or triplets), sentences (genes), paragraphs (operons), chapters (chromosomes), and books (living organisms), they must not merely be “drawn from the bag” in a repetitive order (NONONO) but in an order which encodes information (AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS); and this requires the existence of information which can be encoded. Information, although it can be encoded in matter, can only originate within a mind that has some connection with the system of “symbols” which encodes it. The computer programme “tells” the computer what to do, but only because it is the encoding of the programmer’s intentions according to a system established by the computer’s designer.
The physical and chemical hardware involved in DNA can be explained scientifically, but the arrangement of parts involved can be likened to the arrangements of scrabble pieces or of magnetic fields on a computer disc to encode information, and the original information must come from the mind. Experience tells us that objects with high information content, such as books and musical scores, are products of intelligence. It is reasonable to conclude by analogy that DNA is also the product of intelligence.”

KEITH WARD

Keith Ward has quite an argument with Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins about Evolution/Creationism and other matters.

Williams writes
“Ward says that it is no harder to suppose that God brought life into existence through a long process of evolution than to think that creation happened over a short period of time. Indeed, the evolutionary path might be seen as the more impressive. According to Ward, there is every reason to regard the evolutionary account and belief in God as mutually reinforcing, for “evolution from a state where no values are apprehended to states in which values can be both created and enjoyed gives an overwhelming impression of purpose and design.”

So you can believe in evolution and believe in God…indeed Ward argues that evolution is a sign of there being an intelligence at work.

Dawkins has a history of picking on the most fundamentalist forms of religion and criticising them, without realising that many of the most famous Christians in history were believers

Look at these scientists for example:

Nicholas Copernicus (1473 – 1543) laid the foundations of modern astronomy and the scientific revolution by suggesting on mathematical grounds that the earth travelled round the sun. He held office in the Polish Church as a Canon of Freuenburg Cathedral and described God as the “Best and Most Orderly Workman of All”

Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer, (1564-1642) was the founder of modern mechanics and experimental physics – argued that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Although he was persecuted by the Church he argued “there are two big books, the book of nature and the book of supernature, the Bible”

The founder of modern optics was the brilliant early astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) best known for his discovery of the three principles of planetary motion. He was a deeply sincere Lutheran and said that he was “thinking God’s thoughts after him”.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) – one of the most towering scientific intellects in history.
Well-known for his formulation of the laws of gravity and an expert in the field of optics, astronomy, differential calculus and responsible for the first correct analysis of white light. He believed in the inspiration of Scripture and wrote theological books as well as scientific books, regarding his theological books as more important. He believed that no sciences were better attested than the religion of the Bible.

Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867), who appears of the back of our old £20 notes, was one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century. He discovered the phenomenon of electro-magnetic induction. He was the first to produce an electric current from a magnetic field. He invented the first electric motor and dynamo. Again, the Christian faith was he single most important influence upon him.

Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery
Louis Pasteur originated pasteurisation
Gregor Mendel helped form the basis for genetics
Lord Kelvin was a leading light in the foundation of modern physics
James Maxwell formulated electro-magnetic theory.

All these leading Christians were scientists.

Professor James Simpson, who paved the way for painless surgery through anaesthetics was asked “What do you think is the most important discovery of your life?”
He replied “The most important discovery I ever made was when I discovered Jesus Christ.”

Christians in Science has 700 members in the UK
Christians in Science has 7000 members in the USA

Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, President of Queens’ College, Cambridge, Fellow of the Royal Society, who was professor of mathematical physics before his ordination in 1983, wrote:

“The physical world’s deep mathematical intelligibility (signs of the Mind behind it) and finely tuned fruitfulness (expressive of divine purpose) are reflections of the fact that it is a creation.”

Let's go back to the question of evolution. There are arguments against it of course.

AN ARGUMENT AGAINST EVOLUTION:

I am quite happy to believe that evolution may have happened but we are still left asking difficult questions. Namely, how did cells evolve if they needed all their component parts in order to survive?

Williams writes
“Consider just one of the irreducibly complex molecular machines. Behe mentions in his book the cilium. Cilia are tiny hair-like structures on the outside of cells that help to move fluids over stationary cells (for example in your lungs) or are used by the cell to swim (as in the single-celled paramecium). Without going into details, cilia are molecular paddling units. Any system that swims needs a paddle to make contact with the liquid, a motor or energy source to power the paddle, and something to transfer energy from the motor to the paddle. This complexity is inherent to the task of swimming, and no system that lacked on of these components could swim. The cilium is a swimming machine with microtubals for paddles, dynein arms for motors and nexin arms for connectors:
The complexity of the cilium and other swimming systems is inherent in the task itself. It does not depend on how large or small the system is, whether it has to move a cell or a ship; in order to paddle, several components are required. The question is, how did the cilium arise?”

The cilium must have arrived on the scene as a package deal as a motor on its own or a paddle on its own is totally ineffectual.

Behe writes “To say that Darwinian evolution cannot explain everything in nature is not to say that evolution, random mutation, and natural selection do not occur; they have been observed (at least in the case of micro-evolution) many different times…I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered; what has caused complex systems to form?”

Nobody has answered this question. An atheist would say “nothing” to this answer, but that is just as much a step of faith as believing in God.

As I have said several times in this course already, this course is not about proving that there is a God, but showing that there are good arguments in favour of the existence of there being a God. Ultimately it does come down to faith, as if God proved himself to us beyond doubt we would no longer be able to choose to freely follow him, but would become his prisoners.

For the atheist – no proof has been found as to how the process started in the first place.

Williams writes
“The Journal of Molecular Evolution was established in 1971, and is dedicated to explaining how life came to be at the molecular level. None of the papers published in JME has ever proposed a possible route for a single complex biochemical system to arise in a gradual, step-by-step Darwinian process.”

So it is still an open question . I would argue that the intelligence and complexity present in the world strongly points towards the existence of an intelligent creator – God.

Audio Recording of Cosmological Arguments (approx 15 minutes)

2008-02-09T13:33:00.000Z

Apologies for poor sound quality - it improves towards the end!
Once the sound has started on box.net click your back browser (top left hand corner) and you can get back onto the website and read the notes that come with this talk by finding the right link in the drop down menu

Week 3 - the Cosmological Argument

2008-01-30T16:02:00.000Z

These are notes of the talk which will take place at All Saints Church Hall, Church Street, Whitstable on Monday February 4th 2008 at 7.45pm to which all are welcome.

It is likely that the talk will be shorter this coming week, allowing more time for discussion, and possibly an earlier finish.

The Universe “Big Bang” occurred 10 to 15 Billion years ago, and the universe has been expanding ever since according to this theory.

What was there before the “big bang”?

Williams writes “There obviously can be no “time before time”. Nothing comes from nothing. If once there was nothing, then there would be nothing now, because there would be nothing to cause anything to come to be, and nothing that existed uncaused. Therefore, something has always existed.”

Are there signs that a personal creator could have been at work in creation?

Charles H Pinnock says there are signs:
“ A stream does not rise higher than its source. It is not reasonable to believe that there are effects such as personality, morality, freedom and intelligence in the world which were not present in the cause of it. It simply does not make full sense to suppose that matter, mindless, amoral and impersonal, is the sole originating cause of things.”

If the Universe itself was eternal, and it provided the cause that led to the Big Bang, what created the ingredients that led to the Big Bang happening? All matter is dependent on something else for its existence. There cannot be an infinite number of dependent things stretching back into an eternal and infinite past.

The Big Bang theory, even if it is true, does not therefore disprove that there is a God. Neither does it prove there is a God!

ARGUMENTS TO DO WITH DEPENDENCY AND INDEPENDENCY

Everything in the world is dependent on something else for its existence.
What in the world is truly independent? Everything relies on something else – a tree relies on the seed from which it grew, which relies on the water and the soil supplying it with nutrients, which relies on the rain, etc. How far back can you go with that chain?Can you get to a truly independent thing that does not rely on anything else for its existence?

If everything is dependent on something else, what was the first thing that came into being dependent on? Or did matter always exist? In which case, how was it created?

God by definition is not dependent on something else for his existence as he is greater than all other things. If God were dependent on something else for his existence he would cease to be God.

ARGUMENTS TO DO WITH INFINITY IN TERMS OF THE PHYSICAL UNIVERSE ie ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF THE IDEA THAT THE UNIVERSE HAS ALWAYS EXISTED

Infinity as a concept when applied to the practical real world and universe produces real problems.

Williams writes

“Imagine that your local library has an infinite number of books. Suppose that there is an infinite number of red books and also an infinite number of black books. Does it really make sense to say that if all the red books were out on loan, the total number of books in the library would be the same as if none of the books were out on loan?
Furthermore, if we had an infinite number of books, this would include all the books beginning with the letter “A”. Suppose that we also have an infinite number of books that begin with “A”. Then, though the first set contains the second set and more, both sets have the same number of books. But one would expect that if one set is the subset of the other, the subset would less than the set.
Then again, suppose that each book in the library has an infinite number of pages. The first book in the library would contain as many pages as the entire collection, and someone would read only one book from that collection would have read as many pages as someone who read each and every book!”

So going back in time, dependent things evolve from dependent things, but where does the chain begin? What is the first cause in the chain dependent on? Does it just go back into infinity, which as we have seen is a pretty complicated concept in terms of understanding the real universe, or is there an independent first cause at work here?

This stuff gets very complicated but try this for starters!
Williams writes
“Whether finite or infinite in number, dependent things require the existence of an independent thing upon which to depend. This independent thing must be separate from that which depends upon it. Independence cannot be the “emergent property” of a set of dependent things, for emergent properties depend upon those things which lead to their emergence, and in the case of dependent things, without a prior independent cause there would be nothing to lead to the emergence of any property.”

SO THERE EXISTS AN INDEPENDENT ENTITY?

Is this independent entity eternal?

Williams writes
“If this independent entity cannot come into existence (as this would make it dependent), it would seem difficult to conceive of it passing out of existence. We therefore may say that it is eternal.”

Is this independent entity rational and moral?
Williams says it is: “Since we are intelligent, rational and personal beings, it would seem reasonable to suppose that it is also rational and personal. To do otherwise would be to believe that the greater came from the lesser. If this entity ”X” is rational, it must also be personal, because non-personal things cannot reason. If X is rational, and personal it must know things. Being externally unlimited, X must know things without external limitation. This is not to say that X must be all-knowing, but it is to say that X might be all-knowing.”

HOWEVER, AN ATHEIST MIGHT ALSO ARGUE THAT THERE EXISTS AN INDEPENDENT ETERNAL ENTITY AND THAT THIS IS THE UNIVERSE ITSELF IN ALL ITS FORMS. BUT YOU STILL HAVE THE PROBLEM OR HOW MATTER CAME INTO BEING IN THE FIRST PLACE.

TO CONCLUDE
“If something exists, it must be either a dependent thing or an independent thing. If a dependent thing exists, then there must also exist an independent thing. Something undeniably exists, and so there must exist at least one independent thing. This independent thing must be all-powerful and eternal. Furthermore, as the foundation of our moral sense, we cannot morally condemn it in anything but a subjective way.”

Click HERE for Audio Recording of Recent Talk "The Case for God - looking at the question of morality" (approx 45 minutes in length)

2008-01-29T21:01:00.000Z

Case for God Week 2 - The Case for God arguing for the need for Objective Morality

2008-01-22T11:56:00.001Z

Welcome to the second talk in "The Case for God"
This will be delivered in person on 28th January but is put on the blog in advance so participants have time to think about it in advance and so are better able to ask questions following my talk.

It is fine for newcomers to come along to any week they are interested in. No need to let me know in advance.

The live talk is on Monday 28th January at 7.45pm at All Saints Church Hall, Church Street, Whitstable. All going well, I should be able to put a recording of the live talk on the web shortly after the evening.

A live audio recording of the first night's talk on "God and suffering" is available on this website. Scroll down past this talk to find it.

WEEK 2 THE MORAL ARGUMENT

Before I begin I want to make the following absolutely clear.
This talk is not saying that Christians are better people than those of other faiths. This is clearly not the case - I have met countless inspiring people of other faiths and of none.
This talk is not saying that Atheists or Agnostics cannot be good people! Far from it! They are often wonderful people and can often put Christians to shame.
This talk is not about people, it is about the concept of morality. What this talk is saying is that morality or "Good and Evil" are concepts that are either a purely human construction, or exist independently of human understanding and definition. I shall explain this further in due course.
I believe that morality exists "out there" - that it is an eternal reality, and that it therefore comes from God. Let me begin:

Swinburne said the following

From "Responsibility and Atonement" by Richard Swinburne 1989

“Our moral beliefs are beliefs that objectively certain things matter, whether or not we admit it… We who believe it wrong to torture children, believe it would still be wrong if we had been brought up to think otherwise. We who believe it is our duty to help the starving, feel the force of a moral obligation from without.”

Williams writes:“I believe that Swinburne’s analysis of objective moral values as facts “which nag at us” and are felt as a “force from without” captures something irreducibly true about goodness. Moral goodness matters. There is an emotional content to our understanding of moral values, both good and bad, but these values cannot be reduced to, or explained away as “nothing but” subjective facts about ourselves or our communities.”

IN OTHER WORDS MORALITY IS “OBJECTIVE” AS OPPOSED TO “SUBJECTIVE”

Objective in this talk means "out there", "existing beyond humanity"

Subjective means "invented or constructed by human beings" "personally defined"

A lot of atheistic philosophers don't like "Objective Morality" because it seems to suggest there might be an "Objective Moral Being or thing" beyond humanity. They like to argue that morality is a human contruction. Here are some examples.

AYER’S EMOTIVISM
A J Ayer says moral utterances merely express the attitude of the speaker and have no objective truth. In other words, morality is just a question of personal opinion according to Ayer.
Williams writes in commenting on Ayer
“Moral utterances have no propositional content, and no truth conditions. On this theory, the utterance “Murder is evil” means something like, “Murder? Yuck!”

STEVENSON’S EMOTIVISM
Charles L Stevenson says there are no external moral values but rather how “facts on the ground” are interpreted. So in a dispute between an employer and employees the issue of objective moral fairness is not an argument you can use as there is nothing called “objective fairness”. Instead….
“Perhaps the parties disagree over how much the cost of living has risen and how much the workers are suffering under the present wage scale. Or perhaps they disagree about the company’s earnings and the extent to which the company could raise wages and still operate at a profit.”
There is no moral standards "above the fray of the argument" on which to base the various truth claims.

Williams writes, in commenting on this, that “Moral judgements are seen, as best, as being the same as our subjective judgements of taste. “Apples are nice” and “Apples are horrible” appear to be contradictory statements. Not so. They are shorthand for, “I like apples” and “I don’t like apples”. They are reports of subjective facts. Similarly, so it is argued “Murder is wrong” and “Murder is right”, appears to be contradictory statements, but this is merely because we misinterpret them as assertions of objective facts when they are reports of subjective facts.”

In other words, if human beings "control" what is moral or not, it all comes down to a matter of opinion. Two different people can have different beliefs about what is right or wrong, and both people are right, or wrong, depending on the third person's point of view.

By the way, if you are thinking "hang on, what about morality set by the largest common denominator, by society"...wait a little please as I will come to that!

TO CONCLUDE OUR LOOK AT "EMOTIVISM"

EMOTIVISM GROUNDS ETHICS IN FEELINGS “Ethical judgements are mere expressions of feelings and there is no way of determining the validity of any ethical system and no sense in asking whether any such system is true.”

The Philosopher R M HARE says people can choose their moral values

BUT WHERE DO THEY GET THE BASIS OF THEIR CHOICE FROM?

A UTILARIAN MIGHT ARGUE HE OR SHE CHOOSES HIS OR HER VALUES ON THE BASIS OF UTILITARIAN VALUES - "the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people"

The problem with this is - how does the Utilitarian arrive at the decision that it is good to help people? By appealling to the OBJECTIVE moral value that it is good for all people to be helped, something that clearly was not in operation for example in Nazi Germany!

Williams writes “They cannot choose to become a utilitarian on the basis of utilitarian principles, because they have not yet adopted utilitarianism! To use utilitarian principles in making a rational choice to adopt utilitarian principles amounts to begging-the-question.”

AND IN REPLY TO R M HARE....

Williams continues: “Hare assumes that people can stand in a sort of moral vacuum while choosing their moral feelings; but if they did this, why would they bother about morality at all? There could be no moral reason for the adoption of any morality if morality must be chosen from within a “morality-free zone.””

Williams in making a valid point - maybe this is why morality in general is less "prevelant" in our society. If people can pick and choose their own morality, having a system of morality loses its potency, as who is really watching and who really cares in such a complex moral web?

ST PAUL SAYS “God’s law is not something alien, imposed on us from without, but is woven into the very fabric of our creation. There is something deep within humans that echoes God’s yes and no, right and wrong” (Romans 2, The Message)

ARGUMENTS USED AGAINST MORAL OBJECTIVISM
In other words, arguments used against the idea that Morality comes from God....

ARGUMENT 1 - ALL CULTURES ARE DIFFERENT AND SO SET DIFFERENT MORAL VALUES. THEREFORE MORALITY MUST BE RELATIVE, AND SET BY EACH CULTURE.

The argument firstly says that different cultures have different moral values so it is impossible to have objective morality.

However – lots of cultures have similar moral values

CS Lewis wrote “If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike them will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.”

Some practices differ, but there is often a morality underlying it. Even when cultures differ, we nearly always find a "good" moral argument beneath what appears to be a wildly difficult practise for us to cope with. For example, the practise of killing the elderly in one culture was because they did not want them to be in that condition in eternity. It may seem abhorrent, but there was an underlying "morality" to it that we can understand, even if we totally disagree with it.

When we study cultures we discover deep down that all cultures believe in “right” and “wrong” and have a system of morality built into them. This points to the “moral conscience” that is in humanity and that points towards the existence of God.

Of course, there are plenty of examples where cultures differ in their understanding of morality. This first point is only a starting point.....

ARGUMENT 2 - TOLERANCE AND "SUBJECTIVE MORALITY"
This argument says the world would becomes a much more tolerant place if each culture has its own system of morality and we approved of each system equally.
It states that tolerance is more likely when there is a subjective, cultural system of morality rather than a universal objective morality.

However, if tolerance is just a “subjective” ideal then it is not strong, whereas if tolerance is an "objective" (or true for all) moral ideal then it has more power.

MOST PEOPLE THINK "TOLERANCE" IS AN OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUE - but how can it be if there is no God? How can objective moral values exist independently of human opinion? If human opinion changes, then people no longer believe in "tolerance" and so tolerance disappears from the radar screen. We see this in some cultures today with the growth of the the far right, especially in Eastern Europe, where tolerance for people of different racial backgrounds is not as common as it is in Western Europe (at least from my limited understanding).

Tolerance is a God given value that exists independently of human contruct, in my view. So is love, compassion, sympathy, respect, forgiveness. These are not just Christian concepts, they are universal concepts which are divine in nature.

Williams writes: “In condemning intolerance, the relativist appeals to an objective, universal moral law by saying that we ought to be tolerant

He continues
“Those who advocate ethical relativism often do so on the grounds that moral relativism promotes tolerance….But this only reintroduces objective moral values, for unless some values are better than others – tolerance better than intolerance…there is no ground for praising these virtues, other than that we approve them.”

MORAL RELATIVISTS CAN BE VERY INTOLERANT
“Moral relativists are very keen to impose their view that no one should be “intolerant” by presuming to question the rights and wrongs of any value of
opinions that differ from their own.”

I studied this at University. Basically the jist is that Moral relativists pretend to be very tolerant, untill they come up against Fundamentalism, when they actually become very critical. Because there is a lot of Fundamentalism around, Moral relativists end up not being very tolerant at all.

Having said that, I totally agree that Christians can be equally intolerant and hold my head in shame when this has been the case!

ARGUMENT 3: EVOLUTION
This argument says that subjective, cultural centred morality has come through evolution, as a natural instinct that we have developed as we have evolved. It is a common belief that morality is necessary for the survival of the species.

Williams disagrees with this: “We don’t experience morality as an instinct, but as an “inner voice” telling us which instinct to follow in which situations. No instinct is always morally right, but the moral law is always right. Therefore morality is not an instinct”.

Also – can we say our society is evolving in a morally positive way? Isn't there a lot of evidence that our society is now going backwards rather than forwards in terms of moral values? I certainly believe so. Also, look how societies change so suddenly from "progressive" societies to "regressive" societies. The Germany of the twenties, contrasted to the Germany of the thirties for example.

Such a view on Evolution is now widely discounted in our Post-Modern society.

AS AN EXTENSION OF THIS
ARGUMENT 4
It fourthly argues that morality has developed in society for the self-interest of society. If morality did not exist, then society would be chaotic, so morality has evolved in the best interests of society.

Williams again disagrees with this
“That self-interest should be the foundation of morality is a contradiction in itself. It reduces and relativises right and wrong to the individual’s pragmatic “useful” or “un-useful”. It bases morality on self-interest, and therefore amounts of saying that “I will adopt the moral point of view except in those cases where it is not in my self-interest so to do.””

If we really believe in Argument 4, which is very common in today's society, then we can believe in morality for as long as it suits us. As such morality again does not exist "independently" or "out there" but is instead "temporary", and a "human made contruct".

Maybe you believe in this - I believe morality has a divine, objective origin.

WE MUST CONCLUDE THAT MORAL RELATIVISM IS NOT THE RIGHT WAY

Moral Relativism is Unliveable

Williams writes: “We cannot believe that Belsen was merely unpleasant to our sensibilities. We surely want to say that such indiscriminate slaughter is wrong in a sense that goes beyond our feelings or the feelings of our culture. As Richard Swinburne says, “One is inclined to say that the man who says there is nothing wrong in Hilter’s exterminating the Jews is saying something false.””

Moral Relativism makes the advocacy of progress in morality impossible
Williams writes: “If there is no such thing as an objectively better society, then any social alteration is mere change and never progress. If you think that a society which outlaws slavery is really and truly better than a society built upon slave labour, then you think that moral values are objective.”

ARGUMENTS FOR MORAL OBJECTIVISM

This is the belieft that moral utterances look like straightforward propositional expressions, and so probably have a truth-value.

1. Moral objectivism explains the sense of duty we associate with morality.
2. Belief that moral values are objective is common to almost all people of every era
3. Moral objectivism makes better sense of our common-sense use of language

I AM ABOUT TO ARGUE THEN THAT THERE ARE SUCH THINGS AS OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES

In other words morality must come from a source outside ourselves, which is God.

BUT WHY BRING GOD INTO IT? Cannot morality just exist objectively without a God?

Williams writes “If there is an objective moral law, telling and obliging us to do good and avoid evil, then there must be a divine “law-giver””

MORALITY ENTAILS PERSONAL OBLIGATION BY ITS VERY NATURE
MORALITY THEREFORE MUST BE TO A PERSON RATHER THAN TO AN IMPERSONAL THING

Williams uses this example
“Since I cannot be morally obligated to something non-personal, I must be obligated to something personal. After all, I cannot break a promise made to a fish-bowl, because one cannot make promises to fish-bowls, only to other personal beings. “Responsibility is personal if there is a person to be responsible to. We are all bound by the “law of gravity” but we are not responsible to it. However, although I can be obligated to other people, an objective moral obligation cannot be grounded in either other people or myself. As Richard Taylor put it, the idea of a moral obligation more important and binding than those imposed upon us by other individual or by the state is only intelligible if we make reference to “some lawmaker higher …than those of the state”. Such obligations “can be understood as those that are imposed by God…But what if this higher-than human lawgiver is no longer taken into account?...the concept of moral obligation is unintelligible apart from the idea of God.”

Therefore objective moral obligation must be grounded in a transcendent personal reality to whom we are objectively obligated. Our obligations to other people must be derivative of our obligation to a transcendent personal reality to whom our primary obligation is owed.

PUT IT ANOTHER WAY - If there are moral values that exist objectively, that we have an obligation to live up to, then if it is just OURSELVES to who set these values, they will change all the time. They no longer are objective moral values.

There is a great deal more in the chapter by Williams but this is at least a help in our thinking!!!

Click HERE for a broadband audio recording of first evening's Talk "Evil and pain - why could a good God allow suffering" (approx 50 minutes)

2008-01-21T23:33:00.000Z

2007-12-06T06:36:00.000Z

The below is a course being run at All Saints church, on Church Street, that you may find interesting? It is a response to the Richard Dawkins book "The God Delusion". You do not have to attend in person - you can follow it online.

THE CASE FOR GOD

A course based on the book “The Case for God” by Peter S Williams, but with further amplification and critique by Simon Tillotson.

My name is Simon Tillotson, and I am Team Vicar of All Saints and St Peter's churches in Whitstable, which are part of the Whitstable Team ministry comprising of six Church of England churches in the town.

This website you are looking at is all about a course I will be running online through the early months of 2008 and also in person at All Saints Church, Whitstable, on Monday evenings from 21st January 2008.

All Saints Church is situated on Church Street, just opposite the junction with Juniper Close. It's other main landmark is that it is opposite the Monument Public House.

People are welcome to come to this course, which is free of charge. Please note, on the leaflet that went round the homes it said the 14th January, which is now incorrect. Please email me at tillotsons@googlemail.com if you are planning to attend.

Alternatively, if you cannot attend the course but still want to be involved from the comfort of your home, you can read the blog as it is updated each week from the middle of January onwards and then email me directly with your thoughts or post your thoughts on this blog. I welcome debate!

If you like, you can put a comment on this website at the very bottom of the text. Scroll right down to the bottom and you will find something saying "Posted by Simon Tillotson at" ...and then you will find a time. Just to the right of that, you will find "x" number of "comments". Click on that and it will take you to a page where you can make a comment. It will be sent to me for authorisation before it is put on the webpage, but I do allow comments that disagree with what I am saying providing it is said in a respectful spirit! It would be good to see how you have reacted to this "blog" and could start quite an interesting debate.

The course will take place on these dates and I will try and update the blog in time for each session. It may be that due to work pressures I will not be able to update the blog till just a day or two before the session. The dates are as follows:

21st January The Problem of Evil
28th January The Moral Argument
4th February The Cosmological Argument

11th February Week's break (I am away at a conference - apologies)

18th February The Design Argument

25th February Week’s Break (Parochial Church Council meeting which I must attend)

3rd March Arguments from Common Consent, Authority and Religious Experience Argument
10th March Needing God - Arguments from Desire and Absurdity
17th March Non-Evidential Arguments - Pascal's Wager and the Right to Believe

24th March Easter Break

31st March Conclusion - the Meaning of it all

The Blog should be updated in time for each week's session.

If you cannot attend in person, why not be involved online? You are most welcome to dip into this website and see what sort of subject matters are being explored and to respond online.

WHAT IS THE COURSE ALL ABOUT?

Philosophers and writers like Richard Dawkins have done a great deal in recent years to undermine the public's residual faith in God. By "residual" I mean that the Christian faith was fairly weak in society anyway. Of course, there are still a good number of Christians who attend church each week, but as a minority we are a small section of the community in reality.

This course, based on Peter S Williams book (no longer in print I am afraid), is my attempt to try and regain lost ground. It is an at times quite academically challenging attempt to ask difficult questions and explore difficult ideas, in order to recover a clear sense that the church can respond to the likes of Richard Dawkins. It is also my hope that people will be brought to a stronger faith in God and in Jesus Christ through attendance at this course, either by online attendance or through coming along in person.

Don't worry that the book is out of print although I notice a few copies are available online - reading the book is not absolutely essential because you will be able to follow the arguments by reading the various "posts" on this website. Having said that, Peter has a number of other books out which I would encourage you to buy. If you are familiar with Amazon.co.uk then put his name Peter S Williams into the web search engine on Amazon. Alternatively this link may possibly work.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url?%5Fencoding=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books-uk&field-author=Peter%20S.%20Williams

I do hope you find it helpful.
So let's start....

..................................................................
WEEK 1 THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

This week’s subject matter is a huge one and I cannot possibly promise to answer all the questions surrounding this most difficult of issues. Suffice it to say, it is the most common objection to the Christian faith. Many times have people said to me "I would like to believe in God but I cannot because of all the suffering in the world."

Philosophers like Richard Dawkins and Bertrand Russell, to name just two, have often argued as follows. "If God is all-powerful, and all-knowing, and totally good in nature, how is it that he allows suffering? Surely, he should step in and stop it immediately?"

In order to defend Christianity, what I propose to do is to put forward some arguments, none of which answer this question in its entirety, but all of which at least help us understand why a Christian has confidence to believe in God even though there is such obvious suffering and evil in the world.

I, for one, would be suspicious of any Christian who thought he had all the answers on this most testing subject. As the book of Job clearly states, none of us who believe in God can fully understand his ways. At the same time, I do believe we can confidently believe in God, despite the suffering we see in our world.

I have to say that these notes are very long but they do not even begin to touch on some of the subject matters in any depth. Whole volumes could be written about single paragraphs. I cannot attempt to do justice to the subject matter – I can just begin to scratch the surface.

SO WHERE DO WE BEGIN?

In order to do this we need to discover a “theodicy” – which in the poet John Milton’s words were “an attempt to justify the ways of God to man”.

Let us start with the concept of "Freedom", or in other words, the boundaries of choice that God has given to his creation.

HUMAN FREEDOM

Alvin Platinga, writing in The Philosophy of Religion, published by Oxford in 1971, writes this “A world containing creatures who are significantly free….is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all…To create creatures capable of moral good…God must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so.”

What Platinga is saying here is that evil has to be allowed as an option, for good to be also an option. In other words, if we were all programmed only to do good, and there was no option to rebel, or sin, we would be like robots, and life would lose all meaning.

But hang on, you may say. Why could God not have allowed us freewill, with lots of choices, but made it so that rebellion and inflicting suffering on others was not one of those choices?

And what about the victims of this so-called freewill, you might also argue?

Such an emphasis on freewill, so the argument goes, takes no account of the victims of that freewill. John Humphrys, the Radio 4 journalist, rightly pointed out that those who are subjected to suffering and even murder, like the children of Beslan, had their freedom taken away from them when they were the recipients of the "freedom" exhibited by their murderers. What freewill did the victims of Auschwitz have when they were marched into the gas chambers?

A good point, Mr Humphrys! In Platinga’s favour is the point that if we believe in God as creator, who are we to question the boundaries and limits to which he chooses to ascribe human freedom? Certainly, we might never be able to recognise true goodness if we had nothing to compare it with.

To conclude, Platinga's argument is that good and evil are inevitable choices. However, as we have seen, this raises difficult questions. We need to go further....

FREEWILL AND THE NEED FOR CHOICE.

We may often ask ourselves the question, "Why does God not intervene when he sees something bad about to happen?"

This question was in Thomas Aquinas’ thinking when he wrote:

“All confess that God is omnipotent; but it is difficult to explain in what His omnipotence precisely consists. For there may be a doubt as to the precise meaning of “All” when we say God can do all things” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica)

What Aquinas is saying is this. When we look at the concept “All-Powerful” or “Omnipotent” we have to realise that God cannot be “All Things”. In other words, God has to keep faithful to the sort of God he is.

Christianity clearly believes that there is a “narrative” or story running through History involving “the Fall”. This leads to the state where humanity has been given boundaries to choose between good and evil. It is consistent with God’s character in allowing human free will that he does not intervene.

Therefore, although we would like God to intervene more often, his holiness and commitment to his creation to be non-interventionist means he cannot go against his character. He would quickly turn into a tyrant, ruling creation rather than giving humanity freedom to rule over it.

CS Lewis writes this: “Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless. He cannot ravish. He can only woo.” “Screwtape Letters”

A weakness with this argument is that God does clearly intervene in Biblical history on numerous occasions – the Exodus, the taking of the Promised land and the Return from Exile being just three examples. Nonetheless, the attraction of this argument is, for me, that it is plainly true that were God to be much more involved in intervention, the whole fabric and balance of human existence would change markedly. Human beings, conscious of an interventionist God, would be much more fearful of him, and therefore any obedience to his ways would stem from fear of displeasing him, because of a much more marked awareness of his involvement.

Just think what having an interventionist God would be like! Servanthood would quickly turn into slavery, as those who had seen God intervening might not feel they had any other option but to follow. A God who becomes frequently involved in his creation in an interventionist way would change the whole way people who believe in him would relate to him. Instead of adults developing into mature Christians, we would remain in a "baby to parent" relationship all our lives. Those who did not believe in him and chose to be agnostic or atheist would find it pretty hard to maintain their unbelief in the face of frequent "signs and wonders". In effect, the whole of creation would be forced into a position of belief, rather than left with the choice to follow or not.

Isn’t the whole point of the Christian faith one in which we are given enough evidence to choose to follow God, but we are not forced into believing him in a way that would lead to slavery?

THE IMPORTANCE OF FREEDOM AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH MORAL DEVELOPMENT

So we begin to see that an interventionist God may not be the blessing that we may have originally thought it might be.

Williams argues that freewill is a vital element in our understanding of how human beings relate to God. If there is no option to rebel or even hate God, or at the very least disbelieve in him, then there is also no option to truly turn to him out of our own free will, without pressure or fear of being bullied.

OUR HUMAN CONDITION AND THE LIFE OF FAITH

By "human" condition, I am meaning our human weakness and imperfection. Of course, we all wish we were perfect in a way, but what would life really be like if we were? What would human relationships be like if we were totally perfect, not have any needs, never showing any weaknesses? It is difficult to contemplate.

What Williams does at this point in his book is to say that the fact that we start off as "imperfect" is not quite such a bad thing as it may appear.

Williams writes (page 67) “God created us for a perfect and eternal relationship of freely chosen love with Him, with ourselves and with our fellow God-loved God lovers. Freedom to choose to love God (and so to love ourselves and others as God loves us), requires the existence of some moral evil. Unless we are able to reject God we cannot genuinely accept Him; and unless we are initially less than perfect, it would be impossible for us to reject Him. Morally perfect beings cannot do morally imperfect things. Rejecting God, the source and standard of all good, is as morally an imperfect act as can be imagined. Since we can do such a thing, we cannot be morally perfect beings. We must initially be morally imperfect beings.”

In other words, in order to have a relationship with God, we need to start from a position of being out of relationship with God. To make it a personal choice, for it to be real to us, we need to decide to follow God, to embrace his love.

Think about it. If we were already perfect...if we did not have the potential to sin...then we could not voluntarily choose to follow Him as the option to rebel and sin would not be there either. If we cannot choose to rebel, we cannot truly choose to follow. Freewill becomes obsolete if the only choice we have is to follow. We would cease to be independent creatures who willingly choose to follow.

John Hick backs up what Peter Williams is saying:

“If the end state which God is seeking to bring about is one in which finite persons have come in their own freedom to know and love God, this requires creating them initially in a state which is not that of their already knowing and loving God. For it is logically impossible to create beings already in a state of having come into that state by their own free choices.”John Hick, Soul Making Theology in Michael Peterson’s Philosophy of Religion – Selected Readings

In other words, if faith is to be an act of freewill whereby humanity turns and embraces its creator, it must start from a position of alienation in the first place, where sin and rebellion are all possibilities, or even descriptions of the non-believer's status.

Therefore, if we are already fully in relationship with God, before we turn to him, then our need for forgiveness and cleansing becomes meaningless, and our decision to follow him no longer becomes a personal choice but is something inherent in our make-up as people. The whole question of developing a personal relationship with God, central to the Christian faith, goes out of the window.

In case that wasn't clear let me explain again. What Hick is saying is that if God created us without the potential to sin and rebel, without inherent sinfulness, then there could be no personal decision to move towards God in love, repentance, and willingness to serve. The fact that the results of the "Fall" are with us from birth means that we start our journey towards God from our own volition, rather than having "arrived" already in a state where our freedom to follow was never a possibility.

I must add at this point that I believe God's love for all creation is perfect and powerful, eternal and consistent. It's not that we awaken God's love by choosing to move towards him in love and repentance. It's that our decision to believe and turn to him makes us aware of the love that had always been shining on us from the very first moment we were conceived. That love was always there, but we need to make the decision to move towards it in order to discover it. As many great Christians have written down the centuries, God wants a relationship with us most of all - one that is entered into voluntarily and which continues also in a voluntary way.

FREEWILL AND THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD

Now we go one stage further.

Freewill is a very important concept. However, we may now ask whether the "Fall" was ever the intention of God in the first place?

Before I start talking about "Satan", "Adam and Eve" and "the apple", can I just say this. If you find such language problematic, don't worry. Hold with me and I will try and come to terms with your questions in time. The importance thing to hold on to when we look at the first chapters of Genesis are the underlying concepts that it communicates to us.

So let me ask this question. Did God allow Satan, (historically or metaphorically it does not matter) to tempt Adam so that this dynamic of "choosing to follow or rebel" could be set up? Did God know all along that Adam and Eve would rebel? Was it part of his original intention? Was the Fall all part of God's plan?

The writer of Paradise Lost, John Milton, certainly thought so.

Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree,
whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of EDEN, till one greater Man Restore us,
and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav'nly Muse
.............
That to the heighth of this great Argument I may assert
th' Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.

Some reading this may agree with Milton that "the Fall" as always part of God's intention. I, for one, believe that God never wanted Adam and Eve to rebel. Instead, I take the traditional line that even in the Garden of Eden, the place of moral perfection, the ability to rebel and turn away from that love had to exist. If there had been no "tree of the knowledge of good and evil", no potential to rebel, then Adam and Eve's would have had no opportunity to rebel and therefore no opportunity to show fidelity and love.

Therefore....even in the pre-Fall world, the choice between good and evil existed. Even in the pre-Fall world, God was a risk taker, taking risks with the humanity he so deeply loves. Even in the pre-Fall world, the basis for his relationship with Adam and Eve was one in which the freedom to rebel "perfected" that love dynamic. Even in the pre-Fall world there was no "robotic" love, but a love based on the freedom to be faithful or not to be faithful.

The same is true on the even deeper question of the provenance of evil in the first place. If you believe that Satan is a fallen angel of God - something I strongly believe myself - the question as to why God allows Satan's freedom is an important one, and must be bound up with the same argument that we have explored. Love, to be perfect, must also entail moral choices, must also allow the freedom to reject that love. Satan clearly chose to reject that love, and still does to this day, according to traditional Christian doctrine, and according to my own spiritual experience of good and evil too. According to this view of freedom, the ability to follow or rebel were present at the beginning of the angelic order, as well as the human order.

So let us go back to the question we were contemplating earlier on.....

WHY ARE THE PARAMETERS OF CHOICE SET IN SUCH A WAY TO ALLOW THE CHOICE TO DO EVIL AND REBEL?

Let us remind ourselves of the question
"Could not God have given us a choice between following him and remaining neutral, or better still, following him in two equally good but equally diverse ways, rather than allowing the existence of evil as a choice and actually contrary to the will of God (things like murder, rape, greed and so on)? "

Put bluntly "Why has evil been allowed in by God as a possible choice?"

These are difficult waters. I would like to come up with a more sophisticated argument, but I fear that the one I have given - about choice and the Fall - is the best one. This is, namely, that something has happened in the beginning of humanity which has allowed in evil and even satanic forces. These forces are now in the universe, and are contrary to God's will, and do, to a certain extent, have some power in this world even today.

It seems that even with his angels, a realm I do believe in, God had to allow the freedom to rebel. It was a risk that God took with his subjects which, in effect, went disastrously wrong but I am not criticising God here! Far from it! What I am saying is that even at the beginning of time God allowed freewill to his angelic order.

This is typical of a God of love who rules not as a tyrant or despot, but as a God who wants communion and relationship with all his created order, human and angelic. It is typical of a God whose aim is relationship and friendship, expressed most forcefully in the intimate bonding of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is typical of a humility that is expressed in God the Son, who through his ministry, death and resurrection, revealed the true nature of God - humble, gentle of heart, patient, yearning for all to come into relationship with his heavenly Father, but never forcing it. It is typical of a God who in the person of Christ allows the rich young man to walk away, or who allows Judas to betray him, or Simon Peter to deny him.

Much that many supposed intellectuals would baulk at this conclusion, I believe that the "Fall" therefore is a vital element in our thinking on this subject matter. Without such a concept, which traditionally explains that the world is "out of synch" with how it was originally created it is hard to even begin to come to terms with events such as tsunamis, famines, and earthquakes. Only when we see the world as running awry, contrary to its original intention, can we begin to place suffering in its proper context.

Having explored some of the basis behind traditional Christian understanding of suffering, let us see what else we can discover as we think about this important matter.

THE SUBJECT OF "PAIN AS GOD’S MEGAPHONE"

C S Lewis wrote “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C S Lewis The Problem of Pain

Alister McGrath has written on this topic in a similar vein.“Suffering, though tragic, is not pointless. It is the pin which bursts the balloon of our delusions, and opens the way to an urgent wrestling with the reality of death and the question of what lies beyond.” Alister McGrath Suffering 1992

Pain and suffering, therefore, can bring us to faith, or if we have faith already, can make our faith that much stronger. As a Christian writer, David Watson, wrote shortly before his death from cancer, it is often those who experience most of God’s love who have also endured most suffering:

“An agnostic Professor of Philosophy at Princetown University became a Christian when he studied carefully the lives of some of the great saints of God throughout the history of the Church…Often they suffered intensely, far more than most other people, yet through all their agony their spirits shone forth a glorious lustre that defied extinction. This philosopher became convinced that some power was at work within them, and this discovery eventually brought him to Christ.” David Watson, Fear no Evil, Hodder and Stoughton

Of course, critics will say – could God not have invented another way of bringing his created beings into relationship with him in a less painful manner?

My argument would be that God has allowed us to be born as reasonably headstrong, proud and autonomous individuals and that our desire, naturally, to become followers or believers in God, is often quite limited, if present at all. It therefore often takes some sort of illness or calamity to bring people to faith.

This does not mean that God causes that calamity or illness, but that these calamities and illnesses can bring blessings in disguise. I think of all those people I have met in my ministry whose spiritualities have been immeasurably enriched by walking down the road of suffering.

Contrary to this is the “spirit of Augustus Gloop” (a term I have invented) which to a certain extent is present in our society (from Charlie in the Chocolate Factory). Augustus Gloop wanted his own desires satiated, and from what I gather fell into a chocolate river. I am not sure if he disappeared for ever – I wouldn’t have minded it for a few minutes! The point I am making is that suffering can enrich and ennoble and bring us closer to God, whereas if we have all our own desires satiated it can turn us into very self-centred individuals who can even create a hell of our own making.

The idea that suffering and pain brings us closer to God may not fully answer all our questions. However, the fact that we see it happening quite often certainly gives us great peace in middle of the turmoil that often rages around us when we discuss this topic "Why should a good God allow suffering?"

EVIL AND THE CROSS

Now we come to the classic territory that can help us even further with this subject matter.

God shows us therefore that life is worthwhile despite the pain of suffering, but he goes a step further. He enters into the world of suffering through the second person of the Trinity, Jesus.

I agree with those who say our whole understanding of God must be seen from the vantage point of the cross, where God carries our sins into himself to free us from their weight and to let us go free of guilt or condemnation.

Dorothy L Sayers writes “For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subjected to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation He has kept his own rules and played fair…He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and felt it worthwhile.”Dorothy L Sayers “The Man born to be King”

The point here is the famous argument that many Christians use, namely that God has become involved in our suffering by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ. Therefore, when we see theology through the eyes of the cross we no longer see God as a distant and immovable God of classical Greek or Roman theology, but a God who has fully immersed himself in the world of suffering in order to redeem it.

I certainly believe this to be most important. To see Jesus Christ merely as a prophet or great teacher misses the point. Central to orthodox Christian doctrine is the belief that Jesus was and is God, the second person of the Trinity, and that on the cross, God himself is crucified. On the cross, therefore, God becomes fully acquainted with the suffering of creation.

Again, though not fully answering all our questions, I find this very helpful. I believe in a God who understands what it is like when I lie in bed with a fever, cut myself by mistake with a breadknife, fall off my bicycle, experience hostility without any apparent reason, and so on. My suffering is miniscule compared to the suffering of Christ. I know that God is with me when I suffer because he has been down the road of suffering himself, and still suffers with me by the power of his Holy Spirit when I suffer. I also know that the suffering will not be forever....

THE GLORY THAT WILL BE REVEALED

Right at the heart of Christian faith is the belief that suffering is temporary and that there awaits us an eternity of joy and peace and love.

This is not meant to be a “psychological sop”. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, I would argue, Christians going through immense suffering have had that suffering transformed by the belief that they have an eternity to look forward to where there will no more suffering or pain.

In order to dismiss the Christian theodicy of pain, we also have to dismiss this foundational aspect too. An atheist can easily say, “Ah, but you cannot prove this at all”. Quite right. We walk by faith not by sight – we are not forced into belief – we make the free choice.

Indeed, foundational to this course is the argument that I cannot prove God's existence in the mathematical way that I can prove that 2 plus 2 = 4. Were I to do so, none of us could be free or willing servants or friends of God. We would instead be forced to believe and follow God, which is never God's intention. God, in my view, deliberately gives us enough of himself to allow us to choose, but not so much that we are forced along his way. Those who have called out to him have discovered that he does exist, but this came a response to their seeking.

Hence, the atheist argument "you cannot prove God" loses some of its force as Christian faith is not about that sort of proof. If it were mathematical proof, we would no longer be people who choose to believe, who are free subjects - we would be forced to follow, which as we have seen introduces an entirely different dynamic.

The Christian focus is on the kingdom that is to come - a focus based not on mathematical proof but on a relationship held aloft by faith, entered into freely with no compulsion. Williams writes (page 76) “Out of the present world, God will make a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21.1).

In that new creation, God’s higher logic will enter a new phase. St Paul ( a man not unaccustomed with hardship) wrote “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed” (Romans 8.18). And Jesus, using an analogy that could be applied to God’s suffering as much as to our own said“A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no-one will take away your joy” (John 16.21-22) "

My prayer is that you will know that joy that comes from knowing you have an eternity of peace and joy and love with God and the saints.

FINAL QUESTIONS – EARTHQUAKES AND ALL THAT

Disputes about earthquakes, diseases, Tsunamis and so on are difficult ones to debate as the whole area of human responsibility is less of an issue.

We know that St Paul clearly felt that the world had been subjected to a massive disturbance which had unbalanced it. As I have mentioned several times before, this is traditionally understood in terms of "the Fall" and the power of "the devil" in the world:

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it (ie God) in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves…groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption…the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (Romans 8.19-24)

There are huge variety of opinions on the concept of the Fall and of the power of the devil in this world. I do believe in the devil, and have had dramatic experiences of the demonic on one or two occasions, and so I believe there is no doubt that a lot of the suffering in the world is due to the existence of demonic power. However, I cannot truly understand how the devil’s apparent power in this world relates to God’s authority, although I have argued why the ability to rebel was given to Satan. I know that God has authority over the devil, but why the devil is given so much power is a mystery. It seems to be tied up with the whole concept of the Fall – that there was a moment which allowed evil and suffering into the world to cause such havoc.

Ultimately, we do not know the answers this side of heaven, but we shall know at some point in the future, when we are with Christ. This is a difficult subject matter which you may like to respond by email at tillotsons@googlemail.com or by posting on the blog, or at the evening itself.

To conclude, we also do not contain all the knowledge of good and evil. We would like to grab the apple from the tree and discover all of the universe's secrets, but I believe we can never do this till we meet with God in eternity. We are, after all, speaking of God, and most people would agree that any concept of relating to God has to allow for the fact that he knows a lot more than we do, should they believe he exists!

Thank you for reading this week's blog posting. Please read the next one which should appear in time for week 2 of the course on 28th January 2008.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Can we talk about good and evil as objective moral standards without believing in God?

2. Could God have created a world where human beings had freedom and choice and yet evil and suffering did not exist?

3. How persuaded are you of the positive “benefits” of suffering and evil?

4. Why does God, if you believe He exists, not intervene more in suffering in the world?What does the “Megaphone” analogy mean to you? (C S Lewis wrote “God whispers in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” C S Lewis The Problem of Pain)

5. Have you had any fresh insights into the meaning of the Cross?

6. Do you believe in the Devil’s existence or the concept of the Fall? How would that impact on a “theodicy of suffering”?

IF YOU WANT TO COMMENT CLICK ON THE UNDERLINED TEXT WHERE IT SAYS "X" COMMENTS, JUST TO THE RIGHT OF WHERE IT SAYS MY NAME. ALTERNATIVELY, EMAIL ME AT tillotsons@googlemail.com