Well this post is probably a little late but it's intended to be for the problem of evil week. Oh well. Vacation's as good a time as any to get it done.
So I was really stimulated by Friday's discussion with the guest speaker. Even when responding to student questions he responded promptly and coherently. Seeing as how student comments are unpredictable and so can't be prepared for beforehand, his quick responses show just how well he knows his stuff. If I didn't miss anything, a summary of the discussion is this: his professor's theory to answer the problem of evil proposes that given God is all-powerful AND all good, evil exists for some good reason He knows and He will reveal to us at some point in the future. But toward the end of the class period, the speaker suggested his opinion that God's "power" (given that He is all-powerful) is love-- a self-sacrificing love that entails the ability to negate evil. Hence God sent His son Jesus (who is a part of Himself) as a sacrifice to eradicate the evil that resulted from human free will.
Now here's the kicker... it seems fate decided to toy with me yet again. My previous two blog posts were entitled "Faith" and "Hope". With my Adventist background, I noticed I unwittingly fell into a trend. Check out this Bible verse:
"But now abideth FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (ASV)
So even before that discussion, and even before the week started, I had decided to follow the pattern and entitle this next post "Love" regardless of what I would blog about. Little did I know that love would actually be the topic of this blog. Coincidence? I think not.
So what's the moral here then? I dunno. But I think there's some truth in both our guest speaker's and his professor's ideas. It seems to me that whether or not love, that is, a self-sacrificing love, will be enough to eliminate evil is something that only time will tell. As I was reading in some commentary on this verse, there is a good reason love is the greatest of these three values. Faith is only good in the absence of sight or experience, and hope is only good until that hope comes to fruition. Once Jesus returns to redeem the saints (assuming He does), faith and hope will become antiquated. But love is the virtue that will characterize the world thereafter, and so it is the true and eternal ideal virtue. Of course, the present world needs both faith and hope that God is who we believe Him to be in order for human society to even place enough value on self-sacrifice to make it a functional virtue. Though that's what makes love an ideal... striving for it is a continual process.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Hope
"They say there's no such place as Paradise. Even if you search to the ends of the earth, there's nothing there. No matter how far you walk it's always the same road-- it just goes on and on. But in spite of that, why am I so driven to find it? I hear someone's voice, calling to me..."
--Wolf's Rain (anime series)
This week I was somewhat inspired by one of the assigned online readings. It was coming from an atheist perspective and it argued that belief in God is simply a childhood naivete that lasts until a person grows up and learns of science and the laws of nature that mechanically dictate the workings of the world. The paper argued that as children, some adult figure (usually parents) provides for the child's needs, and this leads the child into a constant cycle of believing there is something greater than itself. The child also looks at the world of evil and hopes for something better. The child then imagines for itself an entity called God who is constantly greater to compensate for the evil it sees in the world. But in the author's eyes, creating God in such a manner is merely a form of escapism much like the way Dorothy ran away from her life to the land of Oz.
I posted a quote from an anime series called Wolf's Rain because I think it's relevant to the topic at hand. The quote both starts and ends the show: the main character begins wandering the earth is search of a fabled place called Paradise, but despite his rationality telling him no such place exists, he wonders "why am I so driven to find it?" He spends the entire series searching a degenerating world in search of Paradise. He knows there are legends claiming its existence, but that's not why he searches. "I hear someone's voice... calling to me." He searches even until the literal end of the world. As the earth slowly freezes over, he finds himself the last living being on the planet. Even so, as he lies collapsed and alone he comes back to his original dilemma. "Even if you search to the ends of the earth, there's nothing there. But in spite of that, why am I so driven to find it? I hear someone's voice... calling to me."
I think that indeed, people see desolation in the world, and without a good answer for its existence or a solution to the problems, people have a need to believe in something that will validate such an existence. In other words, people need to hope for a future in which the problems of the present will be resolved in order to justify an existence of suffering in an interim present. If one were to point to God as the source of this hope, the view would be "The world is full of suffering, but one day God is going to put an end to the suffering. So suffering right now is ok because eventually He will eliminate all suffering." (for more of my commentary on the existence of evil see one of my previous blogs)
There was something else I was contemplating about the argument between atheists and theists (or at least Judao-Christians beliefs). It seems to me like a "what came first: the chicken or the egg?" argument. From the Judao-Christian viewpoint, God created humans who in turn hope for a God despite having evidence but no proof (remember that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evience of things not seen-- see my last blog entry). But in the atheist viewpoint, humanity exists and hopes for something better than its current reality and so creates God to embody and sustain that hope. But much like the chicken and the egg dilemma, it's impossible to say "ok, let's go check to see which one of us is right."
"I hear someone's voice... calling to me." It seems like some people hear the call, some people don't. Some people call it God, others call it a higher reality, others say it simply does not exist. Whatever the case may be, people need an answer for the confusion they experience in the world. People need to hope for something better in order to live.
--Wolf's Rain (anime series)
This week I was somewhat inspired by one of the assigned online readings. It was coming from an atheist perspective and it argued that belief in God is simply a childhood naivete that lasts until a person grows up and learns of science and the laws of nature that mechanically dictate the workings of the world. The paper argued that as children, some adult figure (usually parents) provides for the child's needs, and this leads the child into a constant cycle of believing there is something greater than itself. The child also looks at the world of evil and hopes for something better. The child then imagines for itself an entity called God who is constantly greater to compensate for the evil it sees in the world. But in the author's eyes, creating God in such a manner is merely a form of escapism much like the way Dorothy ran away from her life to the land of Oz.
I posted a quote from an anime series called Wolf's Rain because I think it's relevant to the topic at hand. The quote both starts and ends the show: the main character begins wandering the earth is search of a fabled place called Paradise, but despite his rationality telling him no such place exists, he wonders "why am I so driven to find it?" He spends the entire series searching a degenerating world in search of Paradise. He knows there are legends claiming its existence, but that's not why he searches. "I hear someone's voice... calling to me." He searches even until the literal end of the world. As the earth slowly freezes over, he finds himself the last living being on the planet. Even so, as he lies collapsed and alone he comes back to his original dilemma. "Even if you search to the ends of the earth, there's nothing there. But in spite of that, why am I so driven to find it? I hear someone's voice... calling to me."
I think that indeed, people see desolation in the world, and without a good answer for its existence or a solution to the problems, people have a need to believe in something that will validate such an existence. In other words, people need to hope for a future in which the problems of the present will be resolved in order to justify an existence of suffering in an interim present. If one were to point to God as the source of this hope, the view would be "The world is full of suffering, but one day God is going to put an end to the suffering. So suffering right now is ok because eventually He will eliminate all suffering." (for more of my commentary on the existence of evil see one of my previous blogs)
There was something else I was contemplating about the argument between atheists and theists (or at least Judao-Christians beliefs). It seems to me like a "what came first: the chicken or the egg?" argument. From the Judao-Christian viewpoint, God created humans who in turn hope for a God despite having evidence but no proof (remember that faith is "the substance of things hoped for, the evience of things not seen-- see my last blog entry). But in the atheist viewpoint, humanity exists and hopes for something better than its current reality and so creates God to embody and sustain that hope. But much like the chicken and the egg dilemma, it's impossible to say "ok, let's go check to see which one of us is right."
"I hear someone's voice... calling to me." It seems like some people hear the call, some people don't. Some people call it God, others call it a higher reality, others say it simply does not exist. Whatever the case may be, people need an answer for the confusion they experience in the world. People need to hope for something better in order to live.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Faith
Now one of the issues that has been bugging me in this class for a while is the existence of God. The attitude I've taken thus far is that I'd like to see just how much about this world can be understood without relying on the concept of God. The moment God is brought into an argument, there can be no more room for rationality.
To put it another way, we have been discussing various topics in the philosophical community. And it's interesting that we have not been able to discuss one topic without coming across the notion of God. Also interesting to note is that God comes into the picture whenever we seemingly have no rational answer. And this has happened every step of the way: "How do we know there's a reality? God." "How do we know there's a self? God." "How do we have free will? God.", etc. Whenever we come to a conflicting rational arguments, God can be used to resolve the conflict.
Now I'm not saying God doesn't necessarily exist. Rather, I am advocating that even those who do believe in God try to understand as much about life as they can through philosophical inquiry (which may have to suspend belief in God). Of course, spirituality has its place, too. I think only once one is unable to come to a rational understanding of the world should a person turn to religion for answers. According to Hebrews 11:1 (KJV) "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In those terms, we should try to explain what can be "seen"/observed, and what cannot be explained may be accepted by merits of faith.
To put it another way, we have been discussing various topics in the philosophical community. And it's interesting that we have not been able to discuss one topic without coming across the notion of God. Also interesting to note is that God comes into the picture whenever we seemingly have no rational answer. And this has happened every step of the way: "How do we know there's a reality? God." "How do we know there's a self? God." "How do we have free will? God.", etc. Whenever we come to a conflicting rational arguments, God can be used to resolve the conflict.
Now I'm not saying God doesn't necessarily exist. Rather, I am advocating that even those who do believe in God try to understand as much about life as they can through philosophical inquiry (which may have to suspend belief in God). Of course, spirituality has its place, too. I think only once one is unable to come to a rational understanding of the world should a person turn to religion for answers. According to Hebrews 11:1 (KJV) "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In those terms, we should try to explain what can be "seen"/observed, and what cannot be explained may be accepted by merits of faith.
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