I’m sorry to have to address this again but we need to get out of the way is the idea that the existence of evil or injustice is an indication that God is either weak and powerless to prevent evil, malevolent and uncaring about evil, or that injustice shows he doesn't exist at all. The following was part of my message in this week’s sermon but it’s not original to me. Far more clever and eloquent people than I have made this point previously.
The basis for this argument against God is represented in a statement by a Greek philosopher named Epicurus, who wrote the following about three centuries before Jesus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing, then where does evil come from? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
It seems like a pretty solid argument, and I will conceded that those who wish to logically disprove God's existence, power, and goodness, are often able to make what seem on the surface powerful arguments. But my experience has been that these superficial arguments can always be countered by a deeper consideration. For example, in the case of this argument, the main proposition is that the existence of injustice proves there is no God. But let's look a little deeper. How do we know what injustice is?
Consider the skeptic’s proposition. Their argument seems to be that the world and everything in it was not created but just happened. At some point there was a causeless "big bang" and everything that came into existence just did so by a huge cosmic accident. There is no creator, it's all just natural.
If this was true, then we would have to assume that humans were just another species in the natural order of things; that humans evolved essentially accidentally to be what we are today, but that aside from certain unique biological characteristics humans are essentially no different than any other phenomenon of nature. Humans are not existentially unique. Humans are just animals, like any other animals.
If that were true, you would expect that humans would exist as other creatures exist. I'm not saying that humans might not use their unique characteristics to their advantage in the fight for survival that nature seems always to be engaged in. Of course all organisms are endowed with characteristics that tend to aid in the continued survival of the species. But we would not expect that humans would experience life in a fundamentally different way than other creatures.
But that is not what we see when we look at humans and nature. When we look at nature, when we look at the natural order of things, we see that might makes right, that the organism that is more clever, more powerful, or faster than the others has a definite advantage, that the weaker and slower become naturally the victims of the more powerful. And we see that nature has to work this way. Otherwise, species could not survive. The natural order of things, as pointed out by the Social Darwinists and later adopted by Darwin himself, is "survival of the fittest."
You would think that if humans were a part of this natural order and not unique, that humans would define justice as exactly what we see in nature. Again: the strong exploiting the weak for their own gain and everyone out for themselves. But that is not what humans do.
Every group of humans, at whatever time in history, from wherever on the planet, has demonstrated a sense of justice that runs counter to what we see in nature. And, interestingly, people define justice across time and culture in a remarkably similar fashion. C.S. Lewis writes in his classic Mere Christianity:
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 him will be how very like they are to each other and their own.
Where does this sense of justice come from? It cannot be natural, because it runs counter to what we see in nature. And so we must conclude that it is "super" natural. It must come from something that is beyond nature. Now if you’re not a Christian I don’t know how you can explain this, but if you are a Christian it's not like you have to strain to figure out what it is that makes humans unique because the Bible tells us in the very first pages that humans are created in the image of God.
Unsurprisingly, our sense of justice reflects God's sense of justice. So, far from proving the non-existence or powerlessness or malevolence of God, the existence of injustice in fact tends to indicate the opposite. Without God's image imprinted on human nature, we would not be able to recognize justice from injustice. Whatever happened would be in keeping with the natural order of things, and humans would have neither cause nor inclination to complain about it.
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