Lessons
I have been leading a series of lessons with Suse at a local school. We were there yesterday and had an interesting lesson. We had in our class 3 philosophy students who were very outspoken against Christianity and all religion. It was a very difficult starting point for discussion as we first had to have a debate about whether we exist, whether we can ever say something is wrong and all number of very complicated ideas. The rest of the group got quite frustrated by these people and much of what they said seemed to be almost to be showing off. There was one of them however that was obviously very agitated, i found myself thinking that he had had a bad experience of Christianity or religion. He was very well read and had an understanding of various points of view. One of his questions was:
'If God is omnipotent and omnipresent he must be an evil tyrant because he must of created evil because he would know all of the decisions that would be made by people. Although we may have free will God knows the choices that we make and that most will choose to reject him, how therefore can God be good with this foreknowledge?'
This pupil was about 17, i struggled through with some kind of answer but it has left me pondering. Has anyone got a good explanation. I would be really interested to have some discussion. Please leave me a comment or suggestion
3 comments:
One answer to this issue has been to develop the "open" view of God- as written about by Clarke Pinnock and others (and taken up by Danny Brierley in his thoughts on "voluntary participation") - basically God doesn't know the future, but responds, anything else would not be a loving voluntary relationship.
Not a view that sits well with me - seems to make God small!
The essence of the debate is how much God determine and how much we have free will. The movie "Groundhog day" is interesting as an example of a pre-determined day yet with free choices within it.
Hope that helps- not sure if it will!
HHhhhmm. Doesn't work perfectly as an answer but I am not sure that God giving us choices makes him bad - even if he knows that we are going to do evil. If God doesn't give us choice, then he is a dictator and we have no freedom. For me , it a mark of his love and character that he lets us choose to know his love, compassion and forgiveness... Or choose not to know him. Alternatively, I could quote Tony Campolo when he suggests God doesn't know everything and isn't omnipotent!!!!!
Tell the students to read Romans and then respond!
On a lighter note, I thought your acting was top notch last night. A very convincing Patrick...
People will often use an intellectual argument out of emotional motives - expect you are correct in identifying this person's bad experiences. If someone is hot under the collar about evil in the world and think that this disproves God's existence, then they must suppose the world is the product of a huge accident, and thus has no ultimate meaning. Evil would thus be no different from "good" and why then are they so uptight?? - Anger at the existence of evil is itself evidence that the world witnesses to genuine moral convictions - where did they come from, if not from God?
Omnipotence and omniscience are philosophical terms that don't easily fit with what the Bible says about God. There are many things that God cannot do - like deny himself, or make a square a circle (i.e. self-consistency is one of God's characteristics). Invoking foreknowledge to blame God for all the evil in the world is a mistake - humans like to think that we can imagine what it must be for God to be transcendent over time - if we foreknew something, then it would have to be pre-programmed - but that doesn't seem to be the case, since the Bible everywhere implies that human beings have a certain amount (though limited) of freedom to respond or reject God.
The best analogy for understanding God is that of a parent having children - a genuine loving parent cannot programme a child to respond in a loving way to them. To pre-programme the creation so that evil could not have happened would have resulted in a robotic universe without genuine relationships. Presumably God thought that creating a world with the possibility of genuine relationships with and between creatures was better than creating a bunch of computers, even if that meant that a lot of evil might come about as the result.
Finally, of course, we have to get beyond philosophy to Christianity - i.e. God did not leave the groaning universe to cope alone with the evil that has come about in the creation, but has entered it in the person of Jesus, and allowed it to do its worst to him, triumphed over that evil and thus demonstrated that evil will not have the last word. If someone is angry about evil in the world, they should get off the fence and join with God's movement against evil.
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