Like any believer not in the Westboro Baptist Church, I believe God is good, his steadfast love endures forever (Psalm 136:1). But I don’t think the presence of evil necessarily challenges this, or even could do such. I believe Anything God wills is good, and that ‘good’ is anything ordered by God. This means that we should not be challenged by God’s existence when we see things which ‘appear’ evil. God does not have to appeal to our sensibilities, rather the opposite. And that is my problem with the philosophical problem of evil. What do you think?
What is your definition of evil? It seems to me that we either evolved with or were given an adaptive feeling of repugnance. Injustice seems evil. Numbers 31 seems evil to me. Thanks for the good question as there are indeed horrid natural realities too. I am not just certain that God on purpose wills each HNR.
At what point does one day that a natural disaster is not God given? Your query is very appropriate in the setting of EC, which takes all nature into account. You have put it better than I have considered it thus far.
Numbers 31 prescribes the murder of all men, women and children with the exception of those girls who are virgins (who are forcibly paired and married/raped to all the Israelite tribesmen), allegedly because some women had tried to seduce Israelite men from God. I do not believe God commanded this. The Bible depicts God commanding moral atrocities. Should we believe it? - Randal Rauser
Such a Deity appears hard to differentiate from a devil. I suspect that the writer interpreted from his context. That is why I believe that His word, such as that reported by Hillel and written on our hearts, takes precedence. Otherwise how do we argue with someone with another Book that says something equally egregious?
@Randy, why do you use the word “allegedly” when the narrative says that is just what happened. See Numbers 23. I do not think that you or anyone else is in the position to say that there was not a conspiracy among the Midianite women to seduce Hebrew men and turn them against God.
Assuming that this is true, that there was a conspiracy against God and God’s People by the Midianites, then it was appropriate to assign divine punishment. You and I might disagree with the form and extent of it, but not that God has to right to impose it.
I think that may have been the wrong word to use. Thanks. However,. I think the train of thought was that God would not actually have approved of such a thing. Therefore, the reasoning was that of Moses or whoever wrote down the account, not God.
However, I apologize. I think I was going in the wrong direction from what the original poster wanted. I misunderstood. I think the original question was how we deal with natural phenomena from God.
I think the issue is that we must deal with things that we do not like. Storms are not evil. They are the results of natural phenomena. We need to learn to deal with them, not to curse them as evil, which is why God gave us a brain.
Sin is evil and humans are responsible for it and we must learn to deal with it also, which Is why God gave us a brain and a heart. Non-believers seem to think that we are just observers and not participants in this world. They want answers that do not provide responsibility.
God is the creator of evil. It says so itself in the book of Isaiah. I deal with this issue all the time.
As the creator of evil it can only be that it is the source of evil and that means god is two-faced.
Isaiah 45:7 King James Version (KJV)
7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.
Yes, God created Lucifer and gave him free will. Lucifer used his free will to become Evil, therefore God created the opportunity for evil. Isaiah witnessed the fall of Lucifer after becoming Evil, thus he became the adversary, Satan. Throughout history we see that Satan supplants images of God on Earth, making these manmade descriptions of God two-faced. This is the subject of discussion at the Symposium where the participants expose the two faces of Eros, the Love of God. The materialists at the table only the supplanted Satan and call it lust, not Love. But for them, this Eros is who they worship, not the Wisdom of God that recognized by the enlightened.
This duplicity is pervasive through religions and history. One of my most favorite symbols occurred yesterday when the moon (Satan) eclipsed the Sun (Jesus) at His death on the cross. The moon has no light of its own, and it is only during an eclipse, that we see its true, dark face. The rest of the time it is reflecting the Light of the World. How many places in the Bible and in Christianity do you see that this happen?
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. Genesis 1:4
God separated the light (Heaven) from from the dark (Hell) after the Fall.
God is good, but does he need to appeal to our moral sensibilities?
Yes and no. It is like the question of logic. We have good reason to suspect that our understanding of logic has some flaws (see quantum logic), but this doesn’t mean that we can abandon what we do understand of logic without descending into meaningless babble. Likewise, we have good reason to suspect that some of our understanding of morality may be flawed, but this doesn’t mean we can abandon everything we do understand and still know whether we are serving God rather than the devil.
Thus what is required is a little discernment and to be wary when we have reason to suspect that our sense of logic or morality may be not be on solid ground. An analogy which may help is to consider what a surgeon does and realize that his responsibilities and expertise sets aside the usual rule that cutting people open is an evil thing to do. Likewise, when we find out from evolution that the development of life requires a considerable amount of death and suffering then this can be likened to the case of the surgeon and realize that causing death and suffering is not a good absolute definition of evil.
But the counterpoint to this is that this doesn’t mean God is off the hook for all moral considerations any more than the surgeon is. There is after all a difference between cutting people open to help them with health issues and cutting people open on the street so you can take their wallet or purse. And so just as we still need a means of seeing the difference between a surgeon and a mugger we also need a means of seeing the difference between God and the devil, for we do not want to find ourselves serving the latter.
But does this mean that anybody can say that God desires you to do something and you will do it? That is what scares atheists about this believing in God stuff. Where do we draw the line between deciding that since God orders something then it is good to do, and deciding that if someone says God orders people to do a horrible thing then that is not from God at all? And I very much doubt that the usual fundie standard of measuring this against the Bible is going to work here since by that rhetoric you will have people committing genocide and human sacrifice because “God commands it,” and I would toss Christianity in the garbage can before buying into that sort of nonsense.
I make it a rule not to base important theological concepts on one isolated text, which the one is. The rest of the Bible does not support your view. To better understand the concept behind this verse, let me share this with you.
Hebrew prophecy is expressed in Hebrew poetry, which uses parallel couplets to express ideas. The parallel couplet is “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil” Light and darkness is parallel to peace and evil, but peace is not the opposite of evil as light is the opposite of darkness. Peace is the opposite of war. War is not necessarily evil, just as darkness is necessarily evil. Therefore evil does not fit well in this passage, which is another reason for it to be taken as authoritative.
God is not two faced. This is the result of Western dualism. God has three faces, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which gives God and us the ability to make the choice between good, better, and best.
One would say that without evil we can’t tell God is good.
The true good doesn’t seek for appreciation, therefore doesn’t create conflagrations so it can show his (rare) mercy by extinguish it.
This is so logic. Having a man behaving like that would never make him good.
EDIT:
The whole evil thing started when he started to create world. World can’t exist without dualism, a mix of evil and good.
Greetings and welcome!
Well, I am not sure of that. Forbidding something does not create it.
God, in forbidding an eating of the fruit, did not cause a sin. He actually gave humans responsibility.
I tend to take Eden figuratively, but that is the example that came to me at the moment.
Thanks.
The world can exist without evil. In fact before humans existed, so for a very long time evil did NOT exist. God allows us to do what is wrong because humans must be free to make decisions for themselves. Without evil there is no freedom of choice.
The true good does seek appreciation, because ingratitude is evil and a lie.
God, if anything; if He is, wills existence. That is good. That’s nice of Him. He’s not selfish. Furthermore the only evidence an accidental, placist minority of humanity knows He is and does is because of incarnation. That is good. The rest is down to us. He lets us love Him and zens right back. That is good.
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