Much has been made about the problem of Evil for theists. How can a good God allow evil? This is a problem, one that can be looked at in a variety of ways (see here and here). The problem of Evil is usually then seen as a proof for the non-existence of a good God. However, it is not just a problem for theists. Alan Rhoda, at Alanyzer, takes a brief look at the problem of Evil for atheists.

Alanyzer :: The problem of Evil is for everyone

1. Either (a) the atheist affirms that there is objective evil or (b) he affirms that there is none or (3) he remains agnostic on the matter.

2. If (a) then the atheist is committed to an objective standard of goodness, but whence does this standard of goodness come from?

3. If (b), then the atheist flies in the face of moral commonsense and gives up any objective basis for moral complaint.

4. If (c), then the atheist has the burden of explaining how it is possible that there be objective evil and also flies in the face of moral commonsense, which takes it as obvious that some things (e.g., torturing a baby for fun) are wrong.

Links:

• Theodicy at a glance : Religious Tolerance dot org :: Why do terrible things happen in the presence of God?
• The Problem of Evil for Atheists : Alanyzer :: The problem of Evil is for everyone
• The Problem of Evil for God : The Unsound Argument :: A Logical Impossibility
• The Problem of Evil for People : The Unsound Argument :: Rebellion

This short paper will seek to examine and refute Augustine’s view of Original Sin and the ability of the will to choose to turn towards God. It was Augustine view, and the view of the reformers after him, that if one denies these tenants, then one is forced to adopt the views of Pelagius, namely that Jesus was just an enlightened man. I will employ three arguments to discount Augustine’s above claims. The first one involves a logical extension of the personhood of Jesus. The second argument demonstrates the need for a total free will as a prerequisite for sin. The third argument gives an alternate understanding of how God can cause faith and at the same time, faith can be freely chosen. Finally, an alternate view of soteriology will be given. |inline

Why did Luther find the bondage of the will to be a comfort? The short answer is that it allowed him to be incredibly abrasive to his opponents and get away with it. The long answer is that it, along with the rest of his metaphysics, allowed him to be sure in his salvation. Luther seems to hold that we, as humans are completely enslaved to sin. He writes that “free-will without grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good .” Therefore, for Luther, in order for a will to be truly free, it must be able to always choose the good. Thus the “ineffective power” of the will to choose good renders it as “no power ”. The only way for the will to choose God is by the grace of God enabling. It is evident that only some men choose to seek God, therefore God predestines some to receive this enabling grace and must therefore also choose to not give it to the others. These special individuals that receive grace are called the elect. Luther places an extremely high value on the will of God. For Luther whatever God wills comes to pass. God does not suspend his will for the sake of others like Denck suggested. When God wills that the elect receive grace and are saved, this willing cannot be altered or changed by anyone, even God, because it would be outside of His nature. So, in the realization of the bondage of the will to sin and to God, Luther can be comforted that his salvation is not in jeopardy by any sins he might commit, such as the sins of the false dichotomy and of the straw man.

In the latest issue of Discover they did a little proof that 0.99999… does equal 1. This is how they did it.

1. Take .999999 (repeating) to equal x.
2. Take x times 10 equals 10x
3. So 10x = 9.9999999
4. 10x - x = 9x
5. 9x = 9 (9.999999…. - 0.99999…. = 9)
6. Therefore, x = 1 and .99999….

Crazy, no?

In my last post, I referenced an argument put forth that aimed to show not only that God was mutable, but also that He must exist inside the temporal realm. I do not hold to that conclusion. While I think that God does change, much like a man changes his position while walking, God does lie outside of time.

This does not seem possible at first glance. If something changes, then those changes must be in sequence. If they are in sequence, then they are done in time. If the sequences are done in time, that which undergoes the sequences must also be in time.

I would say that while from the perception of an individual inside of time, God does seem to change within the temporal sequence. However, God only invades time as to interact with that which is in it, yet is still separate from the creation and as a result, is separate from time.

As part of my class on Augustine, I have to do a one-page relfection on the reading for that week. This week’s reading is books 1-5 of the Confessions. This was my reflection for this week.

An interesting topic that I would like to know more about Augustine’s worldview is his view of God. I do not want to inquire about the religious aspects of God. Augustine makes very clear in passages such as 1:11 that describe God’s holiness, goodness, mercy, and wisdom. Instead what I would pick Augustine’s brain about is the metaphysical aspects of God, such as his views on the problems of omnipresence, pantheism, free will, necessary simplicity and God’s relation to time.

Augustine at once maintains that God is separate from His creation and is present everywhere in it. Being everywhere would seem to imply that God pervades through everything. This idea of God pervading through everything sounds a lot like pantheism, which is impossible since Augustine says that God is separate from His creation. I am not sure how he would reconcile those two ideas.

From what I can tell, Augustine seems to have God being completely outside time, holding to “B Time”. This is into contrast to “A Time” where God is contained within the same time that His creation is in. One first encounters God relationship to time in 1:9, “You are before the beginning of the ages, and prior to everything that can be said to be `before’.” The phrase, “before the beginning of the ages”, puts God at least in sequential order to creation, but still allows for God to be within the realm of time. The last part of the sentence implies that God has existed before there was a time to speak of. If this is so, how is it possible for God to intervene within the realm of time?

Furthermore, Augustine seems to be very concerned with freewill as a necessary component of salvation and in the human condition. At the same time, God is very active within history and within each individual’s life. This is evidenced by the constant God’s prodding and positioning of things in his life that ultimately lead to Augustine’s conversion at Milan. If God is actively manipulating events, how can one say that they have chosen something of their own metaphysical free will?

Lastly, I wonder how Augustine would reply to the idea that in order to be perfect, God must be simple. In order to be simple He must be unchangeable. But if God does hear prayers and decides to act on them, then He must have changed His mind and as such is not simple and therefore not perfect.

Cross posted at the Theology for the Masses and Hundiejo.com

I am getting ready to start my first year of grad school at MU. In light of this, I wanted to give a sketch of my worldview, if not for the sole purpose of looking back and seeing how my ideas have changed over the years.

I believe in a dualism, with a basic structure materialism infused with something like Schopenhauer’s idea of will. Most of the universe is deterministic, but there are pockets of free will, i.e. the wills, the souls, the minds that are to a degree separate from the materialism and the determinism that follows. I am a Christian, so I think that there is a supreme will that is God.

I believe almost whole-heartedly the consensus of science. I try not to, but often sketch in a god-of-the-gaps into my religious/scientific worldview. For instance, I think that while there was a big bang, that God set the spark, or that while evolution has and is occurring, it is directed by God. While I think that there is a God and as the creator He has a connection to science, I am hesitant to say that he often divinely saves science from our lack of understanding. After all, we as a race are constantly improving our scientific worldview.

In the realm of metaphysics and religion, I am a Kantian(ish). I think that the world/universe/everything is divided into the noumenal and phenomenal. Because we are bound to our senses, we cannot enter into the noumenal realm to see what it is like. Only that which is already in the noumenal can venture into our phenomenal world and let us know what is going on behind the scenes. I think that part of us lies within the noumenal world, but that we cannot accurately sense that part of us. We can see the effects of the noumenal in the phenomenal world after the fact. I do have a sneaking suspicion that maybe some of the mystics are not crazy, but have had touches with that that is behind the curtain of our senses. However, I do recognize that unless there are supernatural occurances outside the visions or perhaps prophetic statements that come true, there is no way to verify those experiences.

I think the best way to describe reality is the Aviditie analogy. To put it shortly, God is a master computer programmer and the world is a gigantic software simulation.

Back to what I said above, I am whole-heartedly and unabashedly Christian, so I buy into that worldview, for the most part. With that said, I think that Christians could do well to look and listen to what the other religions have to say about things and incorporate that which makes sense into their own worldview. Examples of this is the Eastern (Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist) view of interconnectedness, or Pratitya-samutpada (that is hard word to say, but I think I got it), and the idea of non-attachment. Now, this does not mean that one need to buy into the rest of the other religions, but just to not consider the source when evaluating ideas. We would not want to be guilty of the genetic fallacy would we? Of course not.

Ethically, I favor a literal ethical relativity where deontology determines what is right and wrong and consequentalism determines what is the most right behavior. It recognizes that there are sometimes no clean choices and that we have to decide between the choices in front of us.

The above is a sketch of the way I view the world. I don’t have a good, well explained and reasoned systematic approach to this, just a jumble of ideas that seem to work well in describing certain areas. We shall see how my ideas and views develop in the coming years.

The Scottish philosopher Hume had presented philosophy with a grand problem. Hume had tilled the grounding of the current metaphysics of the day. He had taken the postulates of Descartes and questioned them. He found the evidence for causality in the specific lacking, rendering one unable to point to the exact cause behind any certain event. Like all Empiricists, Hume wanted all philosophical systems to be grounded in immediate experience. He defined the two types of mental concepts, impressions and thoughts and ideas. Thoughts and Ideas are the recalling the memory of situations, and the anticipating future ones. An example of this is thinking about being angry. Impressions on the other hand, are perceptions of the mind that are the most clear. They include our more lively perceptions: when we hear, feel, love, hate, desire and will. An example of this is being angry. The difference is that “impressions are distinguished from ideas when we reflect on any of our sensations or movement. ”

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As a skeptic, Hume did not like the idea of an I that produres. Why is this? Well, first lets get a concept of what Hume meant when he talked about I, or personal identity:

- The concept that I am, I exist as a mind of a certain structure that produres through time and changes

1. Memories, hopes, beliefs, a storage bin of impressions
2. Choice in what I think and that I have a sense of continuity, a sense of flow.

- I have a mind that has concepts in it.

Hume says that we should strip away from this concept thoughts, ideas, impressions - everything that the mind holds. Now, Where is the mind? Hume asks to show me where this thing that you call mind exists. Hume says that you can’t show Mind, Personality. It is meaninginless to try and .: it is of no use in philosophy. For Hume, the purpose of philosophy is to build knowledge. To Hume All that there is the changing elements. This can also be known as the bundle theory¹.

All one can percieve is the thinking; what is not percieved is the “I” behind the thinking. This is all done within a Cartesian framework. Since we cannot percieve the I behind the thinking we can’t know anything about the I. Remember, where Hume thought all ideas came from ² .

Q - Why do we think that there is an I behind the thinking?

A - It is convient. In the process of organizing the collection of memories we assume that there is a mind behind everything. But philosophically we cannot say anything about the mind, or that it even exists.

�When I speak of objects in time and in space, it is not of things in themselves, of which I know nothing, but of things in appearance.�
ďż˝ Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Part Three, The Cosmological Ideas.

With all that the human race has learned since Kant’s day, some of his maxims still ring true. There have been many realizations that have shaped humanities understanding of how the universe operates. Throughout it all, the majority of man’s believes about what is beyond their world has not matched pace. In the years following Kant, the West thought that it was about to reach an endgame in regards to science. All that was left were a few clouds on the horizon. Those clouds quickly grew to become massive hailstorms that completely altered the way one views nature and even the very nature of reality.

The majority of these storms one can trace their origin to the late, great Albert Einstein. The ideas that he cultivated helped to lead to one of the great revolutions in science. It even lead to the birth of cosmology as a science. His paper on the photoelectric effect lead to Quantum Mechanics, the most successful theory on describing the behavior of matter and energy on the subatomic level. His papers on relativity vastly changed the way one views space and time. His ideas showed that there was no actual distinction between time and space, they are both merely different dimensions of the fabric of reality, called space-time. The fourth paper published in 1905 entitled Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? gave rise to the famous equation E=mc2. This equation meant that energy and matter are equivalent; they are merely different forms of the same thing. (more…)