Early Christian History

Extras / The Unexpected Nature of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God

Tradition makes many claims about God, such as that he’s omnipotent (capable of doing anything), omnisicent (knows all there is to know), omnipresence (can be found in all places), eternal (unchanging, or existing beyond time), and benevolent (wishing the best for all). There are some problems, though, with putting all of these into one neat package, which I’ll discuss in greater detail.

Theodicy and “the Problem of Evil”

One of the most important and best-known paradoxes imposed by western beliefs about God is known as the “problem of evil.” Simply put, if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and benevolent, why is there evil in the world? Isn’t God capable of eliminating evil (since he’s omnipotent), and wouldn’t he want to (since he’s benevolent)?

Most religious people don’t consider this to be a serious problem. They simply accept, axiomatically, that evil exists in spite of God. Even so, there have been many attempts over the last couple millennia to explain why evil exists in spite of an all-powerful, benevolent God. These are known as theodicies. While I cannot address all of the theodicies which have ever been proposed, I would like to discuss a few of the most common ones.

  1. Comprehension theodicy: This theodicy proposes that evil exists, so that we can understand God’s goodness. Without the existence of evil, we’d never comprehend God’s love and benevolence.
  2. Free Will theodicy: This is the assertion that evil exists, so that we can choose between good and evil.
  3. Learning theodicy: This is the assertion that we learn from evil and suffering, things we could never discover any other way.
  4. Illusory theodicy: What we consider to be “evil,” is actually not; it’s all part of God’s greater, overall plan, which benefits us in a way that only He comprehends.
  5. Pragmatic theodicy: Evil exists. Live with it.
  6. Divine Limitation theodicy: This is the assertion that, while God is capable of eliminating evil, and He may even want to, He is under some constraint that prevents Him from doing so.
  7. Irrelevancy theodicy: God has allowed evil to exist, for reasons only He knows. As our Creator, this is His right, and we have no right to question His nature; therefore, justifying the existence of evil is irrelevant.
  8. Heavenly-Reward theodicy: This is the assertion that suffering in our physical lives is of no account; all or part of humanity will be rewarded with everlasting bliss, after death, which will more than make up for any suffering incurred during our physical lives.
  9. Deceptive theodicy: This is the notion that evil and suffering are not “real,” they are, rather, a misperception which results from our own imperfection. Only goodness is “real,” all else is deception.

Of course, one could, alternatively, conclude that God is either not benevolent or not omnipotent. This is not a theodicy, however, since the point of a theodicy is to explain why God can be both of these things, yet evil exists.

There are problems with all of these theodicies. The pragmatic theodicy and the irrelevancy theodicy are related to one another, and in either case, all discussion ends, at that point — neither theodicy gets us anywhere, both leave one still trying to understand how evil can exist in a universe created by an all-powerful, benevolent God. So these don’t satisfy.

The divine-limitation theodicy is flawed, because ultimately, it isn’t a theodicy; it states that God has limitations, which is impossible, if one also asserts that God is omnipotent. Even most theologians do not accept this theodicy, although it does still crop up from time to time.

The illusory and deceptive theodicies fall apart due to the fact that suffering and evil are inherently subjective in nature. That is, only someone who is suffering can say if they’re actually suffering. If you broke your leg, for example, I cannot stand by and insist that you are’nt experiencing any pain. Of course you are, you know it — in spite of the fact that no one else can sense your pain — and it would be laughable for me to do so. By the same token, God (or his apologists) cannot stand off, aloof, and simply define the suffering or evil that goes on in the world, as not being “true” evil, or as not actually existing. This distinction is ours to make, not His. Since suffering occurs, and evil exists, and we all know it since we’ve all experienced them, these theodicies also fail.

The learning and comprehension theodicies are related to one another; they fail due to God’s omnipotence. That is, he is infinite in potential; there must, therefore, be ways for him to teach us things, or to express his goodness, which “don’t” require us to suffer. So these theodicies also fail.

The heavenly-reward theodicy has the flaw of assuming our physical lives to be — ultimately — meaningless. This makes no sense, however, for obviously God has given us physical lives, for a reason. Our physical lives cannot be “inconsequential,” they must by definition have some meaning. Furthermore, once one has suffered, the experience of having suffered, remains. The only way to eliminate that, would be to wipe our memories upon our entry into heaven — which, again, relegates our physical lives to irrelevancy, and we’ve already established that our physical lives can’t be irrelevant. So this theodicy, too, fails the test of logic.

The Free Will Theodicy

This leaves us with the free will theodicy, which is perhaps the strongest of all, and the one that most theologians and theists lean on. Evil exists so that we can choose to do good or ill, or ultimately, so that we can choose for or against God. There are a number of problems with this theodicy, however:
  1. Christian thought (and Judaic thought, as well, though I’m not sure!) states that all men and women are inherently “wicked” sinners from birth, and we cannot actually do good, without God’s intervention. This flies in the face of the notion of free will. If we actually have free will, the law of averages says that at least some of us would choose to do good without God’s intervention.
  2. The need for free will does not explain “natural evil,” or suffering caused by non-human forces (such as, hurricanes, disease, earthquakes, drought, etc.). Judeo-Christian teaching claims that the world is imperfect, and therefore subjects us to “natural evil,” due to our own wickedness. Even so, natural evil isn’t needed in order for us to express our free will.
  3. Our “will,” or decision-making capability, can be influenced by physical (especially physiological) factors. For example, someone could fly into a panic and hurt someone; the panic is part of our biological “fight-or-flight” mechanism, however, and precludes rational consideration, or the exercise of “will.” Never mind that things like mental illness can rob people of their “will” and drive people to do awful things. Clearly such people do not really have “free will,” since their actions are dictated at least as much by their pathology, as by their choice.
As you can see, all theodicies are flawed. From the empirical evidence before us, we know that we live in a world full of evil and suffering; and moreover, we know that it’s inconsistent to posit a God who is both all-powerful and benevolent. What remains is to determine which of these two qualities God actually has.

Benevolent God?

I will address this issue with a thought experiment. Imagine that you are at the beginning of Time. God is — well, somewhere! — all alone. He decides to make a Creation.

Let’s assume that God is all-powerful. At the moment of Creation, therefore, He has an infinite number of possibilities before Him. He can create any kind of universe He wants — including one so alien to us that we couldn’t even conceive of it! He has some goal in mind — a cosmic purpose, if you will — and wants to achieve it, whatever it might be.

Now, at the moment of Creation, God made a decision. He chose to make the universe we are in, right now, a universe with evil in it.

What does this tell us about God? you may be wondering. Well, it says everything!

Whether God is or isn’t all-powerful, obviously it was His choice to create the universe we now live in, and populate it with people who would be subjected to suffering and evil.

Ambivalent Or Malevolent God?

All of this leads us to the conclusion that, if He exists, the Judeo-Christian God is not actually benevolent, at least not by our definition of that word, since He has placed His interests ahead of ours, to our detriment. (He may still call Himself “benevolent,” however, this has no meaning to us since He cannot be benevolent in any way that we can recognize.)

So if God is not benevolent, it stands to reason that He must be either ambivalent (neutral toward humanity’s welfare) or malevolent (desiring our suffering). Deists of the 17th and 18th centuries took the former view; they believed that God created the laws of interaction (what we’d call the laws of physics), got the ball rolling, then stood back and watched. But another underlying assumption that the Abrahamic faiths make about their God, is that he is interested in the world we live in and has interacted with it periodically through history ... and he continues to do so even today, in the lives of his believers. Logically, then, this eliminates the possibility that the JCI God can be ambivalent or uninvolved in his own Creation.

Questioning Benevolence

There is, of course, one final way to view God’s moral and ethical nature. That would be to assert that, while God cannot be “benevolent” in any way meaningful to us, it is just as invalid to call Him ambivalent or malevolent. In short, since He is infinite in power and scope, it’s impossible to qualify His morality by any human term. His nature doesn’t lend itself to description by humans using human language.

Empirically speaking, this is a valid viewpoint, if one is speaking of God only in a generic sense (as, say, Deists do). But we are speaking here specifically of the JCI God, and the idea that he is beyond comprehension is one which most JCI theists do not agree with; in Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, God has most certainly revealed himself to humanity, whether through prophets (as Judaism and Islam claim), or in person (as Christians do). The JCI God cannot be anything like the aloof, esoteric, remote being posited by Deism (for example), since he has been involved in his creation since the beginning. The idea that God cannot be known, forces us even to dispense with the idea of “God” altogether, since by virtue of this decision, we have decided that God cannot be described in words and therefore cannot even be labeled by humans, let alone understood.

The only rational conclusion one can come to, then, about the JCI God, is that it is not possible for Him to be benevolent or even ambivalent. Logically, the JCI God can only be malevolent.

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