[Vision2020] God's problem

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Greetings:

I fully agree that Donovan has not been intellectually honest in this debate about God and evil. He is also stubborn and arrogant. He claims to take his authority from the Bible, and yet time and time again we find God directly responsible for evil in the world.  

First, there is a very clear passage that indicates, as Luther reminded all Christians, that God creates both evil and good (Is. 45:7).  

Second, at the end of the book of Job, God confesses that he is the one, by empowering Satan, who caused Job to suffer, not because of his sin but, I guess, because of his pride.  He was the most righteous man in the land, but Satan made a wager with God (a good God would have turned him down flatly) and God said "You're On!" and empowered Satan to kill all of Job's children and reduce him to utter misery.  Oh, the joys of gambling and winning in the end!  And are we to think that allowing Job's wife to birth a new family was really any consolation to her?

If Donovan's view was orthodox Christianity, we would never have had the phrase "Acts of God," to describe all the evil that is not caused by human will.  But then the free-will defense also crumbles.

I like to use St. Augustine as proof of the failure of the free-will defense for the evil that human do.  In the City of God Augustine states that humans sin because they have deficient wills, and then he essentially admits that those wills are deficient because God made them so.  

As Luther reminds us time and time again, if we believe that God is omnipotent, then all things flow directly from his will not any other will.  Although most Lutherans cringe when they read this, here is Luther's unassailable logic: “Since God moves and does all, we must take it that he moves and acts even in Satan and the godless; . . . evil things are done with God himself setting them in motion.”

I am a theist only because I converted to process theology when I enrolled for graduate school in Claremont in 1967. (I was just in Claremont to celebrate the birthday of the world's greatest process theologian, John B. Cobb, Jr.)  Process theology solves, to my satisfaction, both the problems of free-will and evil.  See my essay at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/process.htm.

Those wishing for a lighter read might enjoy a column I did on Katrina and the Wrath of God.  You can find it at my government sponsored vanity website: www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/katrina.htm.

By the way, Donovan makes a claim that most of the world religions believe in Original Sin, which of course is false.  Not even the Jews, the "owners" of the story of Adam and Eve, believe it, neither do Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, Shintoists, or Buddhists.  It is significant that the "Fall" of Adam and Eve is never mentioned again in the Hebrew Bible.  The Doctrine of Original Sin was the invention of New Testament writers and made into a dogma by the Church.

Nick Gier