brick-a-brak 17/10/10

• Glen thinks being a Christian might have a positive influence on some people, well duh!
• Andrew Marr says some hurtful things about bloggers, HT
• Vinoth wants to save Adam Smith from the free marketeers
• Steve gets into the proverbial Odyssey
• For those who go to academic conferences this will be depressingly familiar

• My eldest daughter really liked this picture, perhaps you will too?

The problem of evil: the mathematics of humanity

One of the things I didn't think that Rowan Williams did particularly well in his interview with John Humphreys was deal with the 'problem of evil' in a very satisfactory way. The 'problem of evil' (POE) is an old chestnut which goes something like this:

1. God is both all powerful and totally good/loving
2. An all powerful and totally good/loving creator God would not make a world with evil in it
3. Evil exists in the world
4. Therefore there is no God

Now it is no.2 which contains the assumption where the argument falls down on a philisophical level because, of course, we humans have absolutely no way of knowing what an all powerful totally good being might or might not do. However, RW rightly recognised that in Humphreys' case, as with many people, the argument is not really a logical one so much as an emotional one. That is, at some point someone witnesses enough evil, or something so evil, that they find belief in a good God unconvincing. (Of course there are many other reasons for not believing in God but the POE is often reason enough for many people.)

What RW didn't do was to challenge Humphreys' on his acceptance of the emotional argument against God. For Humphreys' the terrible things he witnessed as a journalist led him to conclude that God could not exist, in particular the death of innocent children. The reason this needs challenging is that it betrays a rather wrong headed approach to the value of human life.

The emotional POE argument goes something like this,

1. God is good, and God made the world which is good
2. But something terrible happens
3. If God made the world knowing that something terrible might happen then God cannot be good
4. Therefore God is either evil, incompetent, or non-existant

What this argument basically says is that the genocide and the rape, the exploitation and the poverty, the war and the violence, in the world negate the goodness in the world, and so if God made the world he did it wrong, and so God is probably no god at all and just a figment of our imagination.

But I dont think that is right. Because the world that contain all that evil also contains much that is good. What we cannot do is try to calculate whether or not the evil outweighs the good. We cannot do this because it is absurd to say that because a child's life ends in violence that they should never have been born at all. That their short life, however full of tradgedy and pain it was, was somehow not worth it. But this is what the POE argument (in both its forms) says. It says that on balance there is so much evil as to render the world, if it has been created, a big mistake. That the world is not worth it.

It would be just as foolish to suggest the equation could be better done the other way, i.e. that there is enough good in the world to negate the evil. What we can say is that this world with all it evil is the only world in which you, me, the murdered child, and the rape victim could have existed in. In any other world, but especially one devoid of evil, we could never have existed. This is the world we live in, and if there is a God, God has decided it was worth it. For the love of you, me, the murdered child and every victim of every crime, God decided it was worth all the evil to bring us into existence.

To say that there is too much evil in the world for there to be a God is to say that our existence and the existence of all humanity is negated completely by the presence of evil in the world. Is that a judgement you are willing to make? Can you make that judgement on behalf of the victims of the world? Would they rather have never existed? Maybe some of them would rather that, but I dont think I would make that decision for them. I cannot calculate the worth of a life, no matter how short or tragic against whatever evil that might befall that life.

At the end of the day, if there is a God, only God can decide if it is worth it or not, because only God know the beginning from the end. And if there is a God then God has decided, and we (humanity) are worth it. But of course, if there is a God then God has an advantage over us, the big picture, where one day (if there is a God and if the Bible is God's word) God 'will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.' (Revelation 21:4) The Christian claim has never been that the good in the world outweighs the evil, or that things will somehow balance out in the end, but that God will one day comprehensively and decisively deal with evil and it (and its effects) will become a thing of the past. The answer to the POE, if there is a God, is that all evil however evil is only temporary, but all good will endure for ever in the eternity of God.

For those deep thinkers among you

An interview with Paul Moser a Christian philosopher who has just published an enormous book.

Hebrew versus Greek Anthropology

So one of the central questions I will will be researching for my thesis is whether Paul is thinking like a Greek or a Hebrew when he talks about the church as being the 'Body of Christ.' Although Paul was a Hebrew and educated as a Rabbi he also grew up in a Greek city and seems to have been educated in Greek rhetoric, so either is possible. Anthropology is the study and philosophy of what it means to be human. Here are some differences:

• Greeks opposed form and matter, body and flesh. Hebrews did not, their word for body/flesh, basar, describes the whole life physical life substance of a human.
• Greeks contrast one and many, whole and parts, a body and its members. Hebrews had no word for the whole body, but almost any part could be used to represent the whole.
• Greeks had a body and a soul, the soul was the essential ego which would eventually be liberated from the material body. The Hebrews were an animated body. The Hebrew person did nothave a body, they were a body. (So dead Greeks were souls, while dead Hebrews were merely shadows)
• Greeks describe a body in terms of its boundaries. Being a body is a principle of individuation. Hebrews saw being a body as binding them to their neighbour, kin, and all creation. Individuality only came through being responsible to God, not as a product of a body's boundaries.
• Greeks could conceive of a human body distinct from creation, family and God. Hebrews simply did not think about the body for its own sake, but only in terms of its relation to something else.

So you are probably thinking that the Hebrew point of view doesn't make much sense. And if it doesn't it's probably because you are a Greek! (everyone raised in the western intellectual tradition is to some extent) But hopefully you can see how much difference it makes whether Paul was thinking in Greek or Hebrew categories. The respective world views and theological/philosophical implications are huge, not least for the way we read these words in the Bible.

(source: John A.T Robinson, The Body: A study in Pauline Theology.)