Van Inwagen and the Secular Academy

So I found this passage from Peter Van Inwagen's spiritual autobiographical essay Quam Dilecta extremely interesting, and extremely truthful:

"In 1980 or thereabouts, I began to experience a sort of pressure to become a Christian: a vast discontent with not being a Christian, a pressure to do something. Presumably this pressure was of the same sort that had led me to pray for faith on that one occasion ten years earlier, but this was sustained. This went on and on. My mind at the time is not readily accessible to me in memory. I wish I had kept a journal. I know that sneers directed at God and the Church, which--I hope I am not giving away any secret here--are very common in the academy, were becoming intolerable to me. (What was especially intolerable was the implied invitation to join in, the absolutely unexamined assumption that, because I was a member of the academic community, I would, of course, regard sneering at God and the Church as meet, right, and even my bounden duty.) I perhaps did not have anything like a desire to turn to Christ as my Savior, or a desire to lead a godly, righteous, and sober life, but I did have a strong desire t o belong to a Christian community of discourse, a community in which it was open to people to talk to each other in words like the ones that Lewis addresses to his correspondent in Letters to an American Lady. I envied people who could talk to one another in those terms. I know that I was becoming more and more repelled by the "great secular consensus" that comprises the world-view of just about everyone connected with the universities, journalism, the literary and artistic intelligentsia, and the enterta inment industry. I knew that, confused as I might be about many things, I was quite clear about one thing: I could not bear the thought of being a part of that consensus. What made it so repulsive to me can be summed up in a schoolyard cri de coeur: "They think they're so smart!" I was simply revolted by the malevolent, self-satisfied stupidity of the attacks on Christianity that proceeded from the consensus."

Weekly Scripture

“There is none righteous, no, not one; There is none who understands; There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside; They have together become unprofitable; There is none who does good, no, not one.” -Romans 3:11-12 (NKJV)

A God-Centered Theodicy

A common attempt at reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of an all-good God has been to say something like the following: God allows various kinds of evils because they are necessary conditions for various sorts of goods. More concisely, for every evil x God intends to bring about a good y which could not exist otherwise, and is therefore justified in allowing x. The examples of what sorts of goods these might be have been many, but I intend to point one out which seems to sum the others up, and which comes from a distinctly Reformed perspective.

Let us first examine a proposition which could be said to be the foundational one for these sorts of theodicies:

P1- For every evil x, x is justified iff x is necessary for bringing about a good y which outweighs the evil of x.

What constitutes the idea of "outweighing" in this premise is, admittedly, quite vague. But it could possibly mean something like this: A good y outweighs an evil x iff y results in effects more morally great than x is morally evil. This is still vague, but I don't think it's vagueness is that much of an issue, since we intuitively recognize when a good outweighs, or is greater, than a particular evil, even if we don't recognize exactly what constitutes this "outweighing'. So let us content ourselves with moral intuition on this point.

Now take another, widely accepted, theological premise:

p2- The greatest possible creaturely good is to magnify the glory of God (who is the paradigm of goodness).

Given these to premises, we can formulize the following argument (assuming God's existence for reductio):

1. Any evil x is justified iff it is necessary for bringing about a good y, and y is sufficiently greater than x.
2. The good of magnifying God's glory is always sufficiently greater than any evil x.
3. There are evils which are necessary conditions for bringing about a magnification of God's glory g.
3. God's providence insures that every evil x brings about a g.
4. Therefore, any evil x is justified.

This argument implies that individually, and collectively, all the evils that exist in the world are serving to magnify God's glory, the greatest possible creaturely good. The reason I say "individually and collectively" is because it may be hard to see how one particular, small, evil serves to magnify God's glory in any significant way. But, in a collective sense, it may serve to achieve that goal. For instance, a child hitting his or her sibling may not appear to magnify God's glory in a very apparent, or exemplary, way. But that one evil, under the Christian story, is a contributing factor to Christ's eventual (if this happened before 33 A.D.) death on the cross. Jesus' death on the cross is an exemplary display of God's glory in His mercy for sinners, and therefore all that contributes to it is justified. Similarly, there are some goods which individually, regardless of their collective significance, magnify God's glory. For example, say a soldier gets shot in battle. As he dies he cries out to God for mercy and salvation, and finally sees the beauty of God's power and etc. This good is greater than the evil of the man getting shot because he acknowledges the great glory of God, and is then ushered into His eternal kingdom. So this would seem to be justified apart from God's plans overall for exemplifying His glory at the end of the age, or whatnot.

One weakness of this argument is that it will primarily appeal to those who already believe in Christianity, but to few who don't. This is because the premise that exemplifying God's glory is the greatest possible creaturely good seems utterly incoherent to those outside the faith (and, sadly, many within). Goods like caring for someone with cancer, getting honor in battle, and other standard examples that come from this theodicy make more sense to the unbeliever. So I suppose this argument should function more as a comfort to the believer who is struggling with why God allows evil in the world. I think that he or she would find that this answer is Scriptural, coherent, and is a great comfort for the Christian (since God works all things for their good, as Paul says). Put in a better way, all the evils which occur in the life of the Christian serve to magnify God's glory in love and mercy, as opposed to wrath and judgement.

Soli Deo Gloria

-Ben C.

Analytic Philosophy and Calvinism

Here's an interesting blog post I found by the philosopher Jeremy Pierce (you may have seen him on the popular philosophy of religion blog "Prosblogion"): http://parablemania.ektopos.com/archives/2007/02/calvinism_philosophers.html

Weekly Scripture

"And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross." - Colossians 2:15 (NIV)

J.I. Packer on Evangelicalism

In his essay Evangelical Annihilationism in review J.I. Packer gives what is, to me, one of the best definitions of what it truly means to be "evangelical" that I have ever heard. He says evangelicals are "Trinitarian Bible-believers who glory in Christ’s Cross as the only source of peace with God and seek to share their faith with others". Beautiful.

Foreknowledge, Atonement, and Predestination

If one views the atonement as a penal substitution, and believes that God has perfect foreknowledge, then I think something interesting follows. What follows is, I believe, the Reformed doctrine of Particular Redemption (or "Limited Atonement"). Here's why: If God, from eternity past, foresaw who would respond to the gospel, and who wouldn't, why would He provide propitiation for those whom He knew would reject Him? Keep in mind, by the way, that Limited Atonement defined in the classical Reformed sense means that Jesus' sacrifice was sufficient for all, but intended for the elect only. Another more theologically proper way to say it is that the atonement was infinite in expiation (removing God's wrath), and finite in propitiation (reconcilation).

So again, wouldn't it make sense given God's perfect foreknowledge, that even if man were free to accept or reject the gospel, that He would only provide a perfect and covenantal sacrifice for those whom He knew would choose Him? The sacrifice, God would foresee, would never find application in the lives of those who rejected the gospel, so why pay for them (this God would know via His middle knowledge, if you're a Molinist)? One may object that this line of thinking only works if God is in time, which (the objector will probably believe), God is not. But this is not so. God, in His "Eternal Now" (as C.S. Lewis put it), would still have perfect knowledge of the free actions of His creatures, and it would still be pointless for God to intend to make a propitiation for those whom He perfectly, and eternally, knows will reject Him.

Thoughts?