Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Theodicy

  • Theodicy and Openness Theology

    Some time ago I made a few remarks on Dr. William Dembski’s article, Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science (last accessed 3/4/07). I think it’s a wonderfully well-written article, though I disagree with his conclusions. I’m going to discuss this article a bit more, but first I want to cover one or two points (in separate posts) that are peripheral. The first one is Dembski’s treatment of openness theology. In general, Dembski is quite fair to his opponents in this article, but I think he misses the boat just a bit on dealing with openness theology, as one generally does when one attributes motivation to other people’s beliefs.

    The entire section to which I want to respond is contained in a single paragraph on page 34 of the essay, starting with this:

    The overwhelming reason for truncating divine foreknowledge in current theological discussion (especially among openness and process theologians) is to assist in the task of theodicy.

    This misses the point somewhat. I certainly did not come to favor openness theology because I needed it for theodicy. In fact, I regard theodicy as a generally doomed business. Theodicy has proven useless to me. When I watched my 17 year old son die after a five year fight with cancer, it was not any principled theodicy that kept my spiritual life alive. It was simple experience of the presence of God, even around the time of death. God is whatever God is.

    No, the problem for me is that there is simply a gap between God as portrayed in different passages of scripture and even the God I experience. I don’t mean that my experience of God challenges scripture. In fact, one of my major reasons for accepting the authority of the Bible is kind of in reverse. The God that I experience in prayer, meditation, and worship, is so effectively described by the vocabulary of the Bible, that I have to accept the probability that my experience is similar to the Biblical writers.

    In fact, my personal experience of God is fractured in similar was to what a surface reading of many Bible passages presents. Without going into great detail, one needs to reconcile the God who “declares the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10) is “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (Hebrews 13:8) and yet “if a nation will turn from its evil, he will change his mind/relent” (Jeremiah 18:1-11). Many of us have become so theologically adept, whether we’re theologians or not, that we can reconcile those texts without thinking, bring the meaning of each into line with our theology.

    Similarly my personal experience of God goes through times of absolute sovereignty in which I feel carried forward without choice, and yet at other times places at which God allows me broad freedom. If my concept of God is too narrow for this experience, how likely is it to be broad enough for an actual infinite God who is the ground of all being?

    For openness theologians in general, and for me in particular, reconciliations of these aspects seem somewhat shallow, and seem to truncate one concept or another. The Bible speaks of humans having choices with consequences, consequences that would be different had humans behaved in a different manner. God repents frequently. In the book of Jonah, the prediction is that Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days. The people repent, and God repents. God’s grace is given priority over at least the appearance of his foreknowledge.

    Thus my motivation in exploring openness theology is more an effort to give full weight to all of these aspects of scripture and personal experience of God in my theology. I have never seen free will or such broader approaches as openness as all that helpful. In the end, God created absolutely everything, good and bad, whether he did so directly as in special creation or indirectly as in an evolutionary model. If God is the ground of all being–a definition I like–then all chains of causation lead back to God, and all things happen because God wanted the universe to be that way. This remains true whether he limits his foreknowledge or not.

    In such theodicies, a limited God is absolved from having to remove evils for the simple reason that he is incapable of removing them.

    Well, no, not really. In such theologies God would be incapable of creating logical inconsistencies in the universe. Thus the finite beings cannot simultaneously have full freedom and yet be restricted from being evil. I recall interviewing Dr. Richard Rice, one proponent of openness theology a few years back for a conference on the Religion Forum, and he commented that it was not that God could not know everything, but that he chose to create the universe in such a way that he would not know everything. (I lost the transcript of that talk, so that is from memory, but I believe it is an accurate representation.)

    But why engage in such theodicies at all? No sound arguments show that divine foreknowledge is logically incoherent. To argue against God knowing future contingent propositions invariably involves questionable assumptions about how the world, though created by God, might nonetheless impede God’s knowledge of the future.

    Except that what is actually argued is that God impedes his own knowledge of the future. Now I have not read every exposition by openness theologians, and I imagine there are those who would limit God in the way Dembski describes, but that is not a necessary component of openness theology. Openness theology would best be expressed, in my view, solely as God’s approach to interaction with this finite universe. It’s a way in which various possibilities have been reconciled in the finite, when in the infinite they had no need of such reconciliation.

    Further, I think that the coherence of free will and foreknowledge is quite illusory. William Lane Craig’s lengthy exposition to the contrary notwithstanding, I would still regard a fixed future as incompatible with free will. That’s a long discussion in itself, however, so I will hold with just the assertion at this point.

    Moreover, divine foreknowledge does not preclude human freedom. If God foreknows what I shall choose, then I shall not choose otherwise. It doesn’t follow, however, that I can’t choose otherwise. As William Lane Craig puts it, “my freely chosen actions . . . supply the truth conditions for the future contingent propositions known by God.”62 In contrast to theodicies that attempt to justify God’s goodness/benevolence by looking to divine limitation, I’m going to argue that full divine foreknowledge of future contingent propositions is indispensable to a theodicy that preserves the traditional understanding of the Fall (i.e., one that traces all evil in the world back to human sin). [Citations in this passage are from from William Lane Craig. I reproduce footnote 59: William Lane Craig, “Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb’s Paradox,” Philosophia 17 (1987): 331-350, available online at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/newcomb.html (last accessed January 12, 2006). Access date is Dr. Dembski’s.]

    Here we see, I believe another example of the type of reconciliation I’m talking about. For Dembski, preserving a traditional understanding of the fall is important, and thus he looks for a reconciliation of the various elements that includes that traditional understanding. I believe that he operates in a way that is very similar to the openness theologians, and for that matter to most everyone else, in that he sees a number of teachings in scripture and hopes to provide an overarching theory that will account for them all. I have no problem with that. I simply point out that others are operating on the same motivation, and not simply moving the boundary markers in order to make themselves feel better about God.

    One option at all times is to reexamine our understanding of any particular point in the light of whatever evidence we have available. This means that the ideas of free will, of sovereignty, of evil, and yes, the traditional understanding of the fall can be examined again and again as we try to reconcile the various pieces of information available to us. There is no God-given general theory of divine sovereignty and human will. That is something we have to look for.

    In addition, we have to look at the sources. One difference between various approaches to theodicy is sources. What weight is given to scriptural statements over observations of the natural world? I would have to say, for example, that an observation of the history of life on this planet creates an interesting question about the God who “sees a sparrow fall” (Matthew 10:29) and the God who permits “survival of the fittest” as the driving force in the diversity of life.

  • Theodicy: Taking a Stab at Natural Evil

    Theodicy is a big subject, but for many people it relates closely to acceptance by Christians of the theory of evolution. I recall conversing with one friend who commented that while he could understand my acceptance of evolution, he just had a terribly hard time accepting a loving God who could, at the same time, use a process that involved so much killing and destruction in the creation of life.

    Now personally, I have a much harder time dealing with the holocaust, the Russian revolution, or the death of Saudi Middle School girls because of the actions of religious police. Those actions represent clear evil to me, moral choices made in favor of evil resulting in pain and death. The fact that God allows such things requires a bit of explaining.

    Nonetheless, the sheer bloodiness of the evolutionary process is certainly troubling to many. Since I grew up believing in young earth creationism I can understand this. To go from the idea that God painlessly and bloodlessly created all the creatures essentially as they are, and that all pain and death are the result of evil, to a view that pain and death are simply a part of existence in the universe is quite a step. There are those who will say blithely that evolution really doesn’t make any theological difference. It’s just a matter of the technique God used to create. But that is to ignore serious implications.

    In this case, however, the implications also apply to old earth and/or intelligent design creationists just as much as they do to theistic evolutionists. The blood and guts exist, and they exist before any human being has made a choice to sin. Thus they seem to be a feature of the universe rather than the result of some wrong action. This is called “natural evil.” Wikipedia gives a fair definition, but when dealing with creation one needs to note in addition that the traditional Christian view that has accomplanied young earth creationism is that there was no natural evil in the world prior to the fall of man (Genesis 3), and that all natural evil resulted from that moral failure. Thus while you can distinguish natural evil from moral evil on an ongoing basis, even natural evil ultimately was caused by the actions of a moral agent.

    Dr. William Dembski has written an excellent article on this subject, Christian Theodicy in Light of
    Genesis and Modern Science    . Those who read this blog regularly will be aware that I generally don’t hold a positive view of Dembski’s work, so listen to me here. This article is the best single discussion of natural evil that I’ve read. It’s clear, well argued, and creative. I think those who write on theodicy will be responding to it and referencing it for some time to come. Having said that, I disagree with the major conclusion and would debate a number of individual elements. Dembski believes in an old earth, though he also supports intelligent design, which makes his overall view very close to that of most old earth creationists. I’m going to quote it here simply to demonstrate the widespread acknowledgement that this is a problem. In some later posts I plan to respond to individual elements of Dembski’s view.

    With regard to Hugh Ross, he says:

    Nonetheless, the actual arguments I’ve seen from old-earth creationists that attempt to preserve both theological and scientific orthodoxy have struck me as inadequate if by theological orthodoxy one means a traditional understanding of the Fall that traces all natural and personal evil in the world to human sin. Take Hugh Ross. Ross does not believe the Garden of Eden was free of death, decay, pain, and suffering. For him, there was never a perfect paradise. To justify this claim scripturally, Ross will cite Genesis 3:16, in which God informs Eve after she has sinned that he will greatly multiply her pain in childbirth. Since zero multiplied by anything remains zero, Ross infers that God did not here initiate Eve’s pain but rather increased her existing pain in childbirth. More generally, Ross will suggest that God uses randomness, waste, and inefficiencies (his terms) to bring about the “very good” world into which he placed Adam.

    I will simply note that I sympathize with the problem here. For people who are used to thinking of a God who uses no “randomness, waste, and inefficiencies” this seems a pretty serious problem. Dembski cites Ross as accepting that, and indeed he accepts that he himself has a need to discuss this particular problem.

    I was thinking about all of this when I ran across a post by Carl Zimmer on The Loom, Cancer: An Evolutionary Disease (follow links from there to an abundance of additional information). My son died of cancer, and suddenly the whole issue becomes personal. In my view of evolution, cancer is just as much a product of natural selection as is anything else. So “natural evil” touched me rather directly in this case. At the same time, I’m extremely interested in seeing evolutionary research aid our understanding of cancer and help find cures.

    Now let me try to get to the point of this note. After thinking a bit about how I’ve answered this question before, I simply don’t believe in natural evil. What we call natural evil is simply the environment in which we live, and which rewards our good choices and “punishes” our bad choices. Further, the sort of environment proposed by young earth creationists–which I believe for the first 20 odd years of my life, is non-sensical. Dembski quotes Ross as referring to the “increase” in labor indicated in Genesis 3 as part of the curse as a reason to believe that there was hardship and death prior to the fall and it was merely increased.

    I would suggest that there’s a better reason: It simply couldn’t be any other way. And Genesis confirms this, I believe, when it says that God placed the man in the garden ” to till it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15 NRSV). Do you suppose that if Adam did not till the garden, the plants would grow equally well? If he chose one seed over another, would there be more of what he did plant than of what he didn’t? Even the much maligned author of the second creation story (Genesis 2:4b and following) doesn’t imagine a perfect world in the way that Christian theology imagined. There would still be choices and there would still be consequences, ultimately confirmed simply by the fact that the human couple were able to make the choice to sin, and noticed consequences even before God came a talked to them.

    There would simply be no meaning to moral evil, or no possibility of it in a world in which there were no consequences to one’s choices, and if there are consequences, then it must be possible for them to be negative as well as positive.

    I’ll be posting more details. This is just my opening shot on the topic. Watch for the category Theodicy in the coming weeks.