Spiritual Musings on Collapse

Gravity

Gravity post=5935 wrote:
But actually, I find the possibility of free fate to be as much a profound mystery as the existence of necessary suffering, it seems that one can only be understood in deep relation to the other.

…

That depends on how emotionally one approaches the free will argument, especially when framing it in the mode of God’s will in creating or permitting suffering and evil, whether He had any choice given the possible parameters of free will applicable to Himself, and given that all things divine must be reasonable.

I agree that God cannot be illogical, i.e. he is not exempt from rules of logic.

The reason I said the free will explanation alone is not adequate to answer the question of evil/suffering is because I believe God has revealed to us that he knew evil and suffering would be a part of our lives and it would further his optimized plan for humanity. So it goes beyond humans causing suffering independent of God’s will.

A very simple analogy – a grad professor gives his students very difficult assignments and examinations to prepare them for future courses and eventually a career. The student confronts him and asks him why such brutal testing is required. The professor can say that it isn’t really that hard and the student is simply making it harder on himself by slacking off, failing to take notes, not putting in the effort, etc. OR he can be honest and say that, despite whatever shortcomings the student has, the material is designed to be extremely hard. Why? Because that’s the optimal way to truly prepare the student.

Similar logic applies to God’s design of the Universe to be a place that will inevitably result in both moral and natural evil (natural disasters, illnesses, etc.). The scriptures are very honest about God’s involvement, and may even logically necessitate such a conclusion, even though a lot of Christians would rather ignore those parts because they feel it weakens their position with skeptics. I say we should be honest, humble and try our best to understand what God has revealed to us.

With regards to reconciling free will and determinism, I see a few positions people can take:

1) God foreknows and predestines everything, and there is no human free will.

2) God foreknows everything, predetermines some things and there is human free will (ex. God knows exactly what will happen if you go somewhere, but that doesn’t mean you are destined to go there; he only predestines the major aspects of his plan, such as Jesus’ death on the cross)

3) God foreknows everything, predestines everything and there is still human free will.

I tend to lean towards #3, but I don’t think we need “compatibilism” to explain how that’s possible. Free will and determinism can be metaphysically compatible if we try to think in terms of extra dimensions. It’s hard (if not impossible) for a 2-d being to truly imagine 3-d structures. Similarly, it may be very hard for us to imagine what kind of “structures” are possible in 4+ dimensions of space and 2+ dimensions of time. A non-physical, eternal God operating outside of our spatial and time dimensions could perhaps establish a physical Universe in which free will exists for his creation, yet he still remains sovereign over everything that happens. Instead of this being a logical contradiction, the apparent incompatibility stems from our limited capacity as beings that operate in a few spatial dimensions and one dimension of time.

We must necessarily distinguish between necessary and avoidable suffering. In biblical terms of moral allegory, basically all avoidable suffering is evil and sinful, and caused by some sin or compounding of sins. Only avoidable suffering can be sinful and subject to reprehension, while all necessary suffering is by definition not sinful or morally accountable except unto God, notwithstanding limited understanding of neccesity.

Yes, I don’t think “natural evil” can be classified as sinful. Moral evil is sinful. Yet I think it’s clear that God planned for both to occur. In fact, it seems apparent that God allowed Satan into Eden as the ultimate test of original humanity’s faith, knowing full well that they would fail the test. So we shouldn’t try to downplay the fact that both forms of evil were a necessary part of God’s optimal plan.

For example, we are increasingly discovering ways in which natural events (hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.) are absolutely essential for the survival of advanced life on Earth, and that there would probably be even more suffering if they weren’t as frequent and powerful as they are. Same thing goes for predator-prey relationships, certain parasites and illnesses. However, I doubt we will ever comprehend the full extent of how/why these things are designed optimally. And there is no doubt that moral evil by humans enhances the effects of natural evil (which may be God’s very clever way of stressing the importance of moral conduct through the laws of physics).

Similarly, suffering that stems from moral evil by humans is essential for spiritual growth, matured faith and true love, which will all culminate in the conquering of evil. I believe this Universe was established by God for that purpose – to raise his children into spiritual perfection in a fallen world (through faith and love) and conquer the evil that began with Satan (before Adam) once and for all.

It could also be that free evil is a prerequisite function of free volition of any sort, and that it is logically impossible even for God to create free will in the material or spiritual realm without the possibility of evil suffering. This line of reasoning is only as simplistic as the model of free will defined.

Free will must create the possibility of evil, but I don’t think it must always lead to evil. The unfallen angels are examples of that, and I believe human beings will become examples of that as well in the new creation. We will not be stripped of free volition, but we will always be obedient to God.

Form another perspective, a particularly narrow definition of free will, it is free will itself that is inherently evil, and people more easily desire sinful evil of their own accord, so that only submission to the righteousness of divine will is truly sinless but also comparatively unfree.

I don’t really see the contradiction between submission to God and free will. Choosing to be forever faithful does not strip people of their status as free agents made in God’s image.

Also, even without God, but permitting the conditional existence of evil, it is a moral responsibility anyhow to discern avoidable suffering and to avoid it by means of a moral heuristic, to delineate good and evil in the best possible way, and this wisdom pertaining to avoidable suffering seems possible only by the experience of necessary suffering, so that one pain may lessen another by some great mystery of normative utility.

Perhaps, but I find non-theistic explanations of morality (or immorality) to be extremely lacking in reason and logic.

The buddhist conception of suffering is also decent and practical; all existence is defined by suffering, the cause of suffering is desire and attachment, freedom from desire thus lessens suffering. This also appplies when releasing attachment to life itself, yet death is so unpopular.

My main problem with this philosophy is that it really seems to go against our ingrained sense of moral conscience. The Zen Buddhist would say that love is just as evil and contributes to as much suffering as does hate. Both actions or emotions imply a relationship, and all relationships are supposedly evil. Love and peace may sometimes lead to suffering, but I don’t see any way in which they are equal in moral weight to hate and violence.

And why is the existence of joy not a mystery of equal magnitude? Certainly its evermore inexplicable as an experience, but inherently not seen as profoundly unjust or unnatural, so no one ever complains about the equally deficient and unaccountable allocation of joy.

It seems to me that “joy” is a privilege, and one primarily reserved for redeemed and perfected creatures in a new creation. In our current universe, under our current laws of physics, subjected to rampant moral/natural evil, we shouldn’t really expect there to be an over-abundance of joy. In fact, such rampant joy would probably undermine the goals of spiritual growth and maturity through faith and obedience to God.

TonyPrep post=5941 wrote: This makes absolutely no sense to me. You now seem to be saying that God is subject to some laws or limits, which means that God is not God. If God really is God, then it is all powerful and can do whatever it wants. Mind you, the notion of God having wants is another illogical (to me) notion. Where did these wants (desires) come from?

The “rules” of logic are not laws like gravity. Logic is not something God created, but something that applies to him by his very nature. God cannot be illogical or immoral any more than he can choose not to exist.

Almost every aspect of a creator interventionist God is illogical and impossible for humans (or at least this human) to understand. I’ve thought about these things for decades. The irrationality of it is what caused me to lose my faith, once I actually started to question what I believed.

Interestingly enough, the irrationality of materialist naturalism is what caused me to lose my faith in atheism and deism. Naturalists can’t even explain why our thoughts can be irrational or illogical or immoral, because they have no basis for positing objective standards of rationality, logic or morality. The fact that we can even have this discussion is proof that God exists and we were created in his image.

Now we have the idea that suffering may be necessary, even though we don’t suffer equally and some may not even suffer at all when suffering is measured against the average suffering.

The idea is that there are spiritual purposes for our mental and physical suffering.

I imagine you believe that people suffer chaos and violence for no reason whatsoever, and most of them will never get any sort of restoration or justice, i.e. the Universe just doesn’t care one way or the other. It’s a cold, purposeless Universe…

You may think that’s the rational thing to believe, but it doesn’t add up at all for me when observing and reflecting on the external and internal evidence.

Sorry, it’s all illogical. Faith is something one has or one doesn’t have; it’s not explicable and cannot be objectively rationalised.

Faith is something that everyone has, including you. The only question is what you choose to put your trust in at the end of the day.

Supergravity post=5971 wrote:
I am starting with that premise, since I’m not a true believer, but I think that the moral teachings of scripture are more universally accessible when presented as allegory and not necessarily as gospel truth, so that even the atheists can appreciate the ethical considerations without being forced to make premature leaps of faith.
I agree that the moral content of stories concerning Jesus would become a sham when held as fictitious, and they do seem to be explicitly meant as a historical account of actual events. but not so for many other stories, they could be merely allegory and still contain useful moral content.

Much of the situational ethics in the bible could be fictitious or moral allegory but still useful as a literary or didactic device.

I understand that, but the context of the Bible should dictate how the accounts are treated, just like any other text. If we are dealing with poetic “wisdom” literature, for ex, then we may find more allegory, metaphor, etc. However, even within that genre, there is plenty of historical narrative that is meant to be taken literally.

The one thing we shouldn’t do is treat the accounts however we feel is best based on our modern cultural conceptions. That’s what a lot of people like to do for the OT stories, making most of them less than literal, but there’s no good textual reason for it. Jesus himself believed many of the events actually occurred, and I think it’s safe to say he had a good idea of how the OT is meant to be read. A literal interpretation is also often necessary to understand the actual theology being communicated, because the Bible presents an ongoing and dynamic history of people and events that are all inter-connected.

I’m not looking to bring any atheists to the Bible as a source of moral teachings and nothing else. IMO, the Bible is useless unless it is understood as the true word of God. I wouldn’t want to believe in something that purports to be divinely inspired just because it gives me some wise teachings, especially if it doesn’t reflect the true nature of God and our relationship with him.

The concept of sin really does indicate avoidable suffering, since I cannot conceive of any sin that is necessary and cannot be avoided, sin seems contradictory to necessity [except maybe for that judas incident, that seemed foreordained and inevitable somehow].
If sin exists, and is avoidable at all, it strongly argues in favor of making unnecessary and avoidable suffering a distinct moral category from necessary and unavoidable suffering.

I think it really depends on whether we are taking a metaphysical perspective or a social (practical) perspective. If the former, then we are able to posit that our sins are predestined from the foundation of the Universe, but we still retain free agency to choose not to sin. In terms of human social relations, though, we cannot comprehend the full extent of that predestination, so we practically behave and react to others as free moral agents, just as God intended.

These dimensions must still be causally connected to our plane somehow, so they would be included in a single universal logic, seemingly allowing for a compatibilistic mode of free volition in a deterministic universe, so this would conform to option 3).

The idea of an optimal ammount of suffering for an ultimate purpose is an utilitarian function, uniquely informed by divine omniscience, which may make the measure of suffering justifiable beyond human logic. But as constrained by human logic, any policy towards such an ultimate purpose could never justify itself without accountable perfect foresight. One cannot argue that crime should be tolerated because its part of God’s plan. It may be so, but that would be unknowable to any human system of justice. By default, we would have to judge all victimful crime as causing [or being caused by] unnecessary and avoidable suffering.

Yes, exactly.

The idea of God can easily be proven to exist, as a subjective reality or moral force, more easily than as objective reality, but the very idea of God may lead into possible proofs that the soul exists as a moral agent, that the only way in which God can be understood as an idea is because the soul’s comprehension of good and evil as an objective reality.
If it could be proven that the soul exists in an objective sense, a form of information-processing, then this may provide proof of the objective existence of God in some way. But the soul would probably be seen as subjective reality only.

Yeah, I think this is a powerful argument for the existence of god. The fact that we have moral conscience and the capacity to develop a relationship with the concept of god does not make much sense in terms of philosophical naturalism, but makes great sense in terms of theism.

Many philosophical systems produce the substance of the soul as a moral agent of free volition without incorporating the existence of God, so for questions of moral agency and the meaning of suffering, the possible existence of the soul seems of great importance, even for non-theists.
There is no immediate contradiction between the positive existence of the soul and the unexistence of God, which may allow for the moral agency of the soul as an intransient state of mind without the existence of God, although the logic would be similar.

I wasn’t aware of these systems. How do they explain the existence of the soul/spirit apart from the existence of God? Assuming the soul/spirit is defined as immaterial substances of will, emotion and moral conscience.

TonyPrep post=5973 wrote: I’ve refined the question to whether God’s existence is of relevance to us. As any attributes or actions of God appear to be almost impossible to understand, if they mean anything at all, I tend to think that it comes down to whether we should even consider the existence of God or why our individual or collective actions should be guided by some people’s notions of what God might or might not want. As I’ve already mentioned, the idea of God wanting something seems ridiculous, since he has, indeed is, everything already.

How could it not be of relevance to us who our Creator is and if/how we can establish an eternal relationship with him? The truth should always be relevant, and especially metaphysical truths.

It’s not impossible to comprehend Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which tells us its impossible for humans to comprehend the exact nature of any given particle. Same logic applies to God.

New post:

Picturing Humanity’s Redemption
Posted on November 2, 2012 by Brother of Sorrow

The Judeo-Christian theme of redemption has been one of the most powerful and influential throughout the history of human civilization, especially over the last millennium. It has impacted everything from society’s art, music, literature and cinema to its executive and judicial processes. When we look at the Pietà sculpture of Michelangelo, we are looking at redemption. When we read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, we are reading about redemption. When we listen to Handel’s “Messiah“, we are listening to redemption. And when we experience a judicial bankruptcy proceeding, we are experiencing the process of redemption in action.

This latter aspect of redemptive themes is especially relevant to our world today, in which individuals, families, businesses, cities and entire nations are buried under mountains of debt. Our global society has come to typify the idea of humans in need of forgiveness and redemption, as billions of people find themselves with mortgages, student loans, business loans, credit card bills, public taxes, etc. that they cannot possibly satisfy without any external aid. The entire Euro area is a stunning example of nations that can no longer service their debts without massive support from other nations and their taxpayers.

When we look at this monetary predicament in isolation, it’s difficult to imagine any satisfactory resolution for humanity. The whole thing will require great material sacrifices on the part of many people who have grown emotionally attached to their current standards of living. We must remember, though, that our ultimate solace lies in our spiritual redemption through the nearly unimaginable sacrifice made by Jesus Christ on our behalf. That is the power of the Gospel message which became operational throughout all of human history by virtue of Jesus’ work on the Cross and remains extremely relevant to this day.

Indeed, it is the Old Testament which originally provides us with stories about the critical intersection between monetary debts and redemption, as a means of picturing the infinitely more valuable intersection of our spiritual debts and Christ’s redemption. The word “redeem” or “redemption” is used 17 times in Leviticus 25 alone, which describes God’s command to Moses and the Israelites for a year of Jubilee. Of particular interest is Leviticus 25:23-28, which tells us that the Israelites must provide a mechanism through which poor and indebted people can reacquire their land. We are told this redemption can occur through the future prosperity of the person who sold, a near relative of that person a default expulsion of property sales in the fiftieth year of Jubilee.

(full post at link)

Our Lord’s Discipline & Punishment
Posted on November 15, 2012 by Brother of Sorrow

One of the most famous works of French post-modernist philosopher Michel Foucault was his book, “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison“. It documents the transition from public displays of state justice in Western monarchies to the modern penal system of Western democratic governments. Foucault primarily viewed this transition as a means for centralized institutions to reinforce discipline and standardization among subject populations, using the great intellectual and technological advances which accompanied the industrial revolution to their benefit. According to Foucault, it was no coincidence that these two historical developments accompanied each other.

Instead of the modern penal system simply being the result of humanitarian concerns, it was primarily a means of exerting state control in a more efficient and powerful way. Foucault pointed out the similarities in physical structure and operation between prisons, factories, schools, hospitals (mental asylums especially) and military barracks. These institutions all employ temporal and spatial restrictions, constant observation, performance evaluations, labeling/classification systems and feedback mechanisms. At a certain point, those subject to these institutions internalize the disciplinary mechanisms and self-regulate their behavior out of desire for social and material rewards or out of fear of similar punishments.

Each disciplinary institution is usually justified by a corresponding academic discipline, such as criminology, psychology, medicine, economics, etc. I have previously written on Foucault’s theories in the context of neoliberal finance, which had experienced an unprecedented explosion since the 1970s and culminated in the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The institutional arbiter of speculative finance can be thought of as the U.S. currency reserve system established in Breton Woods and all associated organizations, such as U.S. multinational banking corporations, the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund. This system was structured to coerce people, households, businesses and nations into taking on debts they could not afford relative to their cash flows, and to alienate or punish those entities which refused to subject themselves to debt servitude.

Absolute Truth and Freedom
Posted on December 4, 2012 by Brother of Sorrow

In Our Lord’s Discipline and Punishment, I talked about Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary societies and how there is no escaping some form of discipline and punishment in human civilization. The only thing that must be considered is whether we are coerced into the world’s materialistic disciplinary system, many times unaware that we are even within its grasp, or whether we are voluntarily and knowingly submitting to God’s spiritual discipline and justice. Another aspect of Foucault’s work was his emphasis on the intersection between truth and power or oppression:

“Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true” (Foucault, Truth and Power, p.131)

Foucault was a great admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom he derived many ideas about the nature of truth and power in human society. Nietzsche saw claims to “absolute truth” as being a means for those making the claims to exert control over large groups of people and exploit them for personal gain. He viewed “absolutism” as nothing more than the ideological mechanism through which certain people express their “will to power” at the expense of others.

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” (Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense)

We also find this theme of truth claims and oppressive power embedded in the teachings of Jesus Christ, as recorded by the Gospel accounts. Jesus repeatedly castigated the Sagisees and Pharisees of his day, who had upheld themselves as the sole arbiters of God’s truth and used their religious traditions as a means of greed and oppression, rather than a means of faithful worship. He told them, “you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition… thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down… and many such things you do.” (Mark 7:9-13)

In the words of Pastor Tim Keller, “when Foucault, Nietzsche and Jesus all agree on something… it has to be true!”

Revolutionary Grace
Posted on December 20, 2012 by Brother of Sorrow

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.” -John Newton

A hallmark of human history, and especially our world today, is people pointing their fingers at other people. No one is immune from it. The democrats point at the republicans, the progressives at the conservatives, the socialists at the capitalists, the debtors at the creditors, the conspiracy theorists at the bankers and governments, the theists at the atheists, and vice versa, so on and so forth. It is an endless cycle of finding some alleged ignoramuses or agitators or elitists or sociopaths to blame. Where does any of that pointing get us? Does it bring us any satisfaction or any closer to the truth of our situation? Any closer to the solutions for our human predicament?

Jesus certainly knew better than that. His teachings revolutionized how people thought about sin, human nature, God and salvation. Instead of people pointing the finger at the sinners “over there”, he showed us that God wants us to help our fellow brothers and sisters by pointing the finger at ourselves. Instead of people toiling away to reach God through their rituals and works, he showed us that God will sacrifice for us out of pure love and bring us to him. Instead of people being redeemed through their legalistic loyalty or obedience to others, he showed us that we are redeemed by his amazing grace and by that grace alone. We find these revolutionary concepts captured brilliantly in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.

When God Sent Forth His Spirit
Posted on January 10, 2013 by Brother of Sorrow

“This gulf in understanding [life’s origin] is not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna” – Paul Davies, Physicist

“It would be a miracle if a strand of RNA ever appeared on the primitive Earth” -Leslie Orgel, OOL Researcher

“Terrestrial explanations [for homochirality] are impotent and nonviable” – William Bonner, Organic Chemist

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish of the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
and the breath of all mankind.”

(Job 12:7-10)

“O LORD, how manifold are your works!

These all look to you,
to give them their food in due season.
When you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
When you send forth your Spirit, they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.”

(Psalm 104:24-30)

Since the time of Darwin, many people have replaced what their minds and hearts tell them with what popular culture advertises to them. There is no better venue for Western pop culture then the public school. Darwinian evolution is presented to children as fact instead of theory, complete with cartoons of knuckle-dragging apes becoming upright human beings. Very few people stop to question the dogma of biological evolution, asking whether the increasingly abundant evidence actually supports or undermines the theory. The more we learn about the realm of life, the more enigmas develop for natural explanations of its origin and development.

Many theists (especially Christians) have adopted evolution as God’s method of creation, because they think a) scientific evidence supports evolution and b) it will make the faith more popular and easier to accept. Yet the Bible is clear that the truth is what’s most important, as revealed through scripture. And scripture minces no words when describing God’s direct creation of life on this planet over four progressive ages (days 3-6), resting from creation in our ongoing seventh age. A lot of important theology actually rests on creationism – for example, the concept that humans are unique in kind from the rest of the animal kingdom and created with the imago dei or “image of God”.

Although people have learned to automatically associate a progression of simple-to-complex life on Earth over billions of years with Darwinian evolution, the fact is that this scenario exactly parallels the Biblical accounts of progressive creation by God, and these accounts were constructed thousands of years ago. The existence of all these different living organisms is one of the most powerful testaments to the existence of an intelligent and personal God. If there were no supreme intelligence, or divinity took the form of some impersonal force, we would not expect to observe such methodically and exquisitely crafted beings on this planet, which reflect all the tell-tale signs of creative design that we observe in human civilization.