The A Priori Necessity of God's Self-Sacrifice

The historical evidence of Jesus' life and death is near incontrovertible, despite there being outlying objections from a variety of insupportable sources mostly because the best historical record of the events of his life are from the Bible which clearly document his existence from a few independent eyewitness sources (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that were each in turn tortured to death in order to get them to recant their accounts.  But this is not today's topic and I won't be debating it here.

Instead I want to talk about the A Priori necessity of Christ.  That is, of God's on-earth sacrifice to pay for the sins of the world.  The demonstration is an Ethical One and relies essentially on the idea of Justice and the Nature of God as that Necessary Being which makes it possible that there are contingent beings (which are, ipso facto, not God).

In particular, there is the question of of evil.  How could God create something that would make it even possible that there be evil in the world?  What a cruel thing to do!  We are left with a few possibilities.  God might not be Good, that is, God might be Evil in which case, God in creating the world might have made it just to torture us (and everything else).  But supposing that God is in fact as usually accounted, Good (for various reasons, again which I will not address here, but have addressed elsewhere), how could the Good God create Evil things?

This argument will proceed as follows:

First I will tell a story that is possible - the story of how a Good God could create Evil Things.  Then I will show why any other account is simply impossible.

THE STORY

On the supposition that God is Good, then in particular God is unerringly Just, Merciful, Loving, Truthful, Kind, etc.

In creating other conscious beings, God loved them by giving them their consciousness, and furthermore, control over themselves and their environs (us).  To not have done either of these things would have been cruel (to make us slaves or automata incapable of love ourselves).  But in giving us control over ourselves and our environs it becomes possible for us to do Evil Things as well documented in any good history book.

But how could a Good and Just God allow evil things to go running around the world inflicting their evil on other conscious things that God created?

If something performs an evil act, the just and kind thing to do is to nullify that act by preventing it beforehand, that is, by not creating them at all.

But then God could not have created ANY free conscious beings and all the world would simply be automata - mindless slaves.

However, God HIMSELF can suspend punishment - that is forgive - the sins of the conscious free beings since those sins are against God and his Creation.  When we do something evil to another person, we hurt something that God made, and therefore are injuring God's property and therefore indebted to God.

But no person is capable of paying the debt for the damage done by their own evil.  We can compensate for our evil in some ways by dying, but we can not repair the damage we have done to the rest of God's creation merely by dying.  For that we need something more, in particular, plenary forgiveness.

Plenary forgiveness essentially means that God will suspend his requirement for justice for his damages.  Indeed, Jesus Himself has promised that whoever believes Him will not be judged, but has already passed from death to life.  That is, not only is there no guilty verdict, there's no trial.

God -can- do this because it is God's property that is damaged and therefore God is the primary victim of all evil.


The God that did do that is God of Gods, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.

Faith and Reason

One of the neat things about studying philosophy and theology formally is that you learn that there is something to the matter that you might not know before you study it.

The strange thing is that in other fields very few people think they know anything about it without having studied it but in theology and philosophy everyone thinks themselves an expert without having studied it.

For instance, I haven't ever decided to render an opinion about the relative quality of Honda and Toyota engines. Why? Because I simply haven't studied it. This seems fine to me, I honestly don't care and don't currently have any moral imperative to care.

But Theology and Philosophy are different. For Philosophy and Theology we do have a moral imperative to care, each of us, for our own souls. Yet you hear people pronouncing the vacuousness of philosophy and theology without any knowledge of the study of the matter over and over again. "Knowing" without knowing.

This "knowing unknowing" is an aspect of cognitive dissonance. We know X is important but don't want to investigate X because we're afraid of what we might find.

This is, for instance, the stance of the right-wing with regard to climate science, known as Willful Ignorance.

And like Climate science, it's easy to lob in objections from a distance "It seems cold to me, global warming is a hoax!" without investigating the matter methodically. "Nobody really knows anything" is the parallel in philosophy (but of course, we all know how to claim that nobody knows anything!).

But upon investigating the matter systematically and thoroughly facts tend to make themselves clear and demonstrable as with every other field of human study. For while Humans are imperfect, we are not so imperfect as to be unable to build a bridge or determine the meaning of the term "wrong" and finally to understand the nature of atoms and reality itself.

But this path to understanding must begin with the acknowledgement of its possibility, which turns out to be demonstrable, but again, only if someone is willing to study the matter systematically. That first step - acknowledging that Knowledge is Possible, is FAITH. I have not been "kind" in many words about the Catholic Church and this is not because I regard it as wholly evil, I do not. But like all man-made things, the Catholic Church is deeply flawed. That said, the Ecumenical and Rational period of John Paul II definitely is a step in the right direction, remembering that Reason and Faith work together to create Knowledge and Wisdom. As John Paul II points out in his essay, Faith without Reason is Superstition, and Reason without Faith is Nihilism.

https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html

Some Misunderstandings about Socialism

I hear a lot of arguments about socialism mostly based on right-wing "purposeful misunderstandings" of what is intended. These right-wing "purposeful misunderstandings" exist fundamentally to prevent rational evaluation of the value of socialism and the role it -does actually- play in the American Economy and the role it -ought- to play in said economy. Socialism has its roots in pre-marxian communal living strategies that are common to humans in reaction to the stresses of living in industrial capitalist societies, recognizing that the fundamental feature of the industrial (and now post-industrial) capitalist society is the concentration of wealth and power and the protection of the concentration of that wealth and power by the political body. So misunderstanding #1 - socialism is not marxist or communist essentially, but rather just the recognition that societies are communal living. The essential character of socialism, thus, is that it regards the function of the state finally to be the benefit of the humans that make up that state, and it is thus closely related to communal-ism in that the State is by definition an aspect of communal living. In the United States, for instance, the stated purpose of the existence of the Federal Government is written into our constitution, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. So misunderstanding #2 - socialism is not anti-amercian. In fact, the United States of America was founded as a socialist state. What distinguishes socialism from viz. Capitalism, is that the broad class of all citizens is considered "the important class" and that laws that are made are intended to benefit that broad class of "important people" viz - everyone equally, rather than, e.g. in the case of Royalism where laws benefit primarily the Royalty or Oligarchy where laws benefit primarily the Oligarchs, or, of course, Capitalism where laws benefit primarily the rich. So misunderstanding #3 - socialism isn't opposed to freedom, but it is opposed to allowing the government to be used to benefit specific sub-groups of people, again, as the United States constitution says. In truth, then, the United States has its roots in socialism which shouldn't be any surprise to any real student of history. Our revolution overthrowing the imperialist royalist British empire with a People's revolution replacing that colonial rule with a government formed "By the People, for the people" was the quintessential People's Revolution and this should never be forgotten. In modern times one defining aspect of socialism has been the application of social science and economic science to governance. While we do this all the time in terms of safety rules, equal opportunity rules, environmental hazards and other such scientifically informed aspects of governance, application of science to Economics generally, in the United States, has been lacking because the people who are most likely to benefit from the application of economic science to governance are the poor and middle classes because the Oligarchical and Capitalist classes (that is, the people who currently control the vast proportion of money and property in the country) are currently benefiting extremely from the laws designed by them to effectively benefit them through years of propagandizing about the evils of socialism! So misunderstanding #4 - socialism is not about the redistribution of wealth. That has been done by capitalism for centuries. Socialism is about ensuring a level playing field for all citizens. Some notable exceptions to the corporate-capitalist system that is the backbone of the United States economic oligarchy come to mind, namely Social Security and Medicaid wherein the body politic takes responsibility for the ongoing well-being of our older citizens because they are to a significant extent disadvantaged by the nature of being members of a labor-class but no longer able to labor. Thus, without the benefits of property of their own and the ability to labor to gain the necessities of life, the government takes on that responsibility to ensure the well-being of those older laborers that can not any longer so labor. This method of benefiting the vast majority of people with a means of retirement at the cost of our own labor is a classical aspect of socialistic systems, that is, taking care of people. Other systems, however, that Americans have massively failed to socialize to our detriment are Food, Housing, Health Care, Education and Transportation. While we do -to some extent- offer socialized education (in fact, George Bush's "no child left behind" program is a great example of an attempt at a social program gone wrong), the fact that we only offer sufficient education for free to the public to learn to take orders and do jobs is telling as to the final beneficiary of those programs, namely Corporate America. So then, socialism, really, is the application of economic science to the job of governance in order to benefit the vast majority of people in a state. That is, socialism is -the only sensible way to govern- since science is the only systematic attempt at objective knowledge we have. Rejecting socialism, then, is like rejecting global warming, something you can do only if you have a specific personal benefit to preventing it. As such, everybody in the world should be a socialist, and every politician in the world -does- claim to be one when they talk about their campaign promises. It's only when delivering their policies that they are likely to do less than benefit the public as accurately as possible.

Biblical Interpretation and the Problem of Evil

Biblical interpretation and the problem of evil

Someone asked me what is my method of biblical interpretation. And while I am not a “Methodist” when it comes to epistemology in general, the question is like asking “how do you know what God is really saying”.

The Bible itself gives an outline for how this is to be done, that is, in accord with the Bible.

The first thing that is required is the assumption that the Bible is True. Any interpretation of the Bible that makes some parts of it true but not other parts makes what whole thing false.

Of course there are places where this will seem impossible to the reader. This is the generally either due to the fault of the translation (since few read it in original language) or interpretation. For the most part faults of translation can be traced back to the earliest manuscripts we have of Hebrew and Greek originals, and resolved by exegesis and interpretive analysis from that original text, so we should focus interpretive analysis as the harder topic.

When two passages of text differ in their content but are both true, normally these can be attributed to differences in perspective. Either the author is different, or the intent and manner of their descripti n is different.

Thus I may describe to you my mother as a woman of great moral character or as a woman who was deeply flawed. Both can be true without contradiction, only on the assumption that no deeply flawed people can have high moral character can these be considered a contradiction.

That is, in the assertion of any reductio ad absurdum argument, the premises of the argument need to be made clear. For the sake of interpreting the Bible as true, it is necessary to flush out the premises in a supposed reductio and acknowledge that the Bible is inexplicitly (though often explicitly also) proposing that the hidden assumption is 5e false one.

In many ways this is the point of the regenerative power of the Bible, to flush out these hidden false beliefs and show them false, by changing the readers mind about them (that is, in the act of repentance), the reader comes to understand what God intends.

So in many ways a great place to start studying the Bible is in seeking out the points you think must be contradictory and seeing why the Bible says they are not!

Probably the most often proposed contradiction in the Bible is known as the problem of evil. God says that he is effectively omnipotent , “with god all things are possible”. And the Bible says that god is perfectly good, there is no forward ness in Him. And it says that god created the world.

Yet we see that there is in fact evil in the world. The naive conclusion is that the three premises can’t all be true:

God is omnipotent
God is good
There is evil in the world.

Of course, the Bible does address this specific problem but not in syllogistic format, and finding that resolution while not impossible is often more work that people are willing to put in.

This is an error, for as it is written “it is for god to conceal a matter but for Kings to search a matter out!”

The hidden premise where is that if god is good and all powerful then there can’t be any evil because god would either not allow it or destroy it as it arose.

Since we know that god does not do this, we think, god must not be powerful enough or not good enough.

But this is not what the Bible asserts. The Bible asserts that we ourselves are evil “how is it that you, being evil, know how to give your children good gifts....”

Of course accepting our fallen state is among the hardest things for most people to do (especially people who call themselves Christians!) , but this is the crux of the matter.

God allows the existence of evil for our benefit, because he loves us despite the fact that we are evil. Otherwise we would all be destroyed or never come into being.

But god in his infinite wisdom and kindness and patience has allowed us to come to Him for mercy!

Thus the reader is then left with a choice between two premises:

God allows evil because it is good to do so, or, god should immediately destroy me and all of humanity.

But God says that he loves us, because god is love. So is god wrong to love the wicked!?

No, mercy which is the grand expression of who god is as love, is good, and I thank god for the mercy he has shown me every day.

There are many other such examples of interpretive dissonance being the point of apparent biblical contradictions but the reader is encouraged to find them for themselves!

For we have one teacher, God!