The Goodness of God and the Power of God: Part 5

A Robot Angel: Is this the eternal state of the Blessed?

So let's recap what I've discussed so far:

• God is all-powerful and can do anything
• God's actions can be limited, however, by His character and free choices
• Sometimes we do/allow certain painful things to achieve a greater good
• There's a lot of evil in this world
• Some evil is caused by evil humans; a lot of evil is caused by something else
• The free will reason for evil can explain some human-caused evil, but not natural evil--unless Satan has some power over natural forces
• Biblically, God sometimes intervenes to stop human-caused evil and sometimes intervenes to stop non-human-cause evil--but not always

With me so far?  And if not, why not?  (There is a comments section...please use it!  Well, politely, please.)

So let's get back to the character of God.  "Free will" is a popular theory, but it's not a full explanation for evil.  Even if you assign some pretty strong powers to Satan, he is still limited by God saying "thus far, and no further."  And Biblically, God does demonstrate periodic intervention to prevent evil--so Deistic claims that He just started the ball rolling and left it unfold "naturally" can't be called "Biblical" in any meaningful sense of the word.

So what can we know about His character?  If the free will theory is correct, this would reveal that God puts an enormously high value on the evil choices of human beings (higher than preventing all evil), but sometimes (rarely?) steps in to stop the evil that they chose.  There's also that pesky thought that the Telos for the universe contains a heaven of the Blessed, who are really, really better off than we are today--but free from doing evil (or even the possibility of doing evil).  So why go through all this pain and evil in the first place?

Some might think that a free choice must be made at some point for it to be real.  In that sense, then, the free will theory requires that for the best state to exist (heaven), there must be a real moral choice at some point.  And for that choice to be real, some will inevitably choose evil.  Therefore, for good to exist, evil must exist (or at least, have existed at some point.)

Think about the implications of that: that means that God is required to create a universe with a certain amount of evil in order to achieve the most goodness possible.  (In a round about way, we've just entered the "best of all possible worlds" theory...though this theory can be independent from the free will theory, too.)

Think of another implication: what of those who, dying at a tender age, have not exercised "free will" in a meaningful sense?  Infants who die shortly after birth?  Or before birth?  Are they permanently crippled with a "lesser" blessedness because they never faced a free moral choice?

Another implication: can God be meaningfully called "good" if the highest good can only exist because evil exists (or has existed)?  In His eternal state, was God not fully good because evil was lacking?  (Or was evil existing in eternity past if His knowledge of future evil existed in the eternal past?)  And if God knows for certain what He will create in the future, did He ever have a meaningful choice?

 

Ok, I'm getting a bit too philosophical here.  And my point isn't really to try to reason through something philosophically...enough of the rabbit holes for now.  Let's instead turn to Scripture.

 

So, when confronted with evil, what do we do?  We'll talk about free will.  Or we'll talk about God punishing people--that's why bad things happen (Job's "comforters" did this with lofty theological language about the fate of the wicked, to which God said essentially "Your friends are a bunch of idiots.")  But Jesus gave some insight on this:

 

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 And his disciples asked him, c“Rabbi, dwho sinned, ethis man or fhis parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but gthat the works of God might be displayed in him.  --John 9:1-3

Does this give us any insight?  Here, Jesus is asked a question by his disciples: who's fault caused this man's blindness?  Who did wrong?  Jesus said, no, it's not about sin, it's about displaying the works of God.

Of course, we know the rest of the story: Jesus heals the blind man, he goes along praising God, gets himself thrown out of the Synagogue because of his fanaticism, and people start saying Jesus has a demon because of this healing.

Is there some general principle that we can extract from here?  In my next installment, I'll hunt for other Scriptures that might show what Jesus was getting at.  Was it merely a very limited lesson, that the man was born blind so that at this moment in history Jesus could cure his blindness and thus show God's power?  Is there something more?  What does this tell about God's character?

Stay tuned.