Tag Archives: Problem of Evil

In the City of my Childhood

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In the city of my childhood, great elms keep watch over blocks upon blocks of 100-year-old Victorian houses. Those houses would qualify as mansions, if not for the core neighbourhoods they inhabit.

The narrow, crooked streets of the Market area are defined by four- and five-story buildings with massive limestone pillars and elaborate cornices in red and tan brick. The historic painted banners on their sides proclaim the businesses which built them early in the last century.

I stand in an antique house on a street where spray-painted tags ride the back walls of garages with impunity. The tall windows, wide sills, the creak of a true antique oak floor instead of some modern imitation. This is the city as I knew it long ago. It is as it was in my grandparents’ time: a melting-pot of the world, falling down and yet still standing.

We are a motley fellowship around our hostess’s table. We have come here from the Congo, from Chicago, from English and aboriginal Canada, from the Russian Mennonite migrations, from Uzbekistan. Continue reading →

Epicurus and the Scotsman

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For quite a long time, this has sat in a dusty corner of Scienda’s back room: The question of Epicurus and the Scotsman.

First, Epicurus:

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to, then He is not omnipotent.

If He is able, but not willing, then He is malevolent.

If He is both able and willing, then whence cometh evil?

If He is neither able nor willing, then why call Him God?

These objections to the idea of a good God watching over our world resonate timelessly. Without reference to antiquity, they fall from the lips and pens of modern Everyday Joe:

Does God fail to be benevolent or to be omnipotent? He’s under no responsibility to be either of those things, but for there to be starving people on the earth there is clearly a lack of any one sentience possessing both benevolence and omnipotence…Why do bad things happen to good people?

Job. Job should be all I have to say on the issue.

-Commenter at The Areopagus

And herein lies the root of it. Are people basically good? Was Job basically good? On what grounds do we argue the goodness of humanity?

As Shakespeare would say, Aye, there’s the Scotsman.

If we redefine humanity as basically good, we must argue “no true Scotsman” to account for evil actions, or we must redefine good and evil. Both can be supported with limitations, but neither provides a universal theorem of the nature of humankind as a species, nor the origin of moral values and duties.

Indeed, vast systems of behaviourism, humanism, and New Age enlightenment-seeking focus on reforming humanity to be true to its better self, to step above the inconsistency that is us. One might even say, so do all religious systems man has ever designed.

But even that impetus to self-betterment isn’t sufficient. In order to bridge the gap fully, we must also reform the standard of good on the basis of mankind’s sensibilities and practices, and argue that no true good would ever fly in the face of those sensibilities.

Yet, if we reshape the brute presence of good and evil in both mankind and the surrounding world, we risk blinding ourselves to gratuitous, arbitrary, overwhelming goodness when it comes. And it does. Its documented presence and our difficulty recognizing it are an early warning system that something is awry with the moral compass of good men.

Thus, no true Scotsman sees the goodness of the divine nature.

May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man be found a liar… -Rom. 3:4

~Scienda

From the Archives

The Neon Voice by C.L. Dyck

Sin is indeed deafening. In fact, we might wonder whether it defines more of the Christian construct than we like to think. …continue reading >

Pipe Dreams by C.L. Dyck and Marc Schooley

 It’s impossible to know the “thing in itself.” All our perception of phenomena is characterized, conformed, and clouded by our humanness. …continue reading >

The Problem of Gratuitous Good

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…and it was all very good.

God makes each day out of love. It’s we who fail to notice it, or sally in and destroy it.

The problem of evil has a counterpart. Assuming that evil is native to our state—whether we consider it relative or not, and whether we consider it part of our original state, such as an evolutionary mechanism, or not—we still have to explain the problem of good.

Evil, it seems, is far more reasonable than good. We can invent a plethora of justifications for it. We’re excellent at that—it seems to be part of human nature to be able to explain evil. Even arbitrary, gratuitous, overwhelming evil can be attributed to natural selection, natural processes, or if all else fails, blamed on whatever deities we aren’t sure exist.

But gratuitous, arbitrary, overwhelming good? It baffles us.

And not only that, we’re starving for it. Our starvation for that overwhelming ocean of goodness sells millions of lottery tickets per year, makes Las Vegas what it is, and is subverted into every kind of greed and lust. We have an emptiness, and we long to fill it. Continue reading →

What Shall I Do With This Beautiful Decay?

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As usual, I’ll preface with the caveat that I’m no theologian, and have no aim to be. My sense of theology is constrained by commonsense and the recurrent question of what seems evident in the world around me. Neither pure rationalism nor pure empiricism suffices in the removal of cobwebs from my weird little mind.

And that, I think, is as it should be.

Though I tend to live deep inside my mind and have little to say in speaking, that inner world is filled and completed by the outer. Out the window today, I see thunder and lightning, the green of branches and leaves, the mist of rain on a quiet gravel road travelled only by those I’ve known all my life.

How, then, shall I relate to this beautiful, decaying world and those in it? Continue reading →