God, justice, and mercy

[Black_Rose]

Condensed version of post:

• a brief introduction of Chinese Legalism
• one could argue that a “just” (Legalistic) God is not worshipping
• justice involves the impartial application of punishment from the transgression of law
• a merciful, compassionate God who sometimes deviates from justice is worthy of worship
• the enlightenment and the success of the naturalism challenge God’s identity as an active creator
• since the role of creator is no longer a critical characteristic of God, his mercy must be emphasized
• the problem of evil is an argument against God by positing that the existence of evil is not compatible with mercy

The Long Version:

The legalistic Qin Dynasty (221-207 BC), the first unified dynasty of China after the Warring States Period, can be technically seen as a fascist state even though Chinese Legalism was not influenced at all by European political tradition. Its citizens were ruled by a draconian code of law (fa) which was made authoritative by *shi *the legitimacy of the ruler. The code of law was impartially applied to all even those in the aristocratic classes. The code of law would be public knowledge for the citizens, leaving ignorance no excuse for any transgressions and giving citizens the responsibility to comply. The law was to set an objective path, dictated by the ruler, to strengthen the state, even at the expense of the happiness of its citizens. It ensured a disciplined population, controlled by the law, whose personal interests are subordinated to the position of the ruler (rather than the ruler himself) and the welfare of the state. This philosophy enabled the State of Qin to defeat rival states, Qi, Chu, Yan, Han, Zhao, and Wei, with a disciplined, obedient military, leading the unification of China under Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi (259-210 BC).

The stringent enforcement and application of penal measures means that there would be no attenuating circumstances for the offender such as past merits. This is similar to Evangelical Christian soteriology where one is guilty for transgressions against God’s law (the Ten Commandments) and one’s sin condemns one to eternal punishment despite any possible merit (such as good works). In Calvinist theology, one its five points is the total depravity of man due to original sin. Works cannot redeem one from damnation, only God’s sovereign mercy exercised by the unconditional election of those receiving his irresistible grace. Because of its insistence on impartial, universal application, such a system made no allowances for mercy, seeing it as a sign of weakness and an imperfectly administered state, ultimately rendering it vulnerable to corruption and incompetence.

For more about Legalism and Confucianism:
commonwealthprotection.org/AncientChinaLaw.pdf

I do not believe that a “just” god, in the context of the aforementioned Legalistic definition, is worth worshiping even if one is able to prove such a deity’s existence through logical and scientific inquiry. If such a god does exist, then the worship of such a deity would be driven by fearful self-interest devoid of any love in an attempt to evade the punishment of God, not of a relationship borne from the benefits of reciprocal love. In contrast to being an autocratic tyrant, God must balance his justice with the virtues of mercy, compassion, humility, and empathy in order to form a loving relationship with his creation (his subjects). Since such love requires God to actively engage his creation, a god who is detached and unconcerned with his sentient creation would be impersonal and “deistic”.

Before the advent of Darwin’s theory of evolution and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, the intellectual elite of Europe, influenced by the Enlightenment’s contributions to epistemology and political philosophy, still regarded a god as a necessary explanation of the universe’s existence and features. This belief was based on human reason from the logical of the cosmological and teleological arguments, not from revealed truths propagated by the clergy and tradition which were supposedly not backed up by evidence. Darwin and Lyell provided a framework to explain satisfactorily the biological and geological features of the observable world in a naturalistic framework, rendering God a superfluous hypothesis, and contributing to the decline of deism as a popular worldview. The assumption of the absence of God’s intervention in natural history became the new null hypothesis that would be accepted unless falsified by contradictory evidence. This assumption would be the current paradigm of naturalism and materialism where past events can be explained in the terms of present, observable phenomenon without recourse to the supernatural.

 

[Black_Rose]

The decline of deism, due to the collapsing edifice of teleological argument, was the result of the development of an intellectual satisfying, coherent natural history, allowing one as Dawkins puts it be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist”. Also Dawkins named a collection of his essays, A Devil’s Champlain, a homage to Charles Darwin who pointed out in one of his letters that the dystelelogy of evolution as an argument against the existence of God. Because the naturalistic null hypothesis is consistent with empirical evidence and its remarkable resilience in the face of attempts of falsification, one could believe that God did not interact with the world in important epochs of natural history, such as the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, and human evolution, that are critical to the development of an intelligent species. The success of naturalism meant that if one consigned God to the domain of what cannot be explained through science, then intelligent scientists, driven by their inexorable curiosity, faith in rational and empirical inquiry, and the desire for approval from their peers and reputation, would slowly usurp power from God by progressively explaining away the mysterious and replacing it with scientific comprehension. Some might infer, due to the success of the scientific method, that God is an extraneous, unnecessary hypothesis, vulnerable to excision by Occam’s razor for the sake of parsimony. Religion and science should not be competitors struggling to occupy same niche, where only dominance by one party precludes the accommodation of the other.

Because of the success of naturalistic/materialistic paradigm in explaining historical events through natural causation, there is no compelling reason for one support the hypothesis of God’s creative role. Thus, God would no longer be identified as an active creator, although his creative activities can still be understood in a laissez-faire context. For instance, God could create the universe through the Big Bang, and allow understood processes of stellar evolution take over, forming stars and galaxies from the gravitation collapse of clouds of hydrogen, creating a panoply of elements up to an atomic number of 92 (uranium) through stellar fusion and (for elements beyond iron) supernovae resulting a strong neutron flux from collapsing stars. He could also initiate the origin of life, but not intervene with the Darwinian forces of common descent through modification.

While God might not play a prominent role in natural history, science does not encroach on God’s role in salvation history. A literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account, of course, would be at odds with the orthodox scientific views of human origins, endangering the doctrine of original sin and the subsequent need for a savior. In salvation history, God cannot play a passive laissez-faire role since he must interact with his creation, apprising them of his identity and relationship to his creation and interacting with them spiritually, if not materially to forge a meaningful partnership and fellowship with them. In this context, God’s identity would not be tied to his role as a creator, but with other attributes such as benevolence and mercy. Unlike in the Enlightenment’s intellectual culture, the concept of God is inextricably linked a merciful, benevolent, and personal natural with the definition of God. A negation of these characteristics would then be the negation of the concept of God itself.

A common and simple argument against the existence of a personal God involves the incompatibility of one’s observations of the world and God’s attributes. It would seem that God’s omnibenevolence and omnipotence are incongruent with the ubiquitous, immense suffering prevalent in the human condition. This latter refers to the Epicurean paradox, a deductive argument demonstrating the impossibility of a benevolent and omnipotent deity who permits suffering, because it is assumed that suffering cannot co-exist with a benevolent, omnipotent deity, since its benevolence would compel its omnipotence to ameliorate suffering. The person invoking the “problem of evil” argument could then interpret the existence of evil as the absence of God’s mercy and a contradiction of his benevolent nature.