Theodicy/Problem of Evil

[redhen]

It’s the nature of nature. All living things depend on living things for sustenence whether it’s wildebeasts eating grass or leopards eating wildebeasts. You and Darwin call it evil. I call it the state of the world.

So that’s just the way of nature? In other words God is not omnipotent? He could not have created a possible world without carnivores?

 

[Ferde_Rombola]

So that’s just the way of nature? In other words God is not omnipotent? He could not have created a possible world without carnivores?

That’s the way of the world that God created. All living things die. The manner of death varies, but the bottom line is the same. I suppose He could have done it differently. He could have done a lot of things differently, including not giving us enough rope to hang ourselves.

I think the question is not God’s omnipotence, but whether He exercises it on earth or exercises it to our satisfaction. Some people have the idea they can push God around and order Him to do our bidding. I don’t think so. Abraham bargained with Him about the destruction of Sodom and changed His mind for a while and God let himself be persuaded. What does that say about God’s omnipotence?

I believe it’s not healthy for me to question God. The world is the way it is. I believe in the Judeo-Christian God and in the life, death and resurrection of His Son and I play the hand I’ve been dealt accordingly. You play your cards another way. That’s the way of the world, too.

 

[jinminn]

That’s the way of the world that God created. All living things die. The manner of death varies, but the bottom line is the same. I suppose He could have done it differently. He could have done a lot of things differently, including not giving us enough rope to hang ourselves.

I’ve wrestled with this myself. I always seem to get into a cunondrum, though… it can’t be just the way he created it because he did it with full foreknowledge of what would happen and it’s a theological mandate that we weren’t supposed to die. There literally has to have been a fall for the redemption of Christ to mean anything. Otherwise we are (what I think far more likely) just evolved primates who are no the way up from ancestral species vs. having been perfect, then plummeted, and then slowly walked back up the moral slope again. Smooth, consistent plots are far more likely than a plot at infinity crashing down to 0 and then making it’s way back up again.

And this, again, is the whole problem of evil – just as you said it: ‘He could have done a lot of things differently’

Given omniscience (the ability to see ever possible way things could have been), omnipotence (the ability to do anything), and omni-benevolence (the quality of not wanting to inflict anything but love upon his chosen humans), the problem of evil asks what possible reason we have for suspecting that a deity with these qualities actually exists?

Those not committed to theological mandates for believing these properties have easily answered that he’s simply not one of them – usually that he’s not omnipotent or omniscient in the sense we typically think of (he knows ‘probabilities’ but not certainties).

Some people have the idea they can push God around and order Him to do our bidding. I don’t think so. Abraham bargained with Him about the destruction of Sodom and changed His mind for a while and God let himself be persuaded. What does that say about God’s omnipotence?

Some people don’t have the idea they can push him around. Some people beg and plead in despair for him to help them, which is a far cry more human and relevant than Abraham’s non-emotional game of numerical blackmail.

I believe it’s not healthy for me to question God. The world is the way it is. I believe in the Judeo-Christian God and in the life, death and resurrection of His Son and I play the hand I’ve been dealt accordingly. You play your cards another way. That’s the way of the world, too.

As someone who’s life has been flipped upside down with respect to the faith in the last 5 months… my response is that it’s not healthy for you to question god because it leads to disbelief. My last 5 months of questioning and reading has been extremely convincing that to think about these questions leads one to be extremely dissatisfied with any possible theological answers. They amount to non-answers or only possible answers that are themselves even more unlikely, contrived, speculative, and unverifiable.

Re-read your paragraph. My honest thought was that it would be personified by plugging your ears and saying ‘lalalala’ and just asserting ‘there are no boogie men.’ I don’t want that to come off as hurtful, but your response is to retreat from questioning and just assert what you have been told is true.

One final response to this: when I began to doubt I realized that I never had the surety necessary to defend my religious beliefs. I decided that this was not acceptable. I no longer wanted to be ashamed of ‘evangelization’, lacking in convincing reasons why someone else should consider my claims true, etc. So I embarked on my quest for knowledge. I’m far more satisfied and comfortable defending the propositions of atheism than Catholicism. That’s what it’s come down to for me thus far. Intellectually I can’t believe the knots I would get myself tied up into defending the Christian concept of god rationally. Thus, at present, my life is intellectually atheistic but I still allow believers in my community to pray for me and pray as best I can something like, ‘Lord, let me be convinced. I will receive whatever you have for me.’

The point is that no matter where my path took me, I wanted the ability to stand on as firm of an evidence and reason based grounding religiously as possible. I no longer think that Christianity is that ground. It’s extremely difficult to stand on and results in exactly what you describe. It gets scary not to understand how god could be like x but the world look like y and I was forced into ‘I just can’t go there’ or ‘there are answers but I just don’t know them’ rather than examining the explanatory power of the other answers instead… That’s what being open and seeking the best evidence is about for me.

 

[sannb]

One final response to this: when I began to doubt I realized that I never had the surety necessary to defend my religious beliefs. I decided that this was not acceptable. I no longer wanted to be ashamed of ‘evangelization’, lacking in convincing reasons why someone else should consider my claims true, etc. So I embarked on my quest for knowledge. I’m far more satisfied and comfortable defending the propositions of atheism than Catholicism. That’s what it’s come down to for me thus far. Intellectually I can’t believe the knots I would get myself tied up into defending the Christian concept of god rationally. Thus, at present, my life is intellectually atheistic but I still allow believers in my community to pray for me and pray as best I can something like, ‘Lord, let me be convinced. I will receive whatever you have for me.’

The point is that no matter where my path took me, I wanted the ability to stand on as firm of an evidence and reason based grounding religiously as possible. I no longer think that Christianity is that ground. It’s extremely difficult to stand on and results in exactly what you describe. It gets scary not to understand how god could be like x but the world look like y and I was forced into ‘I just can’t go there’ or ‘there are answers but I just don’t know them’ rather than examining the explanatory power of the other answers instead… That’s what being open and seeking the best evidence is about for me.

—It appears that you are more interested, jinminn, in winning the arguments, than in sharing the truth (planting seeds when evangelizing) and allowing the Holy Spirit to water them and bring them to fruition. It is not us mortals who convert people, it is God. We don’t mind being called “fools for God” because, we need to be humbled, not exalted. God helps us to stay humble by not always giving us what we want, He knows what is for our good, and His timing is perfect, whether we recognize it or not. It’s not about winning arguments! And also admitting that we do not know much at all in the scheme of things and asking the Holy Spirit to give us the words. All those “facts & figures” you have quoted are merely “theories”, none proven in any way, and if the world had actually existed without God, it would not have lasted this long. People would have killed each other in such large numbers that there would hardly be anyone left, because there would be no moral law, and no reason to not kill everyone, until only one was left standing, unable to reproduce.

There has been an effort by philosophers and politicians, over the past three centuries and more, to build a society as if God did not exist. That Enlightenment culture is built on three lies, secularism, relativism and individualism. They are components of what Benedict XVI called a “dictatorship of relativism… that recognizes nothing as absolute and which leaves only the ‘I’ and its whims as the ultimate measure.” Those three lies are weapons deployed by our enemy, Satan, the father of lies. Our job is to counter his lies with the truth. If you speak the truth, you will have an impact beyond what you know.

Cardinal Edouard Gagnon described a conversation he had with John Paul II:
“The Holy Father… told me, “error makes its way because truth is not taught. We must teach the truth… not attacking the ones who teach errors because that would never end—they are too numerous. We have to teach the truth.” The truth may not immediately enter in the mind and heart of those to whom we talk, but the grace of God is there and at the time they need it, God will open their heart and they will accept it. He said, error does not have grace accompanying it.” (Lay Witness, March, 1990, 6-7)

The first lie is secularism: There is no God or He is unknowable. The existence of God is not self-evident. But it is unreasonable not to believe in God, an eternal being that had no beginning and always existed. The alternative is that there was a time when there was absolutely nothing. But that makes no sense. St. Thomas Aquinas said, “if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence–which is absurd.” Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.

The second lie of Satan is relativism. To say that all things are relative is absurd, for that statement itself must be relative. The jurisprudence of relativism is some form of legal positivism, which asserts that there is no higher law that limits what human law can do. A law of any content is valid if it is enacted pursuant to prescribed procedure and is effective. Hans Kelsen, the leading legal positivist of the 20th century, said that Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulags were valid law. He could not criticize them as unjust because justice, he said, is “an irrational ideal.” Kelsen claimed that relativism is the philosophy of democracy. John Paul II said relativism leads instead to totalitarianism: “If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to … impose his own interests … with no regard for the rights of others.” In your personal and professional lives you will be pressured to be a relativist, to lie, cheat or steal. As John Paul put it, the negative prohibitions of the Commandments, which are a specification of the natural law, "allow no exceptions. Lying, cheating and stealing are what governments do best, and this is destroying our world. Look around!

 

[sannb]

Continued…

The third lie is individualism. Social contract theories denied the social nature of man. They spoke of a state of nature in which each person was an autonomous, isolated individual with no relation to others unless he consents. That is the origin of pro-choice as we know it today. Planned Parenthood didn’t think it up. The mother has no relation to her unborn child unless she consents. The husband and wife have no continuing relation unless they continue to consent. And so on. The autonomous individual is his own god. Conscience is not a judgment about the objective rightness or wrongness of an act. It is the individual’s unfettered decision as to what he wills to do. Whatever he chooses is, for him, the right thing to do. That is portrayed as the way to freedom. But “authentic freedom” cannot be separated from the truth. You are “free” to choose to put sand in the gas tank of your car. But you will no longer be free to drive your car because you have violated the truth of the nature of your car. You are “free” to choose to lie, to steal, etc., but you will diminish yourself because you have violated the truth of your nature.

We allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that the smart guys are the academics who think that something can come from nothing, are sure that they can’t be sure of anything and who think that freedom means, without limit, the power and right to do whatever they want. This culture has lost not only its faith, but also its mind.

Don’t fall into the traps! The truth is that God created everything to be good, the first people decided to disobey the one thing He asked them not to do, and death of the body, and a distortion of nature resulted in carnivores, nasty insects, murderous viruses/bacteria, etc. But, “happy fault”, that Jesus came into the world to open the gates of heaven, and is willing to feed us with His own Body and Blood, would we be open to believing what He told us. It all fits if you stop straining so hard to find what is right in front of you.

God bless you for your openness in explaining your spiritual dilemma. The world (aka satan) has placed much before us to block the way to God. Don’t let him win. And when speaking to someone about the Catholic Faith, it would have been best to have prepared yourself with what the Church Fathers taught, from the Source (Jesus), with lots of prayer, and openness to the Holy Spirit to speak through you. It’s not about “winning” it’s about doing God’s will in all things. His will is to obey the commandments, and to live with Him eternally in the beatific vision. The “Our Father” prayer says it all: “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” and that time will come soon.

 

[sannb]

After having entered my last post, I went to the Adoration Chapel for an hour with Jesus, and I prayed that Jesus would give me a Word from the Bible that He wanted me to hear. I had no particular request or intention, just a Word! This is what I opened up my Bible to: 1st Corinthians chapter 2:
v.4 & 5…my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom, but on the power of God. v.6 Yet we do speak a wisdom to those who are mature, but not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. v.7 Rather, we speak God’s wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory, …v. 12 We have not received the spirit of the world but the spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. v.13 And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms. v. 14 Now the natural person does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God, for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it, because it is judged spiritually. v. 15 The spiritual person, however, can judge everything but is not subject to judgment by anyone. v. 16 For who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel Him? But we have the mind of Christ.

Chapter 3 …v. 6 Therefore, I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth. v.7 Therefore neither the one who plants and the one who waters is anything, but only God, who causes the growth.

This is not a coincidence - nothing is ever a coincidence - we call them God-incidences. This happens quite frequently - as though the words I wrote were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and He is confirming through His Word. I wanted to share this with you because it shows how God works through us when we let Him and does speak to us. With the odds against so many “coincidences” in my life, I wish I played the lottery with these odds! I would be a multi-millionaire - which I am in a different way than with dollars. God has spoken to you in many ways, but you did not recognize where it came from. You assumed it was coincidence, I am sure.

I was also inspired to ask jinminn, red hen, and others who are having difficulty believing that God exists, to pray the rosary - ask Our Lady to prepare you and then lead you to Jesus. She will, and does these things all the time. She is the greatest intercessor. She is the Ark of the New Covenant, who carried the Word of God within her, sent by God to gather her children to herself for protection in this difficult time, and to lead us to pray and focus on God. She loves you and will help you, but you must pray in trust for her help, and you will be amazed at what she will do for you! Please, try doing this, with the attitude of a child who trusts his mother, and she will respond. But, do not do this as a test to prove anything, because our attitude is everything in these matters, and you cannot “trick” God. If you truly want to find out the truth, you will be sincere, and God will work with you. This is the truth!

 

[Ferde_Rombola]

I’ve wrestled with this myself. I always seem to get into a cunondrum, though… it can’t be just the way he created it because he did it with full foreknowledge of what would happen and it’s a theological mandate that we weren’t supposed to die. There literally has to have been a fall for the redemption of Christ to mean anything. Otherwise we are (what I think far more likely) just evolved primates who are no the way up from ancestral species vs. having been perfect, then plummeted, and then slowly walked back up the moral slope again. Smooth, consistent plots are far more likely than a plot at infinity crashing down to 0 and then making it’s way back up again.

And this, again, is the whole problem of evil – just as you said it: ‘He could have done a lot of things differently’

But He didn’t and that’s what you refuse to accept. Like good, intelligent athiest, you have a willingness to disbelieve. You have rationalized your disbelief and are now trapped by an argument you cannot refute. Let St. Peter tell you something I tried to get across to you:

           *Stay sober and alert.  Your opponent the devil is prowling like a roaring
              lion, looking for someone to devour.  **Resist him, solid in your faith,
              realizing that the brotherhood of believers is undergoing the same
              sufferings throughout the world.***  -- 1 Peter 5:8-9.

You may be past the point where that will do you any good. I will continue to pray for you that the Spirit of God will instill in you a willingness to believe.

Given omniscience (the ability to see ever possible way things could have been), omnipotence (the ability to do anything), and omni-benevolence (the quality of not wanting to inflict anything but love upon his chosen humans), the problem of evil asks what possible reason we have for suspecting that a deity with these qualities actually exists?

Those are athiest retaionalizations which dispell the kind of free will athiests, in another context, will champion. In short, it makes too much sense and is, therefore, theological nonsense.

 

[Ferde_Rombola]

Continued…

Some people don’t have the idea they can push him around. Some people beg and plead in despair for him to help them, which is a far cry more human and relevant than Abraham’s… game of numerical blackmail.

Such people include St. John of the Cross and Mother Teresa, both of whom spent years cut off from any spiritual contact with God. They never gave in to the temptation to disbelieve. They continued living their vocatons in the face of their trials, which St. John called “The dark night of the soul.” God put them to the test, they persevered and were rewarded.

As someone who’s life has been flipped upside down with respect to the faith in the last 5 months… my response is that it’s not healthy for you to question god because it leads to disbelief. My last 5 months of questioning and reading has been extremely convincing that to think about these questions leads one to be extremely dissatisfied with any possible theological answers. They amount to non-answers or only possible answers that are themselves even more unlikely, contrived, speculative, and unverifiable.

Re-read your paragraph. My honest thought was that it would be personified by plugging your ears and saying ‘lalalala’ and just asserting ‘there are no boogie men.’ I don’t want that to come off as hurtful, but your response is to retreat from questioning and just assert what you have been told is true.

Regardless of what you don’t want to come off as, your remarks are insulting. You have a presumption that I’m an idiot; that I have not encountered and considered the things you, in your wisdom, find so compelling. You say you sense I’m upset by your insisting to interpret the experience I related to you. The presumption there is I’m too stupid to discern one thing from another and that you, far more intelligent than I, can interpret for me. I don’t know if ‘upset’ is the right word, but I definitely resent your attitude in the manner of “just who the hell do you think you are?”.

One final response to this: when I began to doubt I realized that I never had the surety necessary to defend my religious beliefs. I decided that this was not acceptable. I no longer wanted to be ashamed of ‘evangelization’, lacking in convincing reasons why someone else should consider my claims true, etc. So I embarked on my quest for knowledge. I’m far more satisfied and comfortable defending the propositions of atheism than Catholicism. That’s what it’s come down to for me thus far. Intellectually I can’t believe the knots I would get myself tied up into defending the Christian concept of god rationally. Thus, at present, my life is intellectually atheistic but I still allow believers in my community to pray for me and pray as best I can something like, ‘Lord, let me be convinced. I will receive whatever you have for me.’

The Lord said we cannot serve two masters, we will love one and hate the other. RIght now you are in love with Satan and have thrown God under the bus. Without your cooperation, your ACTIVE cooperation, no prayer will help you. The first thing you need to do is reject Satan. Since you don’e believe he exists, that will be difficult.

The point is that no matter where my path took me, I wanted the ability to stand on as firm of an evidence and reason based grounding religiously as possible. I no longer think that Christianity is that ground. It’s extremely difficult to stand on and results in exactly what you describe. It gets scary not to understand how god could be like x but the world look like y and I was forced into ‘I just can’t go there’ or ‘there are answers but I just don’t know them’ rather than examining the explanatory power of the other answers instead… That’s what being open and seeking the best evidence is about for me.

Let’s dispell once and for all the noton you are interested in the ‘best evidence.’ You are interested in the evidence that seems best to you.

You read my argument to redhen about the Shroud of Turin and Our Lady of Las Lajas. That is scientific evidence. You reject it in favor of formal, tiresome athiest excuses which offer you no evidence at all, but only denial. You are free to call that ‘evidence’ if it suits you, but it isn’t evidence. Evidence of evolution is not disputed by believers, but for some reason athiests treat it as it it is. When you have no valid argument, I guess you have to create one.

sannb has given you some sage and valuable advice. I hope you read what he wrote carefully.

 

[jinminn]

—It appears that you are more interested, jinminn, in winning the arguments, than in sharing the truth (planting seeds when evangelizing) and allowing the Holy Spirit to water them and bring them to fruition.

You are correct. Though how do you distinguish ‘winning the arguments’ (also known as having 1) better evidence or 2) a better overall case) and ‘sharing the truth.’ Just as I stated, I’m actually extremely interested in ‘sharing the truth’ and therefore want to know exactly what it is.

It is not us mortals who convert people, it is God.

Exactly! This is why I proposed to everyone who is distraught over my current disbelief and questioning that they should just blame Jesus.

• He knew me before I was formed in my mother’s womb
  — Knew my genetically inherited traits
  — Knew the environmental factors what would form me during life
  — Knew every situation I would encounter
• Therefore, he knows my ‘threshold of belief’ (what must be overcome inside of me to believe)
• He is all powerful and can provide whatever is necessary
• Your premise: it is god who converts people not people
• Therefore (from the above): god knows what I need, has the power to do it, and it’s actually his responsibility, not that of any mortal

Given that I don’t believe, we need to be blaming him for this.

I skimmed the rest of your post, but it’s essentially just asserting quotes and statements as fact. Your facts come from a line of tradition that stems back to an event that may or may not have happened. If you can’t establish the truth of the event (resurrection), then the whole tradition crumbles.

Furthermore, this is why a cumulative case is far more intriguing to me: we study many areas where god may or may not display evidence for his existence and make the ruling based on that. Thus far, in nearly every area the natural explanation does a better job than the religious. In the few that are not so, ‘I don’t know’ works better than asserting something even more removed from experience and knowledge of the world (solving our existence out of what seems to have been nothing with a being who defies even further our notions of what types of being exist for example).

 

[jinminn]

But He didn’t and that’s what you refuse to accept. Like good, intelligent athiest, you have a willingness to disbelieve. You have rationalized your disbelief and are now trapped by an argument you cannot refute.

It’s not me trapped in an irrefutable argument… it’s the theist who can only offer possibilities but not actual explanations about why god would do such a thing. The problem of evil (at least including natural evil) has not been conclusively solved by any theist. Look it up in something like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and have a read through if you’d like. Presents both sides fairly.

It still stands: if god has such a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil, we have no clue what it is.

You may be past the point where that will do you any good. I will continue to pray for you that the Spirit of God will instill in you a willingness to believe.

How could you think that? Are miracles impossibilities?

Those are athiest retaionalizations which dispell the kind of free will athiests, in another context, will champion. In short, it makes too much sense and is, therefore, theological nonsense.

Don’t really understand this… Things that are simple and coherent are by definition not true theology and to be discarded? Theology has to not make sense to be theology?

 

[jinminn]

God put them to the test, they persevered and were rewarded.

You have no idea if they were actually rewarded or not…

Regardless of what you don’t want to come off as, your remarks are insulting. I don’t know if ‘upset’ is the right word, but I definitely resent your attitude in the manner of “just who the hell do you think you are?”.

I read the text. You said it was unhealthy for you to question, that’s it’s ‘just the way things are’ and then asserted your beliefs. This is the same as turning off critical thinking skills in this area, deciding that it’s you who must be wrong in any doubts that creep in, and then just asserting the creed with brute force. How would you re-interpret your own sentence?

The Lord said we cannot serve two masters, we will love one and hate the other. RIght now you are in love with Satan and have thrown God under the bus. Without your cooperation, your ACTIVE cooperation, no prayer will help you. The first thing you need to do is reject Satan. Since you don’e believe he exists, that will be difficult.

This is nonsense. I am not in love with satan. How can one who is simply asking questions and seeking the best answers be engaged in evil as you suggest? If god is the author of all truth, all questions I ask should lead to him. Instead, they don’t. They suggest that we are predisposed to seeking agent-based explanations for everything and have been obsessed with inventing religions for 25,000+ years. This one is no different.

Let’s dispell once and for all the noton you are interested in the ‘best evidence.’ You are interested in the evidence that seems best to you. You read my argument to redhen about the Shroud of Turin and Our Lady of Las Lajas.

The shroud of Turin was carbon dated by at least two if not three independent institutions and found to exist exactly when they thought it first appeared in medieval times. That’s scientific evidence which you reject

I suppose you’ll retort that they picked from the wrong part of the cloth. It was believers who wanted to test it in the first place; how can one blame the results? The Vatican has never released it for testing on the ‘real’ part of the cloth ever since. We have a reliable method that placed the shroud nowhere near the time of Jesus.

There’s almost nothing written about Lajas I can find. I’d be interested in someone who’s studied it other than reporting what they read from an internet site…

God is not limited by time. Let him present timeless, space less evidence to me. Literally he can do anything. Why not simply give me a sense of him in my heart? An inkling with the same urgings as my urging to eat, drink water, etc… or the same negative urgings as my desire not to murder, eat something disgusting, etc.?

 

[jinminn]

After having entered my last post, I went to the Adoration Chapel for an hour with Jesus, and I prayed that Jesus would give me a Word from the Bible that He wanted me to hear. I had no particular request or intention, just a Word! This is what I opened up my Bible to…

To determine how miraculous this is, we would need to analyze the new testament and determine what percentage of scripture passages could have been interpreted to apply to my situation compared to the whole of scripture passages. We would actually need to determine how many sets of two pages did not contain something applicable since I find it likely that opening anywhere in the NT will give you at least something on any two pages that is relevant.

This is not a coincidence - nothing is ever a coincidence - we call them God-incidences. This happens quite frequently - as though the words I wrote were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and He is confirming through His Word.

I am open to this. Will you help god show himself to me? If so, we can try either of these two methods:

1. I will think of a particular verse. You will go to adoration and repeat this experiment and ask god to guide you to the verse I pick. We can even just make it a chapter if you’d like, like 1 Kings 2. Then you post back and tell me what it was. To use your lottery example, this would be more true since to win the lottery you need precisely the right answer rather than having a vague sense of what you meant confirmed by the fact that the numbers were there but in the wrong order.
2. I will think of some theme in my mind and/or heart – like the virgin birth, the flood, creation, the fall, etc. You will go to adoration and ask god to tell you what theme I would like his (name removed by moderator)ut on, pray to receive the answer, and then type back what sense you received from him.

I was also inspired to ask jinminn, red hen, and others who are having difficulty believing that God exists, to pray the rosary - ask Our Lady to prepare you and then lead you to Jesus. She will, and does these things all the time.

I am also extremely interested in this method. My only question is how long I should do this before concluding, if no belief, emerges that god does not exist. ‘To the end of your life no matter what’ is not an acceptable answer.

You appear to be willing to put some confidence in god. Paul is my hero. He had nothing to do with Jesus and even killed his people and god intervened without his permission to assist him in believing. Why is this, or evidence proportionate to doubting Thomas, not a reasonable request?

You both (Ferde + you) seem to imply that the evidence is clear and that I’m spitting on it, yet here are clear cases of two who would not have believed if not given far clearer evidence than I’m even stating would be reasonable…

Or what about the two on the road to Emmaus? If I had a ‘burning in my heart’ and just knew Jesus was alive, I would believe.

Or what about the Ethiopian Eunuch who has scripture interpreted to him and then Philip vanished before his eyes?

Any of these things which converted people back in the day would work for me. I can’t see any reason why it is forbidden from happening today.

 

[jinminn]

The mother has no relation to her unborn child unless she consents. The husband and wife have no continuing relation unless they continue to consent. And so on. The autonomous individual is his own god.

But the husband and wife can verify each other’s existences, decide on the character of the other and make that decision. I can’t even verify that god exists and his ‘Word’ is riddled with things that are horrible but somehow inspired by him.

The mother also has a relation to her unborn child whether she consents or not. DNA testing would reveal that they are related biologically.

We allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that the smart guys are the academics who think that something can come from nothing, are sure that they can’t be sure of anything and who think that freedom means, without limit, the power and right to do whatever they want. This culture has lost not only its faith, but also its mind.

I don’t think they think they can do whatever they want… they do believe they can apply proven methods to understanding the world more and more. If ‘do whatever they want’ is synonymous with: make medicine to heal people, understand outer space, discover biofuels, harvest the sun’s energy with solar panels… then yes, they can ‘do whatever they want.’

Don’t fall into the traps! The truth is that God created everything to be good, the first people decided to disobey the one thing He asked them not to do, and death of the body, and a distortion of nature resulted in carnivores, nasty insects, murderous viruses/bacteria, etc. But, “happy fault”, that Jesus came into the world to open the gates of heaven, and is willing to feed us with His own Body and Blood, would we be open to believing what He told us. It all fits if you stop straining so hard to find what is right in front of you.

Interesting, I’m open to believing this but need to know:

• what form of hominid were the ‘first man and woman’? When did they have this special evil-free relationship with god?
• what geological/archaeological evidence would support there being no ‘carnivores, nasty insects, etc.’ before a fall event of some kind? So far there is no such evidence. There is tremendous evidence that the first viruses/bacteria would not have even had carnivores living along side them in time.
• what about natural disasters? Did these only happen with the fall? What geological evidence would support this case?

Without establishing the fall, the ‘happy fault’ case fails and we don’t even need a resurrection. We’re evolved species on the way up rather than having started at infinite goodness/relationship with god, plummeting and then slowly making our way back.

God bless you for your openness in explaining your spiritual dilemma.

You’re welcome.

The world (aka satan) has placed much before us to block the way to God. Don’t let him win. And when speaking to someone about the Catholic Faith, it would have been best to have prepared yourself with what the Church Fathers taught, from the Source (Jesus), with lots of prayer, and openness to the Holy Spirit to speak through you. It’s not about “winning” it’s about doing God’s will in all things. His will is to obey the commandments, and to live with Him eternally in the beatific vision. The “Our Father” prayer says it all: “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” and that time will come soon.

• I have been a strong Catholic for 6 or so years, devoted my life to daily prayer, discernment of my vocation, daily mass, very frequent confession, and missionary work. It is my commitment to seeking the truth that has led me to offer this devotion up in light of a better answer.
• The ‘Lord’s prayer’ is not reported the same in the only sources we have. For oral tradition being so supposedly reliable, why in the world could the ‘eyewitnesses’ who handed it down directly from Jesus get it wrong?
• Is Origen a good example of a Church Father? He believed in ‘eunuchs for the kingdom’ that he castrated himself for Jesus.

 

[sannb]

Jinminn, it appears that you are NOT interested in finding the truth, but you ARE interested in sounding superior and all-knowing with the myriad information you have “discovered” in your search for “truth”; apparently trying to prove to everyone who is a believer, or who will listen to your rantings, that their beliefs are wrong, and that they are stupid, unthinking, superstitious people in need of enlightenment; that only you have all the true answers. This is NOT how one conducts a search for the real truth of God, by reading only atheist theories, pretending that they are factual, planting seeds of error supposedly backed up by those bogus theories; then calling fact-based truth, with plenty of witnesses, that apparently doesn’t qualify as truth anymore, for you, if you ever thought it was truth. It would be better to search through Catholic sources, speak to good priests, etc, you heard it all before.

It is very sad, but if you truly were searching for truth you would have recognized even a crumb of it in all that has been posted, or at least tried to use the information for spiritual benefit, instead of immediately responding to everything with sarcasm and convoluted explanations that make no sense to the sensible. The devil’s trademark is twisting of truth, being irrational and prideful, along with many other traits which have been revealed here for all the world to see in your posts - they speak for themselves. You have shown us exactly where you are coming from and your agenda is quite clear - you have definitely taken hold of the bait and are being carried along on a dreadful ride to perdition.

It is ALL up to you because you have chosen, in your free will, the wrong side, and are not open to receive what God wishes to give you. There is no blame that belongs to Jesus in this - it is your decision alone. He is there and always open, you are where you are and closed (no matter how much you protest that you are open to the truth, you are definitely not). Unclutter the brain and go back to basics - and wait for God to show you the way. You want it all now, like a spoiled child, and when you didn’t get your way, you
ran away from home. Like the prodigal son, after eating the food of swine, perhaps you will return in humility, begging for mercy. And when you do, your Father will give you a feast.

We cannot measure God by the actions of people who are believers, because we have fallen natures, and will always sin until we leave this earth, hopefully lessening those sins as we go along, so to point out errors of believers (which you will always find plenty of) doesn’t prove anything except that it is God’s mercy which keeps us going.

I pray that the spiritual blindness will be lifted from your eyes and that you will finally “see” with clarity that God IS real, God IS kind and merciful, God IS patient, and God IS our Father Who loves us immeasurably and wants us with Him eternally!

 

[Ferde_Rombola]

Jinminn, it appears that you are NOT interested in finding the truth, but you ARE interested in sounding superior and all-knowing with the myriad information you have “discovered” in your search for “truth”; apparently trying to prove to everyone who is a believer, or who will listen to your rantings, that their beliefs are wrong, and that they are stupid, unthinking, superstitious people in need of enlightenment; that only you have all the true answers. This is NOT how one conducts a search for the real truth of God, by reading only atheist theories, pretending that they are factual, planting seeds of error supposedly backed up by those bogus theories; then calling fact-based truth, with plenty of witnesses, that apparently doesn’t qualify as truth anymore, for you, if you ever thought it was truth. It would be better to search through Catholic sources, speak to good priests, etc, you heard it all before.

You’re doing heroic work with our friend, sannb, but’s like talking to a rock, isn’t it. I’m shaking the dust from my feet and moving on. God bless you.

 

[jinminn]

Jinminn, it appears that you are NOT interested in finding the truth, but you ARE interested in sounding superior and all-knowing with the myriad information you have “discovered” in your search for “truth”; apparently trying to prove to everyone who is a believer, or who will listen to your rantings, that their beliefs are wrong, and that they are stupid, unthinking, superstitious people in need of enlightenment; that only you have all the true answers.

I don’t have all of the answers. What I have done is to look at the reasons put forth by many, including yourself, and listed tangible reasons why they may be flawed.

You and Ferde simply continue to respond without addressing hardly any of the listed reasons but instead resort to ad hominem attacks which are always fallacious. They illustrate nothing regarding the truth of your claims but only state, ad nauseum:

• I’m not really interested in the truth because a true seeker would have believed something you wrote (another fallacy [1])
• That I’ve hardened my heart and sided with satan
• That I’m arrogant and only interested in sounding superior to others
• Other various statements that critique style or perceived disposition rather than content

The key is to discuss content:

• Either the gospels are historically accurate or not. Suggesting that they have a basis for theological truth, having them criticized as not being good examples of good history, and then responding that I just don’t want to believe offers nothing to the discussion
• Supporting god’s amazing plan with the prior occurrence of ‘the fall’ but not being able to explain any of its workings given the accepted and verified theory of evolution does nothing to support your premise that there ever was a fall
  — Subsequently, if we are evolved descendants of great apes… we need no redemption

Does this make sense? Ferde, it’s like talking to a ‘rock’ because I’m offering objections and having them answered only by personal attacks (again, ad hominem fallacy) and catechism/dogma quotes (argument from authority/blunt assertion).

You overlook that I really am looking for answers and mistake my dissatisfaction with your answers (or lack of any answers altogether other than those in the two categories listed above) as my refusal to accept any answers…

 

[Slowlearner]

The problem of evil (at least including natural evil) has not been conclusively solved by any theist. Look it up in something like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and have a read through if you’d like. Presents both sides fairly.

It still stands: if god has such a morally sufficient reason for allowing evil, we have no clue what it is.

Jinminn, first, if what I am saying has been said before, sorry. I have missed some of the middle pages in the thread.

I looked at the Stanford Encyclopedia discussion of the Problem of Evil, and found it lacking. As I see it the problem of evil uses the concept of “evil” to create arguments against the existence of God. However, I did not see (did I miss it?) any proof for the existence of Evil.

According to a purely scientific, objectivist, and materialist understanding, there is no evil. We are composed of atoms behaving according to the laws of atoms. Human life exists but that is just happenstance and there is no importance or value to it. No philosopher has been able to construct a self-proving theory that shows that a human being has any more value or worth than a mountain on Mars. Thus, for one who does not accept God (or who does not have some other non-objective belief in greater power), there is no basis to accept Evil.

For people who reject God, Evil becomes something that is self-defined by each individual (this is both objectively and empirically true). For instance, one person says “I think it is evil for someone to do X.” Of course, then, a second person is free to say, “I think it is not evil for someone to do X, in fact I like it when someone does X to me.”

Ultimately, I believe that any concept of evil that is not grounded upon God (or some other belief in greater power) ultimately is the same as saying: “Evil is the feeling that a person has when a person does not have personal desires achieved.”

Take the example of rape in your [edit, should be, “the”] first post:

A believer can say, I believe that rape is evil. I believe this because God revealed to us what is good and evil. God has revealed that he is Love, and rape is an act contrary to Love of God and Love of fellow humans.

A non-believer can say, I feel that rape is evil, but I cannot prove existence of any objective overall moral good or evil. I oppose rape because of the way it makes me feel personally.

I do not mean to diminish feelings of repulsion toward rape or any other acts commonly considered evil. The believer has those feelings as well as the non-believer. My point is that the problem of evil is not a true philosophical problem because it assumes the existence of evil in order to disprove the existence of God. And taken to the logical endpoint, the problem of evil can be reduced to the following, “God cannot exist because he would not let me feel the way I feel.”

Interestingly to me, the problem of evil is reduced to a problem with the essence of Christianity: subservience to the will of God, or God first, me and my feelings second. The “problem of evil” reasoning is at its core a affirmation of the primacy of individual feelings and supremacy, upon which is built the denial of anything greater than the individual.

 

[aperture]

I do not mean to diminish feelings of repulsion toward rape or any other acts commonly considered evil. The believer has those feelings as well as the non-believer. My point is that the problem of evil is not a true philosophical problem because it assumes the existence of evil in order to disprove the existence of God. And taken to the logical endpoint, the problem of evil can be reduced to the following, “God cannot exist because he would not let me feel the way I feel.”

Interestingly to me, the problem of evil is reduced to a problem with the essence of Christianity: subservience to the will of God, or God first, me and my feelings second. The “problem of evil” reasoning is at its core a affirmation of the primacy of individual feelings and supremacy, upon which is built the denial of anything greater than the individual.

Not true. I think I’ve had a fine and enviable life so far, but I look at kids who are born to mothers with HIV and are pretty much put into horrible lives from the start, and have to think about that. So no, this isn’t an “affirmation of the primacy of individual feelings and supremacy.”

 

[Slowlearner]

Not true. I think I’ve had a fine and enviable life so far, but I look at kids who are born to mothers with HIV and are pretty much put into horrible lives from the start, and have to think about that. So no, this isn’t an “affirmation of the primacy of individual feelings and supremacy.”

Well, I have been fairly lucky too and can only pray that if I was challenged like so many I would have the grace to accept whatever blessings I had. One of the most inspiring things to me is the joy, hope, and love shown by so many cancer victims, HIV victims, and other victims.

But from a philosophical perspective, the “problem of evil” cannot be used to disprove God for the reason I explained. As a practical matter, the “problem of evil” certainly causes many people to decide to be angry with God and turn away from God.

Many people who suffer turn to God and find comfort. During a period of great personal suffering, I renounced my belief in God (I did not really follow Christ at the time). Later, a friend brought me back to Christ and I learned how God helps those who suffer.

Christians tell those suffering – a child with aids perhaps – that God loves them, that God will give them strength, God will not give them challenges that they cannot surmount, that Jesus died to redeem our sins so we can have eternal life, and that if they follow Jesus’ commands and spread love during their time on earth they can will join God in his Kingdom. In even the worst circumstances there can be love, hope, and joy.

 

[sannb]

Jinminn: What Ferde Rombola and I wrote was truth - we were not asking you to believe what WE wrote because we wrote it, but truth is truth and it has to be written down in order for you to read it. These are not opinions, but the absolute truth, from Truth Who is Jesus Christ.

Neither Ferde Rombola nor I attacked you. What we did was to share the truth, if it feels like an attack, that is you not being able to “see” what is meant and taking it in a wrong way. You must either go one way or the other, toward God or away from Him, it’s that simple. Life on earth is like walking up a down escalator, and when we stop climbing, we start heading back down. It’s hard work to keep going, but well worth it.

There is no way for us to come to an understanding because we are coming from different perspectives, different places; and the proof of God simply speaks for itself, in the complexities of all created things. An accidental explosion of matter (that had to have been created to begin with) could not have come up with the details that are part of each plant, animal, mineral, and all minute lifeforms - each is it’s own marvelous wonder. The odds of the “accidental” assembly of this gallery of life forms, in perfect working order, no matter how much time you are willing to attribute to it, are stupendous, mind-blowing, and this fact on it’s own refutes every argument that you posted.

God is with us, but when we turn away from Him and no longer desire His friendship, He lets us have our own will, and pulls back His protection, through our own decisions. The only survivors at ground zero in Nagasaki, Japan when the atomic bomb hit, was a house with priests who were prayerful. And none of them developed radiation poisoning, as well - this is documented. They were protected because they asked for protection. There are so many instances of people being saved under horrendous situations because they prayed and asked for protection. This is truth…not accidental odds in their favor. This does not mean that good prayerful people do not die - we all have a limited time on earth, and if they are taken, it was their time.

I like where Slowlearner is going with his posts - an interesting new slant from what was written before. The idea of suffering is not well understood. Jesus showed us how to do it, and when we do as He tells us, there is great joy and fruit that comes from it. So Jinminn you will never understand unless you drop your approach to all this. Since God’s Will is always and eternally the ongoing conversion of every soul until it reaches salvation, conversion of heart is solely dependent upon man’s cooperation with the Will of God. This is the bottom line. Keep going in the direction you were previously going, and stop the agonizing quest for answers to everything, which will never be found until we are in our true “home” in God.

Ferde Rombola: Same to you with your heroic efforts, and I too am shaking the dust off my feet and I am moving on! And, by the way, I am a she, not a he.