I had a short exchange with a British pastor on Twitter yesterday. He had posted a response to an atheist’s YouTube video on “Could God be evil?” Both videos ran through some fairly routine arguments for and against the idea: theodicy, the nature of “evil,” what God might be up to in “allowing” it, and so on. Social media has plenty of that; you don’t have to look very far to find it.
But what was really being transacted in that exchange? Was there a larger “truth” or “reality” being affirmed by its existence? Was there something important missing, that by not being mentioned transacted that it was irrelevant? Was something made a harder, more definite, reality in that exchange than what — on the surface—was being argued?
The landscape of the modern mind is fairly “Greek”—or as N.T. Wright posits, “Epicurean.” A helpful summary of the “Greek” way of thinking is “endless comparisons” or “comparing notes” inside of an assumed abstract framework, a lot of subtext, “we all just know” labels and terms, desirable outcomes. But those terms—and even the “need” to kick them around in discussion—seem to be smuggling something a bit sinister in with them.
American sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was fond of pointing out the danger of abstractions. “You cannot abstract time or space,” he pointed out to his students. “If you are ‘inside a house,’ it makes a big difference whether you’re in the kitchen or the bathroom.” The point there is easy to miss. The abstraction is irrelevant to whatever you are doing inside that house. It’s almost completely beside the point.
So if/when Christian apologists argue for “God’s goodness” or try to rationalize theodicy, it seems to me that there’s a double misdirect.
A third error is possible, that we as humans are in some way capable of judging “God’s goodness” or His efficacy when our actions are regularly egregious (by that same assumed standard). How we as a race or as individuals can gauge allowing “evil” where we all comically fall short at both levels would seem to end the discussion before it starts. “How could Jewish ‘genocide’ be moral?” Yet the “moral” objection becomes absurd when you consider Dresden or Hiroshima—wiping out entire cities. Maybe it’s only “moral” if you use napalm and atomic weapons. And that was only the “good guys.”
The first subtle problem is almost an an a priori disposal of God—the presence of historical revelation as a guide—and conversely, the implicit acquiescence to gather our own straw, and then with “Greek” categories, to basically build Him (or simply the “consistent” idea or construct) from scratch. A popular “prove God’s existence” meme is held up as a foil to believing. “You believe in His existence, but there’s no proof; you have to ‘prove’ He exists.” Sagan’s “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” might be the most famous.
But what’s really going on there when we chase that argument? What are we transacting by, even for the sake of argument, accepting the premise?
It’s not much fun, won’t play well in a dorm room with competing copies of Nietzsche, Kant, and a KJV Bible, but there’s no point in accepting the premise. It invalidates our own reality: that historical revelation is valid, and that through hearing, the Spirit has moved us to belief. The instant we begin a defense with those Greek tools of the “extraordinary claim” we confirm that it is “extraordinary”—while missing the point that Sagan’s assertion is in itself a claim. The stick is thrown. Why chase it?
The instances of cultural contact throughout history with a spiritual reality are too numerous to recount. The particular Jewish backstory and their encounter with God is reasonably sound—in terms of textual reliability—to justify belief and that self-identifying entity’s existence. The Gospels, and early letters are too.
But that same self-identifying entity is keen to steer away from abstract description, in the end asserting “I am who I am.” And when questioned on His motives, responds “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the world?”
So what we end up transacting when we chase the “prove it” assertion is a de facto denial of His self-defining character—whatever limited discussion God is willing to have on the subject. And that groundwork is tossed for some sort of game where we somehow both have standing to not take Him at his word—ignore it—and build Him again out of abstractions and basically make excuses for Him in the process.
Not a good look—and for the unbeliever, easy to see through, if only instinctually. Easily confused with someone who doesn’t, in practice, believe it either. (harshness disclaimer: emphasis on “confused” in terms of apologists seeming to backpedal; it’s definitely unintentional/misidentified)
The second subtle problem is a lack of self-awareness. At least in the West, given our accumulated assumptions, mannerisms, assumed sense of fairness, legal science, governmental forms. etc., an uncomprehending disconnect exists on how we function. And most importantly, how unique that is.
Geppetto and Pinocchio, in the whale, at the bottom of the ocean, arguing whether large sea-going mammals exist.
Where are we, really?
This appears in the faith/science “debates” and falls into the same trap I mentioned earlier. It’s a false path—it ignores the functioning power, explanatory and formative, that the Christian construct provides. I forget who said it but “if we didn’t have Christianity, we would have to invent it.” Beginning with early Christianity’s reformations in terms of the standing of women, slaves, and children—running well into the Enlightenment and the solidification of our right to resistance against the State—the motive force, the realities that Christianity assumed were the fuel and direction that made the West.
The list is as long as it is forgotten. The doctrine of the Trinity was lethal to emperor worship—no longer was a deified man the highest human reality. Christianity drove a move from “the polis to the people” during the “dark” ages. Pope Gregory created the practical notion of the “secular” in the eleventh century. Luther went on to coin the phrase “private person.” Democracy as an assumed moral construct with an assumed eschatology of peace logically followed. From the twelfth century on a parallel, more subtle, process began with the discovery of Justinian’s codexes. For several centuries, contract law, negotiable bills of exchange, distributed risk, concepts of informed consent and duress, all bubbled up from Christianity working out the legal language of the West. Science as we know it was a direct creation of that process—with all of the same subtle assumptions that brought a parallel explosion of commerce and discovery.
Whatever the “claims” of Christianity, in the West, we live inside it, like it or not. Whatever the claims of the Enlightenment, a close inspection reveals a trust-fund baby wealthy enough to forget its past, an effete ease of “just knowing” or “just having” the tools for success. It took centuries of painstaking work to not only create and develop those assumptions, and even more astonishing have them adopted and assumed at scale.
Coming full circle, the “need” to argue whether God is “good” presents as little more than a game of “let’s pretend” where the “Can Spiderman beat up Aquaman?” question is of no practical use. Unless the current popular atheist objections have some parallel way of generating that same advancement—from Rome until now—and a way of inducing those common assumptions [common Spirit] at scale, it doesn’t deserve a hearing. It needs to mature and present its case rather than tugging at our pants leg and endlessly asking, “But whyyy??”
What should be transacted in conversation is an acknowledgement of both the genuine nature of the existing revelation and its staggering efficacy or power over time. No, God’s not showing His hand—sorry—and Christians struggle with it too, constantly. But that’s part of the deal. And He says so explicitly.
Trying to reverse-engineer God by pure deduction, even for the sake of argument, is a contradictory activity where we pantomime the validity of the atheist position while essentially making excuses. Again, not a good look.
Both answering seeker/atheist objections head-on (in terms of our own thought-world) and communicating—transacting—that Christianity, not pure deduction, is the space in which we exist, would not only be better, but an authentic expression of what we believe, and communicate subtextually who we are.