It is a mistake when Christian theologians explain evil in terms of God's gift of free will.
Because free will is not a cause of evil.
I mean: free will is not even potentially a cause of evil.
Evil comes from evil: evil acts come from an evil nature.
A good Man would be free, but would do no evil.
Proof?
Jesus Christ: He was free and did not evil.
If Men also had good natures, Men would freely do only good.
Therefore the cause of evil is the nature of things; the cause of evil in Men is the evil nature of Men.
If, therefore, you believe that God created everything from nothing (ex nihilo) - including Men - then this entails that God must have created the nature of Men capable of evil.
(This has nothing to do with free will. Free will does not come into it.)
But since God really-is wholly good, and also Men obviously do evil - then it follows that God did Not create Men from nothing.
The evil that is in Mens' nature is not of God.
Thus there is something within Men that is not of God.
Conclusion: Men are not wholly created by God.
(And the notion that God created everything from nothing is refuted.)
19 comments:
Solid! (And very helpful!)
"A good Man would be free, but would do no evil. Proof? Jesus Christ: He was free and did not evil."
This lines up well with what I consider to be Berdyaev's most insightful observation, "Jesus was a free man, the freest of the sons of men."
Authentic freedom then is freedom from evil. Or, more postively, alignment with God in the sense of being free to good and only good (which begs the question of why an omni-God creating from ex nihilo would not have just created in that way).
This is something I've been trying to communicate for years, yet it keeps getting countered by the old "free will doctrine" argument that posits that freedom can only be free if it includes the choice for evil, and that God had to create in that way because to do otherwise would render men mindless automatons or robot slaves. Remove that choice for evil and man becomes an automaton; a robot. An absurd argument. Was Jesus an automaton then? Nothing more than a robot for good?
If free will is a gift from God, then it is a fatal gift.
God creates from beings who are not wholly good. As you point out, this not wholly good part comes not from God but is inherent in beings, to various degrees, and pre-exists Creation.
This entails that men are not authentically free in the way Jesus was authentically free (free in the sense of being aligned with God). Yet is also suggests that men have the capacity to be free, if not in mortal life, then in heaven provided they are able to release the evil aspects of their natures.
I've argued that the free will doctrine is actually an enslaving force. Choosing evil over good is not a sign that one is exercising one's freedom. On the contrary, it is an outright rejection of freedom.
Evil does arise from evil; that is, the evil nature within men. However, the expression of this evil through choice is not and cannot be considered freedom. In this sense, freedom cannot even be considered a vehicle for evil for the simple reason that the appearance of or inclination toward evil negates freedom.
@Frank - Yes, its a matter of trying to generate a clear and graspable explanation.
Here I am (sort of) assuming that free will/ agency and evil are "orthogonal" -, independent, have no necessary relationship - can be understood separately.
Ultimately, of course, it is seldom valid to separate things - and free will and goodness are indeed related in their origin (as attributes of beings).
But I think that the example of Jesus as free and/yet without evil/ sin, might be the kind of refutation that might (ought to!) carry weight with Christians - and maybe shake an ingrained false habit of thinking.
The deep problem is (as you have often discussed) that people see free will/ agency as a matter of choices - when it is in truth a matter of a Being thinking from the real-divine self, in loving harmony with God's creation.
But that understanding is blocked by the usual metaphysical assumptions; and these assumptions are typically either unconscious, or regarded as necessary and entailed.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that free will causes evil. But it certainly could explain how evil could exist, even given that a wholly good God created everything. By freedom we can choose to take parts of God's creation and twist them to our own ends without considering God's end. The sins of lust, gluttony,. greed, etc, are examples of this. Food and our pleasure in it is one of God's gifts, but it is not an end in itself, which the glutton chooses to ignore or forget. None of this seems particularly abstruse or hard to understand.
Do you suppose evil is embodied as a being who is wholly evil, like a rival or opposite to God (say as like Ahriman)? [by that I mean dualistic opposite divine beings]
If evil comes from evil in the mirror but similar manner that good comes from good (that is from being to being via relationship or knowledge from a being), then that may reason that man stands as a neutral battleground (a microcosm of the world) in which either side wars for affection of the agent by enticement and invitation.
@NW - "I don't think anyone has ever claimed that free will causes evil. "
I've seen lots that do - indeed you yourself are doing so in your comment here!
If a Man was wholly good in his nature, he would never by free will choose to do evil.
So - how did those Men (all Men, except Jesus) who do evil, get to be created Not wholly good in their nature?
@A - Good and evil are sides in the spiritual war of this world.
Nobody is wholly good or wholly evil (indeed it is impossible for a being to be wholly evil in nature).
What defines a person as good or evil is the side they take in the spiritual war.
It seems to me like an instance of what you often decry on your blog, treating abstractions as if they were real. Is "evil" a real concrete thing, or a description of certain of men's choices? I am a restricted being, and I can choose to put my own temporary pleasure against the will of God. When God took on the nature of man (Christ), he also could have so chosen. The possibility of evil enters through our being restricted creatures, and being free to choose. This does not mean that free choice "causes" evil, or that we inherited the potential for evil from God; but that the possibility of evil arises through laws of necessity within the parameters of God's creation.
I realize that "the problem of evil" is real, and a significant stumbling block to actual and potential Christians. However, CS Lewis also dealt with the related "problem of pain" very ably within traditional theology. In any case I doubt if Mormon-style pluralism (which, if we're talking about stumbling-blocks, comes with a whole ream of its own) is an improvement. Maybe it is, I have not yet studied the Mormon theology books you've recommended here. But it's no doubt easy to attempt to poke holes in any such fleshed-out theology / theory of everything.
@Nathan Wright
If free will alone were enough for evil, then God and Jesus would have done evil, unless you mean to say that they lack free will. That kind of free will is good enough for them - it should be good enough for us.
I currently have the ability to freely choose to eat my own poop, but I don't choose to do it, because I have no such desire. The choice to do evil could be just the same
In other words, the cause of darkness is the absence of light, not something in between.
@NW - From what you write, I don't think you understand my arguments and reasoning. This is probably because you regard your metaphysical assumptions as necessary, you (unconsciously or consciously) see no alternative. Working within these assumptions - what I am saying has no traction, because it doesn't hang together.
It's a solid impasse, unless you were prepared to go back to first assumptions.
@VF - If "darkness" is evil, there has to be more than mere absence of good to explain it. Evil is a hatred, resentment, scorn of the side of God/ divine creation/ good.
If there is an absence behind evil, it may sometimes be (not in all instances) that the most intractable evil is derived from an absence of the capacity for love (since all good depends on love). One who is incapable of love *cannot* be aligned with God's creative work.
The capacity for love - which is different from the duty to love. There are people with great capacity to love who don't get to love because that opportunity never arises. The agape thing seems like human projection. Love is inescapably selective.
OT. Did any metaphysically inclined scientists stimulate/contribute to your ideas on negentropy?
I recall you had a post on 'what happens to the laws of thermodynamics if there is no box' - but can't think of a search word that brings it up.
@DS - That sounds about right.
@to - I don't recall it. Negentropy was - for me- a very transitional idea en route between atheist-assuming natural selection type theories, and theism.
I soon-ish realized that negentropy is a double-negative (and quasi scientific - it came from Schroedinger's influential little book "What is life?") way of conceptualizing the positive reality of "creation".
It is better (true-er, clearer) to use the positive term Creation.
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2019/12/negentropy-divine-creation.html
Note - In brief, I regard entropy as the spontaneous tendency to return divine creation to the chaos that preceded creation. But primordial chaos was not completely without the basis of creation, because it already had many beings in it - and beings are not chaotic but "ordered", alive, purpose, conscious, self-sustaining etc (these are some of the attributes of a being - not the definition of a being)...
But before creation each being was autonomous, uncoordinated, uncooperating. Entropy is the tendency to revert towards this.
Entropy is what makes death inevitable in this primary creation, and it was to overcome entropy (as well as evil) that Jesus Christ "made" Heaven.
Note: The confusion caused by attributing evil to free will is seen in traditional/ orthodox theological discussions of angels.
(These discussions assume that which angels are regarded as a separate order of creation from Men. I do not believe this is true myself, I think humans and angels are the same order of being and that we were all angels, spiritual humans, before our mortal incarnation - and some humans go on to become angels after death and resurrection - angel then being a kind of job. But in this comment, I assume for the sake of argument the traditional conceptualization of angels as spirit beings separate from humans.).
On the one hand angels are regarded as potentially incorruptibly good servants and instruments of divine will - which some theologians explain because angels have no free will.
On the other hand it needs to be explained how some angels (especially Lucifer) chose to reject God, fell and became evil: i.e. the devil and demons - which implies they must have free will.
Orthodox theologians found, and find, this very difficult to explain; and I have seen convoluted explanations that attribute free will to angels for a short period after their creation, during which each makes an irrevocable choice for or against God - and then the loss of free will.
But the difference between good and bad angels can be explained in terms of their all having free will, but angels having good and bad natures. The good angels choose to serve God, and bad angels choose to oppose God in accordance with their natures.
However, if the theologian assumes that God created everything from nothing, then the existence of good and bad angels must be attributed to God's creation - and there is the problem of why a God who is supposed to be wholly good, would deliberately create bad angels - this makes no sense.
This is when "free will" is introduced as a cause of evil, because it is used to distance God from the creation of bad angels. The idea then becomes that God created all angels good - having good natures, but some of the good-natured angels then chose to become bad.
This bizarre and incoherent explanation is made necessary because God cannot be allowed to create bad angels, therefore the badness of an angel is attributed to its free will.
It is this kind of traditional orthodox Christian theological reasoning - i.e. which assumes that all beings are created from nothing by God and all beings are created good; and goes on to attribute the existence of evil to free will - that the above post is intended to refute.
This is a complex subject I am grappling with, but I have a couple of comments: in no particular order:
I think any discussion of primordial chaos makes no sense if we believe Godcreated everything. By definition, there was no chaos that pre-dated this creation..
Next, it seems that God creating evil misses the possibility that what we describe as evil may simply be something that exists as a result of the nature of things. I am struggling with an example, but if I construct a beautiful skyscraper and someone either jumps off, is pushed off, or merely loses his balance and falls off, the result is the same. There are certain laws of nature that dictate consequences when one interacts with them. (Think gasoline, oxygen, and a spark. You can power an automobile or burn a city down.) Both of these are the result of the laws inherent in the nature of gasoline. It is possible that the creation of free will means free to choose (absolutely) and whether one chooses good or evil is one of the degrees of freedom inherent in that free will.
@JC - It is Not a complex subject in itself.
It is artificially made complex because assuming both that God created everything from nothing and that God is wholly good, means that nothing can be evil - yet there Is evil.
Even if there was one single evil thing in all of reality, it would still contradict the goodness of God, if that God created everything from nothing.
The complexity is an artefact from trying to explain-away this plain incoherence - the complexity (and abstraction) functions (IMO) to confuse and stun clarity and comprehension of thinking, until such a point where the incoherence goes unnoticed.
Everything gets simple if it is acknowledged that God didn't create everything from nothing. Of course, this is church dogma - but it isn't Biblical.
Nothing in the Bible and no statement attributed to Jesus states plainly that God created everything from nothing - which surely it would have don if this was regarded as a necessary foundational dogma.
But creation-from-nothing needs to be rejected *anyway*, because it makes the goodness of God incoherent - and God's goodness is vital to a Christian. It is (to me) utterly appalling that most Christians are Much more willing (almost eager) to sacrifice, obfuscate, and obscure God's absolute goodness, than to reject the (originally not-Christian) theological-philosophical concept of creation-from-nothing.
Hmmm processing … processing … processing …
I have to noodle this some. Thanks for the additional thoughts.
A thought: Evil is bounded, Good is expansive; yet, very often, both function in an inverted way in our thinking. One hates, bounds, inverts; the other loves, expands, clarifies. Free will is a blessing that allows for a clear understanding of reality. God is wholly good, knowing evil for what it is beforehand, He made this kind of creation in which we would develop to experience evil within ourselves, so that we would have the chance to learn the constraints of the situation, but then recognize the expansiveness of Good, leading us all to Salvation. Hence the importance of Jesus Christ.
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