Practical Wisdom from the Sorites Paradox

Hello all, today I would like to try and share with you a practical piece of advice for your Christian walk. As stated by the title, the wisdom will be derived from the Sorites Paradox.

The Sorites Paradox

Simply put, the Sorites Paradox asks the question, "how many grains of sand make a heap?" Is it one? No, it can't be just one grain of sand. How about two? No, we are still lacking. On and on the questions go until an agreement can be made as to exactly how many grains of sand are in a heap, or until some other thing occurs. Another variation of this paradox involves hairs on a head, but I personally like to think of rain, and that is the illustration I will use in this blog.

What is a Storm?

I would like to convey an idea to you that I first learned from CS Lewis. An idea that is of very significant importance to any free being, but even more so to those of us who struggle with using our will for good or evil. The idea, or rather, the piece of advice that I wish to give to you is simply that everything we do matters. Every action you make, good or bad, big or small, makes a difference. Not only does it affect the world around you, it affects you. Lets take for example, a man named Aldous. Lets say that Aldous one day wakes up and is evil, does this seem right? No, because people don't just randomly wake up as evil beings. Instead, a series of experiences and choices add up and, having left their mark on his soul, produce an evil man. Please understand that I do not wish to get into a heredity vs. environment debate here, I am simply illustrating a point that I think most people will agree with, and that is simply that the things we do and experience affect us. We change because of the things that happen in our lives. Every action and experience is like a rain drop (for the most part anyways, since it is true that there are times where a single experience can change everything), seemingly insignificant on its own, but when take together with all of the other rain drops, you get a storm. Think about this principle and how it applies to sin. A boy may decide one day to look at a magazine that he knows he shouldn't, but just once. After all, will one time ever hurt anybody? Well, one time turns into a hundred and before he knows it he is hooked on pornography. Another good example is smoking. "One more cigarette won't kill me." You may be right, but the sum of cigarettes smoked will. The point here is that having a "just one more time" mindset is very dangerous. We cannot help but be affected by what we do, wheter good or bad.

An Encouragement

Keep striving to do whats right, even little things, because just like with a storm, every rain drop contributes to the whole. Every good act you do contributes to making your soul good. This is not to say that salvation can be achieved through hard work, but good character can be. Deny yourself, pick up your cross, and follow Jesus. He will give you every help you need, but you must will yourself to move that cross. If you stop doing evil, which will be tough, and begin to do good, then you will gradually notice that you yourself are becoming a better person. Every action counts, so don't say things like, "just one more time." That just may be the one time to many, when some damage is done that cannot be undone. This principle works wonders for the good, but great evils for the bad (good and bad refer to actions, not people, in this case).

Closing

Hope it helps! God bless and Jesus loves you!!

-Jon

Can God Sin?

This is a question that was brought up to me by someone on Facebook, and I felt like it was something that should be talked about. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

A Distinction

For starters, I would like to make a distinction between God in His fullness (which I would imagine goes far beyond our world and/or experience) and Jesus Christ; God in the flesh.

Can God Sin?

If God can do anything, does that mean He can sin? The answer is a simple and resounding no. So does this mean that we have found something God cannot do? Yes, but this does not diminish God's greatness at all. Consider this, yes God is omnipotent (all powerful), but He is also omnibenevolent (all good), which means that even though God has the power to do anything that He wills, His will is good. Meaning that anything He does will be good. Also think about this, can God force someone to accept salvation? No, for if God did this He would have to violate the free will He has given to that person; the free will to accept or reject Him. There are some things that God cannot do simply because He allows that He cannot do them (as in the case of human free will). If reason fails to sway you on this point, then let me appeal to God's own revelation, the Bible. In James 1:13, we are told that not only does God not tempt anyone, but that He Himself is not tempted by evil.

(Note: I do not wish to imply that reason is greater than revelation. I think that reason should be used to defend scripture, and the God who inspired it.)

Can Jesus Sin?

This question is, admittedly, trickier to answer. We know that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. So could the part of Him that was fully human cause Him to sin, even though He is also fully God? I have to say that I don't believe so, simply because God cannot violate His own nature. The difficulty with this answer arises in the form of the question, "if Jesus could not have sinned, then wasn't his temptation arbitrary? If so, then doesn't this mean that His human walk was incomplete?" My answer to this question is also, quite simply, no. I will now attempt to prove this point to you. For starters, let us consider the reason why God allows temptation. In James 1 we learn that trials help us to mature in Christ. Temptations are a form of trial through which we grow to become more like Christ. So, if God is already fully Himself, why does He need to experience temptation at all? From the outset Jesus was fully human. We are merely human, in other words, we are trying to become fully human (as God intended us to be, and as Adam was in the Garden). So why would God need to be tempted? I believe it was for experience. Jesus came down to earth for at least three reasons: 1.) To reveal the truth about God to us, 2.) To die for our sins, and 3.) to experience our humanity. I assume that the first two reasons are common knowledge to most people (even non Christians), and so I will focus on the third.

Why Experience Human Life?

We learn from the book of Hebrews that Jesus is our high priest, and that He experienced human life so that He could sympathize with us. So, having said that, I believe that the reason God allowed Himself (Jesus) to be tempted was so that He could experience Human temptation for Himself. This doesn't make his temptation arbitrary at all, it simply means that it served a different purpose than ours does. He had no need to be made perfect, He just wanted to intimately understand what we went through in our own lives. The question that might now be raised (even in some of your minds) is, "If God is omniscient (all knowing), then why would He need to experience our human life?" I think that the answer lies in the distinction between knowing and experiencing. Maybe to God, just as to us, there is a difference between knowing everything simply as fact and possibility, and actually knowing it through experience. Maybe thats part of the reason why God made us, so that He could actually know us, and not just the possibility of us.

In Closing

I hope this has been a blessing to you. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to let me know either on here or on facebook. God bless and Jesus loves you!!

-Jon

A Response to the Euthyphro Dilemma

The Euthypro Dilemma is an attempt to show that the Divine Command Theory is false. In this blog I will attempt to show that this dilemma falls short of accomplishing this task.

The Euthypro Dilemma:

The Dilemma begins by posing a question that is intended to show that the DCT is false. The question is, "Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?" Lets take a look at these alternatives.

If They Are Good...

If the theist attempting to defend the divine command theory were to answer the dilemma by saying that God wills morally good acts because they are morally good, then he seems to fall into a trap. This trap is called the independence problem, which basically says that if God wills moral acts because they are morally good, then these acts must be morally good prior to God willing them, which means that they are good independently of God's will. The full implaction of this is that moral goodness is independent of God, which means that God is merely a messenger for the moral law. This is not good for Christians, seeing as how they hold that God is not subject to anything outside of Himself. Yet, if the moral law exists independently of Him, then it appears that He is subject to a law outside of Himself. So this answer cannot be correct.

If God Wills Them...

On the other hand, if an actions moral worth is based solely on whether or not God deems it moral at that moment, then all moral commands are arbitrary. To illustrate this point, imagine that God, right at this moment, decreed that wearing sandles with velcro straps was a moral evil. Well, as far as we know, it has never before been a moral evil to wear velcro strap sandles. However, all it takes for an action to gain moral worth (or to lose it) would be for God to say, "thus says the Lord." Even though this option could answer objections to some of God's seemingly immoral conduct (such as His command to have Abraham sacrafice his son Isaac), I highly doubt anyone would really give full support to this idea.

The Dilemma

So, it would appear that we have reached a dilemma. If God wills good acts because they are good, then He is not as great as we had thought, and if an acts moral goodness is dependent upon God's decree, then morality is arbitrary. However, I believe that this dilemma can be answered with a variation of the first option.

A Look at God's Nature

We must first take a brief look at the nature of God in order to understand how this solution will work. For starters, we must remember that God is absolute. In other words, He is the ultimate reality. There is nothing that can exist independently of God, not even a concept or a quality. Lets take the quality of beauty for example. Is God beautiful? No, God is not beautiful. Rather, God is beauty. What I mean by this is that God does not merely possess the quality of beauty, but rather the quality itself exists because God is beauty. Likewise, God is not good because He adheres to a standard of morality outside of Himself, but in actuality God Himself is that standard. So when God says that it is wrong to do something, He is not saying it because He has a scroll that He found sometime during His eternal existence that tells Him what to do. Rather, God's decrees of right and wrong are a reflection of His own moral character. So in reality, when we do something immoral what we are actually doing is acting contrary to God's character; we are in a sense, rebelling against Him. We must remember that we are made in the image of God, and so we are held to the very standard of God Himself. Every time we do something wrong (like steal, kill, lust) we are violating the image of God that He has given us, and likewise, we are sinning against God Himself. Lets look at an example:

Lets say that you are a father, and you have a beautiful daughter. Now lets say your daughter has a problem. Everytime a guy asks to have sex with her, she agrees, and you have to watch. Over time, you would probably see that she begins to change drastically. She may begin to hate herself, and act out accordingly. Her sin affects her very soul, and she begins to deteriorate. However, her sins also affect you, her father. That is how it is with God. When we sin we are affected personally (and so are the people in our lives), but God is also offended deeply by what we do. The reason for this, as said before, is that we are made in God's image, and are expected to live accordingly. Our failure to do so is what is known as sin.

(Note: I understand that this may be difficult to understand, and if you want me to I will be more than willing to go more in depth with this subject in another post. The main point is simply that we are made in God's image, and as a result, we are expected to live accordingly. When we sin we are not violating some law that exists independently of God, we are sinning directly against God, who is the standard.)

The Solution

In a sense, answer one is correct. God wills good acts because they are good, but the source of their goodness is found in God's own being. He Himself is the moral standard by which we are held accountable. The dilemma fails to recognize this as a possible answer, and for that reason fails to conclusively show that the Divine Command Theory is false.

In Closing

I apologize for any confusion you may have encountered. I was expecting this blog to be much shorter, and much simpler. However, in order to make my point I had to talk a bit about God's nature (which is a thing of wonder and amazement). Hopefully this has been a blessing to you! Until next time,

God bless and Jesus loves you!!

The Problem of Evil: Evidential Problem

Hey everybody, today I am going to focus on the evidential problem of evil.

The Problem:

I am not going to put the evidential problem into a formula like I did for the logical problem. Instead, I am going to tell you the difference between the two, and then I will attempt to show you why the problem is flawed.

As you know (if not, please read my post on the logical problem), the logical problem asserts that a contradiction exists between God's existence and evil. As a result of this supposed contradiction, the argument concludes that God is not real. The evidential problem, however, takes a different approach. Rather than saying that God does not exist, the argument says that the existence of evil serves as strong evidence against God. In other words, it says that God's existence is unlikely. The argument uses the vast amounts of seemingly useless suffering (i.e. animal suffering, natural disasters) in the world to support its conclusion, and at first it appears to have a pretty good case. Think about it, what good reason could God have for allowing children in third world countries to starve to death? Why would he let natural disasters take so many lives? What reason could there possibly be for all of this evil and suffering? At first, the argument seems to have a good point. Even though its possible that God would allow evil for a greater good, it seems unlikely that all of it works towards a greater good.



The Assumption:

Even though the argument seems to work pretty well at first, it rests upon an assumption that, at least to my mind, greatly weakens it. The argument assumes that either: a.) we are God's equals, or b.) we are greater than God. How exactly does the argument assume this? Well, the argument uses the fact that we cannot seem to find good reasons for why God would allow certain evils to exist as evidence against Him. This line of reasoning is flawed. We must remember that God, if He exists, is greater than us. So we should not expect to be able to discern all of His reasons for doing or allowing something. Furthermore, we should not use our lack of understanding as evidence against God. That would be like me saying that since I cannot picture someone running a mile in five minutes, it is very unlikely that it can be done. In reality, all I've proven is that I cannot picture someone running a mile in five minutes. Likewise, all the evidential argument really proves is that we do not understand all of the reasons for which God allows evil, and that is hardly an argument against Him.

In Closing:

Hopefully this been helpful to you. I also ask that you please remember that I am not claiming to have solved this problem. It has many different aspects to it that make it a challenge. I am simply trying to show you that these arguments are not as strong as they might be made out to be.

The Problem of Evil: Logical Problem

In this post, I would like to take a look at what is known as The Problem of Evil. More specifically, I want to look at the Logical Problem of Evil.


The Problem of Evil is a philosophical argument against the existence of God. It comes in two main forms: The Logical Problem, and the Evidential Problem. For now we will focus on the logical problem.


Here is the Logical Argument:


1. God is omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful), and omnibenevolent (all good).


2. So this means that God is aware of evil, is able to stop it, and would be inclined to do so. Yet evil exists.


3. Therefore, God does not exist.


Solution to the Logical Problem


The Logical problem of evil asserts that a contradiction exists between these three qualities of God and the existence of evil. However, this argument can be refuted rather easily. All one has to do is show that God could allow the existence of evil for the sake of a greater good. What could that greater good be? One suggestion is that it is free will. Human free will is a valuable thing, and in order for it to exist, the possibility for evil must also exist. Aside from that, we also see instances where evil ends up working out for the good. For example, a person who experiences a rough time in their life and ends up having faith in God because of it. I would also like to point out the fact that many people seem to agree that suffering helps us to become better people. It is often a sort of fire that tests us and helps us to become better people. So for these reasons (and possibly others as well), it would seem that the logical problem isn't as difficult as it at first may seem.


The End?

Of course not, this is only the begining of our study of this problem. I will attempt to deal with the evidential problem shortly.


-God bless and Jesus loves you!!


PS: Remember to ask questions if you have any!!

Welcome!!

Hello, if you were previously following my Bebop Philosophy blog, then you have come to the right place.I have decided to take my ministry/blog in a new direction. I will be focusing on Apologetics, and this is the blog that I will use for that purpose. Also! I will be starting a facebook group with a focus on apologetics as well. So if you have a facebook, be sure to look it up.

-God bless and Jesus loves you!!