This evening I was surprised to find myself being referenced and commented on at a blog I had never heard of before, Anglican Origins Discussion, and by a person who for some reason chose to not engage my argument here at this site. Instead he chose to email the owner of the blog privately (they are friends), who then published a post about the contention in an article titled “Evil and its problems.”
It seems this friend took issue with my argument that assertions of “gratuitous evil” are illicit, by virtue of being assumptions that beg the question against God. “If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent,” I had said, “then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are.” Against my view, this friend had written the following in response:
It’s the omni-point and gratuitous evil stuff that is sick. Ryft forgets there is a fall and thus there is gratuitous evil. His convenient enthymematic premiss is that God ordained the fall, an admission which would have atheists rejecting Christianity outright.
There are a couple of problems I have with the statements that he made, things that I find a bit troubling as cutting against the biblical grain.
First of all, notice that he simply asserts that “there is gratuitous evil.” No attempt is made to prove biblically that some evils are gratuitous, nor to counter the argument that I had presented. Again, given the very definitions of the terms involved, it follows necessarily that if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, then it is logically impossible for any evil to be gratuitous (unjustified, purposeless).
And no, there is no need to posit that God “ordained the Fall,” for even if he had not so ordained things, God is nevertheless omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. That is, even if we grant that God does not know the free choices of man before they are made (as per Open Theism), he knew that Eve was reaching to partake of the forbidden fruit and had the power to do something about it. (Even the Open Theists will confess that God knows what a person is thinking.) But he did not stop her. He knew what she was doing and could have stopped her, but he let both her and Adam fall. Why? It would be my contention that God had a purpose in it, and there is a large host of scriptures that can be called to support that view. Would this friend disagree, and assert that God did not have a purpose in it (gratuitous)? If so, can he produce any scriptures which show that God is ever purposeless? And can he provide a coherent and sound exegesis of all the scriptures that state otherwise (e.g., 2 Kings 19:25; Isaiah 10:6; cf. Amos 3:6)?
As for the classical and orthodox theology of God being omnipotent and omniscient, he dismisses it with a wave of his hand as being “sick,” which presents itself as a wholly inadequate response. Throughout the centuries of church history, the catholic faith has regarded these attributes as theological orthodoxy across every tradition, from Catholic to Eastern Orthodox to Protestant. In every age theologians have treated the doctrines as a ‘given’, that is, something which is so obvious in the scriptures as to be commonly received. That is, until about the end of the 20th century when the likes of Pinnock, Hasker, Boyd, Sanders, etc., introduced Open Theism. If this friend wishes to deny that God is omniscient and omnipotent, more than just a wave of his hand will be required of him by those who search the scriptures for truths about God.
And finally, atheists already reject Christianity outright. While it is true that pressing upon them the penetrating reach of God’s nature, the implications of his holiness, the lost condition of man in his sinfulness, the exclusive and sovereign jurisdiction of God over all things, man’s inescapable moral culpability to God, etc., will certainly enflame their anger and enmity to God, that is by no means an argument to hold back on such vital truths, ever, which we are commanded to preach unto all the world. As servants of our Lord and Savior, our allegiance is to him—and him alone. We owe to unbelievers nothing but the debt of love—and even that is not for the unbeliever’s sake, but for the sake of Christ and the glory of God. Our faithful commitment is to God in Christ alone, and that covenant relationship we must never allow any man to come between.
As Horatius Bonar put the matter,
For we know that the unrenewed will is set against the Gospel; it is enmity to God and His truth. The more closely and clearly truth is set before it and pressed home upon it, its hatred swells and rises. … It is the Gospel that he hates; the more clearly it is set before him, he hates it the more. It is God that he hates; the more vividly God is set before him, the more does his enmity awaken and augment. … How, then, is this resistance to be over-come, this opposition made to give way? How is the bent of the will to be so altered as to receive that which it rejected? Plainly by his will coming in contact with a Superior one, a will that can remove the resistance … The will itself must undergo a change before it can choose that which it rejected. And what can change it but the finger of God?
