Category Archives: Laws of Nature
How can a Good God exist when there is so much evil in the world? (part 2) The Thirst for Blood.
The Boodthirsty Deity of the Aztecs Huitzilopochtli
One alternative to the atheist amoral world view (see part 1) in which the moral question regarding suffering and death of children is written off as ignorance….. is that there really are objective standards of ‘ought-ness’ in the universe… and that having feelings of injustice are not silly delusions… not mere evolutionary expedients… but valid. Ie that such feelings are an awareness that some experiences and realities ‘ought not to be thus.’
If we accept this second view to be correct, immediately we must ask then how are we to know what is truly moral and what is not?
What is the standard by which we may rightly judge events, actions, and cultures as being Good or Evil… how do we escape mere subjectivity and cultural relativism?
And what about ‘Natural evils’ like floods and disease and distinct issues from Man made evils?
It is this second type of question which most people struggle with, and it raises the prospect that though indeed God may exist yet still he may not be Good at all!
Was the universe created by a malevolent being?
Is God a capricious tyrant?
I want to focus on this second line of questioning today. I will only touch on the Human factor in respect to evil in the world…‘why does God allow men to commit evil actions?’… by simply saying we are freewill moral agents and that as such we are free to live good lives or to be evil… and yet inspite of the apparant ‘licence’ we have to commit evil that I believe that one day we shall give an account… justice will prevail.
Does ‘Shit happen’ because God is not Good?
Aztec Human sacrifice to apease the Gods.
The Aztecs believed The Gods were in fact blood thirsty monsters!
They believed that if they did not satisfy their demand for Blood by plentiful human sacrifices that the Gods themselves would sleight their thirst by visiting them with Natural calamities… famine, Earthquakes, disease, etc.
This is their explanation for why ‘evil shit happens’… Satan is god!
That is a horrible thing to contemplate… and believe!
It actually vindicates monstrously barbaric behavior!
The Aztecs used to prey on their neighbors and feed them to the God’s.
There is a rationale here: either slay people to appease the Blood thirsty Gods… or suffer Plagues, pestilence, and disaster!
Some atheists will argue that this sort of barbarism is representative of religion in general. Ie Absurd superstitions which inspire Evil actions. And while I have already discussed the paucity of the atheist position, I confess that if I thought that Aztec-type rationale and practice definitively represents all religion… I would have never have forsaken Atheism! I could not worship such Monsters!
While I know that belief in a cold and indifferent universe cannot put moral restraints upon Human depravity, tyranny, and barbarism, I also know it does not expressly encourage it! Nor does it postulate a malevolent universe as does the Religion of Mexico.
Important Note: The Idea of Blood sacrifice is a common theme amoung the religions of mankind.
It is very possible this is evidence of an acient common origin from which many Deviations and dark perversions have occured as mankind has spread out around the Globe… drifting into darkness.
This Anthropolocical rationale fits in well with the Bible story.
Thus an original knowledge of Noahs animal sacrifice on Ararat… which pleased God… has been perverted into the abominable Human sacrifice of the Aztecs… and Their Blood thirsty Gods.
I will now argue that such a narrow description of Religion by Atheists as being a universal Evil… is one-eyed and naive. I hope that I can present an alternative description of God and alternative explanation for why Natural calamities fall upon the innocent, the Just, and the unjust alike.
Sinner or Saint? A Victim of the Eruption of Versuvius.
There was a lot of sin and vice at Pompeii, yet this was true of many other cities too.
Why was Pompeii destroyed? Man, woman, and child?
First, before I get into the main argument as I find in the Bible, I want to say that It is not at all easy to isolate and distinguish what may be deemed to be Natural calamities, from the actions and responsibilities of Man.
Many of the ‘Natural disasters’ which befall us, and have caused Men to blaspheme and shake their fists at heaven, are actually a consequence of human ignorance and error.
Eg. Was It God’s fault that Men Built Pompey at the foot of Versuvius?
Was it God’s fault That the CTV Building collapsed in Christchurch killing hundreds of people… or is the chief blame to be place upon human error and bad design?
Even with things like plagues, floods, and diseases, mankind must take some responsibility for his own foolishness, unsanitary conditions and practices.
How many children suffer and die of Famine simply because of the Lust for political power?
When we realize this, blaming God for a huge percentage of the suffering and death of children, and ‘good people’ is misdirected indignation… He is being unjustly accused.
In the light of such reasoning, is it possible that God is neither indifferent or malicious?
Now we are getting to the Nitty gritty!
What makes many people refuse to believe in a Good God is this final kind of rationale… The apparent indifference of God. In spite of all human folly, and wickedness… ultimately Does not the fact that God allows the good and innocent to suffer still make him responsible for it all?
Why does he not intervene?
To avoid stretching this question out to far I will present the Christian answer to the problem of evil in the world in part 3. I hope to do it with economy, and so I am sure there will no doubt be questions that remain… yet hopefully they will fall within the framework of what I present in the next post.
Superstition?
“When you believe in things that you don’t understand
Then you suffer
Superstition ain’t the way”
Lyrics from ‘Superstitious’ by Stevie Wonder.
Many People delude themselves about their grip on reality…esp many materialist Atheists… whom love to condemn *Faith*.
They agree with the lyrics of Stevie wonders Song, and pretend they only ‘believe’ in cold facts… things they ‘understand’… yet this is self delusion.
Stevie Wonder was blind within hours of his Birth.
This makes me Wonder if he understands what light, sight and colours really are?
If not, is he being superstitious in believing other people really do posess an extra sence that he himself does not?
The Hadron Collider.
Does Stevie Wonder Believe in Gravity?
How Many people… if any… understand Gravity?
Are we all being ‘Superstitous’ in believing it to be a characteristic of Mass without understanding how this is so?
Perhapse we are!
The Bible says of Christ that… For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (Col 1:16,17)
It interests me to speculate that the quest by Particle Physicists to find the Graviton… is in fact a search for Christ!
(The Un-created Necessary Being… The final destination of the noble quest for ‘the theory of everything’)
What more I am amused by the reality that even if they discovery such a particle that this does not ‘eliminate’ Christ, for Christ then simply may be understood as what imparts the Gravitons nature. Contray to the delusions of folk like Dawkins, such descoveries dont eliminate any so-called ‘Gap for God’…. Theism is not ‘In Retreat’.
The same may be said about the science of the Mind/ Brain in that insights into it’s Electro-chemical processes do not prove the monist denial of the incorporeal inner being as postulated by dualism. Nor does it disprove freewill.
‘Free will’ participates in the formation of Neural pathways, and in the release of neuro-transmitters like Dopamine.
It is false to think that science is proving we are merely ‘Automations’.
That is an assumption. An interpretation of the facts baced upon pre-concieved materialist bias… nothing more.
The Brain is an ‘Interface’ between our incorporeal spirit and our bodies… by which we ‘feel’ our values as physical emotions.
So I laugh at the hypocritical naivety of Atheist Materialists… their vain belief that they don’t live by faith… that they ‘know’ Materialism is true…. that it has been proven!
Socrates about to drink Hemlock
Chærephon, put the question to the Oracle at Delphi, Whether any other man was wiser than Socrates? The answer given was that there was none wiser. Not being conscious of the possession of wisdom, Socrates was perplexed, till at last, after testing the supposed knowledge of many distinguished men, he interpreted the reply of the oracle as meaning that whereas other men thought they knew, he was one of the few conscious of their own ignorance.
The reality is We all believe in things which we don’t understand.
Thus those whom refuse to accept a particular tenet of the Bible *Until they understand it* …are kidding themselves as to the rationality of such a refusal. They are imposing an impossible standard, and as such are committing an act of self delusion.
They are not (as they claim) exercising a superior epistemology which trumps Bible believing faith… but via arbitrary whim they simply choose not to believe.
Dont be duped by the modern propaganda that Science has always been in conflict with Revealed religion!
To the contrary I argue thus: By all means continue the quest for knowledge, yet has not the scriptures proven true enough in what can and has already been weighed and measured… so that we ought to consider it trustworthy in those things which are currently beyond our scope of verification?
I believe this to be both a rational approach, and a wise one. It is the very Basis of science…*Faith!*
Faith that The Universe is intelligible because it was created orderly via Divine reason.
What are you?
In a footnote to his paper God and Objectivism: A Critique of Objectivist Philosophy of Religion published in JARS, Stephen Parrish says
I find it difficult to ascertain exactly what Objectivists believe about the mind and the body. They reject substance dualism, yet also reject any sort of reductionism. It seems to me that their view of the mind-body relation is a sort of nonreductive physicalism. In this view, what really exists is matter—specifically, the brain, and the mind supervenes on, or is realized by the brain. This means that the mind does not exist apart from the brain, but cannot be reduced to it, by which it is meant that it cannot be totally explained in terms of the physical makeup of the brain. Writes William Thomas (n.d.a) on the mind-body relation:
What we call the mind is the set of capacities to be aware, to perceive the world, to think about it, to feel, to value, to make choices. How do these capacities arise? In many respects, the answer to that question must come from science, not philosophy. But everything we know indicates that they are the product of biological evolution and that they depend on our physical sense organs and brain, as well as on the many other support structures that the body provides.
Even the above, is not all that clear and could be interpreted in terms of either property dualism or nonreductive physicalism. I think that the latter fits in better with the overall picture of reality that Objectivists espouse. Actually, the mind-body problem is another area in which Objectivists need to work. …
Get to work, Objectivists!
Tell me, do you accept or reject substrate independence? Substrate independence is the claim that
conscious minds could in principle be implemented not only on carbon-based biological neurons (such as those inside your head) but also on some other computational substrate such as silicon-based processors.
In other words
what allows you to have conscious experiences is not the fact that your brain is made of squishy, biological matter but rather that it implements a certain computational architecture.
Do you accept or reject this claim?
[Cross-posted to The Third Watch.]
We are not Robots Ayn Rand. We are Moral Agents.
Though we are wonderfully designed beings *we are not Robots!* This is a monumental fact that raises human beings into another League far above the rest of creation.
One of the most self-evident of proofs that we Humans are dualistic Spirit beings, and part of a higher reality than the materialistic realm is that we possess Libertarian free will. Atheist Materialism is at a complete loss to explain this. Therefore they deny it. Evolutionary Psychology is the new big thing in atheist academia, and it specializes in theorizing away freewill morality. In Contrast the Biblical theistic explanation of reality actually has the explanatory power to deal with the issue as to how and why freewill and freedom are possible.
Materialism is a very shallow faith… a purely convenient atheistic whim that does not square with the facts of experience. They abitralily impose it upon reality by sheer force of will. The fatal problem is in a purely Materialistic Universe Liberty and freewill are impossible because everything is enslaved to deterministic causation. Atheist Materialists infer that everything in existence from the moon and the stars to Ford cars and lustful thoughts all were pre-determined within ‘the big bang’. Of course even admitting the universe had a beginning is a recent novelty for Materialists. They used to believe the universe was eternal and would mock Christians fo believing God made the universe out of nothing… that is until science proved that the universe did in fact have a beginning just as The Book of Genesis declared.
Now having quietly corrected themselves on that thorny issue, it is staggering to apprehend just how outrageous and blundering the atheist assertion of materialism still is! Not only does it deny freewill, It actually infers that Henry Ford was compelled to invent the Motor car! They are supposed to be inescapably determined by the Laws of physics! They assert everything that exists and happens, from the Big Bang to Entropic Death is supposed to be nothing more than the ‘settling of Cosmic dust’…the blind result of an explosion! It ought to be obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense that this is absurd! Many Atheists (Richard Dawkins included) hate discussing this matter. Many bury their heads in the sands of denial. In contrast Freewill *And design* is fundamental to Theism and the teaching and ethics of the Bible.
For eg. The Bible clearly teaches Gods will is currently * not being done* on Earth as it is in Heaven. The Earth is filled with Rebellious evildoers whom freely commit atrocities and perversions …. And The Bible says God holds mankind accountable for our wicked works… We are accountable to God because we are not compelled by materialistic forces to commit evil, Nor does he impose his will upon us. We act via our own choices. We are moral agents. Christ taught his Jewish disciples to pray to Their heavenly Father “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in Earth as it is in heaven…”. They were praying for an end to the free reign of unchecked evil. In the meantime we need Just government to mitigate the evil urges of fallen man.
Freewill Morality begins back in the Garden of Eden. When God made Adam he gave him the liberty to disobey Him. God gave Adam a choice, and it is in the Genesis story that the principles of Libertarian ethics find their origins. It is here where Man gets his God-given inalienable right to Life, and the liberty to exercise his own moral judgments as a freewill agent.
Consciousness and free will are Theistic realties. The problem of slavery to determinism is the ultimate proof that if Atheist Materialism were true, it would render reality Amoral as it not only negates the Libertarian ethics of inalienable rights, by rendering Man a mere chemical reaction, but destroys morality absolutely! Moral law has not foundation in a cold materialistic universe and Materialistic beings cannot be moral agents as they don’t possess freewill. It is a double dilemma. Most Materialists claim we horribly delude ourselves as to the existence of morality and freewill… They say the scientific man has exorcised these bogeymen ( This is what the foolish superstition of Materialism leads to and a good example of this reasoning can be found in the writings of honest atheist Bertrand Russell)
And then flying in the face of all this you get the psychotic delusions of Objectivist atheists whom pretend they can squeeze Inalienable rights out of stones. They are Bat shit crazy… bordering on dishonest.
Rabid atheist Ayn Rand was 100% wrong in her John Galt’s speech when she called The Adam of the Bible a Robot! The truth is *It is Her Atheist Materialism which renders Man a mere amoral machine!*
That is an inescapable fact! Rand was absolutely wrong! She is deranged! Her whole argument is Bunk. She is the enemy of Libertarianism because she sets about to destroy faith in the bible… and it is from the Bible that all the essential principles of Libertarian Individual rights and limited government are derived. (eg. Study John Locke). Thus it is my duty as a Lover of Liberty and a believer in The objective reality of Individual rights to expose the fraudulent delusions of Ayn Rand… a wolf in sheep’s cloth. A deceiver of Souls.
Theism escapes this amoral prison because man gets his life and freewill conscience breathed into him from the spirit of God himself. Ie our conscience is not a product of or determined by Matter. And the honest man must admit this view makes far more sense! It can explain why I am free to write this sentence… I could have watched TV instead. My wife was not a Robotic slave to inescapable laws of causation… she does love me! YES! Theism is far more rational than Atheist Materialism! Its explanatory power takes in the full scope of Human experience. We didn’t need to touch on the fact that atheist materialism is also complete at a loss to explain the origin of Life whereas The Bible has a brilliant explanation for that too… completely supported by Science proper! And it is from the Christian scriptures that Libertarianism and the conceptualization of Inalienable rights was born. I shall be expanding upon this assertion in future posts… so stay tuned. …Anyone hear the howling of Wolves?
Tim Wikiriwhi
End note: I take no pleasure in conflict. And as a Libertarian Christian I respect the rights of others such as Objectivists to believe what they like and say whatever they like even if it is against my own personal views. This is what freedom is, and freedom of conscience, freedom of religion is the most fundamental of all freedoms. It would be nice if I did not have to level accusations against ‘Objectivism’. Unnecessary conflict is to be avoided. A cardinal rule put down by the great founder of this Blog is in the side Bar. “ Let no unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen”. The primary goal of this blog is edification and the promotion of toleration, yet it must be remembered that Truth is the highest of values, and that Lies damn men’s souls and prop up tyrannies, and that as such Christians are called to ‘earnestly contend for the faith’. It must also be remembered that in a free society that there will still exist conflicting values and world views locked into a War of Ideas. Yet this is a war of minds not swords. Reason, and the power of persuasion are the weapons. It is in the contexts of Individual rights that makes a free society a more civil and just society having removed violence and political coercion from the Ideological Battlefield. Objectivists wage this war with relentless fanatical zeal in emulation of their Idol… The fanatical Atheist Ayn Rand. Thus it behooves Me to meet this Horde head on, and swing the ‘Sword of the Spirit’ at their conceptual throats and to decapitate their Ideological Queen. Objectivists should expect nothing less.
They give no quarter and none shall be given them.
Tim Wikiriwhi. Soldier for Christ.
Read more on Free will and morality…
Monism: Evolutionary Psychology and the Death of Morality, Reason and Freewill.
Update 4/12: http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/2012/03/what-are-you/#comment-8796