The Problem Of Pain

Any attempt to justify pain will invariably evoke a bitter response towards the writer. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear from the outset. I am not arguing that human pain and suffering are not painful. I am however arguing, that those hurts are both necessary and inevitable in this fallen world. No matter which system of thought you believe, it must answer this question, “How do you explain the source of evil and suffering in the world?” If you believe in an all-loving, all-powerful God, the question becomes even more troubling, “How do you reconcile this pain and suffering in the world with this concept of God?”

The problem of reconciling an all-loving, all-powerful God with human pain is insoluble, if we do not accept the truth about the fall of man. Not only are we imperfect creatures because of the fall, we are inherently rebellious towards God. The rebellious human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender itself, provided all is well. Both error and sin have this characteristic. The deeper they are, the less their victim suspects their existence. Pain however, is unmasked and everyone knows that something is wrong when they are being hurt (unless they are a sadist). As C.S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world”. Most people know how hard it can be to turn their thoughts toward God when all is well. Why ask for your daily bread, when you own the bakery, right? To say we “have all we want” is a terrible statement when that “all” does not include God.

The problem becomes even more insoluble, if we do not understand fully what it means to have free will. Free will is the ability to make a choice without outside coercion or pressure. When God created human beings He gave them free will. This of course means that we can choose either good or evil. There is no such thing as creating a free creature that has no possibility of choosing evil. You may attribute miracles to Him, not nonsense. If a thing is free to be good, it also has to be free to be evil. Someone will probably ask, “Well was it better to create or not to create given this possibility of evil? Why create in the first place if He knew people like, say, Hitler would exist?” I do not know what the best theologians or philosophers would say to that, but this is what I think. We are here, so obviously He thought it was worth the risk. Free will, even though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes life worth living. Try to exclude the possibility of evil (which the existence of free wills involve), and you very quickly find that you have excluded life itself. When children do bad, are their parents responsible? Parents are not morally responsible because human beings are free moral agents not robots. If we do not haul parents before the law courts to answer the charge of “bringing someone into the world who chose to break the law”; then we should not point an accusing finger at God because He created people who chose to do evil.

Another important point to understand about free will is that a thing can be in accordance with your will one way and not in another. It may be quite sensible for a parent to tell their child, “I’m not going to make you do your homework, you have to do it on your own”. Then they realize that the child is not doing the homework. This is against the will of the parent. They would prefer if the child did its homework. But on the other hand, it is their will which has left the child free to be delinquent. It is the same in the universe. God has not willed evil, but His will (that we have free will), has made evil possible. It is men, not God, who are responsible for slavery, genocide and every unspeakable evil that one can imagine. The gift of free will then is like a two-edged sword. Not by nature of the giver, but by the nature of the recipient.

The problem remains insoluble so long as we define “love” from a purely human standpoint. We attach an extremely trivial meaning to the word “love”, compared to Divine love, which is how God loves. As Traherene in Centuries of Meditation put it, “Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.” The restoration process, albeit painful, is for our own good and ultimately His glory.

In this fallen world that is still under the dominion of sin, everyone will be rejected and hurt in some way. The beauty about God’s goodness is that, even when we are wounded He can still use it for our good and the advancement of His redemptive purposes. So that we can all say to those who choose to serve like Judas, rather than John, what Joseph told his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good…” (Genesis 50:20).

Consequences Of Darwinian Morality

It seems that Darwinian fundamentalism is on the verge of spilling over from biology into almost every sphere of life. If your are into politics there is “Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom”. Is economics your thing? Then you might want to consult, “Economics as an Evolutionary Science”. Lawyers, you are also covered with titles such as, “Evolutionary Jurisprudence” or “Law, Biology and Culture: The Evolution of Law”. Today, Darwin’s disciples are touting evolution as all-encompassing. Culture can no longer be separated from biology they tell us, for culture itself is merely the product of evolutionary forces. If that is true of culture, it is also true of morality. If any society embraces this all-encompassing evolutionary system of thought, the results will be devastating. Especially in the area of morality. Hear what some of the most “learned” Darwinists think about certain moral issues.

First up is Steven Pinker of MIT, considered by many to be one of the leading thinkers in the field of cognitive science. He wrote an article in the New York Times applying his brand of evolutionary psychology to the issue of infanticide. This was around the time the story broke in New York about a teenage girl, who delivered her baby at a school dance and then dumped it in the trash. He began talking about how, “we must understand teenagers who kill their newborns”, because infanticide “has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history”. His reasoning was that since it was so ubiquitous, it must have been preserved by natural selection, which therefore means it must have an adaptive function. He went on, “if a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favour the healthiest in the litter or try again later on”. Lest the reader be misled, Mr. Pinker is still speaking about human babies, not cats. Because of natural selection he goes on, “a capacity for neonanticide is built into the biological design of our parental emotions”. These remarks should not come as a total surprise though. At a symposium studying infanticide among animals, many of the participants agreed that “infanticide can no longer be called ‘abnormal’. Instead it is as ‘normal’ as parenting instincts, sex-drives and self-defense,” and may even be a beneficial evolutionary adaptation.

On the matter of rape, it gets even worse. In a book titled, “The Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion”, the authors (two university professors), made the claim that rape is not a pathology, biologically speaking. Instead they “reassured” us it is an evolutionary adaptation for maximizing reproductive success. The book even goes so far as to call rape, “a natural biological phenomenon that is a product of the human evolutionary heritage”. At this point, the dangers of higher “education” become glaringly obvious. It is quite possible to be highly educated, but yet still be a fool. One of the biggest problems in the world today is that the educated fools are so sure of themselves whilst the wiser people are so full of doubt (but that is another story).

A local writer commenting on the issue of homosexuality asked what would be next. Would people be soon arguing to remove the taboo on sex with animals? Well, if Princeton University professor Peter Singer gets his way, the answer to that question is yes. In his article titled “Heavy Petting”, he makes it clear from the get go that he is attacking biblical morality (at least give him points for barking up the right tree). He writes, “in the West, we have a Judeo-Christian tradition” which teaches “humans alone are made in the image of God”. “In Genesis, God gives humans dominion over the animals”. He however maintains that, “we are animals” therefore “sex across the species ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings”. This sick mentality is not restricted to academia. In 2002 a play opened on Broadway called “The Goat, or, Who Is Sylvia?”. It featured a successful architect who confesses with his wife that he has fallen in love with someone else. The someone else is, you guessed it, a goat named Sylvia. With a culture already desensitized to adultery, the playwrights apparently decided to probe the waters of beastiality.

Picture for a moment a culture driven by this kind of Darwinian logic. Even though this way of thinking is fatuous, it is still very popular, why? Because it promises some kind of morality based on science instead of religion. The logical flaw in such a system of morality however, is that it cuts its own throat, philosophically speaking. Philosophically speaking, it is a self-defeatist or self-referentially absurd (or quite simply, it is dumb). For if all of our ideas are products of evolution, then so is the idea of evolution itself. At the pinnacle of this fatuity, is the presumption that only other people’s views have evolved, and are not objectively true or right, whilst the evolutionary view, somehow magically immune from this same process, alone remains true and objective. God help us all, if Darwinian fundamentalism spills over from the biology lab into other areas of public life.

Keeping Religion In Her Place

Since most secularists are too “intelligent” to directly attack religion, they put it in the values realm. Case in point. A recent writer started began by stating, “Mathematics and certain sciences can provide definite answers. Politics, religion and everything under the heading of “ideas” are ephemeral and there is no end to arguments on topics which are simply ‘opinion’.” Many of the problems in western society is the direct result of such thinking. Thinking that is locked in the past of the Enlightenment period. As a result religion is trapped in the private values realm, where relativism reigns supreme. This is where people say, “What might be true for you, is not true for me. That’s just your opinion.” Secularists tout their ideas as rational and unbiased whilst implying that religious views are subjective “ideas”. Quite apart from anything else, this is a lie. We all come to the table with prior experiences, personal beliefs and other interests. A popular slogan in the philosophy of science is, “All facts are theory-laden”. Secular humanism, materialism, modernism and post-modernism now masquerade in the public square under the guise of “facts”. It is impossible to think, period, without some prior philosophical commitment. Our minds are influenced by the spiritual stance we take, whether it be for God or against Him. We are inherently religious beings, created to be in a relationship with God. If we reject Him we do not stop being religious, we simply find some other ultimate principles upon which to base our lives – Science/Reason for some, boys’ philosophies for others. The question is not which view is religious and which is purely rational. The real question is, which view is true and which is false? It is when we honestly answer this question, we will realize what Francis Schaffer said is so true, “Christianity is not a series of truths in the plural, but rather truth spelled with a capital “T”. Truth about total reality, not just about religious things.” Once these false ideas are rooted out, people will be able to run the country better.

Old Testament Miracle A Historical Fact

There is a writer who of late seems to take great pride in mocking the account given in the book of Jonah (1:17). Unbelievers, and false teachers in the church have for years rejected this miracle, calling it fiction. However, Jesus Himself regarded it as a historical fact. He used the incident of Jonah and the great fish (a whale according to our Lord), to illustrate His own death, burial and resurrection (Matthew 12:39-41). Skeptics who deny this miracle should keep in mind that they have to reckon with the very words of Jesus. Perhaps though, these most learned skeptics are wiser than Jesus. The same writer also hinted sometime earlier that the Bible was written during the time when men thought the earth was flat. Most people would have probably read that the men of the Middle Ages thought that the earth was flat and the stars near. Actually, this is a lie. Ptolemy had told them that the earth was a mathematical point without size in relation to the distance of the fixed stars. A distance which one ancient text estimates at 117 million miles. As to how what Ptolemy said then became, “the earth was flat”, I do not know. Those who read their “little” Bibles do not leave their brains at the door and come in and praise the Lord, as some would like to mislead. Chesterton indeed got it right when he said, “The Christian faith has not been tried and found wanting. It has rather been found difficult and left untried”. Maybe Christendom is better off that way.

When Government Help Hurts

SOCIAL COUNCIL SOON was the headline of The Barbados Advocate on Saturday June 11, 2005. Later in the article it stated, “…that governments must begin to see their social protection policies and programmes as developmental, rather than concentrated in the welfarism aspect of the programmes”. This is good news. In the early 1990s, America had a radical shift in their approach to welfare. A shift we should take note of. Although welfare had done some good, it had also created a permanent underclass – the chronically poor. With this permanent underclass also came related social pathologies such as alcohol addiction, drug abuse and crime. America’s welfare system was in dire need of reform. Marvin Olasky discovered the answer. He discovered it by analyzing the traditional Christian approach to charity. In researching the numerous Christian charities in the nineteenth-century, often dubbed the Benevolent Empire, he found that churches specialized in personal assistance that literally fulfilled the meaning of compassion – “suffering with” others. These charities didn’t just hand out money, they helped people to change their lives, focusing on job training and education. They required that those receiving aid do useful work. This gave them a chance to rebuild their human dignity whilst simultaneously making a worthwhile contribution to society. They built social networks, reconnecting the needy with family and the church for continuous support and accountability. Most importantly, they addressed the moral and spiritual needs that lie at the root of all dysfunctional behaviour. If there is one area where government help can hurt, it is in the area of welfare. The American government realized that by handing out welfare cheques to all who qualify, without addressing the underlying behavioural problems, they were in essence “rewarding” antisocial and dysfunctional behavioural patterns. And we all know, that any behaviour the government rewards will tend to increase. The churches’ successful approach was outlined in Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion. This book impacted former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich so much, he distributed it to all incoming freshmen in Congress. Olasky then became an advisor to President Bush, who promised to create a special office to support faith-based initiatives. A lesson we would do well to take note of.

Genetic Determinism and Free Will

In a book titled Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, the authors attacked the biblical teaching of “original sin”. They insist that the September 11 attacks had nothing to do with moral “evil”. They maintain that a predisposition to violence “is written in the molecular chemistry of DNA”. The genes made them do it. This raises the obvious question, are we solely the by-product of our genes? To my mind, genetic determinism makes no sense in humans. Even if a genetic link is established, it can only mean we have a tendency to act in a certain way. There are too many factors, both biological and social, between a gene and a type of behaviour to justify any claim that one completely determines the other. The discovery of genes for physical traits, tends to reinforce the idea that we are merely by-products of our genes. In reality, it is not that simple. Genes act within a particular context and depend largely on what else is going on. Molecular biologists – who study the chemical activities of genes – quickly point out that it is not the genes alone. Genetic determinism cannot eliminate human freedom. A proper grasp of what we are and how we function is foundational to any well-ordered society. Human beings are the unity of two distinct realities – body and soul. “Scientific” talk (which is really naturalistic philosophy masquerading as true science) about genetic determinism can be misleading. Unless the limitations of genetic research are made clear, we will set a dangerous precedent in the long run. If we believe the gene myth that, “it is all in the genes”, we could as well absolve ourselves of all moral and social responsibility. The more we accept responsibility for who we are – body and soul with the freedom of choice – the more honest we become. To attribute everything to genetics only diminishes what it means to be human. It diminishes what it means to be created in the “likeness” and “image” of God (Genesis 1:27).