Weblog of a Christian philosophy student

Weblog of a Christian philosophy student. Please feel free to comment. All of my posts are public domain. Subscribe to posts [Atom]. Email me at countaltair [at] yahoo.com.au. I also run a Chinese to English translation business at www.willfanyi.com.

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Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Saturday, September 08, 2007

Divine Hiddenness

Divine Hiddenness
Will G

(1450 words)

The Argument

The argument I am going to put forward is an attempt to explain why God provides the level of evidence in the world that he does. It has the following form, which I will then comment on in a paragraph per argument point.

1. All humans are created necessarily imperfect.
2. This imperfection affects everybody in different ways.
3. Imperfection necessarily affects a proportion of people who are created by God in such a way that they have characters that would never make the choice to be saved.
4. The choice to be saved is an equal choice between heaven and hell. Hell involves a limbo-like existence of no pain or joy for eternity, and heaven involves such a significant loss of autonomy so as to make hell a reasonable choice for people affected by premise (3).
5. People in this life are Christians or non-Christians based on their decision to accept the choice in premise (4).
6. God has no reason to separate savable and unsavable people in the universe, and may have a positive reason to put them together on the same world.
7. Believing in Christianity strongly enforces the choice to be saved.
8. From (1) (2) (3) and (6) God will create a world with savable and unsavable people together.
9. From (3) (7) and (8) if God did not hide himself from a world containing a mix of savable and unsavable people, then he would violate the free will of those who cannot be saved.
10. From (6) and (9) God has a good reason to hide himself from humanity.


Defending Each Premise

1. All humans are created necessarily imperfect.

See my article here. If someone says 'There are perfect characters in existence who have complete free will but never do wrong. One such character is God. Why didn't God create others like him?' - how does one respond? The best answer is to contest that argument at its source and say God cannot create perfectly moral characters outside of himself. Fortunately, this doesn't hinder Christian theology because we can draw on the Holy Spirit of God in the afterlife to become perfect despite our necessarily imperfect characters.

2. This imperfection affects everybody in different ways.

A reasonable point I think - or sinning and bringing down the Fall on oneself, or living after the Fall, makes your imperfection much worse. Some people are less affected than others. Arsonists, serial killers, etc., other very evil people are much more affected by post-Fall evil or their imperfection cuts across key areas of their soul. Others are not really that badly off from our point of view despite their imperfection.

3. Imperfection necessarily affects a proportion of people who are created by God in such a way that they have characters that would never make the choice to be saved.

Otherwise I think you ultimately have to say God doesn't save some people because he chooses not to, which I don't think is acceptable for God who allegedly wants to save everyone. Also, if God can create a character that can accept salvation then he could achieve salvation in that character. It comes down to character and what a person can choose, not to individual free choices where it can go either way, to my mind.

4. The choice to be saved is an equal choice between heaven and hell. Hell involves a limbo-like existence of no pain or joy for eternity, and heaven involves such a significant loss of autonomy so as to make hell a reasonable choice for people affected by premise (3).

Point discussed a lot here. This is to avoid a couple of serious problems with the idea of hell. First problem is why doesn't God give us a choice to accept or reject him in the afterlife? Second one is, people need to know the consequences of their choice for it to be free, and so unbelievers have to know they're choosing to go to hell. But if hell is really awful, this seems absurd - no unbelievers would choose it and so no one is choosing to go to hell in this life. Both problems are answered by positing an equal choice - hell is simply limbo of no pain or joy forever, and heaven involves a huge loss of autonomy. Why does heaven involve this loss? Because as I mentioned from my comments on premise (1), because of our necessary imperfection we have to accept God's Holy Spirit to save us. Problem is, to really save us from ourselves, the Holy Spirit has to be so dominant in our lives that it is equal to a HUGE loss of autonomy - which some people will not accept. I don't think this approach compromises Christian theology at all, as long as we still say 'hell is bad, heaven is good and hell lasts forever.'

5. People in this life are Christians or non-Christians based on their decision to accept the choice in premise (4).

To make my theory compatible with other aspects of Christian theology, I need to say that everyone who hears Christianity and rejects it in this life is someone who would choose not to go to heaven, and the opposite is true for Christians. I'm going to simply say (or hypothesise) that God has a good reason for laying things out this way.

6. God has no reason to separate savable and unsavable people in the universe, and may have a positive reason to put them together on the same world.

First of all I don't think the imperfection works in a way that allows God to only create savable people. It's not a matter of every person who will exist randomly being assigned unsavable imperfection or savable imperfection. I think the randomness operates not just over one person, but over a large quantity of people. God literally does not have the power to selectively create only savable people. But then there's still the question of creating the savable people and unsavable people in the same world. My answer to that is that if God did separate savable and unsavable people, there would still be natural evil, small scale moral evil and large scale moral evil, etc., because I'm declining here to put the solution to those problems onto my solution for divine hiddenness. This divine hiddenness article is not the pillar to support those heavy problems of evil - I say think of something else to justify the Holocaust. If there are defenses against evil, then those evil events, or evil events like them, have to happen, no matter what, whether only savable people live on a certain world and unsavable people on another one. Although one might say, there would be a benefit in separating savable and unsavable people in that even though God would still have to allow events like the Holocaust on the savable world, savable people would not experience doubt. But maybe that has a purpose to (to test faith?) And God may have a positive reason to put believers and nonbelievers together or create nonbelievers that I haven't thought of.

7. Believing in Christianity strongly enforces the choice to be saved.

If you don't want to go to heaven and accept the resultant loss of autonomy, believing in Christianity strongly enforces that choice. In other words, if you have no intention of choosing to go to heaven, and you live your whole life as a Christian, then your free will is being violated (although you will still never choose to go to heaven.)

8. From (1) (2) (3) and (6) God will create a world with savable and unsavable people together.

Already talked about.

9. From (3) (7) and (8) if God did not hide himself from a world containing a mix of savable and unsavable people, then he would violate the free will of those who cannot be saved.

The logical conclusion of (7), is that if savable and unsavable people mix, and if for an unsavable person to believe in Christianity strongly enforces the choice to be saved, then their free will is being violated or interfered with in some way if they believe. Thus God lets there be enough evidence for savable people to accept Christ, but no more than that, certainly not enough to convince most of the world's population. This explains the level of divine hiddenness in the world.

10. From (6) and (9) God has a good reason to hide himself from humanity.

9/8/2007
Will G