One thing that a Christian must always remember–even though sometimes it is very hard to do so–is that hopelessness is a great sin, and thus the Christian must never despair, and the reason that he must never despair or become hopeless is because to do so is to literally admit–through one’s actions and one’s behavior–that Christianity is false, for true despair and genuine hopelessness could only arise in a situation in which we believed that God was not in control of creation or in a situation that negated Christ’s overcoming of the world and its foul sin, and yet, of course, CHRIST IS ALREADY VICTORIOUS, and so are all of us who stand with him, and so how could we ever genuinely despair if Christ is indeed victorious; so, as stated, the Christian cannot despair of this world, for to do so is to deny Christ himself, and thus the Christian who despairs literally cannot exist, for the Christian who despairs denies the foundation of Christianity, and thus the truly despairing Christian forfeits his Christianity the moment he genuinely despairs, and so remember, NEVER DESPAIR, FOR CHRIST IS KING (…and, of course, I do not mean that a Christian who has flashes of despair and hopelessness, or who is, say, clinically depressed, is not a true Christian, but rather that a Christian who begins to willingly and freely embrace despair and hopelessness has thus willingly and freely let go of his Christian faith, and he thus needs to repent of his despair in order to be able to genuinely retake the mantle of ‘Christian’ upon his shoulders).
Evil
An “Evil” Argument for an Afterlife
One of the things that often vexes unbelievers and believers alike is that while an honest inquirer will admit that there are, at the very least, plausible “reason-only” arguments for the existence of a good and holy God, it is the case that the existence of an afterlife is something which seems to require empirical / experiential evidence to argue for, for while we do have testimonial evidence from NDEs and from resurrected individuals concerning the existence of a postmortem realm–and such evidence is not to be easily discounted–it is nevertheless the case that it would be beneficial to be able to formulate an argument for the existence of an afterlife without needing to appeal to such testimonial-type evidence, and the fact is that, ironically, it is the so-called problem of evil which can provide us with such an argument, and this argument could be articulated in something approximating the following manner: 1) a good and moral omni-God exists (based on, say, the ontological and/or moral argument, or one of Aquinas’ arguments…and also note that this first premise can be used on a solely “for the sake of argument basis” as well); 2) sin, pain, and injustice exist in our present worldly life; 3) God would not allow sin, pain, and injustice to exist in the world unless these evils were ultimately rectified; 4) sin, pain, and injustice cannot be rectified in this Earthly existence; 5) ergo, some other type of existence must exist in which sin, pain, and injustice are rectified, which means, in simple terms, that some type of an evil-resolving afterlife must exist; and so, this wholly rational argument–each premise of which is quite defensible–does indeed give us a non-testimonial reason to believe that some type of justice-creating afterlife exists where wrongs are righted and evil overcome…and note that this is not meant to be some pie-in-the-sky wish that “badness” is ultimately made right some day and so I feel that an afterlife simply has to exist, rather it is a simple logical chain which argues, irrespective of our wishes and desires, that the existence of a good God and the existence of unresolved Earthly evil necessarily requires the existence of a place and a time where such a God will resolve such evil, and since that resolution is not done in this life, then that place and time must be some type of after-this-life existence, and so this argument for an afterlife is an entirely rational one which, ironically, employs the problem of evil as a means to demonstrate yet one more facet of the Christian faith.
A God Who Literally Understands Our Individual Pain
I have often held to the idea–and there are decent scriptural reasons to consider this idea as reasonable as well (Matthew 8:17 linked to Isaiah 53:4)–that Jesus Christ, when he died on the cross, not only took the sins of the world upon himself, but actually also took all the pain of the world (all of it, past, present, and future) onto and into himself, and he did this so that when we meet him as the glorified Lord, and when we lament of the pains that we have suffered, Christ can say that he understands our pain and feels it, and yet he will be able to say this not in some analogically empathetic way, but literally, for he will have literally and personally experienced the very pain that every single person has ever experienced; now, while this fact may not do much to solve the issue of evil from a philosophical perspective, I tell you that Christianity is made all the more compelling, and all the more reasonable, and all the more pastoral, when it is understood that the God of the universe not only died for our sins, but He also experienced all the pains that we have experienced, for what could have been more comforting and encouraging than being embraced by a being who has not only experienced similar pain to yours, but experienced the exact pain that you experienced, and can thus empathize with you on a level that no other being can…furthermore, understanding that Christ experienced all the pain and suffering of all of existence in that one short period of time on the cross puts his suffering and passion in a whole new light, for it shows us that his sacrifice for us was not just painful in a human sense, but painful in a way that none of us could ever experience or know, thereby meaning that although we have indeed experienced suffering and pain in our own lives, it is actually Christ himself (meaning God) who experienced the most suffering out of any human person–suffering that is astronomically more than any one of us could even understand–and so not only can Christ empathize with our personal suffering perfectly, but we can also realize that when complaining to Christ about our own pain and suffering, we are complaining to a person whose suffering was so much greater than ours that we realize that perhaps we should just silence our complaints in the presence of Christ’s sacrificial martyrdom.
Thought on the Possible Illusion of Pain
As part of the so-called ‘Problem of Evil’, atheists and unbelievers routinely argue how the pain that exists in the world is clear evidence against the existence of a benevolent and loving God, but while I contemplated this issue, and inspired by my background in the martial arts, I must admit that I have wondered about the possibility that pain actually does not exist, that it is some kind of illusion, for I have both seen and experienced the fact that through physical and mental control, borne from philosophical and spiritual reflection, a person can literally take an event that would normally result in either physical and/or emotional pain and let the pain pass through them in a way that there literally is none of the expected pain from that event (and this is not just ignoring the pain, but literally being able to not experience the pain as pain), and if this is the case, then this raises the question of whether pain, or at least a great deal of pain, is simply dependent on our reaction to it, and being so dependent, can be removed to the point of non-existence; now this fact, even if true, does not remove the whole problem from the issue of suffering and pain, but if a great deal of pain is little more than a mind-dependent illusion which could be controlled, mitigated, and removed with the proper degree of knowledge and training, then this fact could, in my view, seriously reduce the force of the so-called problem of evil.
Is the Problem of Evil an ‘Atheism of the Gaps’ / Incredulity Argument
Not a day goes by in the debate between atheism and theism where one does not hear some unbeliever intone that some argument for God is either a ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ / ignorance argument (essentially, and crudely, an argument which claims that we do not know how something happened, so God did it) or an argument from incredulity (where the believer allegedly claims that he simply cannot believe some naturalistic explanation, and so it is false), and yet what is fascinating about this atheistic desire to label so many arguments for God as ‘gap’ and / or ‘incredulity’ type arguments–even when they are clearly nothing of the sort–is the fact that arguably the greatest, most significant, and most well-known atheistic argument, namely the ‘evidential argument from evil’ (an argument which claims that since God would not permit gratuitous suffering to exist (either qualitatively or quantitatively), and since gratuitous suffering does exist, then God most likely does not exist), is actually an ‘atheism-of-the-gaps’ / unbeliever’s incredulity argument, for note that what the unbeliever is ultimately saying when he offers forth the evidential argument from evil is that he cannot understand or see any explanation for some evil that exists, or that he simply cannot believe that God would have a morally sufficient reason to permit some allegedly gratuitous suffering, and yet the former claim is just a ‘gaps’-type claim (namely: there is no explanation for this evil that I can see, so God does not exist) while the latter claim is just a claim of incredulity (namely: I cannot see any explanation for this suffering, and so there is none); and yet note that the standard answers that atheists use against ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ arguments (namely: “Scientists are still working on it” or “We just need more time”) or the answers they give against arguments from personal incredulity (namely: “The fact that you can’t come to believe the answer does not make it false), can just as readily be used by the theist, for the theist can always say “Theologians are still working on it” or “We just need more time to understand the reason for this evil” or “The fact that you [an atheist] cannot accept this explanation of this particular evil does not make the explanation false”…and so it seems that the unbelieving community is stuck in a dilemma, for 1) if many arguments for God are claimed to be ‘gap / incredulity’ arguments and are thus considered invalid, then the same reasoning can be turned on many atheistic arguments, thus rendering them invalid as well via their parity with theistic arguments, or else 2) the atheist denies that his arguments are ‘gap / incredulity’ type argument (or, alternatively, accepts the legitimacy of such argument types), and yet thereby gives the theist the ability to claim the same thing, but either way, the unbeliever loses a significant intellectual advantage which he falsely believed that he had over the God-believer.
The Impotence of the Issue of Evil in light of Everlasting Life
One of the things that I find many unbelievers fail to appreciate, especially when speaking of the so-called problem of evil, is both 1) the radical value / good that an everlasting life with God brings with it as well as 2) what the value of this morally good thing means for the issue of evil and for the issue of what God would permit to happen in the world so that even but one person received this everlasting good, and so to illustrate what I mean, I wish to use an absolutely extreme example, but one which will illustrate my point well: for the sake of argument, consider a situation where God knows that a certain person will only come to freely accept the gift of everlasting life with God if and only if a trillion other people experience pain and suffering, but if those other trillion people do not experience this pain and suffering, then the one specific person will not freely embrace everlasting life with God, and so when placed in such a situation–and, of course, all other things being salvifically equal (meaning that no one, including the trillion people, will lose their salvation because of the suffering of this trillion people), then not only would God permit the suffering of a trillion people to eternally save the one, but He–I would argue–is actually morally obligated to do so given His loving nature, for given that the salvation and never-ending bliss / happiness of merely one soul is an essentially infinitely greater good than the finite suffering of any finite amount of people, then in light of this moral calculation, God would indeed not only have a morally justifiable reason to permit the suffering of these one trillion people to save one soul, but He should actually be morally praised for doing, and we should and would all do the same if we reflected on the matter thoroughly (and note that this reasoning is nothing more than an explanation of Jesus’ parable concerning the shepherd leaving the 99 non-lost sheep in order to save the one lost sheep); and yet, note that the matter gets even worse for the unbeliever, for not only would God be morally right and good to allow a trillion people to suffer to give salvation to the one–again, all other things being salvifically equal–but God would be justified doing so even if the person that was saved would not exist for hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of years after the trillion people suffered (perhaps, for example, the person reads about the past suffering of the trillion people and that is the only thing significant enough to make her hardened-heart call out to God for a sign and/or to begin the journey of even thinking about God and His potential existence), and so in light of these two points, then it becomes quite clear that there is literally no coherent or reasonable way for an unbeliever to ever claim that some evil or some instance of suffering is gratuitous, for there is no way for them to have any coherent or reasonable idea of the effects that that evil / suffering will have in the far future…and so, when all is said and done, it seems, at least to me, that in light of these ideas, the guts of the so-called problem of evil are ripped out, and there is not much force left to the argument on an intellectual or rational level (and lest you think this is just some form of abstract reasoning, I note that in my own life, my return to the Truth was caused entirely by the writings of arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, for it was only after reading his ‘God Delusion’ book that I realized that if the arguments for atheism were as weak and shallow as his, then I seriously needed to investigate the Christian side of the argument, and so, even in my own life, I can see an instance of God allowing an evil to occur (namely, Richard Dawkins’ writing on God) which would seem to have no connection to me, and yet lead me back to salvation).
The Beauty and Kindness of Original Sin
Unbelievers and other anti-Christians often rail against the idea of Original Sin (that we are born with the sin of Adam, and that this sin unavoidably taints our minds towards sin in this world, but not uncontrollably or completely so), and such people claim that Original Sin is an idea and a theological concept which is demeaning and disgusting, but though holding to the concept of Original Sin is neither necessary for salvation nor absolutely fundamental to Christian belief, it should nevertheless be pointed out that the anti-Christian attacks against the idea of Original Sin are completely misguided and foolish, for, ultimately, Original Sin is a beautiful and kind thing that we should be thankful and grateful for, for it shows the mercy of God; now though the unbeliever will claim that saying the latter is sheer folly, in his dislike of this Christian doctrine, he does not see the bigger picture and thus misses the mercy of Original Sin, for just as in a human court, if someone is born with a condition that uncontrollably predisposes them towards some negative trait, that innate condition actually serves as a factor which mitigates both their personal responsibility for the crime in question and serves as a factor which is used to reduce their punishment for the crime as well, for we all understand that a man who is not fully responsible for his actions cannot be held wholly responsible for those same actions, and so it is with Original Sin, for given that this affliction uncontrollably predisposes us towards sin, it actually serves, in the eyes of God, as a mitigating factor towards the sins which we do commit, which is exactly why God, in His mercy and love, allowed Original Sin to be transmuted to us rather than having to have us take the full weight of sin onto our shoulders when we stand before Him in judgement (and make no mistake, we would all fall like Adam, so receiving Original Sin ahead of time is a mitigating mercy for us to embrace, not a curse to be spat at)…and for the individual who then objects as to why mankind needed to fall from grace in the first place, I briefly respond that God, in this life, wants and needs us to choose between Him and His desires or us and our total freedom, and the only way that we can justly choose, in a free sense and actually informed sense, between God and total freedom, is to experience total freedom, which means to know sin, and so God has to allow us to sin in order for us to be able to make a genuinely free and informed choice about whether to be with Him or to go our own way, and so we would have to sin anyway, which thereby returns us to the fact that if we had to sin anyway in this life in order to be able to fulfil the purpose of this life, then at least God, in His mercy, mitigates our responsibility for this sin by giving us Original Sin.
Thought on Atheist Apologetics and Their Implicit Argument to Stop Science
One of the most interesting and unnoticed things in the field of atheist arguments against religion is that when arguing against religion, there is an implicit argument in the atheist’s reasoning that can be used to undermine the study of what so many atheists consider most precious, namely “Science(TM)”, and to understand why, consider this: atheists routinely rail against religious belief and argue, at least in part, that religious belief should be eradicated because religious beliefs are used as a type of tool that supports and spreads and exasperates war, violence, bigotry, and immorality in the world at large, and yet, by such reasoning, should not atheists also argue that science, or at least certain scientific enterprises, should be eradicated as well, for note that science has also been a tool that has supported and spread and exasperated war and violence and bigotry (racial theories, for example)–in fact, science has made war much worse than religion ever did (consider the “gift” of weapons of mass destruction, for example, something which only science could give us)–and so, by the atheist’s own reasoning, if certain societal ideas and tools should be avoided, or restricted, or removed simply because they can be used to assist in war and bloodshed, then it seems that a good atheistic case can be made to reduce scientific inquiry just as much as we should reduce religious belief; in fact, it is arguably more important to stop science than religion, for while religion may–and I stress may–be used to motivate people to violence, science can exponentially increase the ability to cause violence and death, and thus if the atheist really wishes to reduce violence and bloodshed between men, he would arguably be better served arguing against science first and foremost than against religious belief (or at least against certain kinds of scientific enterprises), and yet, since the atheist does not do so, then perhaps we can see that his real aim is just to undermine religious belief in anyway possible and support atheistic supremacy rather than to really seek societal improvement….it is, at the very least, an interesting point to think about.
Thought on the History of Islam
If Islam is so much like every other religion, and is allegedly such a religion of peace, then why is it the case—as it has always been—that whenever a Muslim nation or tribal group abuts a non-Muslim one, or whenever there is a large percentage of Muslims in a non-Muslim country, there is always war, violence, and death with the non-Muslims, and why is this not the case with other religions if all these religions are so similar; for anyone with eyes to see the truth, the question answers itself, which is that Islam is neither like most other religions in terms of having a peaceful nature nor is it a religion of peace…it may be true (it is not, but that is a separate discussion), but, as history bears out, it is not a religion of peace.
Thought on How the Two Engines of Atheism Undermine Themselves
It must be said that a point which is routinely overlooked in the debate on atheism is how the (alleged) two great engines driving modern atheism–namely, evolution and the existence of evil–actually undermine themselves, for when you consider the matter closely, and when you observe the nature of man in its totality when compared to other animals, then you find that man is both such a depraved beast and a vile thing capable of horrid evils and a being capable of goodness that at times reaches an angelic realm and which goes astronomically beyond anything that a mere animal would do, that you thus begin to realize that the evolutionary account of the origin of man is simply too poor and inadequate from a moral perspective to fully explain man’s beyond-animalistic evil and his beyond-bestial goodness; and so, the moment that atheists begin to lament man’s great capacity to cause evil as a reason to disbelieve in the existence of God, they thereby give us a reason to see their evolutionary account of the origin of man as insufficient to account for this evil and thus they give us a reason to believe in a moral creator and designer, thereby undermining their atheism, and, conversely, if they point to evolution as a reason to disbelieve in God, we can simply point out that that idea is lacking in enough explanatory power to explain the full range of human depravity and goodness, and thus it cannot explain man in full, which, in turn, means that there is something beyond evolution that has affected the hearts of men, and this too is a factor that undermines the strict naturalistic account of man.
investigative apologetics 