I hope you have good eyes and a lot of patience. These are great questions, but there are even greater answers that should more than satisfy them, if you are not opposed to long reads. You have asked lofty questions and thus the answers to them are virtually impossible to provide with much conciseness while comprehensively addressing them. I would ask that you keep in mind that, by the time you have finished reading this, I have provided you the shortest version of my answers due to the nature of the format (as a side note, I am writing a voluminous book aimed at comprehensively, and rather exhaustively, resolving the common and many uncommon questions posed to the Christian faith, which you will receive a "teaser" of some of the articles I have written herein). However, my goal in answering any questions is to not leave the inquirer with more questions than they had before I answered it, so I hope that I am able to successfully provide that satisfaction for you here.
I've been having a lot of doubts in my faith for the past few months. Not the kind that can be easily dismissed, but actual, relatively rational thoughts.
I haven't really been able to talk to anyone about them, since no one in my family is a Christian and neither are any of my friends (online or off). So I'm wondering: how do y'all deal with doubt?
If anyone's interested, my specific concerns in the doubt are:
1. Inefficacy of (Intercessory) Prayer
Studies have shown that intercessory prayer doesn’t work. The Bible says it does – Jesus says it does! – but it doesn’t. It doesn’t have better outcomes for sick people, or make you more likely to succeed in your goals, or anything! We’re supposed to be able to move mountains and be immune to snake venom, but people who truly believe they’re safe still die from Christian snake-charming.
Why would a God who exists and loves us and is all-powerful say that He’ll help us, and then turn out to not do anything at all?
Of the simpler questions, there two succinct points that can be made to this:
1. While this is your experience, it is not the experience of many others, including myself. I have experienced answers to many prayers that were specific and fulfilled in perfect correspondence to the specifications of my prayer. I have also seen healing done (some first and some second-hand experiences), and, on one occasion, a brain tumor eliminated (the tissue spontaneously died before the surgery was necessary).
2. Scripture does not promise that your life goals will be advanced: "When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God." (James 4:3-4)
Jesus also answered Satan about this very same claim in the context of twisting God's promises to mean what they do not, abusing them for purposes they are not for: "Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 'If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “ ‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.' Jesus answered him, 'It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" (Matthew 4:5-7)
It is also said that the prayer of a
righteous person is powerful and effective (James 5:16), and that there are things that can prevent our prayers from being temporarily ignored (Isaiah 58:3-4, 1 Peter 3:7, again James 4:3-4, et al.). This question is also connected to my answer to your next two questions.
2. Why sin/evil/etc? God can do anything, so why this?
Here’s the thing: this is not the best possible world, with or without Eve’s fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. If God is all powerful, why doesn’t He just make it so that whatever makes us have to go to Hell isn’t necessary in the first place? Not just believers: everyone.
A good God couldn’t possibly want all of those people to go to Hell, right?
There’s the argument that God did exactly that through Jesus, but why? Why would he do that when Jesus’s resurrection happened 2,000 years ago (give or take), and we don’t have any solid evidence that the actual miracle of the resurrection (or any other miracles) happened?
I mean, if God is real, shouldn’t there be a lot more hard evidence?
3. Dead Babies:
Everything that happens is God’s will, or can be made to fit His will, right? So how do dead babies make any [staff edit] sense? Babies don’t sin, and their lives aren’t object lessons.
I am going to answer this question in three points (my entire argument is actually a four point, but I am hoping these three will be sufficient to satisfy), with some concluding clarifications which may answer some questions that seem unresolved amidst the immediate text.
1. The human capacity to apprehend objective moral values and duties
Since God created us, the universe that surrounds us and everything extrinsic to Himself, everything in all existence derives it's being from God
in its entirety. This includes the entity inside of our flesh we call the brain, which was created to be our fleshly device by which we process our thoughts, emotions and the world around us in our mental interactions with it. This brain in which we contain all of our cognitive capacities and functions was provided by God
all of its abilities, not only in its
range of apprehensions of truths but also in its ability to apprehend
categories of truth.
What I mean by
ranges of apprehension is our brains capacity to be used to process information at certain speeds, the amount of information our brain can hold simultaneously, how efficient our thought processes are, how much access we have to our subconscious, etc.; our quantitative abilities. What I mean by categories of apprehension is what we can apprehend to exist
at all, which we can extend the range of our capacities through to apprehend knowledge about such matters. To provide an example, the
range of our cognitive capacities concerning moral truths would be applied to discriminating between events and actions to determine the moral quality of those events and actions. Our cognitive capacity of
categorical apprehension of truth in this instance would be the ability to understand that their even is a moral realm to apprehend
at all.
Thus, God is the source of our moral apprehensions, and if God wanted to deceive us, being the designer of our cognitive functions and capacities in their entirety, He would not even have to try. All God would have to do to deceive humankind is provide them cognitive capacities so limited that they would be absolutely unable to apprehend His deception if He were to flaunt His malevolent motives before their eyes all day long. So what you have to ask yourself is this: If God wanted to deceive me, why would He provide me the cognitive ability to discriminate between truth and falsehood with such accuracy that I would be able to discover His deception? The truth is, doubt exists for only two reasons: Ignorance and free agency. Either we are simply lacking in knowledge and unable to understand why God is abundantly worthy of our absolute trust, or we simply choose to deny Him and His testimony. This decision or ignorant response of doubt never results from rational investigation.
In summary, God is the author of the same cognitive functions that we must use to doubt Him or impose our perspectives onto His creative decree (how we think things ought to be), wholly by the use of the tools provided by His decree of our minds. When you consider this, it should occur to you that there is literally no more of an absurd use of our minds than to use them against the one who constituted them, to doubt what He has revealed of Himself or the perfection of His will.
2. The providence of God in creating the world which would produce the greatest potential good.
In creating a universe that would accommodate truly free moral agents, God would have a potentially infinite number of options available to Him with an equally potentially infinite amount of possible outcomes. From what we know about the nature of God, He would naturally choose to create the world which would produce the greatest possible outcome. What is the greatest possible outcome? There is none other than that world which provides the circumstances which leads the largest number of souls to freely accept the grace of God through the salvation provided in Jesus Christ (an explanation of why salvation is the greatest good, if required, will be provided in the concluding clarification of these three points). From what we know about God's nature, particularly that God is omni-benevolent (perfect in love), omniscient (perfect in knowledge) and omnipotent (absolute in power), this can be deductively inferred as follows:
1. Because God is omni-benevolent, He would desire to create the world which would produce the greatest potential good
2. Because God is omniscient, He would know which world would produce the greatest potential good
3. Because God is omnipotent, He would be able to create the world which would produce the greatest potential good
Therefore the world in which we exist is that which would produce the great potential good. To repeat, this greatest good is the largest number of souls that would freely surrender themselves to God and receive His grace. It would follow that, in a world of free creatures, the world which produces the great potential good does not contain any gratuitous evil, but only whatever evil is necessarily
permitted in the course that results in the best possible outcome.
Again, God would have had a potentially infinite number of options present of worlds to create with an equally infinite number of possible outcomes. By His perfect nature, however, God would not create a world at random in which His will to create concurrently
free and absolutely
loved creatures was not accomplished. So God would have to narrow His options to feasible worlds which accommodate creaturely freedom and yet lovingly provides the circumstances that permits each person who would freely choose God to do so. Knowing God, once He had narrowed the options to the assortment of great results, He would naturally choose the greatest of these possible outcomes. This is not to say God is predestining our decisions, but the creation of the world which would provide the social, environmental and personal circumstances that are necessary for each individual, in their own times and places as God foreknew, to interact with each other, their environment and God in a way that corresponds to their psychology/personality, ultimately and inevitably leading to the salvation of those who would freely respond affirmatively to God's grace in whatever circumstance they find themselves. In this sense, then, God can literally be said to have elected those who are saved (Mark 13:20, Romans 11:7), though their choices as well as those who reject God are entirely free (Joshua 24:15, 1 Kings 18:21).
As is stated in Acts 17, God placed us within our context because He knew that if given that context we would freely choose to accept Him by the testimony and in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit. It could then be rightly asked "well then could God have not provided a precise set of circumstances that would be those which are necessary to win the soul of every person?", and the answer would be no. For some people, there is no such set of circumstances that would be sufficient for them to freely receive the salvation of Christ by the Holy Spirit's testimony. This is affirmed doubly in the Scriptures. First, in Daniel 12:10 concerning the course through to the end times Jesus says: "Many will be purified, made spotless and refined, but the wicked will continue to be wicked. None of the wicked will understand, but those who are wise will understand." Again, concerning God's providence Paul says in Romans 9:22: "What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?"
It may also seem confusing to think that God has among His human creation "objects of wrath" which He prepares for destruction, until you comprehend these points and Scriptures collectively. There are some souls which God would create that will freely reject Him under any and all circumstances, but are still necessary in the grand scheme of world history to play a role in drawing all those who will be freely saved into that salvation. God Himself illustrates this wonderfully in His statement to Pharaoh in Exodus 9:15-16: "For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth."
See Acts 17:26-27, Genesis 50:20, Jeremiah 25:8-14 and Judges 14:4 for more Scriptural examples on the providence of God and how it works.
In conclusion, it is important to note that God is perfectly just and shows no partiality (Deuteronomy 10:7, 2 Chronicles 19:7), and these attributes would necessarily inform His creative decree in which world to actualize.. No person is favoured, whether man or woman, rich or poor, slave or free, great or small (Galatians 3:28). Thus we can be certain that if God selects the specific times and places of every individual for the explicit purpose of preparing them to receive the salvation that is in Christ, it follows that all who extend beyond the means of receiving that salvation on account of their place or time are not victims of misfortune, but are those whom God foreknew would freely reject that salvation. Their existence then serves to play a role, indiscernible to us, in world history in maximizing the number of souls who would freely come to Christ on account of the unfolding effects and ripples of their lives.
Refer also to Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares in Matthew 13:24-30, which illustrate these collective points perfectly.
3. The participation of Christ in human suffering in the incarnation
The gospel reveals that God is not removed from human suffering, neither spiritually, mentally, emotionally nor physically; God is comprehensively acquainted with our suffering (Isaiah 53:3). In the gospel it is revealed that Jesus of Nazareth, the Word (Greek:
logos) of God, the second person of the Trinity, incarnated in the body of a man; He assumed the nature of a man and though remaining truly God became also truly man, simultaneously possessing the divine nature and the human nature. Thus, though this man we call Jesus Christ remained perfect in His divine qualities, He subjected Himself in His Spirit to the expression of those qualities by fleshly limitations (Philippians 2:6-9), though remaining sinless, and to the human experience of our weaknesses and finitudes (Hebrews 4:15).
Christ had to endure the course of the human life, growing from a child into a man, obeying His Father from a truly human perspective. He was submitted like a man to the duties the Father assigned Him in His life and physically and emotionally endured the hardships of human service with the taxing nature of living to glorify, in the flesh, our heavenly Father in a world pervaded by sin, to love enduringly those who did not love Him. Throughout His ministry, Jesus faced hunger (Matthew 4:2), thirst (John 19:28), fatigue (John 4:6), self-denial (Luke 22:42), rejection (John 6:66), persecution (John 8:59), mockery (Matthew 27:29), hatred (Mark 14:1), abandonment (Matthew 26:56), physical attacks (Luke 22:64), brutality (Matthew 27:26) and eventually death (Luke 23:46). To compound the problem, all of this was endured as innocent suffering by a man who had no culpability, and who lived for the exclusive purpose of glorifying His Father through the extension of His grace, mercy, and love towards as well as leadership of lost mankind.
There is no man more acquainted with suffering, and no man less deserving of His fate than Jesus Christ Himself. Yet this is the life Christ endured to provide the unmerited favour of God towards the world He gave Himself up for. As the Scriptures declare: "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8)." To emphasize the truly human experience of this suffering, Christ did not endure His road to the cross removed from the depth and perspective of the human experience, but demonstrated intense anxiety, anguish and sorrow towards His impending fate of temporary separation from His Father and the wrath God was going to reveal against sin through Him in satisfying the demands of justice (Matthew 26:41-42, Luke 22:44). Despite this, He surrendered Himself to this fate to be offered as the only ransom which is acceptable for our account, the only name under heaven by which we can be saved (John 14:6, Acts 4:12), and was resurrected on the third day following to vindicate His claims before many witnesses, as the gospels testify.
Jesus Christ is the fullness of deity in human form (Colossians 2:9), the complete expression of God and everything He wanted and needed to communicate to mankind in preparing us for the fulfilling of our personal knowledge of God and to enable our personal relationship with Him. Christ is our advocate, our mediator, our Saviour and Lord; the Alpha and the Omega, the Almighty. In Christ is the fulfilment of human existence, our purpose, our meaning, our value and our suffering.
Concluding clarifications:
It could be asked, "
Why should we think of salvation as the greatest good?"
In Christ, there are three stages of salvation. Listed in the order that they occur, they are justification, sanctification and glorification. The purpose of the first stage is particularly notable in answering this question in the context of the current sinful condition of the world. The abundant presence of sin that would rouse you to ask the question, “if God is good, why is there so much evil?” is the same sin that rouses God’s righteous indignation so powerfully He was willing to pay the highest price to achieve justice against it, without neglecting His endless desire to extend mercy. After all, it is precisely the lack of love, grace and mercy in people that is the origin of all of our sins that necessitate God’s justice against us. Thus, in accomplishing justice, God clearly had no intention of forfeiting the same attributes that caused us to commit so many grievous evils that demanded that justice.
So salvation begins by first justifying us from our innumerable sins that provide the content and reference point for the question of why evil exists. After freely choosing to accept the justification provided in Christ, just as we freely chose to commit the evils that required His payment on our behalf, we are then enabled to draw near to God as one who has been cleansed of all their unrighteousness and receive sanctification under His Lordship. Sanctification is salvation from the
present power of sin that is effectuated by the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit of God Himself in us, who enables us to relinquish the sinful desires roused by godlessness if we submit ourselves to His Lordship that guides us into moral perfection. Just as we freely chose to commit the evils we have, so we must freely choose the good that is provided to us in our submission to God, since the same freedom that allowed for sin is the freedom necessary to allow for any moral good to exist.
The question may then arise that, if we can freely choose to do good, why do we need God or the salvation He offers that provides sanctification? There are two points to make in sufficiently answering this question, and they will be provided in an order that is consistent with the stages of salvation in the order that they occur:
1. Our decision to choose good over evil in certain circumstances does not resolve the issue of our need for
justification. As perfectly righteous and just, God will not simply allow the sinful actions caused by our lack of love, grace and mercy to go unpunished. Jesus’ Lordship aside, we would still require Christ’s salvation to justify us and allow us to receive God’s mercy without compromising the demands of justice. So we would still need salvation from the condemnation we will receive for our sins without Christ.
2. The reason we need to be
sanctified in the salvation of God from the present power of sin is because God
is the good. As explained in the first point for the argument of God’s goodness, God is the source of all of our moral knowledge, both in what we can know of moral truths and in our ability to know there is a moral realm of truths at all. In addition to this, God is not the provider of some moral standard that existed inexplicably apart from God Himself prior to creation (as moral truths require personhood for their existence; this is why a rock can not be called evil that injures a person as a result of laws of physics directing it in a path that a person was incidentally obstructing), rather God is the ground of objective moral truths (1 John 4:8). That is to say, God’s very nature provides the substance of moral values and duties, so that to speak of God’s goodness is redundant; it is like saying “God’s godliness.” Since the nature of the person God is the ground of objective moral values, the presence of God entails moral goods, and the absence of God entails moral evils. Even the unsaved individual is only capable of doing as much good as they do because the law of God is written on their hearts and minds (Romans 2:15). This is why the Scriptures say that those who remain unsaved have a form of godliness but deny its power (2 Timothy 3:2-5). So the one whom God is able to inhabit on account of their justification (being removed from the relationship of judge and judged to Father and child of God) will be filled with the presence of God, who will then proceed to progressively repel sin from their life, in cooperation with the person’s willful submission, and thus facilitate the conditions necessary to remove evil from the world in the saved person by displaying His power through them.
In conclusion, the question of “where was God when x evil occurred?” is an excellent question. However, the logically accurate variation of this question would be, “where was God
in their heart when they caused such evil to occur?” To receive salvation is to increasingly remove the evils of this world, one person at a time.
It could also be asked, "
Why couldn’t God have created a world without free will so there would be no evil?"
The answer to this question is simple: Without freedom of the will, there would be no occurrences of a moral nature
at all. Authentic freedom does render the emergence of evil possible in any world with free creatures, but it is that same freedom that allows for the possibility of moral goods. This is because any creation that exists without free agency merely constitutes a force of nature, as all occurrences that result from their presence would be merely
incidental rather than
intentional. Since impersonal forces do not possess intentionality, and intentionality is a prerequisite of love, the source of all moral good (charity, kindness, friendship, service, humility, etc.), an entity without free will can neither withhold love (constituting moral evil) nor provide it (constituting moral good). When water drowns a man, it does not murder him, and when it satisfies his thirst, it does not spare him; the fire that warms does not seek to comfort, and the fire that consumes does not intend to destroy. These elements are neither cruel nor charitable, they simply behave according to the irresistible natural laws that govern them, and their effects are decided by incident and circumstance.
An entity that is a
natural force rather than a
personal agent can not provide love, the source of all moral good, any more than a machine can provide love by exclaiming phrases of ostensible affection or affirmation that are merely products of programming that cause it to render a recorded audio file of such words by the hour. Thus, God created a world with free will because, despite the consequence of emergent evil by the same agency, only in such as world is there possibility for any good
at all, never mind the
greatest potential good.
The last question I will answer here that may have arose is, "
Isn’t God showing partiality by creating a soul He foreknew would be condemned if they existed for the purpose of playing a role in leading another soul to salvation?"
There are two points to consider in answering this question:
1. To be partial is to show special favour towards someone or something. God is not being partial in the grace He extends towards any individual at any time in any place, but rather places us each in our contexts with the exclusive purpose of maximizing the number of souls that freely accept the salvation found through Christ alone (Acts 17:26-27). The circumstances vary because the individuals placed in them do, and thus their courses are plotted according to how they will affect other courses and respond to their own. That being said, those who accept salvation and those who reject it do so freely, and those who reject it would do so under any circumstances (Daniel 12:10, Revelations 9:20). Thus, God would be partial if He did not create the wicked who will be self-condemned rather than create them, as He would be favouring souls that would freely choose wickedness over souls that would freely choose righteousness, thereby precluding the one who would choose rightly from enjoying the eternal knowledge of God on account of a reprobate individual who would incessantly reject Him.
2. This question also neglects to consider that the inadvertent benefit of this self-condemned person’s life will likely extend beyond the salvation of one individual. The person who finds themselves lead to Christ by the direct or indirect causes of this person’s existence will, in many cases, have the broad opportunity to intentionally direct others to the salvation found in Him, resulting in potentially dozens, to hundreds, or even thousands more saved souls. To reemphasize the first point, partiality would be the cause for
not creating the self-condemned person at so large an expense, which would be true even if it were only for the one, which is unlikely.
In summation, God being unwilling to create the self-condemned to spare the freely saved would be like a man who refuses to spare the lives of his family in defending them from an armed attacker, who has had many warnings not to enter his house and threaten them, because he does not want to choose between their lives and the assailant’s. The devil has come to steal, kill and destroy, but Christ has come to destroy the devil’s work (John 10:10, 1 John 3:8).
Questions 4 and 5 will be answered in my next post; for now, a little break.
