It may not make much sense to center a discussion of the universe's purpose around a study of good and evil, but everything will (hopefully not just to my muddled brain) fall into place soon enough. We begin by addressing two possibilities of relativism: epistemological, in which there may very well be an absolute standard of morality but humans can never hope to know it; and ontological, in which "good" and "evil" are mere constructs to accommodate taste. Along those broad lines we are in the domain of philosophy, and while philosophy does deal with the question of God and his various attributes, etc., once we cross into the realm of "God's desire for his creation and his creatures within that creation" we are, very certainly, in the realm of religion/theology. I'm not much of a philosopher, but I do see myself as something of a (budding at least) theologian. So I don't think I'm much out of my element here.
I have this to throw in, and I'm not sure where it would best fit, but I'll put it here and let you make of it what you will. This is a comment I made a while back, and the wording is pretty good so I'll just let it stand as a kind of summary of what's to come: By "evil" I mean that which, as humans, we discern as being counter to the design of God. Natural futility is not evil because it does not inhabit a moral spectrum. Morality becomes an issue strictly with the advent of rationality and the power of choice. Chaos and disorder are inevitable in a universe where chance operates; but if you throw into the mix the idea of a willful God whose overarching power holds the mess together and drives the creation toward a definite goal, this chaos and disorder (and futility) is not contrary to plan. Humans, however, with the power of will (image of God), have the ability to counter God's designs for relationality. As for the classic idea of the spectrum-ends of darkness and light, the former being the point of "growth" for "evil" and the latter being the point of "growth" for "good", this is not an altogether faulty picture. Human evil is rooted in taking part in the chaos of the universe. But on its own, chaos is not evil. Bad, maybe, but unavoidable, and contributing to the overall picture of order. But chaos taken up into the agency of reason and engaged with by an independent Mind is a completely different picture. A soul colluding with chaos becomes a soul colluding with evil. We should be careful to distinguish between "darkness" and "light", "less desirable" and "more desirable" (I would say "bad" and "good" but futility itself is not "bad" until it grows out of control, which I do not think the Creator will allow until his plans for this universe are up) as value categories, and "evil" and "good" as moral categories relating to the scheme of "loving communion".
Now most skeptics incline to the ontological assumption, holding that "good and evil" (and indeed most other concepts of absolution, or metaphysical truth) are matters of perspective. We label "evil" that which disrupts the order of our society. I concur, but I do not think it such a shallow thing as do many. This quickly becomes a matter of "human purpose" (which ties into the larger theme of the meaning of the universe--what a focused thinker am I!--and on that count connects with the more grounded context of science v. religion, in the sense of what can scientific discovery say about the meaning of life, and does science need religion to balance out its findings or lend them value-based and moral-based substance), and in that sense we are, very definitely, treading religious ground. But first, a glance at the universal condition. The creation is structured in a very certain way, despite the massive amounts of fluctuation and chance at work, and "geared" toward fruitfulness and order--in the sense that the vastness of creation accommodates the tiny area of space in which rational life dwells, and in the sense that the universe as a whole still manages to hold together and work in a fashion suitably routine to allow for study, measurement, and prediction of its behavior. It seems obvious enough that there are certain conditions that must be met for life to abound. Life being the primary aim of creation (I suppose one may prefer death over life, but I'm taking it as a first principle that what has purpose is preferable to that which is pointless--I hope you're not a nihilist) it follows then that what "laws" and ordinances make for life are those with which a rational creature capable of choosing alignment should actually align. And that's the real thrust: the lower animals follow mere appetite and instinct, acting out of desperation and fear. This is not an unfortunate hiccup in the evolutionary process. Creation is developing--and at this stage in the argument I'd like to throw in this idea. Creation is not something that's just thrown together and left to run on its own steam, with God sitting back to see what comes of it, as it were. Rather, creation is a "project" with which God remains involved. It is constantly changing and moving toward some definite goal, namely order. Granted, it will run down in time, but order is not so much an end in itself within this current reality; rather, order serves to accommodate the "highlight" of God's work (not that God actually designs every little detail, or even whole species--I rather think he lets evolution takes its own course, but his will "dictates" that it should work toward rationality and self-awareness). This crowning achievement--humanity--then works with God to move this creation toward the next. It may not be often posited as such in the popular forum, but the real purpose, I think, of Christianity, is to "sow the seeds" of the next world (NOT heaven). We are to work here in the present with love and reason and sacrifice and humility, to anticipate the time when God makes all things new. Our efforts in the mortal phase somehow will contribute to the glory of the phase to come. Humanity may disappear from the universe long before it itself freezes over and collapses on itself. But the work we do in service to the name of Christ will survive and be resurrected along with the entire creation (ourselves included--this is not a fanciful supernaturalist hope merely, either, as science has shown us that the universe works by "information" and so humans are bundles of "information", and information does not readily deteriorate and can easily be transported from one "mode" of being to another...anyway). That is the real aim of God's creation.
Humans, as rational agents (not the only intelligent species, but far and away the most advanced and gifted, and probably the most spiritually adept, though we cannot see into the souls of the apes; still, Christ did not come as an ape, so it's safe to say that humans are better able to enter into willing relationship with the Creator than the primates), are capable of great influence over the natural world, in ways I think once relegated to the realm of idle superstition but now being more fully explored by the sciences. The universe is, indeed, just what its name implies: a uniform sort of entity. All the parts are mysteriously connected. There is intrinsic order to the system. It can be argued that chaos and order co-exist, as though in equal portions. I argue that the universe has emerged from mere chaos and works toward order (even if in quantifiable terms chaos may outweigh order--a point I made in the last note about "entropy" comes into play here), so that destruction and decay intermingle with the abundance of reasonable life (and logical non-life). This is a point I lost in the last paragraph, but I'm picking it up here again. Animal savagery is potentially a threat to the notion of objectivity or a definite ontological reality of "good and evil". But the way animals behave is actually very understandable given the developing nature of the universe. Much of creation involves "chance", as God allows the universe to work itself out, with his hand guiding it along all the time, so to speak (a paradox, but they are real enough). Why God would produce such a slow-moving system and not a ready-made one is easy enough to see I think once we grasp what kind of God we're talking about: this is a God of substance and intentional relationality. "Love" is not something that can be manufactured, it must "develop" out of a gradual growth of awareness. The universe then is made to hold creatures capable of self-aware, and God-aware, relationship. Animals are a step toward that level of awareness, but still largely enslaved to the largely "chaotic" underpinnings (or inner workings) of nature. So their behavior is sporadic and often vicious, but life finds a way through it all. Order wins out. Life cannot exist in pure chaos, because chaos is the dissembling of all parts into final annihilation. And chaos is precisely the dissembling of relationships. So an orderly universe is necessary for creatures such as humans to conduct meaningful existences and enter into communion with one another and with God. Love is at the basis of it all, really, as sappy as that may sound. God is love, an unstoppable energy that yearns to give of itself and yearns for giving in return. This can be seen on God's part as "inevitable" since he is love in essence and has no "choice" but to give of himself; but I'm not sure that's ground we should be treading. God remains unfathomable, and rightly so, being the base of all existence (and I suppose it could be argued that God the creator is subject to an overarching principle himself, so that he is not really the ultimate ground, or foundation; but nothing in the Bible, nor in philosophy, demands us to view the personal God as other than the Absolute on which all things, including "laws", logical and otherwise, stand).
So the universe produces beasts, able to drive themselves, to feel and, tangentially at least, to think, but which are still largely bound to impersonal forces and the wild seas of subatomic process. After fourteen billion years, though, "persons" emerge. This itself is a slow climb. A potential stickler here is the "intermediate" stage of neanderthals, who were self-aware and religiously minded. But they were still driven in large part by raw animalism and primal fear of the unknown. (I can't remember exactly how, but the "neanderthal" thing was thrown at me by my friend as counter evidence of my whole theory. Someone reading this may have thought of the same objection, whatever it was, and if so, then there you go, enjoy my response.) The goal of humanity is to rise above fear and desperation, to look away from the largeness of the universe to the largeness of the loving God and to base their actions and desires in their knowledge of him. That God is loving, by the way, is intrinsic. What we know as "good" is what God is by "default". As all reality streams from him, it follows that the grain of reality runs in the direction of order, justice, reason, sacrifice, love. While we're on that, let me make this point. My friend gave the analogy of a dictator whose fondness of blue leads him to desire a world in which all things revolve around blueness. So he orders his subjects to like blue, and in time they come to see blue as the ultimate, the only thing worth liking. But the analogy is faulty. For one, the dictator remains a creature. The creator is quite a different sort of thing altogether. So his ruling is not nearly so arbitrary, nor based on taste, aesthetics. It could be held (as by my friend) that God prefers good because he just happens to like it. I say God prefers good because it is what he is, by no choice of his own. When he says "good is best" it has real ontological force: good is what gives shape and structure to reality, and, as I asserted earlier, it is intrinsically more desirable for there to be something than nothing. I'm not saying that chaos is intrinsically "evil", or order intrinsically "good" in a moral sense. In the sense though of final goals, then yes order is most certainly better, it is "good" in a way chaos is not. Chaos will breathe its last (as if it were an actual positive force! chaos itself is more the absence of order than anything; it could then be argued that "evil" is simply the absence of good, and while this is partially true, I think, it is also true that evil takes on a life of its own...more on that in a bit). God's ruling is not "opinion", which, by the way, falls into two camps. There is opinion on what is "correct". One opines about a certain fact when one does not directly know that fact. Let us assume that God knows all there is to be known, at least about the nature of the universe and the laws of reality (what makes it tick, as it were). Then there is opinion based in aesthetic preference, which we've already been through. Is this open to God? I think not, for if that were so, and the dictator analogy were to hold, what kind of God would that be? A God who coerces us into liking what he likes, to thinking like he thinks? Can a real relationship be built on the "brainwashing" scenario you envision, or even out of pure fear of the great terrible power overriding your own insignificance? Fear plays a part in the creaturely relation to the creator, but primarily "love" works through pure, earnest desire to know the other party. So if the moral law were but a programme fashioned after God's whims, it would not really be worth following, and we should rather die in defiance of the self-absorbed tyrant.
Our race is intelligent enough to realize what makes for peace. So we set up rules and regulations to set us apart from the animals. The factor that makes us different--our rationality, our power of free choice--is the very thing that makes us the most volatile force in the world. The agency of reason and morality that enables us to be true masters of the earth also tells us to be servants of the earth, to tend it out of love and reverence. This agency also tells us, in its truest form (as envisioned by Jesus), that the last will be first, that to lose yourself you must find it. This paradox is written large across the whole canvas of the cosmos really: through death, life. Then again, the pattern of "through chaos, order" is also there. Is this then incentive to encourage at least a dose of chaos within human society? Not at all. Chaos is the disruption of reasonable process, a formless flux of undirected energy (or non-energy?). The death of plants is not a chaotic process. There is an order, a pattern, to the descent to soil and the reascent to new life. Chaos is exactly that state where there is no pattern. And human self-sacrifice is not the raving lust for death, as life is to be desired more. Self-sacrifice comes when one realizes one's death will contribute to the greater cause of love and justice and order. Humanity is called to conduct itself around the principles with which God himself operates. These are the things that build trust, that build knowing and understanding. Murder, thievery, conniving, brutality, these things break bonds and throw the whole network of mutual dependency out of whack, as well as dehumanizing--derationaliz
On that note, it goes back to first principles--starting assumptions. That's where I and my friend differed; that's where I and the skeptics (religious, atheistic, and agnostic) differ. The skeptic takes a more "pessimistic" tack and assume that all judgments, all rulings, even God's, must be simply the "preference" of the one who makes those judgments and rulings. In the realm of morality there is no intrinsic right or wrong, it's all a matter of taste. But there is certainly a right and wrong way to go about dealing with, say, physics, or chemistry; so if the brute operations of nature have actual values of "better" and "worse" (in regard to specific outcomes, say, the ongoing fruitfulness of the universe), what works as opposed to that which does not, why cannot the infinitely more subtle and complicated realm of morality? The soul is a universe unto itself, and all souls are connected to one another and to the source of all things; it is a dance and a symphony, and the pattern is set by the conductor, but in this case the conductor has not put together the piece because it tickled his fancy in a quirky human sense. The difference is precisely that this is the Creator we are speaking of: whereas humans can change their tastes and wants, the Creator, being the fixed principle upon which all systems stand, cannot, by virtue of being what he is.
And to wrap things up, this is where most atheists/agnostics and many religious people fall short, I think. They are inconvenienced by the idea of God, so they dismiss him altogether or perhaps imagine a scenario in which they "offer God a beer", i.e., treat him in a casual, almost indifferent, fashion. That latter I honestly think is either a failure to recognize just WHAT (more than simply "who") God actually is, or it is an attempt to bring the infinite to a manageable level, which is an understandable sentiment. The vast unknowability of God, though tempered by the fact of his incarnation in Christ, is dreadful to think on, and understandably so. When we turn to God, we turn to the wellspring from which the whole construct of reality flows, the root of our being. If we cannot even know ourselves, how do we expect to know the origin of ourselves? (As for the possibility of God being a creature himself, I'm just assumed here that he is the "ultimate" and that his creation is by divine fiat alone, not by manipulation of pre-existent material, so he does not stand at any intermediate level--all things come from him, whatever that means, and I don't think it means that he is composed of all things, but more that his will is such that it can call forth that which was not, save in the mind of God as an idea.) The anti-religious persons, and the believers who view God with such non-chalance, will doubtless deny the charge, and possibly take offense at my seeming arrogance. But know this: it is not arrogance, but a growing sense of awareness at my relation to the Creator, and thus a growing humility, that compels me to stress this truth. God does not demand our subservience because it satisfies his ego. We are compelled by the mere fact of our being created, and his being creator. It is the wind over the grass--the wind does not order the grass to kneel, but the two things being exactly what they are, this is how they interact; the grass flattens under the magnitude and power of the wind. Love entails recognition of God's awesomeness. In any event, we will all stand before God one day, and then we will see the disposition of our true selves. The soul that hates God will still bow, but it will be with much protesting. The soul that loves God will bow with tears of joy.
Another question my friend brought up was the issue of "those who've never heard about God". I'm not exactly sure (as with the neanderthal thing) how it fit into the overall discussion, but he brought it as another rebuttal to my theory. So again, someone reading this may have been bugged by the same perplexity and so this is for you. Regardless, it's another pretty decent summation of my views, so I include it for kicks (and it actually brings the whole topic of the "purpose of the universe" to a nice close). I kind of approached my friend's question with the issue of "fallenness" (i.e., humans were once well aware of God and his desire for relationship, etc., then fell from that happy state and had to be reinformed, so to speak) but I'm not sure there was ever a stage when humans were fully cognizant of God's purposes for their lives. Humans have always had understanding of morality and justice and order. The whole notion of the personal, loving God who speaks directly to us and calls us to walk with him and take part in governing the world and making ready fo the next, though...that's a realization that has to grow out of actual experience. Knowledge of the fact brings the danger of rejecting the invitation. Whatever that will entail I'm not sure. It may be there are two ways to hell: denial of the basic human perception of rightness and love (the one in denial must of course be mentally disposed to making rational choices), and denial of the much more specific truth of God's plan for his creation. The Jews got the "plan" first, for whatever reason; I rather suspect it's just further proof of how God works, gradually, from a tiny speck to a grand scheme. In any event, now it's spreading, and transforming the world (even if we can't see all the effects just yet), under the authority of the name of Jesus, the man who stands at the center of the human race and thus, metaphysically, at the center of the universe, summing up all things in himself and pointing all things toward their perfect fulfillment.
No comments:
Post a Comment