Exploring Lewis's God: The Greater Good

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Instag0

Sergeant Knight at Arms
Apparently summer's long, boring nights and days have gotten to me and I've deevolved into writing about philosophical bull****. I even started a new blog, Goddammit. Most of this drivel is crossposted from it (and some is crossposted from my submission to reddit.) Regardless, I thought maybe a few of you would enjoy this.

I've been wondering about God's existence for a long while now. Ever since taking an introductory philosophy course at my university just this last Spring, I've been wondering about the implications of the theistic God as defined by C.S. Lewis. He claims the theistic God is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Along with this, he adds that God desires our love and our acceptance.

At the very least, I mean to provoke thought by exploring the theistic God outlined in Lewis's own definition.

1. The theistic God exists.
2. The theistic God desires humanity's acceptance.
3. The theistic God works toward a greater good.
4. To accept God, humans must first recognize him and then understand him.
5. Evil Exists.
6. God allows evil in his plan for a greater good.
7. God's reasoning behind his allowance of evil toward his plan of a greater is not apparent.

8. Therefore, a benevolent God who desires our understanding cannot work towards a non-apparent greater good.
9. Therefore, God does not exist.

Notes:

Once again, the definition of God and his will are taken from C. S. Lewis, a prominent Christian theologian. Since he explicity expresses that God desires our understanding, and that God is benevolent, then it must be apparent to us why evil's atrocities exist. However, it is impossible to form a rationale behind why a benevolent God would sacrifice his creations towards a greater good, unless God's reason is impercitable

Assuming God does indeed exist outside humans' capability for logic, then God cannot desire our acceptance because we would be incapable of understanding him. And if he does not desire our acceptance, he is not a theistic God per Lewis's definition.

To reiterate, no God that desires our acceptance could work in mysterious ways. For us to accept him, we must follow a continuum of acceptance: firstly, we rocognize God, and from this recognition stems understanding, and from this understanding stems acceptance. If at any point this continuum is broken, then we cannot accept God. It follows that God cannot both desire our acceptance and work in mysterious ways if he desires our understanding. These two concepts are mutually exclusive because God circumvents our continuum of acceptance by working in mysterious ways, outside our ability to understand. For God to work outside our understanding yet desire our acceptance through understanding is contradictory, so it follows that God, with the aforementioned traits, cannot exist.
 
I believe the theory (not by Lewis) is that God desires us to find salvation, but we must do it on our terms. That is, for salvation to mean anything, we must have the choice of either good or evil (see A Clockwork Orange). However, at the same time, he was working towards a mysterious goal, and thus acts in mysterious ways, as he is an omniscient being, whose logic is not necessarily the same as a human's, and which spans a much further amount of time, as he can plan for millennia (**** you Firefox, millennia is too a word) ahead, as an immortal being. But, this argument necessitates throwing out the statement that God desires our acceptance, so it really just agrees with Lewis' statements. I think the simple assumption that he does [desire our acceptance], however, can't be taken for granted, since God is our maker, and our superior. So, I don't agree with Lewis, in that God must desire our acceptance; he may, but he might just have that wish of all parents to see their children do well and succeed - in His case, living morally and correctly and finding salvation.

EDIT: Reading through that, my post sounds extremely disjointed.
 
You touch on the freewill response, an oft-used reply to the problem of evil. To summarize, the problem of evil states that no benevolent creator would allow evil, so no benevolent creator exists. The response answers this by stating God allows evil through free-will, but this ignores natural disasters. Besides that, opponents to the freewill response bring up the question of why God didn't create a world such that freewill exists without evil. Naturally, the counter to this is that this is not logically possible, which lines up well with Lewis because he is very particular about his definition of God's omnipotence: God can only do all things logically possible. Still, this confines God to a higher authority of logic, which seems to go against the very basis of God as a supreme being that answers to no one. Socrates classically proposed a very similar problem in his Euthyphro dilemma, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Anyway, thanks a ton for the well-reasoned response. That's the first I've had in a long time. :smile:
 
1. The theistic God exists.
2. The theistic God desires humanity's acceptance.
3. The theistic God works toward a greater good.
4. To accept God, humans must first recognize him and then understand him.
5. Evil Exists.
6. God allows evil in his plan for a greater good.
7. God's reasoning behind his allowance of evil toward his plan of a greater is not apparent.

8. Therefore, a benevolent God who desires our understanding cannot work towards a non-apparent greater good.
9. Therefore, God does not exist.

Not exactly, it just means that God can't embody all three traits as we see them. At the very most two out of three is acceptable under that proposition, but not all three. Or, God doesn't really care about this universe, but still exists.

Some people could also make the argument that evil like sickness, suffering, and general bad things exist so we could show things like empathy and sympathy. However, it's a little suspect that God cannot create situations like those without the use of such techniques.
 
I think of it in the same way that God desires our acceptance in the same way a father desires the love of their child. It's not needed, but wanted.

As previously stated, I think he wants us to find salvation, but his design for us included free will (he wanted companions/children, not slaves) so the choice to not accept his love is there, because it has to be. And also, "mysterious" is not the same as "indecipherable".

Now to wait for this to be picked apart by my hypercritical peers...

And Swadius, what kind of situation would that be? A little girl scraped her knee, so you fall down and weep for her? It doesn't really seem to work.
 
It fails in the early stages. If God needs to work towards something, he is not omnipotent. If he was, he'd be able to achieve the desired result without any of the work. Conclusion - an omnipotent God would have no need of a universe in the first place.

Instag0 said:
Naturally, the counter this is that this is not logically possible, which lines up well with Lewis because he is very particular about his definition of God's omnipotence: he can only do all things logically possible.
Not sure what the logical problem would be with free will and no evil.

Technically, with omnipotence there is no act which would be logically impossible.
 
CJ1145 said:
I think of it in the same way that God desires our acceptance in the same way a father desires the love of their child. It's not needed, but wanted.

As previously stated, I think he wants us to find salvation,

Why do you assume this is so? Existence of God is not tied to anything else.


but his design for us included free will (he wanted companions/children, not slaves) so the choice to not accept his love is there, because it has to be.

This is particularly strange here, since God is supposedly all powerful, yet cannot create salvation without also introducing evil.

And Swadius, what kind of situation would that be? A little girl scraped her knee, so you fall down and weep for her? It doesn't really seem to work.

No, some philosopher have said that people being inflicted with terrible diseases and general suffering would necessitate others helping them out at their own expense, in doing so trying to demonstrating that evil has a place after all and can lead to good. You are right to say that there are holes in this argument, but your analogy isn't entirely correct, the main proposition is for me to help her as well as sympathize with her condition.
 
If God has always existed and was/is singular, and is omniscient/all knowing etc then..

Perhaps God always having been at the summit of all knowing, has desired to wonder what it would be like to be powerless, or perhaps equal or lesser to another?

Of this desire maybe the reasoning for existence of unknown knowledge - Our universe.  Maybe he is incarnated in some form in this universe, or perhaps he is the universe proper. Maybe then the summit of the universe's progressive gains of knowledge, is the completion of a puzzle, which will see him realized.


Or..


Perhaps it is that God, having had companions, or creation within his influence, wondered what such creations would be like outside of his influence, hence a universe here.

However, if that were the case, then such a venture would be meaningless because if he is all knowing, then there would stand nothing to gain, as he would already know.

The logic then would suggest that perhaps WE, beings only knowledgable within the direct influence of God, wondered what existence would be like, not directly within his influence.

An existence of challenge, and a chance to form singular identities as beings..

Existence without training wheels.


That said, and if the latter is the case, then God perhaps may never be able to experience the journey of self discovery we as embodied creations do. Consider yourselves fortunate in this matter.


On the matter of evil there is non such. There is only knowledge and ignorance. We have free will, and we make choices on our own per either of those concepts. Therefore there cannot be a tyranny of evil since no one else makes the choices for us.
 
ealabor said:
If God has always existed and was/is singular, and is omniscient/all knowing etc then..

Perhaps God always having been at the summit of all knowing, has desired to wonder what it would be like to be powerless, or perhaps equal or lesser to another?
He would already know how it is to be powerless because he would be all-knowing.

Perhaps it is that God, having had companions, or creation within his influence, wondered what such creations would be like outside of his influence, hence a universe here.

However, if that were the case, then such a venture would be meaningless because if he is all knowing, then there would stand nothing to gain, as he would already know.
Plus why would we worship him if he left us to rot by ourselves? How could he expect us to believe in him if he does not influence our universe? These are also quite a lot of assumptions.

The Mercenary said:
I believe the theory (not by Lewis) is that God desires us to find salvation, but we must do it on our terms. That is, for salvation to mean anything, we must have the choice of either good or evil (see A Clockwork Orange). However, at the same time, he was working towards a mysterious goal, and thus acts in mysterious ways, as he is an omniscient being, whose logic is not necessarily the same as a human's, and which spans a much further amount of time, as he can plan for millennia (**** you Firefox, millennia is too a word) ahead, as an immortal being. But, this argument necessitates throwing out the statement that God desires our acceptance, so it really just agrees with Lewis' statements. I think the simple assumption that he does [desire our acceptance], however, can't be taken for granted, since God is our maker, and our superior. So, I don't agree with Lewis, in that God must desire our acceptance; he may, but he might just have that wish of all parents to see their children do well and succeed - in His case, living morally and correctly and finding salvation.

EDIT: Reading through that, my post sounds extremely disjointed.
What about cribdeath? Those babies go to hell without having the chance to prove themselves nor the choice of either 'good' or 'evil'. Plus, if he could plan for milennia (which is a ridiculously small amount of time for an omniescent being) he would know the exact course of our lives at the moment he created us.

 
Archonsod said:
It fails in the early stages. If God needs to work towards something, he is not omnipotent. If he was, he'd be able to achieve the desired result without any of the work. Conclusion - an omnipotent God would have no need of a universe in the first place.

Instag0 said:
Naturally, the counter this is that this is not logically possible, which lines up well with Lewis because he is very particular about his definition of God's omnipotence: he can only do all things logically possible.
Not sure what the logical problem would be with free will and no evil.

Technically, with omnipotence there is no act which would be logically impossible.

I figure the way it works is this: forced goodness is not goodness at all. It's, again, like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. He's given aversion therapy, forcing him to stop acting in an evil way, but at the same time, he's not reformed at all - he still has an evil weal. Of course, you could argue that God could simply clap his hands and change everyone into a good weal, but then what would be the point of creating us in the first place? The process and struggle is and of itself the most rewarding part of any effort - imagine a movie where you see the introduction, the problem, and then someone shows up, claps his hands, and Earth becomes a utopia. While the end result is good, its unfulfilling (**** you Firefox, unfulfilling is too a word). At the same time, I find the process of creating something, learning something, et cetera, to be more fulfilling and rewarding than the end product of what I've done. The labor is in and of itself enjoyable, even if it goes wrong at times. That's the way I figure God to work - if He was just going to force us to do what He wanted, He never needed to create us in the first place, since what we do has no impact on Him - the entire universe doesn't affect Him. However, the struggles of humanity, the struggles of the universe, and the drama of free will is what He enjoys, and He deals out punishment or reward for the actions that we have performed, to have a hand in the final events of our universe. In this way, I'm sort of like a Deist - He created the Universe, He created us, then he sat back and watched.

Please note that I'm a (mostly) atheistic person.

Instag0 said:
You touch on the freewill response, an oft-used reply to the problem of evil. To summarize, the problem of evil states that no benevolent creator would allow evil, so no benevolent creator exists. The response answers this by stating God allows evil through free-will, but this ignores natural disasters. Besides that, opponents to the freewill response bring up the question of why God didn't create a world such that freewill exists without evil. Naturally, the counter to this is that this is not logically possible, which lines up well with Lewis because he is very particular about his definition of God's omnipotence: God can only do all things logically possible. Still, this confines God to a higher authority of logic, which seems to go against the very basis of God as a supreme being that answers to no one. Socrates classically proposed a very similar problem in his Euthyphro dilemma, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"

Anyway, thanks a ton for the well-reasoned response. That's the first I've had in a long time. :smile:

Hell, I was considering a logical answer to this, and I realised it sounded similar to my above answer to Arch. So, yeah.

EDIT: ****, stop posting so fast!

Raz said:
What about cribdeath? Those babies go to hell without having the chance to prove themselves nor the choice of either 'good' or 'evil'. Plus, if he could plan for milennia (which is a ridiculously small amount of time for an omniescent being) he would know the exact course of our lives at the moment he created us.

An hour is a small amount of time for a species that lives to be 80 years old. And a millennium is not constant throughout the world. I don't really have an answer for babies who die before or within a few years of their birth - I'm not omniscient.

As for the omniscience thing - I believe he knows every path our life can take, but our free will necessitates him being incapable of knowing exactly what we will do, else, we would have no true free will at all.
 
I haven't thought about it like that, ealabor. Those are all very unique ideas of possibilities concerning a higher power, but it abandons the idea of a theistic God.

Same goes to you, Arch, at least as far as I haven't realized that God would need no "creation phase" if he's omnipotent. Supposedly a truly omnipotent god's universe would exist alongside him. If he's been here forever, and knows everything that is, was, and will be, then nothing stops him from allowing the universe to exist alongside himself. And if that's all true, it's odd that he'd create beings below him dimensionally speaking. You'd think perhaps he'd create beings that could experience all instances of time simulatenously like himself, but instead he creates us in the lowly third dimension where we can only experience instances of time progressing in a linear fashion.

Still, this all goes against common perceptions of theism: an omnipotent creator, benevolent, and all powerful.

By the way, extra <3s to Swadius. I didn't mean to spark tension! :smile:
 
I'm just gonna toss some random stuff in here so I don't have to participate this conversation.

I read a book called The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs.--Great book.  Even though this thread is about any all powerful deity, I was just wondering how many people here have read the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible?

There's some really F***ed up stuff in there.

Instag0 said:
1. The theistic God exists.
2. The theistic God desires humanity's acceptance.
3. The theistic God works toward a greater good.
4. To accept God, humans must first recognize him and then understand him.
5. Evil Exists.
6. God allows evil in his plan for a greater good.
7. God's reasoning behind his allowance of evil toward his plan of a greater is not apparent.

8. Therefore, a benevolent God who desires our understanding cannot work towards a non-apparent greater good.
9. Therefore, God does not exist.

4-  His this his opinion based on what he thinks god is?  Is the "Theistic" God Jehova were talking about here?  If not, isn't recognizing God obsolete the purpose of faith?  Unless it meant recognizing as in understanding the idea of Him.
 
1)"I think there is a god, as described in the Bible"
2)"I realize that said god cannot exist in our universe by our logic"
3)"Therefore, <insert ridiculously far fetched explanations (which cannot be backed up by nor derived from any source)> because I already made up my mind before the analysis"
4)William Ockham rolls in his grave

(To no-one in particular)
 
As far as 4 goes, that's my reasoning. But yes, my syllogism has everything to do with theism (and especially God as defined by Lewis).

By the way Raz, I agree with your logic there, especially at the end of 4). :grin:
 
Instag0 said:
Assuming God does indeed exist outside humans' capability for logic, then God cannot desire our acceptance because we would be incapable of understanding him. And if he does not desire our acceptance, he is not a theistic God per Lewis's definition.

You're implicitly excluding intuitive nonlogical understanding (i.e., "faith") from Lewis' definition. If this is allowed then God can operate outside of logic and still be understandable. In fact this is probably the preferred reading of that axiom, i.e., logical understanding of God is inherently limited and incomplete.

EDIT: actually your thesis could make an interesting point that Turing machines don't have souls because they can only comprehend the computable, and God is not computable, therefore s/he cannot desire the worship of Turing machines.
 
The Mercenary said:
I figure the way it works is this: forced goodness is not goodness at all.
It's not a binary choice between good and evil. One could always choose to be neutral or a non-entity, or one could be good without accepting God.
Of course, you could argue that God could simply clap his hands and change everyone into a good weal, but then what would be the point of creating us in the first place?
That was my point. If he's omnipotent, he has no point in a universe. If he creates it anyway, he's not omnibenevolent.
The labor is in and of itself enjoyable, even if it goes wrong at times. That's the way I figure God to work
He creates suffering for his own amusement? Not benevolent as most people understand the term :wink:
As for the omniscience thing - I believe he knows every path our life can take, but our free will necessitates him being incapable of knowing exactly what we will do, else, we would have no true free will at all.
Which rules out omniscience too ....
Instag0 said:
Same goes to you, Arch, at least as far as I haven't realized that God would need no "creation phase" if he's omnipotent. Supposedly a truly omnipotent god's universe would exist alongside him.
He wouldn't need one. All he needs to know is what he's looking to achieve and if he is truly omnipotent, he achieves it. Even assuming the universe was a necessary step, as an omnipotent being he could just "fast forward" to the end.
Lewis' God is a bit of a paradox. In the first case, as an omnipotent entity he has no need to create the universe, since he can achieve whatever he desires without it. As an omniscient entity, the universe is pointless as he already knows what will happen. Despite both of these, for him to go ahead and create the universe brings into question his omnibenevolence, since he's creating unnecessary suffering.
Omnibenevolence is another problem though. Even if we accept there is a greater good, can you truly call a being which eternally punishes others benevolent?
 
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