Answering the Problem of Evil
The first objection thoughtful unbelievers generally raise against the Christian faith is the problem of evil. “How can there be a God?” they ask, “Just look at the state of the world!” One can certainly understand their argument, and I’m certain I would feel the same way if I were not a Christian. In fact, several years ago I heard a news story that I’m certain I would mention to any evangelist knocking on my door if I were an unbeliever. “What about that young boy, Dylan?” I would ask. Dylan Groene, nine, and his sister, Shasta, eight, were abducted by a sexual predator. As Katherine Ramsland describes the incident:
(Shasta) told police that over the course of several days, she and her nine-year-old brother had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by their kidnapper. Then he’d taken Dylan away, tortured and shot him, burned his remains and fled with her. (Dylan’s remains were found in Montana.) There’s little doubt, if not for the intervention of concerned citizens, that she was next.
Their abductor was James Edward Duncan III, a convicted child molester. His criminal history includes a long string of assaults against children, as well as at least one other murder. He remains a suspect in several as-yet unsolved cases, and in his online blog, he alluded to having committed murder more than once. Duncan officially began his criminal career in 1978 when he was fifteen by forcibly raping a nine-year-old boy at gunpoint. Apparently he told a therapist that he’d already assaulted at least a dozen boys in a similar manner, six of whom he’d bound. Only two years later, he was in prison for raping a 14-year-old boy.
Duncan remained in prison for fourteen years, and his parole conditions stipulated that he stay away from children…
In April 2005, [Joseph Edward] Duncan [III] was charged in Minnesota with molesting a six-year-old boy and attempting to molest his friend. Bond was posted and Duncan then purchased a shotgun, a claw hammer, and ammunition. He stole a Jeep Grand Cherokee and fled the state, arriving in Idaho. He apparently spotted the Groene children in their yard, and staked out the home for a few days until he determined the right time to go grab the kids. Instead of taking them from the yard, he decided to kill three people inside the home. Even worse, rather than just shoot them, he chose instead to bind them and use the claw hammer to bludgeon them to death. Each person heard the others being killed, which bears witness to Duncan’s need to inflict psychological as well as physical torture. He also described to Shasta and Dylan what he had done to their family and recorded his treatment of them for his later enjoyment.
Duncan, 42, had grown mean over the years, and viewed his treatment as unjust. He’d kept a Web diary labeled “Blogging the Fifth Nail,” a reference to the nails used on Jesus Christ during his crucifixion.
In some entries, Duncan discussed the idea of right and wrong and his awareness that he did not know the difference. “God has shown me the right choice,” he wrote in April 2005, “but the demons have tied me to a spit and the fire has already been lit.” Duncan also expressed a great deal of anger over his social isolation, the result of his Level III sex offender status, and he wanted to strike out at society. “My intent,” he wrote, “is to harm society as much as I can, and die.” Apparently his aim was to kill people and grab children for his own pleasure. In one entry, just four days before the Idaho murders and abductions, he wrote, “The demons have taken over.”lxxi
So the question I would ask the evangelist at my door, were I not a Christian, is the same one I now ask the Church as a long time member of the Christian community: Did God foreordain in any sense the sinful activities of Joseph Edward Duncan III?
I can imagine how a tactful evangelist might respond. Probably he would feel genuinely apologetic in having to admit it was a mystery to him why such things should happen. This would almost certainly be his response if he were a Calvinist or simply an average Christian attending the kind of Evangelical church where he heard a Calvinistic apologetic ‘answer’ about why evil exists. Probably the evangelist would hesitate to tell me what he really thought about the matter if he understood his church’s apologetic at all—that in some sense God had designed that Dylan should be raped and murdered by the sexual predator who first bludgeoned most of Dylan’s family to death, while yet remaining blameless in decreeing such events. “But deep down I know God is good,“the evangelistmight add, before leaving my doorstep to give a ‘reason’ of the hope that is in him to my neighbor down the street— “…good all the time.”249
I think the Church needs to have something better—nay, different—than this kind of Evangelical apologetic. When Francis Schaeffer was once asked how he would approach an unbeliever with the gospel if he only had an hour to do it, he replied that he would spend 45 minutes showing the man the problem and 15 minutes showing him the solution.lxxii Of course, Schaeffer was referring to the problem of trying to convince the man that there was real sin in the world, and that the man was responsible for his own part in it. Unfortunately, Christian apologetics has unwittingly blame-shifted the problem of sin onto an all-sovereign God and then tried to excuse Him in order to make the gospel message more winsome to the average unbeliever. The result has been a diminished view of sin. Schaeffer was correct, however. We need an apologetic that is biblical, imposing, and impressively truthful about sin. And so while Christians should not endorse all the tenets of Open Theism (such as its belief that God doesn’t know the future because He lacks foreknowledge), we need something other than James Spiegel’s Calvinistic argument in his book, The Benefits of Providence, in which Spiegel argues against Open Theism’s belief in human freedom. Says Spiegel:
Open theism does not shield God against culpability for evil (assuming, for the sake of argument, that he is culpable in the classical view). According to openness theology, God allowed evil to occur in the world. Also, he has been immediately aware of it and able to prevent it. So how is he, in this view, any less responsible for evil than he would be if he ordained evil? In other words, since in the open view God is at least the indirect cause of evil, how does the insertion of an intermediate causal step (human beings and their free will) exonerate God? To do X with advance knowledge that X will lead to evil consequences is tantamount to willing the evil itself.lxxiii
While Spiegel is right to criticize Open Theism’s claim that God had no foreknowledge about Adam’s choice, his own Calvinistic system likewise fails to provide a rational framework for the coexistence of both God’s foreknowledge and human freedom. One wonders, for example, how Spiegel’s all-sovereign God is not equally guilty of the same charge which he lays at the feet of Open Theism in the above quote. Would not an all-sovereign God also have foreknown what events would lead to evil consequences (granting, for the moment, Spiegel’s argument that God’s foreknowledge ‘led’ man)? The problem here, is that Spiegel is simply mistaken to imply (presumably, unwittingly) that God is responsible for the moral content of events simply because God knows what will happen in the future. The Bible never indicates that because God foreknows the future He is responsible for it. Spiegel appears to have come to this conclusion because he has failed to see that human freedom totally removes God from the responsibility of human sin. Human freedom, we note, by biblical definition, means that man is the uncaused first cause of his choices, including his sin. As Jesus states (Mk. 7:20-23):
20And He said, “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. 21For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, 22thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness. 23All these evil things come from within and defile a man.”
Jesus was echoing the same thought found in Ecclesiastes 7:29: “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” Thus when Spiegel implies, in effect, that God did X knowing it would lead to evil, he is proposing that God is directing man toward sin. He views God’s original creation of free will and His foreknowledge of how man would use it as ‘tantamount’ to God creating the evil Himself. Thus, Spiegel fails to accept at face value that Jesus recognizes no antecedent cause of man’s sin other than man’s own will. What has happened, in fact, is that man has taken what God has created and added evil content to it. Take, for instance, an analogy from the world of art. Spiegel’s view is similar to saying that Leonardo Da Vinci would have been wrong to have painted the Mona Lisa had he foreknown that four centuries later the ‘artist’ Marcel Duchamp would take a copy of the Mona Lisa and paint a mustache on it as a gesture of his disdain for traditional, classical artists and their claim of upholding true principles of craftsmanship. In such a case, (we ask) should Da Vinci have not created the Mona Lisa simply because he knew someone would deface it? Of course not. Yet Spiegel insists, in effect, that Da Vinci’s foreknowledge of someone desecrating his picture would make him responsible for such desecration along with its implied message! Thus contained within Spiegel’s view of God is the subtle assumption that God’s motive in creating man was to bring about evil in order to bring about good. In effect, had Da Vinci the foreknowledge of what Duchamp would do to a copy of his picture, Da Vinci’s real motive (or at least partial motive) in painting the Mona Lisa would have been its desecration, i.e., so that the Zeitgeist would continue its ineffable march of dialectically defining the principles of art. This is the same kind of assumption one would hold, for example, if one said that God’s motive in pointing out Job’s righteousness to Satan was to get the Devil to tempt Him, in order that the ‘good’ part of God’s agenda might ultimately take place.
We don’t deny here that, for any man to exercise his free will in this world, God must sustain the physical creation of the man and the world around him. (As Paul said (Acts 17:28) “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.”) But God sustains the man apart from his sin. Again, this does not make God directly or indirectly responsible for evil just because He knows what man will do. When the Calvinist treats Ecclesiastes 7:29 as though it means: “The Lord hath made man upright, but he hath sought out many devices, yet the Lord hath ordained that man seek out such devices,”he is being a biblical revisionist. And so despite Spiegel’s claim—”To do X with advance knowledge that X will lead to evil consequences is tantamount to willing the evil itself”—we cannot find any biblical support for such a statement. Nor (to give a human example) can we imagine the likelihood that Spiegel discussed this X principle with his wife before deciding to have the three children he mentions in his book’s Preface, who, precious as they doubtless are, no doubt inherited the same seed of knowledge of good and evil which all of us have inherited from the Adamic line and from which point (after later maturing) they will eventually follow during their period of accountability. For Spiegel, then, to say that people are tantamount to willing the evil itself if they do that which they know will ‘lead’ to evil, would all but mean that people ought not to have children (since, generally, children eventually mature and travel through the age of accountability, or, in Spiegel’s view, would certainly bear the transgression of Adam even as infants).
Spiegel continues to misunderstand the true biblical definition of free will in a special chapter called “The Problem of Evil.” Here he invokes a doublethink to say that God could have made man with the ability to choose, but in such a way that he would only choose good. This is apparently the flipside to the Calvinistic belief that all men can choose, but can only choose evil. Thus, in the following quote Spiegel treats irrationally the concept of choosing, i.e., by stating that there can be a choice between one thing:
…is human autonomy really so valuable that it makes God’s risking cosmic catastrophe worthwhile? Is it safe to assume that an omniscient being would be able to anticipate just how devastating our evil choices might (or would likely) turn out to be, including the massive proportions of rapes, tortures, and other cruelties that human history has seen? Such misery presents a strong presumption against the idea that personal autonomy justifies it all…
…But the problems with the free will theodicy run even deeper. Even granting the premises of this approach, we may still reasonably ask why God has allowed so much evil? Couldn’t he at least have diminished the harmful effects of our sins in ways that I have already suggested above?250 Even in allowing us to run headlong into the many vices we do, surely God could have curbed the painful ramifications somehow. And couldn’t he have simply made us more intelligent, such that we could more keenly anticipate the negative fallout of our wrong choices? And giving us a stronger moral imagination would have helped, so that we would have a more acute sense of what it is like to be other people. This too, would have provided a powerful buffer against evil without compromising our freedom.
To push this line of thinking even further, why couldn’t God keep us from doing evil altogether? According to libertarians, this would negate our freedom. But this is not true. Much real freedom would remain for us within the domain of goodness, since there are myriad good actions one may perform in any given situation. Right now, for instance, God could build a moral hedge around me so that I could not sin in any way, yet I would still be free to do thousands of different things, from continuing my writing, to taking a walk, to starting a conversation with some students down the hall…lxxiv
Observe that Spiegel claims that a domain of goodness is possible without any attendant possibility of evil. He asks: ‘Couldn’t God keep us from doing evil altogether?’ Thus, Spiegel makes a subtle change to the word ‘us’ in his question. He assumes the ‘us’ is present, when in fact it is not, i.e., by the same token that the ‘my’ in “my desire” is not present in Edwards and Sproul’s theology whenever man needs to be so inoperative that he cannot react with real choice (in Edwards and Sproul’s case, morally positive; in Spiegel’s hypothetically stated case, morally negative). In effect, Spiegel is really asking, “Can’t men do things without deciding to do them?” Well, no doubt men can be theorized to do whatever Calvinist theologians need them to do in the arena of irrational theology. After all, couldn’t God have created an apple that we could have eaten without eating it? Couldn’t God have created a world so that we could commit sin without doing it? Couldn’t God have chosen our choices without choosing our choices? (Is anything too hard for the Lord?!) One is reminded again of C.S. Lewis’s comment in The Problem of Pain, that, while the Bible tells us that God can do all things, such things must be things; they cannot be non-things.
And so Spiegel’s view is a disturbing one, for it denies any meaning to the concept of choice or even to the concept of good. Take for instance the various activities Spiegel labels as ‘good actions,’ e.g., writing, walking, starting a conversation with some students down the hall, etc. But couldn’t Spiegel refuse to do these very actions if he wanted? If he couldn’t refuse to do them, then how is his being different from a machine? After all, a machine performs actions but exercises no choices.251 So to exist in a state where choices would never be possible but where activity is said to be performed, is to be a machine. And observe that machines do not inhabit moral realms. They perform action but never moral or immoral action. One might say, “The machine is a good machine and performing well,” but the machine is never understood as causing or possessing itself any moral good. This is because a moral designation can only be applied to persons, since obviously only persons inhabit a moral realm. To deny this distinction between men and machines is to depersonalize the moral dimension of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and to change the words, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into meaningless (machine) terms. The inevitable result would be a universe of existential choices devoid of any meaning, yet a universe where it might be said that there was ‘good.’ And so while we certainly recognize that God could have created a universe of machines instead of persons, we also recognize that the machines themselves could never be morally good. A robot that ‘wrote,’ ‘took a walk,’ or ‘talked’ to some students down the hall would not be doing morally good things, but merely be in motion. In fact, such a universe of indifferent machines would be far different from the universe that actually exists. God’s actual creation has real persons who are able to make real choices between real good and real bad. Part of what God decided would differentiate a person from the rest of inanimate creation is this very thing—the ongoing ability to choose between good and evil unto eternal liability. But the kind of universe that Spiegel envisions as God’s ideal creation is exactly what fallen history has provided. And so he claims that evil must exist for the greater good (Spiegel refers to this explanation of evil as the greater good theodicy). If Spiegel had to choose between (what would be for him) a lesser model of ideal creation, he would, according to his description, still choose the existential one he describes, in which (we note) actions are performed without any moral meaning by ‘persons’ without moral capabilities. That Spiegel views such a universe as even possible, not to mention preferable,to the actual creation that God originally made and which, in fact, involved human freedom, demonstrates his failure to understand what persons truly are, and can and cannot be. He imagines he is still thinking of people when he uses the word ‘us,’ but he is no longer describing persons. Apparently, this is because he imagines that any type of conceivable universe without qualification is possible with God. Thus the verse, “With God all things are possible,” would presumably be caricatured (if unwittingly by him) to mean that God could have created a world in which God was irrational. This is another way of saying that“God can become other than Himself, and still be God,” and of course, this is really advocating nothing more nor less than neoorthodoxy.252
Rather, a proper biblical view maintains that God does not exist outside the moral dimension which he defines. Neither do persons (made in God’s image) exist outside the bounds of being judged by God’s moral law.253 For example, Spiegel mentions the activity of writing; but regardless of how insignificant any piece of writing might seem, the motive behind any written statement is judged either good or evil according to how God defines these concepts to be. A morally good piece of writing might be an encouraging note to a struggling friend, a letter to one’s daughter away at college, or a dictionary stating accurately the definition of God. Conversely, evil writing might be the seductive advertising copy on certain billboards or a book about the equality of all religions to Christianity. In the real world there is always the moral dimension attendant with every choice, even in mundane writing, notating, or checkbook balancing. In real history there were two prisoners, one named John Bunyan who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, but another, Adolph Hitler, who wrote Mein Kampf; and while these are extreme examples to prove our point, all writing, like all human activity, embraces assumptions and motives that are right and wrong and therefore lands on only one of two sides in the moral question. To get rid of the moral dimension—to describe a ‘better’ creation as an existential and meaningless universe but still say that it has meaning and a moral dimension—is to verbally deny what a man is, and to deny him a culpable role in his sin.
Furthermore (in examining Spiegel’s view), we find it curious that Spiegel would think that a “stronger moral imagination” would help us not to mistreat others. Indeed, is there a need for imagination here? Do we not all feel what others feel when we ourselves are sinned against? In arguing for a hypothetically better creation where a ’stronger moral imagination’ would supposedly be present, Spiegel seems to have forgotten that God Himself declared that the creation of man de facto in Genesis was very good. Apparently God’s own testimony about His original creation in which man was intended to remain without disobedience is not satisfying for theologians like Spiegel, who believe that any number of creation possibilities (including an existential universe) would have been better.
Then, too, Spiegel claims that more intelligence would have helped us with empathy, so that we would not mistreat others. Having more intelligence, however, doesn’t seem to have helped Satan very much in motivating him to stop mistreating people, nor has it helped the rest of the demons to stop their mistreatment of fallen man out of any similar empathy, even though these emissaries of the Devil are all more intelligent than the smartest of men. Nor has having more intrinsic knowledge about good and evil ever helped Adam or any of his descendents live a godly life.
But to return to our discussion about choice, Spiegel seems to fail entirely in understanding that the term ‘human freedom’ cannot bear its opposite meaning. This principle—that a concept cannot bear its opposite meaning—is affirmed throughout all of Scripture, but specifically invoked in 2 Corinthians 6:14 (”for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?”), Romans 11:6 (”And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then is it no more grace: otherwise work is no more work”), and in Isaiah 5:20: (”Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”) The point of these verses is not that the application should stop with light vs. darkness, bitter vs. sweet, and good vs. evil, etc., but that it should be applied across the board to all things (including the language used to describe them) until it is understood that a particular thing (such as human freedom) cannot be itself and not itself at the same time. Furthermore, Isaiah 5:20 actually warns that God’s displeasure is unto those who would traduce such terms, for God says, “Woe unto them…” How has Spiegel not violated this principle as set forth in Isaiah 5:20, when he tells us that God could have given man a free will that could not be exercised freely, and proceed to define other key terms in theology with similar irrationality? It is sad and illogical, that Spiegel actually says that things like murders, tortures, rapes, etc., are too horrific to justify the idea that God gave man the personal autonomy to unilaterally commit it, but apparently not feel that such crimes are too horrific to justify that an all-sovereign God have the autonomy to freely decree them. Obviously, the question begs itself as to how the positing of an all-sovereign God somehow justifies these crimes if sin truly displeases God. Spiegel would deny that such an all-sovereign God is really an argument for God criminalizing man, but, of course, such a denial of a logical fact in hand will always be the chief ’strength’ of the one espousing an irrational position. So we should expect this procedure of Spiegel as a Calvinist, since the denial of irrationality (and rationality) is the essence of his Calvinism.
Furthermore, Spiegel laments that “Proponents of the free will theodicy typically assume, often without justification or argument, that personal autonomy is so valuable that it makes the risk of moral evil worthwhile…” But again the question begs itself to Spiegel why the “risk of moral evil” cannot be justified by human freedom but somehow be thought justified by an all-sovereign God. Furthermore, after each of the first five days preceding the creation of man, the Bible says that God saw that His creation was good (KJV), but after the sixth day—the day He created Adam—He looked upon the whole of creation and said “It is very good”: Why, then, the difference in statements, unless it be that God had completed the earth’s creation when a more complete expression of His nature was finally realized, i.e., Adam, and the personal free will of Adam which reflected the very nature of God and which carried with it eternal liability? Most especially, we take issue with Spiegel as to the real identity of those who would often (I should say, always) offer up assumptions without justification regarding the problem of evil. For we observe below his following surface treatment of Romans 9 (including his gloss-over of Isaiah 45):
Paul’s discussion of divine sovereignty in Romans 9 also suggests a compatibilist model of human freedom. In fact, in verses 19-22 he anticipates a main concern of the open theists. After underscoring God’s meticulous control of human hearts, he says, “One of you will say to me: ‘Then why does God still blame us? For who resists his will?’ ” His answer is, “Who are you, O man, to talk back to God?” And he quotes the prophet Isaiah, who likens our relation to God to that of clay in the potter’s hands. We have no right to question God about his choices. It is his prerogative to use whomever he wants for whatever purposes he chooses.
Note that two problems are raised in this passage. One is the metaphysical problem of reconciling divine sovereignty and human freedom. The other, which rests upon the first, is the moral question as to whether we are in fact responsible in spite of God’s sovereignty. Paul’s approach is to address the moral issue and seemingly ignore the metaphysical question, a strategy some find frustrating. But Paul’s silence here might be the most salient feature of this passage for our purposes. Perhaps his refusal to give a metaphysical explanation suggests that we cannot comprehend the true answers. Or perhaps Paul intends to remind us that such disputes ought not to distract us from our first order of business, which is right living. In any case, I believe this passage constitutes strong scriptural support for a compatibilist approach.lxxv
By ‘compatibilist approach,’ Spiegel is referring to what we of the opposing position have been contending is the Calvinist’s embrace of a contradiction (i.e., doublethinking). But let me pause here for a moment. I feel we must congratulate whoever was first responsible for sprucing up the English language and Christianese withthe term,‘compatibilist,’ so that a more winsome discussion can take place about ‘compatibilism‘ rather than about an impossible contradiction or the “Achilles Heel of Christianity,” as R.C. Sproul was frank enough to call it. Admittedly, such words as ‘compatibilism’ add to the sad tradition of Evangelical Christian proceedings. At any rate we have already given a complete answer against Spiegel’s standard Calvinistic interpretation of Romans 9 in an earlier chapter. Perhaps we should merely add that we feel genuine exasperation that the Scriptures are not handled in a more thorough and responsible way by thinkers who profess Christianity and have such obvious general intelligence.254
Once Spiegel advances the Calvinistic interpretation for Romans 9, it becomes inevitable that he will deny there is human freedom, even though he must still say there is human freedom. Again, he must say there is human freedom so God cannot be blamed for sin, yet deny there is human freedom so that God will remain absolutely sovereign. Thus Spiegel’s explanation can also be added to R.C. Sproul’s list of clever attempts to solve the problem of evil without giving discerning readers any real satisfaction.
By the time Spiegel’s readers come to his next to the last chapter—”The Problem of Evil”—the appeal to mystery is reaching a climatic development. Consequently, Spiegel backs off the kind of absolutist language he uses elsewhere so that he might now describe ‘evil’ as chiefly a ‘something ‘:
Sadly, we are all well acquainted with evil. It visits us regularly and in myriad ways. Evil is typically categorized as “moral” or “natural.” The former refers to the wrongful actions of free beings, such as rape, murder, theft, slander, and child abuse. Natural evil, on the other hand, includes pain and suffering that are not attributable to immorality, such as occur in earthquakes, famines, congenital defects, and infectious diseases.
To define evil generally is no easy task, but the most influential definition in the West sees evil as essentially privative, specifically a lack of being. Augustine maintained, in agreement with Plotinus before him, “that which we call evil (is) but the absence of good.” Along these lines Aquinas writes:
“Being and the perfection of any nature is good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies being, or any form of nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good….For since being, as such, is good, the absence of one implies the absence of the other.”
This conception of evil also has been widely affirmed outside philosophical and theological circles, such as by Emerson, who declares that “Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity.”
While I affirm this traditional Augustinian definition of evil, nothing that follows depends crucially upon it. One may prefer to define evil more generally as any departure from the way things ought to be, whether morally as in the case of sin or naturally as in the case of pain and suffering. The main point to recognize here is that something has gone terribly wrong in this world, and those of us who are theists have some explaining to do. Or, as some might dare to put it, the God in whom we believe has some explaining to do.lxxvi
Notice first that while Spiegel categorizes some evil as ‘moral’ and other evil as ‘natural,’ he does not clearly state that rape, murder, theft, etc. are de facto sins, i.e., moral evil in a way that natural disasters are not.255 For example, suppose a man shoots another man out of malicious intent such that the victim loses his arm from the injury. The shooting we may justly call sin, but the loss of the limb, while a consequence of sin, is not at all a sin. Again, if a man were paralyzed in an auto accident we would not call his condition a sinful condition from which the man must repent (i.e., change his mind). For Spiegel, then, to lump both sin and its consequences under the heading of ‘evil,’ as though there was only a technical distinction between them, is a failure to define sin properly.lxxvii Notice too that he says that evil, generally speaking, is any departure from the way things “ought to be.” But we must ask Spiegel how anything in the world can be a departure from what it “ought to be” if God is claimed to be absolutely sovereign and good ? Such statements by Spiegel are illogical.
This vague way of defining evil continues with Spiegel’s next thought in the same chapter. Here Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Emerson are cited for their agreement in defining sin. Amazingly, sin is not granted an absolute status of being, but only a quasi-existence, which, of course, is non-sensical. (One recalls the anecdote related by author Lloyd Douglas, accused by one critic of writing prose that was “almost ungrammatical.” Douglas responded by telling his readers that he knew what “grammatical” was, and what “ungrammatical” was; but what was “almost ungrammatical”?) Sin, says Spiegel, is “essentially privative” (the West), “it cannot be that evil signifies being” (Aquinas), “Evil is merely privative, not absolute” (Emerson), etc. In a footnote at the bottom of the page Augustine is quoted: “But for good to be diminished is an evil, although, however much it may be diminished, if the being is to continue, that some good should remain to constitute the being.” Note the immediate doublethink, that good can be ‘diminished’ to a quality other than goodness. Thus good is not a fixed definition in the Augustinian view. (Notice how Augustine describes evil as a nameless force acting upon ‘good’, i.e., “But for good to be diminished…” Yet Augustine should have asked himself the question: Who is it that diminishes good in an all-sovereign, divinely decreed universe? So Augustine, by defining evil as privative in nature, defines evil as the state of good being deprived. Evil, then, would have to be that state when good is deprived of part of itself, since it cannot be deprived of what it is not(in the same way that if my body lacked an arm from amputation due to a car accident, we would understand my body as being deprived of part of what (when it was complete) was properly the body itself, and therefore not deprived of a pair of scissors or a stapler that was never, or could never, be part of my body). In this way evil is defined by Augustine as something within good, not something against good. This makes the ‘buzz’ about evil, in any discussion about man’s sin, appear as though it takes place in the context of good. This is a very confused way of speaking because it is a clever form of doublethink. It attempts to grant the existence of evil while denying its existence. This is why Augustine (while on the frontward rock) says evil has no being. (Again, defining evil within good mirrors the Calvinistic methodology of defining all activity as within God, imagining, as Calvinists must do, that they can express one divine will as two wills—a sovereign will and a ‘revealed’ will.) Thus, on the one hand evil is said to exist because everyone obviously experiences it, but on the other hand it is nowhere granted its being.256The result of such a contradictory definition is that no one can be the causal agent of evil since evil has no real being, a result most useful to Emersons’s monism and to Calvinists trying to solve their dialectical problems. But notice what I wrote just a few sentences ago: “On the one hand evil is said to exist because everyone obviously experiences it.” Just after writing this sentence I caught myself. I realized that I had been subconsciously adopting the passive way of describing evil in the 3rd person as do Spiegel, Augustine, Aquinas, etc. I was adopting language that states that we experience evil, rather than more honestly expressing the fact that we cause evil. I had begun to combine in my mind both sin and its consequences under one idea—’evil.’ This is the danger of philosophy. We come under the subtle influence of false thinking before we realize it. It begins to make sense to our sinful desires so that we might excuse ourselves, and soon we begin thinking and talking the same way as those whose false ideas we are studying. This is why the Bible warns us to beware lest any man carry us away as a spoil of spiritual warfare through the deceitfulness of false philosophy.
The result of Spiegel taking forward this definition of evil is that he arrives at a point where the causation of evil is not much of a factor. Thus he says, “The main point to recognize here is that something has gone terribly wrong in this world, and those of us who are theists have some explaining to do.” Yes, indeed, to be sure, something has gone terribly wrong; except we Christians used to think that this something was more definite—i.e., the sinful act performed by our first parents as they disobeyed God and ate of the forbidden fruit, not to mention post-Adamic man’s own sinfulness besides. So much, then, for the Calvinist who might otherwise have worried about sin’s causation, so that he would be forced to use the word ‘evil ‘ in an honest fashion instead of the word, ‘something ‘. As long as evil is a something which is nothing the Calvinist cannot be caught on the horns of a dilemma. No more, then, does the Calvinist have to scramble to explain why an all-sovereign God couldn’t have sovereigned over the formation of sin while doing so, or why man could be free to commit sin even though he and his acts are under the foreordination of God. Like Emerson, who queried in his Essays whether or not there was any reality outside his own mind—and thus solved the problem of tension by eliminating the particulars between which tension needs to exist—so with Calvinism the particulars of good and evil are eliminated by defining evil as a something that is nothing, so that the dialectical tension between good and ‘evil’ is not a tension at all (the latter being nothing). In this manner the tension that exists between an all-sovereign, ‘good’ God and the free will of ‘evil’ men can be ‘reconciled’ and placed into a cozy bed called ‘compatibilism.’ Thus the problem of evil is effectively swept under the Calvinist’s rug. That Spiegel should be expected by our readers to go back and forth between a true biblical definition of evil and the false definition of Augustine, Aquinas, Emerson, & co., need hardly be stated. And small wonder that Spiegel claims that nothing crucially depends on whether evil is defined as privative in nature, since his other key, theological terms are meaningless deconstructions anyway.
Though Calvinists may find it necessary to make such bewildering explanations about evil,257 an honesty is needed among all Evangelicals so that we do not shy away from a plain statement of the truth. There is a biblical model that is rational, logical and that explains the problem of evil—it is man’s heart. The Bible demonstrates that God foreknows everything including the activity of man before He created the world, yet deemed it exceedingly good that man should choose his own moral content, even if it meant that content was against His will. More to the point is that God wanted man to love Him in return, a choice only a person of free will can do. Furthermore (and to return to an earlier parallel), God has been no more responsible for the desecration of man than Da Vinci would have been responsible for the desecration of the Mona Lisa, had Da Vinci foreknown how Duchamp would have desecrated his portrait.258 Granted we cannot any better understand God’s creation of man’s free will and His non-determination of it than we can understand the same relation between God’s foreknowledge of all history and His non-determination of it, nor both of these in regard to the additional difficulty of understanding, for example, how God can have an eternal past. But having examined the Scriptures and the historical-grammatical, lexical evidence of words, we may say with confidence that God foreknew the choices of all of us, including those by one, Joseph Edward Duncan III, without in any way determining or predetermining them. This is why Evangelicalism needs to turn 180º away from its meaningless and contradictory apologetic that does itself and the world no real good. And it needs to proceed instead unto a biblical model to explain the problem of evil, for otherwise it cannot hope to achieve a real unity within itself nor present to a skeptical world the gospel with any significant, divine power and blessing. Such falsehood always creates improper division and weakness in the saints of the Church. So let us turn away from all such false teaching. For only a God who is sovereign over all things, not in all things, can affect the malady of our time.
249Someone recently pointed out to me that God is so good at salvaging something out of a bad situation that people think He designedly uses sin. Suppose, for example, a soloist sang in church with no other motive than to glorify himself. Even in such a circumstance God may bless the message of the song and the beauty of the music which derives its meaning and beauty from God’s principles of language and music. Thus the solo may still minister to the edification of the congregation, even though the one singing will not profit himself. This was Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 13. Paul is not saying that the wrong motive leads to no profit whatsoever but to no profit for the one acting with the wrong motive, i.e., “it profiteth me nothing.” Thus, while it may seem that God is using the sin of the soloist’s motivation to bring glory to Himself, this is not really the case. Rather, God is merely upholding the form and content of language (the words of the song) and the aesthetic form of audibly intelligible music, which is governed according to the principles of tonality and skilled structure.
250Elsewhere Spiegel takes the position that God could have softened the Fall so that it wouldn’t have been so bad; thus the fact that God didn’t ameliorate it shows how His absolute sovereignty is really a mystery (since it seems reasonable to us that He should have ameliorated it). But why (we ask) should God have ameliorated the Fall? God designed that severe consequences follow man’s sin in order to show man the deep gravity of his wickedness. A lesser consequence would have said to man, ‘Your sin is not so bad as that!’ God allowed severe consequences to follow the Fall for the same reason He introduced the Mosaic law— to raise man’s awareness of God’s determination to judge sin.
251A person’s choice, i.e., human freedom, by definition means a willing, or an eventual willing of one thing, thought, or action above another. As for sleeping or being in a coma, it is true that persons are not always making conscious choices while in such states, but when one awakes from sleep or a coma [the latter by either being restored to health or by dying (thus regaining consciousness in the afterlife)], there is always the eventual return to consciousness and the making of choices, such as what the person will decide about his thoughts.
252—a movement which, as a mentor of mine once pointed out, is neither new nor orthodox.
253See chapter 18 for a discussion of persons not yet mature in age.
254It is interesting to note that, while throughout this book we have advocated the law of non-contradiction as a fundamental principle in the moral universe, it could, in theory, have been otherwise. See Letter to Ravi Zacharias beginning on p. 711.
255He refers to these crimes as being in the moral realm, whereas natural disasters are not; but such a distinction becomes meaningless, since ‘evil’ does not necessarily equal ’sin.’ Spiegel, alarmingly to us, seems to treat both sin and calamity as the same, as though (for example) the KJV, in using the word ‘evil’ to mean both ’sin’ and ‘calamity,’ was rightfully equating the two. In effect, Spiegel dismisses context as determining any difference of meaning for the term “evil.” Nevertheless, we recognize that while the Bible regards all sin as calamitous, it does not regard all calamity as sin, and that the context surrounding each given appearance of the word “evil” determines which meaning it intends to convey.
Furthermore, Spiegel accepts Aquinas’ claim that all being is good, rather than state that all things are good as they were created by God (which never included sin). Moreover, the Bible assumes and states the opposite of Aquinas’ position in many places, e.g., “The heart (Heb. leb, i.e., The heart as it really is) IS decietful above all things and desperately wicked.” Or again, as Christ stated the matter of origin in a parallelism of similarity, not contrast: “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh (Luke 6:45). This verse in parallelism speaks of good and evil being brought forth out of the abundance of the heart. How, then, can one suppose a lexical meaning of “brought forth” in the case of good, but “not brought forth” in the case of evil, i.e. evil which is claimed by Aquinas and Spiegel as having no ontological being? Why, then, did Christ express these actions as both coming from the abundance of the heart? To press the point, as Spiegel presumably would be wont to do, that it is the good of “abundance” on the one hand, but “the diminishing of abundance” on the other hand, is sheer eisegesis. So, to assume Aquinas’/ Spiegel’s position, one must take the verb “to be” or “brought forth” etc., to de facto mean “not to be” and “not brought forth” in the case of evil. Such conclusions are dialectical, illogical, and again, purely eisegetical.
256This notion of stating that man does evil as a thing which is no thing is the type of non-sensical statement that C.S. Lewis would have regarded as meaningless. For again, while one may correctly say that God can do all things, they must be things; they cannot be non-things (as Lewis pointed out). So, for example, God is not so ‘great’ that He cannot ever exist. Even so, we ought not to grant sin the same glib expression of non-possibility.
257The reason why Reformed thinkers like Spiegel deny the existence of evil is because (wittingly or not) they deny the existence of man as a distinct person from God. And, of course, if there is no man, there certainly can be no sin. By analogy the same denial would be held regarding angelic persons, that is, whenever the Reformed theologian is on the forward rock of the rocking horse.
258Again, Duchamp drew a mustache on a print or copy of the Mona Lisa, not the original.
lxxiRamsland, Katherine. “Joseph Edward Duncan III: Compulsive Child Molester.” [http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/original/1205/0102_joseph_duncan_profile.html].
lxxiiChallies, Tim. Book Review: Pursuing God. [http://www.challies.com/archives/000884.php].
lxxiiiSpiegel, p. 75.
lxxivSpiegel, pp. 190-191.
lxxvSpiegel, pp. 71-72.
lxxviSpiegel, pp. 184-185.
lxxviiWhen Christian thinkers embrace any idea built on contradictory language, it becomes impossible for them to express truth in that particular area. The resulting deception sells itself to hearers when the person advocating the contradiction makes ‘explanations’ that are drawn out and which contain any number of otherwise common sense statements. And that is the real danger with combining sensical statements with non-sensical statements. A man may first set up his hearers (or readers) as an unwitting patsy with common sense statements that put his hearers off guard, such as (for example) his claim that he had a piece of apple pie at the local diner for lunch, that the pie was made with Golden Delicious apples, and that he used to pick this variety of apple on a Southern New Jersey farm when he was a boy. But then he slam dunks a non-sensical statement about once eating an apple that didn’t exist, and thus he wins the game for his irrational position. Of course, the same game played out in ‘theology’ is on a much more subtle and sophisticated level. Thus the irrationalist, in using common sense statements, conditions his readers to think he knows what he’s talking about, especially if he writes authoritatively and intellectually on his topic.
Some might still take issue with what I have said here about how a man may take the word ‘apple’ and treat it irrationally. One might argue, e.g., that if a man vomited an apple he ate, he really didn’t eat it, even though he ate it. But this is a false way of using language. The word “eat” and “ate” in the above example (”I ate the apple I didn’t eat,”) is contradictory because the verb to eat in its two appearances is being given two different meanings. Rather, if we say that “ate” means that the apple entered the man’s stomach, then we cannot also say that the apple did not enter the stomach (even if the man later vomits the apple). Similarly, if by “ate” we mean the full digestive process, then we cannot say that the apple was ever eaten if the apple goes into the man’s stomach but then he vomits it. Thus by using language properly we avoid what at first appears to be “legitimate contradictions.”
The same principle applies to another example I have seen used by one, Gregory Koukl, when trying to justify the idea that evil is deprivation only. He uses the idea of a donut hole. Thus he claims that a donut hole is, and is not, a part of a donut, and therefore by implication both is and is not a thing. But the confusion is cleared up once we state in what sense a donut hole IS part of the donut, and in what sense it is NOT part of the donut. First, the essential reason a donut hole IS a part of the donut is because, despite the donut hole being mere space, it is always located in three dimensional space within the outer perimeter of the donut and serves a potential function to the eater (as a finger hold). Second and contrariwise, the essential reason the donut hole is NOT part of the donut is the same reason it is not part of a bugle or a spoon, namely, it contains no donut material (dough, yeast, sugar, etc.) Once the proper meaning of words is understood, there are no “legitimate contradictions” in language. It is interesting to note that while Koukl offers the symbol of a donut hole to explain the Augustinian concept of evil, contrariwise, the most common culinary symbol that the New Testament uses for evil is yeast, a definite thing with an intensifying nature.
The biblical position is that evil is a real thing. Those who commit evil (i.e., commit sin) are men who use their freedom of will against God. Jesus stated that such sins arise from within men’s own hearts. Thus, men cause their own sins, and this means that our sins are not, nor ever were, the creation of God. Christ died for these very sins so that men and women would not have to suffer eternal punishment for their own sins. If evil is a non-thing, as Augustine and his followers think, then it would mean that Christ died for nothing, which is nonsense. Furthermore, to suggest that evil is merely the deprivation of good is to use language mischievously. For example, Koukl claims that evil is the deprivation of good even as cold is the deprivation of heat. But one could claim just the opposite—that good is merely the deprivation of evil even as heat is the deprivation of cold. (I have actually had someone trying to refute me on this issue by citing the scientific theory of absolute cold. Yet even I, a non-scientist, understand from the Bible that creation has always involved motion, since it has a sustainedness based on God’s power, which, in the context of a material creation that IS, must involve heat, and that therefore there can be no such thing as absolute cold.) Thus, neither Koukl’s paradigm nor that paradigm turned on its head helps define evil for the Christian. In fact, if both of those paradigms were true then good, evil, cold, and heat would all be mere deprivations of their “opposites” and therefore non-things. And that would mean these “things” do not even exist. This kind of thinking ultimately leads to a theological discourse of literary deconstruction, in which definitions are circular and meaningless; all that remains is an indivisible Oneness of non-distinction and non-reality. Frankly speaking, to support definitions in this manner is to dress up Eastern Mysticism in Christianese—nothing more nor less. As Christians we must forsake these kinds of ‘explanations’ and insist on proper definitions for all things, including that for sin. Only then will we have a correct understanding of evil and a better appreciation for the sacrifice of Christ for our sins.
It will be helpful, in this debate about evil, if the Christian apologist prepares himself for critical responses, some of which will be aimed at him in a benign-sounding tone. I do not mean necessarily because he must respond to all criticisms; Christ did not, and neither, necessarily, must we. But for the sake of his own peace of mind, he will probably wish to know why his critics are wrong. Unjust criticisms from Calvinists have key elements that the true Christian apologist will find helpful to recognize, and I will discuss them in a moment. Criticisms will come from others claiming to be Christians (we hope they truly are Christians, though obviously confused). I received one such criticism after I refuted the online position of Gregory Koukl. At length I received a diplomatic response from a 3rd party person couched in difficult to understand, philosophical language. After reading and re-reading his response I began feeling stupid and wondered if I really had misunderstood Koukl’s position in some way. I also found that the more I tried to grasp this man’s criticism, the more I became confused. But at length (I believe it was many months or a year or so later) I realized (doubtless with God’s help) that I was falling prey to a method of criticism I had actually warned my own readers against in this book, yet failed for a long time to catch.
My chief mistake while reading this man’s criticism was my unconscious assumption that this man and I shared the same meanings about words, even about the word “contradiction.” We did not. But I did not realize it for a great while. Consequently, the more I read the more I became confused, since I was becoming more and more enveloped in this man’s ‘language’ as I tried to understand it. This is because he was defending his ‘logic’ (but, in reality, only consistent irrationalism,which I did not recognize at first). Interestingly enough, while he did so, he invoked the 1st principle of formal logic, i.e., that A cannot equal non-A, in the form of a statement to the effect that one could contradict one’s self. The problem, however, was that in the course of his response he was defining contradiction in a meaningless way once all his statements were taken into account, and thus his statements fooled me for a great while. In short, he spotted contradictions sometimes, but not always.
First, he stated his belief that I had “gone beyond” Koukl’s definition of evil. Watch out for that kind of criticism! As you confront people about their rocking horse methodology (that is, their dialectical method) you will be told (sometimes kindly, as was the case here) that you do not appear to have understood what was meant by the terms you criticized. Thus I was told that Koukl, by saying evil was a thing, was merely saying that evil was a word, symbol, idea, notion, etc. that referred to a ‘thing,’ but a ‘thing’ which had no ontological being (existence). Let my readers think of the numerical symbol “0″ or word symbol “zero,” both which stand for the absence of number, and I think this is what my critic meant. So, for example, if I said I had zero ducks on my farm, this would mean I had a complete absence of ducks. At this point in his attempted reproof of me, he stated that if Koukl had granted ontological being to “evil” (i.e., nothing), he would have contradicted himself. So far, so good. In effect my critic was stating that Koukl was merely saying that evil was e.g., a word only, and that it had no existence beyond the concept of zero that it represented. Now I don’t agree with this definition of evil, of course, but I had to admit that Koukl was not contradicting himself when maintaining that non-things could have no ontological being. That much made sense. Both my critic and I understood that if Koukl had stated such a point otherwise, he would have contradicted himself. In a sense this was the pivotal point in my being deceived. For at this point my critic had me assuming that he understood, and would admit to, a contradiction whenever it occurred. I’ll explain further what I mean in a moment. He then pointed out that Koukl states that rebellious acts are, in fact, evil against God, and that such a position agreed with my own. And, foolish person that I was, I believed him. For surely any Christian would admit that rebellious acts are against God. The problem, however, was that the phrase ‘rebellious acts’ and the concept ‘God’ meant different things to Koukl and my critic than to me, though (as events proved) it would be a long time before I realized it. So, my critic had me believing that because Koukl and I used the same words, we agreed with each other on that point.
What I missed, then, for so very long, was that two people can state the same thing but mean something entirely different. Again, I had even warned my readers of meeting people who used doublethink; indeed, I had even described how they did it. Yet because of the subtlety of my critic I did not recognize what he was doing for a long time. Now, the most obvious example that comes to my mind to illustrate how the same words can be used but with different meanings, is revealed in the response Joel Osteen once gave to Larry King when asked if Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (a Mormon) was a Christian. In effect Osteen replied that he would assume Romney was a Christian, since he said that Jesus Christ was his Savior. But as biblical apologist Hank Hanegraaf explains this incident: “It’s not the words; it’s the meaning behind the words.” Hanegraaf went on to explain that Mormons do not believe that Jesus has always existed but is merely a child of one of the Father’s many wives. Obviously, such a definition denies the eternality and Deity of Christ as defined by the Bible. Now to return to the point about statements made by Koukl and myself; the meaning behind the phrase ‘rebellious acts’ and the word ‘God’ are quite different. For Koukl, rebellious acts are non-things which have no ontological being. For me, rebellious acts are acts (things) which man has willed into existence ex nihilio (Lat. out of nothing,by which I mean in the particular context of our discussion here, without prior cause ). Again, for Koukl, God is the only One who creates ex nihilio. For me, God is someone who made the form of creation ex nihilio, but not the choices of the will of man nor of angels, both of whom create their own moral content ex nihilio as a thing. For my critic, then, to state that Koukl and I agreed that murder and rape were rebellious acts against God, was actually false. For Koukl and I, as a more astute observer than myself would have observed at the time, actually held different meanings of what that statement meant, because we defined words differently. His Augustinian position, which disallowed any creation ex nihilio except by God, effectively disallowed a man’s will (i.e., intention). Oh, to be sure he would claim otherwise, like Sproul, who thinks he solves the problem by thinking that man has freedom of will, though no liberty. But such a statement, had my critic included it in his attack, would have only demonstrated further that my critic and I held entirely different meanings. But, as I say, I was tricked for a time, scratching my head and asking myself how it was that I was not understanding exactly what this man was saying. And all because I assumed that his understanding of contradictions was of the same nature as that which the Bible defines—the one that an Average Joe’s common sense tells him is a contradiction. But again, that is not the kind contradiction—i.e., an actual contradiction—in relation to rebellious acts and God, to which he was referring, though doubtless he thought he was.
What’s the lesson in all this? It is that the Christian apologist who aims to be truthful must never assume he and a Calvinist share the same meaning of words. Most (all?) serious Calvinist apologists are so mired in the habit of trying to justify their position by appealing to their standing contradictions, that they cannot abide the reproof of common sense logic. You will not want to believe that about them. After all, they can be sincere in trying to correct you, with no hint of mocking. And you’ll realize these thinkers may have just as much natural intelligence as you, if not more, and that therefore they could not possibly have allowed themselves to be led astray along such foolish lines. Don’t believe it! Many persons whom the federal government recognizes as mentally slow, even to a point of vocational disablement, grasp the principles of theological common sense (which are child-like), even while these others, who can run intellectual circles around them, do not have such sense.
Thus this critic of mine claimed, through various arguments, that Koukl was not really saying that evil was a thing by merely referring to it as a ‘thing,’ and that I had misunderstood that. Later, he pointed out that Koukl claimed that rebellious acts of God were, in fact, evil. Lastly, he stated that Augustine was correct to believe that only God created ex nihilio (Latin, out of nothing). Thus evil could not be a thing, since God would not create evil. And therefore (said he) evil was merely the deprivation of good, and not a thing at all. Another trick upon my thinking lay, in part, on his clever use of the term ‘deprivation,’ which sounds like ‘depraved.’ I was tempted to think that by deprivation my critic meant the moral opposite of good; but all he really meant (though he himself surely didn’t realize it, since he had to go back and forth attempting to bolster both the rational and irrational sides of his dialecticism), was the idea of ‘absence,’ as understood in the idea that evil is the absence of good, i.e., in the sense that evil is absent of, say, mustard. The irrationalism of this critic became clearer to me as I examined all the statements he was making regarding evil (so called). Technically, then, there was no meaning at all in any of his statements about evil, and thus by the term “evil” he and I meant very different things (pun unintended). Moreover, since his definition of evil was non-sensical, therefore, technically speaking, all the terms in all his sentences which grammatically interacted with the word-symbol ‘evil’ also had no meaning.
Now, reader, don’t tear your hair out trying to understand the ‘logic’ of Calvinists, because you can’t. It is non-sensical. And the more you try to understand it the more you will find yourself troubled (if you are a truth-seeker), because you are trying to find meaning where there is none. The association you have with words that your detractor is using will make you think he is saying something, when he is not. Again, I myself did not realize it for a great while, and so I urge my readers to beware of the pit in which I found myself for so many months. But eventually I did realize one thing in this man’s conclusion, and it began to settle my mind on the whole issue. He was claiming that only God created ex nihilio, which, I realized, if that were the case, would eliminate the possibility that a man could ever have a will. The will of a man, by biblical definition, is the bringing out by a man his own intention ex nihilio. Otherwise, it cannot properly be called a man’s will, i.e., a man’s own will. So, if it had been true, as the critic claimed, that only God could create a man’s will (as Augustine implied), then we cannot refer to the will as belonging to a man, since it is a will in name only. A Calvinist can certainly speak of a man’s will, as B.B. Warfield implies, when he claims that God creates the very thoughts and intents of the heart (i.e., heart of man), but such speech is nothing more than sounds without meaning. Again, technically speaking, there can be no man in the spirit sense (i.e., a human creature who is the sole cause of his moral content) if, indeed, God alone creates ex nihilio. There can only be willless things. In which case all that the Bible can mean (following Augustine) by the term the divine judgment of man is that God puts certain material items in the fire at the end of the age but spares other material things, like putting some logs in the fire but others not. I might proceed to show other equally absurd conclusions inevitable from the Augustinian/ Warfield view, but certainly by now my readers get the point. Needless to say, our opponents would deny this criticism of them with further fruitless ‘definitions’ of their own, all based on standing contradictions which have only an appearance of meaning Thus they could even take my own words and place them in a context of their own making, as indeed my critic did previously with my response against Koukl, until there would be no meaning to them at all. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.
In the end, I realized that my original article on Koukl really answered all of my objector’s views. It had refuted at length the same method of irrationalism both Koukl and my critic used. Unfortunately, though my critic took some pains in thinking to correct me, he stated that he had not had the time to read through my article, and I found that neither did he indicate a familiarity with the line of objection I was taking. Also, I found it interesting that in his refutation he never really quoted scripture at all, but appealed instead to scientific theory, Augustine, and philosophical reasoning.
As a Christian apologist I have sometimes been overly concerned about whether and how to respond to the unending stream of conceivable arguments that people might present against my position. But it is plainly impossible for any one person to refute them all. I am slowly learning that it is not always a spiritual thing for me to respond to those who are not really searching, even though their criticism may be a public reproof of me. If you are like me, you will be tempted to think, “But if I do not respond, people will think I was dumbfounded by his arguments against me.” Well, if you must, respond either privately or in a common venue with them, that is, if you are truly led by the Spirit. But I think we all need to trust God more, i.e., that His Spirit works to convince the world of sin, wayward Christian thinkers included. For it is not always our job to continue discussions. True searchers will eventually understand that you have already answered your objectors in your first detailed response. For they know it is a shame and a folly for anyone, the critic included, to answer a matter before he has really heard it. Moreover, words of wisdom are heard in quiet, and true searchers will find that corner of quiet. It is, in fact, their responsibility, even as God said—He would be found by the man who searched for him with all his heart.