I think what you're touching on is that when we read the Bible we are reading something with a different relationship between author and reader than everything else we read. When the author is another human, we are generally on the same playing field in terms of understanding; typically, the author will understand a bit more than we do a…
I think what you're touching on is that when we read the Bible we are reading something with a different relationship between author and reader than everything else we read. When the author is another human, we are generally on the same playing field in terms of understanding; typically, the author will understand a bit more than we do about some topics they write about but there will be parts or topics that the reader actually knows more about than the author for a variety of reasons, so we naturally question what we are reading because sometimes it is wrong. With God as the ultimate author of the Bible, though, we never know more than the Bible's author and never are morally superior to Him, but it is hard to make that mental switch from reading humans' writing while being skeptical of what they are writing to reading God's writing while being skeptical of our understanding.
Some of your examples help explain this phenomenon: 1) what you describe as God's lie about what would happen if Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by which I believe you mean that God said "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." When Adam and Eve don't experience a physical death on the calendar day that they eat the apple, a reader might consider God to have lied. But knowing that God doesn't lie, and that he wrote the book we're reading, it is appropriate to ask what we are missing. Perhaps this primarily meant the spiritual death that Adam and Eve experienced by no longer walking with God in the Garden; this did seemingly happen on the same day they ate from the tree. In our focus on the lack of immediate physical death, maybe that even implies to us that we are overconcerned with physical death and God is nudging us through a confusing element of this passage towards the importance of spiritual life/death. The meaning could also be that physical death that was not necessarily on the cards for them had they not eaten of the tree becomes certain on the day that they eat from the tree (as in, that day brings physical death for humans into the world). 2) the demand for Isaac's sacrifice. This one is certainly jarring and seems horrific when we read it. But it is so jarring and horrific-seeming, even intentionally so (e.g., when we already know that Abraham has been asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, Isaac pauses and asks where the lamb for the sacrifice is), that it all but forces the reader to ask why is this happening and why is God telling us this? The conclusion of that particular story, that a sacrificial ram is provided by God, points us towards the overarching story of the Bible that God is providing the sacrifice for us. And perhaps a story of a father (almost) sacrificing his only son helps us to understand a little more about what the Father sacrificing his only Son was like, except in this case with the Son's full knowledge of what was to happen to him.
In those couple examples I am trying to exemplify the type of approach that is logical to take to God's Word: when it doesn't make sense to us, it's us not understanding, not being perfect, etc. rather than God being in the wrong.
I appreciate the length of your response and your line of thinking, and this is roughly what I'm trying to consider with my daughter. But I find the task exhausting. The position that the Bible is the true word of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent being is not available to me. Once you take God to be benevolent by assumption, that's the end of the discussion. What evidence would the Bible need to include to convince you otherwise? With that starting point, there's no such evidence possible.
I commend your efforts with your daughter and agree that it can be a tiring task. I have heard the statement that God does not need a lawyer, which is logical on principle, but it doesn't always feel that way (hence the statement's origin).
To your point about assuming God's benevolence, it is true that if one unwaveringly believes Him to be good then nothing the Bible says can change that belief. I would note that the belief of His goodness and our concept of morality itself are intertwined with each other (i.e., the source of morality is God, evidence for his existence includes some common ground on morality). In other words, square 1 isn't "God is always good" but rather that's a conclusion which is then a lens through which everything from that point should be understood.
People do not grant God status as the moral law giver so they allow some parts of their view of morality to be shaped by their own setting rather than an external source. But morality must be objective to be maximally useful: if two interacting people (or cultures) disagree about whether an action is immoral they are at an impasse as to whether to allow it. And agreement on very basic moral concepts is wide and apparently innate, thus pointing to an external source (a law giver). For example, if a person approached a stranger and punched him, the victim would universally be opposed to that and feel no need to appeal to a complicated moral code to justify that the action was wrong—it just is clearly wrong.
Indeed some crimes are universally accepted as immoral, such as the killing of babies. That's precisely what makes the last plague so hard to reconcile with benevolence. If God commits an act that everyone regards as immoral, what claim does He have on being the universal origin of morality? Almost nobody thinks killing babies is a moral act.
The Bible presents God as at liberty to do what He deems best with His creation. For example, His extended speech to Job (“where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”), telling Moses He will have mercy on whom He has mercy, the potter having rightful control over the clay. Of course this is nearly impossible if not impossible to accept if one does not understand God to be the Creator, and still very challenging for those who do think He is, but God having an entirely different relationship to the world as its Creator than we do as its finite inhabitants means He can act accordingly while still being moral.
So, to recap, God is not so much always good as he is the source of the very notion of objective good, which we can identify with what is universally recognized as good, except when he kills babies, which is a case where he is still good because he made those babies, even though not many people think that if you make a baby that gives you the right to kill it.
I would recap differently of course. God is always good and we cannot judge Him as being wrong because He is the source of objective morality. It is expected that many would not accept Him as the one true God and so they view His acts through the lens of what all other beings can permissibly do. And even for those who do accept Him as God, it is expected that He would act in ways that we do not understand.
Thank you so much, John. Your faith is inspiring. My debate is really not with you, but with people that have considerably less faith than you. What I'm looking for is a role for reading the Bible with children within a religion that worships doubt as the source of all insight, not God as the source of all that is good.
Bottom line. If God is the highest objective good, He cannot be all-powerful. He must be fragile, and hidden and hard to discern. He cannot have written the Bible, because only people could have written the Bible and their perception of the highest objective good was bound to be flawed.
Of the points of difficulty that I listed, the one that I find hardest to excuse is the rewarding of Lot's daughters with nation-founding for their act of rape and incest (nations that are also fierce enemies of biblical Israel, mind you). I'm unaware of a way to resolve that one.
Certainly an unsettling passage, but their actions are never praised, just described, so I would say it is a mischaracterization to say they were rewarded with nation-founding. A more accurate characterization may be more along the lines of God worked through their (very notable) imperfections and/or allowed evil not to be immediately punished in that instance (a common theme across history); that the ensuing nations are enemies of God's people might actually imply condemnation of the act.
I think what you're touching on is that when we read the Bible we are reading something with a different relationship between author and reader than everything else we read. When the author is another human, we are generally on the same playing field in terms of understanding; typically, the author will understand a bit more than we do about some topics they write about but there will be parts or topics that the reader actually knows more about than the author for a variety of reasons, so we naturally question what we are reading because sometimes it is wrong. With God as the ultimate author of the Bible, though, we never know more than the Bible's author and never are morally superior to Him, but it is hard to make that mental switch from reading humans' writing while being skeptical of what they are writing to reading God's writing while being skeptical of our understanding.
Some of your examples help explain this phenomenon: 1) what you describe as God's lie about what would happen if Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, by which I believe you mean that God said "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." When Adam and Eve don't experience a physical death on the calendar day that they eat the apple, a reader might consider God to have lied. But knowing that God doesn't lie, and that he wrote the book we're reading, it is appropriate to ask what we are missing. Perhaps this primarily meant the spiritual death that Adam and Eve experienced by no longer walking with God in the Garden; this did seemingly happen on the same day they ate from the tree. In our focus on the lack of immediate physical death, maybe that even implies to us that we are overconcerned with physical death and God is nudging us through a confusing element of this passage towards the importance of spiritual life/death. The meaning could also be that physical death that was not necessarily on the cards for them had they not eaten of the tree becomes certain on the day that they eat from the tree (as in, that day brings physical death for humans into the world). 2) the demand for Isaac's sacrifice. This one is certainly jarring and seems horrific when we read it. But it is so jarring and horrific-seeming, even intentionally so (e.g., when we already know that Abraham has been asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, Isaac pauses and asks where the lamb for the sacrifice is), that it all but forces the reader to ask why is this happening and why is God telling us this? The conclusion of that particular story, that a sacrificial ram is provided by God, points us towards the overarching story of the Bible that God is providing the sacrifice for us. And perhaps a story of a father (almost) sacrificing his only son helps us to understand a little more about what the Father sacrificing his only Son was like, except in this case with the Son's full knowledge of what was to happen to him.
In those couple examples I am trying to exemplify the type of approach that is logical to take to God's Word: when it doesn't make sense to us, it's us not understanding, not being perfect, etc. rather than God being in the wrong.
I appreciate the length of your response and your line of thinking, and this is roughly what I'm trying to consider with my daughter. But I find the task exhausting. The position that the Bible is the true word of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent being is not available to me. Once you take God to be benevolent by assumption, that's the end of the discussion. What evidence would the Bible need to include to convince you otherwise? With that starting point, there's no such evidence possible.
I commend your efforts with your daughter and agree that it can be a tiring task. I have heard the statement that God does not need a lawyer, which is logical on principle, but it doesn't always feel that way (hence the statement's origin).
To your point about assuming God's benevolence, it is true that if one unwaveringly believes Him to be good then nothing the Bible says can change that belief. I would note that the belief of His goodness and our concept of morality itself are intertwined with each other (i.e., the source of morality is God, evidence for his existence includes some common ground on morality). In other words, square 1 isn't "God is always good" but rather that's a conclusion which is then a lens through which everything from that point should be understood.
If God is the source of all morality, how can the view of what is moral and not moral vary across the cultures of the world?
People do not grant God status as the moral law giver so they allow some parts of their view of morality to be shaped by their own setting rather than an external source. But morality must be objective to be maximally useful: if two interacting people (or cultures) disagree about whether an action is immoral they are at an impasse as to whether to allow it. And agreement on very basic moral concepts is wide and apparently innate, thus pointing to an external source (a law giver). For example, if a person approached a stranger and punched him, the victim would universally be opposed to that and feel no need to appeal to a complicated moral code to justify that the action was wrong—it just is clearly wrong.
Indeed some crimes are universally accepted as immoral, such as the killing of babies. That's precisely what makes the last plague so hard to reconcile with benevolence. If God commits an act that everyone regards as immoral, what claim does He have on being the universal origin of morality? Almost nobody thinks killing babies is a moral act.
The Bible presents God as at liberty to do what He deems best with His creation. For example, His extended speech to Job (“where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?”), telling Moses He will have mercy on whom He has mercy, the potter having rightful control over the clay. Of course this is nearly impossible if not impossible to accept if one does not understand God to be the Creator, and still very challenging for those who do think He is, but God having an entirely different relationship to the world as its Creator than we do as its finite inhabitants means He can act accordingly while still being moral.
So, to recap, God is not so much always good as he is the source of the very notion of objective good, which we can identify with what is universally recognized as good, except when he kills babies, which is a case where he is still good because he made those babies, even though not many people think that if you make a baby that gives you the right to kill it.
I would recap differently of course. God is always good and we cannot judge Him as being wrong because He is the source of objective morality. It is expected that many would not accept Him as the one true God and so they view His acts through the lens of what all other beings can permissibly do. And even for those who do accept Him as God, it is expected that He would act in ways that we do not understand.
Thank you so much, John. Your faith is inspiring. My debate is really not with you, but with people that have considerably less faith than you. What I'm looking for is a role for reading the Bible with children within a religion that worships doubt as the source of all insight, not God as the source of all that is good.
Bottom line. If God is the highest objective good, He cannot be all-powerful. He must be fragile, and hidden and hard to discern. He cannot have written the Bible, because only people could have written the Bible and their perception of the highest objective good was bound to be flawed.
Of the points of difficulty that I listed, the one that I find hardest to excuse is the rewarding of Lot's daughters with nation-founding for their act of rape and incest (nations that are also fierce enemies of biblical Israel, mind you). I'm unaware of a way to resolve that one.
Certainly an unsettling passage, but their actions are never praised, just described, so I would say it is a mischaracterization to say they were rewarded with nation-founding. A more accurate characterization may be more along the lines of God worked through their (very notable) imperfections and/or allowed evil not to be immediately punished in that instance (a common theme across history); that the ensuing nations are enemies of God's people might actually imply condemnation of the act.