Is God's Creation Good?

Christians frequently point to the beauty and elegance of nature as a reflection of the goodness of the creator.  And indeed nature is wondrous in many ways.  But there is a problem: many of the key underlying characteristics that lead to survival and multiplication of posterity are not those that Christians would like to ascribe to God.  These include: deception, predation, sickness, disease, death, fear, pain, poison, starvation, ruthlessness, and so on.  These properties are not simply add-ons to nature, but are deeply embedded in its design and fabric.  Let me illustrate some of these:

Fear and pain.  One of the great evils in this world is to be tormented by fear and pain.  Yet fear and pain play a crucial role in nature, spurring animals to find food and avoid predators.  A gazelle living in fear of mountain lions and wolves will remain alert and has a far better chance of survival than one without this fear.  The fear of the pain of being ripped apart will drive it to flee a pursuer with the last drop of its strength.   Furthermore, when prey are scarce, pangs of hunger will drive a wolf to seek prey with all the strength it can summon.  Fear and pain are like a force of nature, propelling the life cycle onward.

Predation.  Much of the diversity and beauty of nature is a result of each animal being optimized for a niche both in what it eats and in the ways by which it escapes predators.  For instance, panther chameleons are slow-moving tree-climbers that are experts at creeping up on insects and then grabbing them with their tongues that are almost as long as their bodies.  Cheetahs' camouflage and litheness enables them to silently creep up on a herd of impalas and catch one in a high-speed chase.  The impala, on the other hand, with its large eyes seeing in almost all directions and keen ears is highly suited to escaping swift predators.  Without predators, many of the impala's tightly honed features would be superfluous.  If the cheetah ate grass, its features would be superfluous, if not harmful, and it would do much better in a form similar to an impala or a cow.  The key reason for diversity and variety in the animal kingdom is the enormous number of techniques animals have developed both for avoiding being preyed on and for preying on other animals.  The predator-prey relationship is a harsh but necessary component of the beauty of nature.

Death.  Death is an essential part of life for many creatures.  Consider flies.  An apple falls on the ground and a fly lays eggs on it.  The eggs hatch, become maggots and consume the apple.  Once the apple is gone, either the maggots die or they must escape.  Well their plan is to escape by becoming flies which look for more fruit in which to lay eggs.  Imagine flies never died; their numbers would keep increasing with each fruit that fell until the world was 3 feed deep with swarming flies.  But this applies not only to flies, consider caterpillars: they eventually become butterflies whose job is to mate and lay eggs.  Some butterflies have no mouth for eating so living forever is out of the question.  The incredibly elegant and complex reproductive and mating system for animals is based on the inevitability of death.  Without death, any species the reproduced would eventually cover every square inch of the earth's surface.

If nature sings the praises of its Creator, what is it telling us about him?  One must look not only at the love a mother shows her offspring, but also at the cuckoo that kills the other chicks in its nest and the parasitic wasp that lays eggs in a caterpillar that eventually devour the caterpillar alive.  What does it tell us about the Creator that animals (and humans) are designed to suffer fear and pain and to starve and die?  What does it tell us that the winners in the animal kingdom are typically the strongest, fittest, most fertile, most well-camouflaged, most deceitful and most ruthless?  God must value those qualities highly since he made them the criteria for success in his creation.

Now here is the answer that puts all these worries about God to rest.  These bad characteristics are simply a result of The Fall; when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and God cursed the creation.  Since then not only have women suffered pain in childbirth and men had to work by the sweat of their hands, but death and pain and all bad things we see entered creation.  So these bad things we see do not reflect God's plan or his original creation, rather they are just his punishment on earth for man's sin.

As a myth this might be a fine solution for taking God off the hook for designing all the cruel ways in which animals kill and devour each other.  But it fails when it claims to be historical or scientific.  It implies that before the fall that the world was good and these cruelties, including death, were absent.   Cheetahs could chase impalas to stay fit, but they better not sink their teeth into their necks.  For that matter, since impalas don't need to fear cheetahs, they could stop looking around them and grow fat eating grass.  It means that flies and caterpillars better not be multiplying.  Actually no animals should mate unless ways of populating other planets were devised.

There is another problem too: the fossil record clearly records the death of animals for hundreds of millions of years.  That is far longer than anyone would claim humans were around, and far before the fall.  And life and death back then was surely no pain-free picnic.  A fossil (right) that struck me, in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, has been kept in the same pose in which it was excavated showing the dinosaur's neck arched back in its death throes, perhaps as it is buried alive in burning ashes.  And no one can tell me animals didn't suffer pain when chomped in half by the enormous teeth of a TRex or belly slashed open by a deinonychus.    For that matter, what kind of loving, caring creator would bestow an enormous dagger on the foot of a deinonychus?  What was God thinking he would do with it?

It is clear that nature as a whole does not now, nor has in the past, embodied the loving, caring, self-sacrificial  ideals we would like to ascribe to God.  Rather, if it were an intelligent mind that devised the deceitful and brutal ways for animals to catch, kill and eat each other, that mind certainly lacks empathy and care for the downtrodden and weak.  And perhaps taking an intelligent mind out of the creation equation provides hope.  We don't have to accept that humans are doomed to be cruel or evil by nature.  Rather the intelligent minds are now, us!  We have an ability to reason and to empathize with those that suffer.  We do not have to model society after the survival of the fittest model.  Instead, perhaps dignity, freedom and compassion can replace eat-or-be-eaten.

Is the Incarnation a RPG?

Lots of people claim to believe in the idea of divine incarnation. But few, I believe, have much idea of what that really means. Here's my proposal: The incarnation is God's version of a Role Playing Game (RPG). He creates or selects a character which he inhabits just like you would in a virtual-reality RPG. Then he uses his selected human body to play with the other characters. He feels bad for the other characters when they are hungry and gives them food, helps them move up to higher levels and even sacrifices his character for them. But unlike everyone else who is stuck in his or her human body, God has just temporarily chosen his body, and he can dispose of it whenever he likes or bring it back to life if it dies.

It makes one wonder: is it really a big deal if someone operating at a higher level has more powers, can do miracles or even chooses to sacrifice his character others? I could do miracles and sacrifice my character for lesser beings in World of Warcraft. I may even be able to raise characters back to life. But please don't worship me.

Can we know if a message is from God?

Many people have claimed and continue to claim to have all sorts messages from God, but are they justified in making these claims? Let's say one takes the existence of spiritual or non-physical beings seriously and avoids making simplistic assumptions about them. Given this starting point, what can we say about messages that purport to be from a particular non-physical being such as God?

I will start by considering how we know the sources of messages in the physical world. If you claim you have a message from your friend, then you are claiming that the message is not from anyone else. But how can you be sure someone else didn't send it to you? Here are four general methods:

1. You have observational evidence. For example, your friend gave it to you in person or confirmed it by talking on the phone. You know it is him since you can discriminate his appearance or voice characteristics from those of other people.
   
2. The letter has his signature on it. This can confirm that he wrote it if you can discriminate his signature from other people's signatures and also from attempts at forging it.
   
3. The letter is written in his style that no one else has and that cannot easily be imitated.
   
4. The content of the letter contains knowledge that only he (and possibly you) has. You need to know that only he has this knowledge.

So, do these methods apply to knowing if a message is from God? Let's assume that non-physical beings exist (somehow) and can communicate (somehow) with the physical world. Indeed, Christianity has a plethora of these non-physical beings, sometimes called spirits, including all sorts of angels, demons, and gods (if one takes the Old Testament literally). But a priori we can't restrict ourselves to only the non-physical beings in the Christian Bible, perhaps there are innumerable others of all kinds and abilities. To avoid having the name of the being distract our analysis let us denote the set of non-physical beings as G = {G_0, G_1, G_2, ..., G_n}, where G_0 denotes the Christian God, and G_i(i>0) denotes the other non-physical beings, and n is large and could be infinite. Now say you get a message that purports to be from God, that is G_0. How can you tell it is from G_0 and not G_i(i>0)? Can the methods listed above enable you to tell if it is?

1. The problem with the first method is that non-physical beings don't have any particular appearance or voice characteristics. At most one sees or hears a vision. But what is to distinguish a vision provided by G_0 from a vision from some other non-physical being, G_i(i>0)? Presumably there are other non-physical beings that could create just as good visions that also claim to be from God even though they are from some other G_i. It seems that appearance is not going to work to tell if it is from God.
2. What about some sort of God-signature in the message? This is probably the most common means of justifying a message from God, and the signature most Christians accept is a "work of power", or more simply a miracle. But is a miracle sufficient as a God-signature? First there is the problem of showing that it actually is a miracle in some way caused by a non-physical being, but let's assume this can be done. But is it only God that does miracles, of the potentially innumerable other non-physical entities? Surely there could be many G_i(i>0) beings that can do powerful miracles. Ah, the trick that is used here is to assume that everything has one of two sources: either God or the devil. So then once one has a miracle one has only a two-class problem: either it is a God-signature or a devil-signature, and this is potentially feasible to determine if the devil is not very intelligent. But why only two sources and why dismiss all the other sources, G_i(i>0)? This dichotomization is a masterful sleight-of-hand. It is saying that none of the other spiritual beings are intelligent or independent enought to operate on their own or to fool humans. That is definitely not taking the non-physical realm seriously, and can be thrown out as an unjustified assumption. Another objection (from the Calvinists) is to claim that every being acts at the direction of God, and God would not want us to be deceived and so he wouldn't let us be confused by messages from many other G_i's. But even if one accepts the premise that all beings act at God's direction, the conclusion is surely false as it would imply that no human is going to deceive you either. So we are stuck with not having any signature to determine if the message is from God.
3. What about style as a way to identify the sender? It can work to some extent for distinguishing human messages, as we know the range of styles people have and can sometimes identify unusual aspects of a particular person's style. But that's the rub; what styles do other non-physical beings have in their communications? How can we say a particular style is God's style and not the style of some other G_i? Christian teaching in this focuses on the dichotomized problem: distinguishing God's message from Satan's, but as I argued above this is a false dichotomy as it excludes most of the problem. Alternatively, one claims that it is from God if it is compatible with previous revelation (namely the Bible). But this fails for two reasons: we need to know that the previous revelation was from God which assumes we have solved the problem, and also it assumes the non-physical beings aren't intelligent enough to fool us with messages in the style of previous revelations. Thus style is not going to be a useful discriminant for knowing if the message is from God.
4. What about the fourth method: the message contains some knowledge that only God has? The classic example of this is future predictions or prophecies. There are a host of problems with prophecies including: showing that they occurred before the event (as much prophetic literature was actually written after the event but slyly claimed to be written before), and showing that the prediction isn't simply a good-guess or lucky fluke, and showing that the prophecy isn't so vague or general so as to have many fulfillments. And indeed all the prophecies I have seen in the Bible suffer from one or more of these problems. But let's assume we can get a genuine future prediction that comes true and wasn't a fluke. Is that a sufficient way to know that whatever message came with it is from God? Well, if non-physical beings are not constrained by space they won't be constrained by time either. Space and time are part of the same physical reality "space-time" that governs physical things, but not non-physical things. So presumably there are other non-physical beings, G_i(i>0), that have access to events anywhere and at any time and so could also be the source of future predictions or prophecies.

My conclusion is that the only way we can be confident in the source of messages from non-physical beings is to assume that they are all, apart from God, less intelligent than humans and so unable to fool us. However, if one really believes in non-physical beings, then one should surely take them seriously and acknowledge that there may be many of them, that they may be far more intelligent than humans, and that they may intentionally deceive us. As I have argued here, none of our usual method for identifying sources of messages works with intelligent non-physical beings. Thus since our knowledge of them is limited to what they choose to tell us, and who they say they are may not be true, we have no way of identifying the actual source (God or some other G_i) of any particular message.

Does God Fear Human Greatness?

The story of the Tower of Babel is quite revealing; not so much as a historical document, but for its insight into God's perspective. Here's a summary of the story from Genesis 11:1-9:

The people of the earth were establishing a city and proposed using new technology (bricks and tar) to build a skyscraper to unite them and make a name for themselves. This is similar motivation for today's skycrapers, although brick and tar won't make a very tall tower. But then God came down to earth to take a look and said: "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." And so God used a nasty trick of confusing their communication to scuttle their plans.

But why, if God is so great, should he be worried about a tower that is a hundredth of the height of modern skycrapers? Clearly it is not just the tower, but the whole idea of human cooperation and progress that he doesn't like. But what is wrong with cooperation and progress? Surely those aren't bad. So it has got to be the greatness humans achieve through cooperation and progress that has God worried. Human progress and greatness threaten God, and so God knocks us off the ladder.

Perhaps it is like this. One child with an infinite number of Lego sets sees another child with just one lego set starting to build himself a tower. The first feels threatened and knocks down the second child's tower.

Is God Just?

Christians always protray God as being a just judge. But on what basis do they claim God is just? I think primarily it is because they want it to be so; "If God is the ultimate judge, well he better be just." Or if he is not just, then he is not perfect and surely God had better be perfect. At least since the ancient Greeks people have created an ideal of perfection which is ascribed to God. And to Christians perfection includes justice, and so God must be just.

But does this ideal actually correspond to reality? One can mathematically describe a perfect circle, but that does not mean there are any in reality. To decide if this ideal is true, we need evidence. What would make good evidence for God's justice is debateable, but there is one thing that Christians will definitely accept: the Bible. What does the Bible indicate about God's justice?

But before going to the Bible, let me lay the groundwork for my argument. To show that someone is just is hard. Let's take a judge as an example. It would entail going through all (or a very wide sampling) of his cases and confirming that they were justly decided. But to show that a judge is unjust, one simply needs a few examples of unjust decisions. For example, if we found a judge accepting bribes by his clients who he gives favorable decisions to, well we would conclude he is not just, even without going through all his other cases.

We can do an analogous examination of God's judgements that we find in the Bible. For many we do not have enough information to determine whether they are just or not, or it may not be easy to determine from our vantage point. But there is a class of judgements which I believe we can clearly judge as being unjust. This class involves punishing one person for a crime committed by someone else.

What could be more unjust than being punished for someone else's crime? Surely an inherent aspect of justice is that one is punished according to one's crime, which does not happen when one is being punished for someone else's crime. Let me motivate this with two examples. Consider someone steals a car, but the judge sends his neighbor to jail as punishment. Surely that is an injustice, and one would not excuse a judge who did that intentionally and knowingly. Another example of injustice is group punishment. I remember a teacher in school punishing our whole class for making too much noise when it was just a subset of the class that was talking, and certainly not me. Group punishments might be an effective way to control his class but they are not just punishments as some people are punished for the actions of others.

Now on to the Bible. Certainly the writers of various Psalms and the book of Isaiah ascribe justice to God. Such claims are easy to make in the abstract, but are they actually true? To decide that, let's look at some of God's judgements.

Here are three examples, from many possible ones in the Bible, where God punishes or promises to punish someone for the sins of another. The first is God promising to punish children for the sins of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Moses has gone up to meet God, and then God appears to him. Exodus 34:5-7: Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the LORD. 6 And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, 7 maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation."

The important thing to note is that it is not just that children suffer the evil consequences of the sins of their parents. Rather, God says that he [actively] punishes children for the sins of their fathers. Tell me, how can that be just? If that is just, does justice have any meaning?

Now here is another example. Pharaoh won't let the Israelites leave Egypt, so God's final punishment on him is not just a punishment on him only but on everyone in Egypt, recorded in Exodus 11:4-6: 4 So Moses said, "This is what the LORD says: 'About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. 5 Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. 6 There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again. Is that just, to kill the firstborn of the slave girl because of Pharaoh's sins? What did she do wrong that God is punishing her? Clearly he is punishing her for Pharaoh's sin.

My final example is recorded in 2 Samuel 24. It starts: 1 Again the anger of the LORD burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, "Go and take a census of Israel and Judah." David takes the census, but then apparently that was a great sin: 10 David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the LORD, "I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, O LORD, I beg you, take away the guilt of your servant. I have done a very foolish thing." God's answer is to let him choose his punishment (or actually the punishment on Israel) which turns out to be a plague: 15 So the LORD sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the time designated, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died. So God kills 70,000 people as punishment for David's sin. How can that be just? It is not hard to find many more similar examples in the Bible. It seems to me that speaking of God's justice is a form of double-talk. If any one else killed 70,000 people to punish David for his sin, we would call it a grave injustice, but when God does it, Christians call it justice.

There are some potential replies to this argument. One is that sometimes justice entails incidental suffering on others. For example, if a father is sent to prison for his crime, then his family suffers. But note that this incidental suffering is quite distinct from active punishment; if the whole family were sent to prison for the crime of the father we would call that unjust. The examples I listed involved active punishment of the innocent, and not just incidental suffering.

Another reply is that since God gave us life, he can take it away without being unjust. But this reply goes too far. It says justice makes no contraints on God at all with regard to his creation, and so he can do anything at all to us while still being just. That is, saying "God is just" is saying nothing about how God acts towards us. If we are nothing but clay in the hands of a potter, let's scrap the whole pretence of justice; when did clay ever claim to be wronged or demand justice? But actually I think this reply fails for another reason: if one gives someone a gift, one no longer has a right to take it back. So if God has given us life, he does not have a right to take it back whenever he feels like it.

My conclusion is that God, as we see portrayed in the Bible, is not just. Read and see, you will find plenty more examples of God punishing some people for the crimes of other people. Furthermore, if God is not just in this world, why should we think that he will be just in the next? I think Christians have to either give up their cherished ideals of God or else give up the Bible. They can't both be right.