Re: Philosopher’s Corner (Jack Bowers) — “The Drama Behind the Darkness”
Jack Bowers addresses a frequent objection people make to the gospel message:
Ask almost anyone why they find it difficult to believe in God, and the answer will come quickly: just look at the world. Childhood cancer. Genocide. The slow disintegration of a mind swallowed by dementia. If a God of unlimited power and perfect goodness exists, why does evil not merely persist but often appear to go unchecked, senseless, and grotesque?
The problem is that Bowers tends to be pedantic. Oops; I said that the way he would. Bowers uses academic language far too much and too often, alienating a lay audience. He uses too many words and, if you ask me, only touches on one kind of answer. That’s what “pedantic” means. The quoted sample above is pretty tame, but the rest of his post is too much saying too little.
Basically, he says that if you understand the Divine Council Worldview (thesis of the Unseen Realm) you should have no trouble recognizing the problem with the common secular answer. There’s a lot of players in the question besides humans and God. They have free will, they have power over us, and God has said they are doing a bad job of managing humanity.
He does raise the interesting issue that an expectation that God be accountable to human reasoning is way off the mark. Referring to the Book of Job, he points out that this is morally childish. God is under no obligation to satisfy our curiosity about what He’s up to.
This opens the door to something that he apparently does not address: Human existence is supposed to suck. We’ve been saying that for decades. Living in a mortal form is inherently awful and we should expect it so. This is not what God had in mind when He made us. We belong in a wholly different situation, but this is where we are now.
Thus, the only proper question is, “How do we get where we are supposed to be?” The answer is simple: die.
Of course, that answer is both symbolic and literal. It’s the symbolism part that most people refuse to discuss in this context. We are obliged to separate our conscious awareness from the fleshly nature. You must recognize that your mortal flesh is not the real you, but a burden you must drag around until you have accomplished the purpose God had in putting you here. You must learn to disregard the childish demands of the flesh and strive to live like someone who belongs in Eden.
And after a lifetime of fighting that war, your reward is to finally ditch that fleshly nature and go to a resting place in the afterlife until God is finished with the rest of the human race.
One thing you need to remember is that most people who complain about the apparent contradiction between our claims of a good God with unlimited power versus His apparent lack of concern for human suffering is that we aren’t confined by their definition of God. If they have the wrong concept of Him, we should point that out. No one can justify demanding that we discuss a God that doesn’t exist.
It’s simple; tell them, “You have the wrong ideas about God.” Proceed to explain the truth about who He is and what He does. You aren’t bound by some other “Christian” declaration about Him. We stand outside the church mainstream.
