In this post, I'm going to deal with, in particular with YAD. He postulated several points which deal with meta-ethics. What is Meta-Ethics?
Ethics
Ethics, as a broadly used term, deal particularly with the study of morals. In a broad sense, ethics judges what can be right or wrong, and whatnot. For Dr. Bahnsen, he characterized the problem of evil in this way:
Quote:
A well known passage from the pen of the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (a great author by the way), readily stirs our emotions and makes us insistent about the wickedness of men, for instance men who are cruel to little children. It is found in his novel, Brothers Karamazov
. Ivan makes his complaint to Alyosha:
"People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel....
I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother.... You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only.... It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal that sets his vile blood on fire....
This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty -- shut her up al night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night... they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?... Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted?... Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'!.. .
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature -- that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth."
"No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly. (Bahnsen, The Problem of Evil, pp.1-2)
Here Dr. Greg L. Bahnsen is illustrating a very basic concept of what people would consider ethical taboo. It is clear - it is assumed - that it is wrong to torture children. Now, I don't want to seem like some sort of masochist towards children, but for argument sake, let's follow the illustration. If we were to ask the following question that Ivan asks Alyosha, would we "consent" to this sort of architect? It would not only be politically incorrect to answer with a stern no!, but it is simply out of God's character to enjoy the suffering of children. Am I right? Wrong! Now don't get me wrong, I think it is tragic that children suffer the way they do, but if God really didn't want the suffering to continue, it would in fact stop. So then, how do we answer the atheist who decries Christians of having a god who is "uncompassionate"? Again, Bahnsen answers:
- God is completely good.
- God is completely powerful.
Now these two premises in it of themselves provide no serious problem for the Christian. It isn't until we add the following premise -
- Evil exists.
The Scottish skeptic David Hume (18th century) put it like this:
"Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?"(Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 88)
It would seem like a logical contradiction. How then does the Christian solve this dilemma? We have contradictory premises - namely 1 and 2 which cannot comport with 3, say the logical positivist (a school of philosophy developed in its seminal form in Hume). Before I answer this question, let's see how this problem becomes a logical impossibility for the atheist:
"What we find, then, is that the unbeliever must secretly rely upon the Christian worldview in order to make sense of his argument from the existence of evil which is urged against the Christian worldview! Antitheism presupposes theism to make its case. . .
The problem of evil is thus a logical problem for the unbeliever, rather than the believer. As a Christian, I can make perfectly good sense out of my moral revulsion and condemnation of child abuse. The non - Christian cannot. This does not mean that I can explain why God does whatever He does in planning misery and wickedness in this world. It simply means that moral outrage is consistent with the Christian's worldview, his basic presuppositions about reality, knowledge, and ethics. The non - Christian's worldview (of whatever variety) eventually cannot account for such moral outrage. It cannot explain the objective and unchanging nature of moral notions like good or evil. Thus the problem of evil is precisely a philosophical problem for unbelief. Unbelievers would be required to appeal to the very thing against which they argue (a divine, transcendent sense of ethics) in order for their argument to be warranted" (Bahnsen, p.6).
Though this problem does pose a logical dilemma for the Christian, the atheist has no bases by which he can make his argument, for in doing so he undermines the intelligibility of the moral argument for God's existence. In effect, he is - as Dr. C. Van Til writes - on borrowed capital; that is, he is borrowing from the Christian worldview. He is doing so because he has no criteria by which to judge God. I would find any atheist hard pressed to find a logical consistency within his own ethic. However, the atheist is doing something that I think the Christians need to realize. There is an inconsistency in the way theist - Christian theist, for I argue for the God of the Bible - are arguing for God, namely His goodness.
"The problem of evil amounts to the charge that there is logical incoherence within the Christian outlook -- regardless of how much evil there is in the universe, compared to how much goodness can be found" (p.3).
The problem, as is illustrated by the quote above, shows that the problem is not about evidence but about a logical inconsistency. Christians ought to be concerned with the consistency of their view, especially in cases dealing with ethics. Though I disagree with YAD, he does show that if God were the god he shows himself to be (which that deity is not), then there's a logical inconsistency in most of what Christians believe:
"If the Christian presupposes that God is perfect and completely good -- as Scripture requires us to do -- then he is committed to evaluating everything within that experience in the light of that presupposition" (p.6).
Here Bahnsen shows that the presuppositions we have of the God of Scripture, therefore, ought to be justified in light of the God who is fully good and fully powerful. In essence, he [the Christian] ought to be consistent in his or her view of God - and I would add, the God of Scripture, though it be presupposed in light of "good" and "powerful."
Resolving the Paradox
So we return to our problem: How do we make sense of premises 1-3? The paradox (which is simply something that is seemingly contradictory) is resolved by adding the following premise:
- God has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists.
I don't know why God does what he does in nature and in the dealings with men and women, but we do know that we have a God who is completely good and completely powerful, yet has a morally sufficient reason for the evil which exists. I don't believe we are in our epistemic rights in knowing "why" he does these "evil" things, but logically speaking the paradox is resolved and the problem disappears. The atheist here cannot breathe another argument, namely because he has no ethical criteria
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