Posted on by Abe Austin

Faulty Logic

There is a faulty logic that can lead some to abandon the faith that goes something like this:

1. My father believed in Christ.
2. My father hurt me.
3. The church believes in Christ.

Therefore, the church must want to hurt me.

This is not a surprising line of reasoning. It is in our nature to learn from our suffering and to try and avoid it repeating. We instinctively look at the qualities attached to those that hurt us and become suspect of others who carry the same. And in many cases, this can actually help us identify negative patterns and avoid risky associations.

But there is a difference between correlation and causation. Having been hurt by someone who professed Christ, but who did not emulate the teachings of Christ, is not the same as having been hurt by Christ, himself. It takes maturity to look at the harm we have received and ascribe its sources to the qualities that do apply, and not to the ones that don’t.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Bad Things Shouldn’t Happen

A Common Assumption)

Our culture struggles deeply with the idea of bad things happening to good people. It is often cited as an obstacle to having faith in God. To be honest, I have never struggled with this concept myself. I simply do not see why the existence of an all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God is mutually exclusive to suffering in our world. I see it as a non-sequitur, requiring several subconscious assumptions to try and bring those two ideas together.

But as I have thought about it, I wonder if the connection is simply this: Bad things shouldn’t happen to good people because that is unjust. I certainly agree with the second part of this sentence, which states that it is unjust for the good to suffer, but I become a lot less confident about the first part that says it shouldn’t happen. That depends on what one means by “should.” After all, why shouldn’t things be unjust in an unjust world? Isn’t that exactly the pattern that you should see given our mortal context?

The Different Shoulds)

I think the difficulty that so many in our society wrestle with might come down to there being two different meanings of the word “should,” and we, having lost an appreciation for the nuance between those meanings conflate them into one and draw erroneous conclusions. The first use of “should” is a moral statement. It describes the world as it ought to be, in a way that would be just and fair. Spouses should have the loyalty of one another. A defenseless woman should be able to walk down a dark alley without fear. The guilty should be held accountable for their crimes. The world should behave according to moral principles.

The other “should,” however, simply means “appropriate to the context.” It describes the expected effects of a certain condition. The visible constellations should be different from different latitudes if the Earth is round. A species in a favorable environment should thrive. A patient with malaria should have an exceedingly high temperature.

With that last one, are we saying that it is “good” for the patient to have a dangerously high fever? Of course, not. But it is the natural and fitting state for that condition. The suffering is tragic, but it follows the proper order of the thing.

So, should the innocent suffer in a moral sense? Of course, not. But should we expect to see such injustices in a world that isn’t moral? Yes. The sad truth is we live in a fallen world that has largely rejected God and elevated selfishness and sin over love and virtue. What should such a world look like? Should it be the image of justice and fairness, or is the logical order that it would be a place of tragedy, unjust suffering, and a reality far removed from the moral ideal?

Posted on by Abe Austin

Inevitable Universal Truth

Universal truth is inevitable. If there was no universal truth, then that would be the universal truth.

Given that universal truth is inevitable, all that remains is for us to find out what it is and align ourselves to it.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Offensively Faithful- Popular Morality

The State of the End)

In the last post we identified the likely moral landscape in the last days, based on the prophecies of Jesus and the prophets. We identified that there would be a minority of the good and faithful, and at least enough of the utterly depraved and murderous that they could have power over the good. I then theorized that the majority might be morally compromised, people who still think that they are morally good, but who justify their sin with twisted principles, and who provide justification for the ultimately depraved to murder the good.

I suppose that either this will be the makeup of humanity at the end of the world, or it will be a state along the way to a more depraved makeup. Perhaps at the end things will have progressed further, to where most of the self-justifying sinful have also reached the deepest levels of depravity, sharing that same murderous intent towards the righteous.

Personally, I consider the first social makeup to be more likely, where the majority of people are compromised but think themselves righteous in their own eyes. Otherwise, at the time of the second coming there would be a sharp line where almost everyone was killed, leaving only a very few righteous alive. I think it more likely that only the murderously wicked will be destroyed, and there will remain many morally compromised who will have to be ministered to by the righteous to finally convert them back to the Lord. At this time, the majority sinful will no longer have the power of government and moral certitude. They will know without any doubt that they are in transgression of their Creator, and that they cannot remake the world in their image, and that they must repent or they will be sinning against the light. This belief is in part due to the account of the partially evil Nephites who were spared at the coming of Jesus, and in part due to the account of Zechariah 13, which states that Jesus will appear at the second coming to Jews who do not yet believe on him.

Folly of the Masses)

Whatever the general state of depravity in the world in the last days, it at least seems certain that the majority of the people will believe things that are false and sinful. To some extent they will be deceived and led astray. They will justify evil. Many will eschew good and be antagonistic towards the righteous. To what degree is up for debate, but this much is certain.

Thus, if one lives in the last days and they hold the majority views, then even without examining what those views are, we already know that they are faulty and that that person has been misled. And, by extension, most people will be morally in the wrong. Only those that are willing to be unpopular, to be ridiculed, to be called “outdated” and “bigoted” will have any possibility of being in the right. Not necessarily all those with controversial beliefs will be correct, but all those that are correct will have controversial beliefs, and all those with the mainstream beliefs will not.

Now, does this apply to us in our situation today? Well, to answer that we must first answer this question: do we live in the last days or do we not? If the last days are far removed from us, then all that we have said is true of a time long distant and may or may not apply to us today. But if we truly do live in the end times, then modern popularity is a barometer for folly. Tomorrow I will examine the question of whether we live in the end times or not, and why I believe that we do. Then we can be more specific about what trends in the world seem most likely then to be misleading.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Faulty Premises- The Trend

A Recipe for Success)

Whenever people decide to push a social, political, or spiritual movement, they justify the changes that they seek by making certain truth claims. They try to get the world to accept that their core premises are true, or better yet get people to realize that they already agree with those premises. And then, if the premises are true, then the logical response must be to make the proposed social changes.

Every movement, whether its premises are true or not, depends on convincing people of them. Thus, the successful movements are the ones that identify what core premises most immediately lead to their desired outcomes and communicate them in a concise, memorable, and convincing way. When a movement is successful, the premise that was taught then becomes part of the societal fabric. It is now an assumed truth, an axiom for ethical and correct behavior, and future generations will be raised to trust it implicitly.

Unintended Consequences)

But that’s where these movements can start to unravel. The original evangelists of the movement may have only wanted to effect one, specific change, but the rising generations will always take things to their full logical conclusion. They will look at the premise and say, “well if this is true, and it justifies this first step, then surely it justifies the second and the third as well.” And so, they push the matter further than the original evangelists ever intended. Indeed, it is not uncommon for earlier-wave members of a movement to express shock and dismay at what their cause has become in the hands of the later generations. Some of them even express regret for having started the movement at all.

This is a pattern that should give us all pause as we consider the changes that we would wish to see in the world and the methods by which we would achieve them. Every one of us ought to give special consideration to the premises that precede those changes, and what their full potential effect could be, and whether they are even true to begin with.

Tomorrow we’ll look at a specific example of one movement that has gone off the rails, the premise that was indoctrinated in society to make it a success, and why that premise logically led to the unintended consequences we see today.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Evil in God’s World

A Common Argument)

I have frequently heard the argument that if we have an all-loving God, how are tragedies and disasters a part of this world? I have addressed this issue in part with previous posts, but today I wanted to point out a fundamental flaw in the argument itself.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave this argument in an interview where he said, “Every description of God that I’ve heard holds God to be all-powerful and all-good, and then I look around, and I see a tsunami that killed a quarter million people in Indonesia, an earthquake that killed a quarter million people in Haiti, and I see earthquakes, and tornadoes, and disease, childhood leukemia, and I see all of this and I say I do not see evidence of both of those being true simultaneously. If there is a God, the God is either not all-powerful or not all-good.”

I find it interesting that Tyson’s public persona is entirely based around having a scientific mind, yet his argument is entirely unscientific. He jumps to a conclusion that is not at all supported by the premises. Here are the premises that he establishes:

  1. God is all-powerful
  2. God is all-good
  3. ???
  4. There is great tragedy in this world

And from these he draws the conclusion that the last premise is incompatible with the first two. But as it stands, the statements of God’s character and the state of the world live in isolation from one another. There is a crucial premise missing, one that would establish what the relationship between God and the world even is!

This is the fundamental flaw in all of these criticisms. They speak of the nature of God, and the nature of the world, but never establish what one of those has to do with the other. It is quite a leap to say that if God is all-good that He is required to enforce only good things on the Earth of today. Where did that notion come from? Why can’t God be all-good and not puppeteering everything that plays out in humanity?

The Perfect Earth)

One thing that Tyson did not explicitly say, but which I believe is implied in his argument, is that the missing link between God’s goodness and the state of the earth is that God created the earth. If God is perfect, and the original author of our existence, then why isn’t that existence perfect also?

But even introducing this to the argument doesn’t make it any better. Because if one is going to question why a perfect God did not create a perfect world, the obvious answer is, “well, according to our records…He actually did.” In the first chapters of Genesis, we read that God created a world where everything was “good.” There was no death, no sickness, none of the great tragedies that so distress us today. Thus, the expectation actually fit the reality at the moment of creation. God did give us exactly the sort of world that we would have expected Him, too.

But states can change. And man, not God, chose to introduce sin into this world, corrupted its perfection, and gave birth to the fallen earth that we see all around us. This is all made clear in the first three chapters of the Christian canon, so it doesn’t make sense to state that the Christian conception of God does not account for the disparity between His goodness and the world’s evil.

If one does not believe in the biblical explanation, so be it, but don’t claim that there isn’t any explanation. Indeed, this is one of the unique and compelling aspects of Christianity, that it not only acknowledges the dual nature of our existence but also provides one of the clearest, most explicit explanations of that division’s origin.

Of course, one might still be troubled by the disparity between the professed perfection of the Christian God and the suffering in the world, and one might feel that if God really is all-powerful, then He ought to be able to reclaim that fallen world. And to that I say, brother, have I got some good news for you!

Posted on by Abe Austin

Is the Old Testament God Evil? – Mind vs Heart

I have spent the past several days reviewing the common defenses that are made for God having commanded the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite nations. I found some of the arguments more compelling than others. However, even the ones that had strong points were not so convincing that I lost all discomfort for these passages. I find what remains for me is a sense that God was justified to have commanded these actions, but I still wish He wouldn’t have. The more that I delve into the details, the more I realize that the problem isn’t in the details.

I think this is a common mistake when raising and addressing issues related to God. We are dealing with a matter of spiritual unrest and are trying to resolve it in intellectual terms. We too often assume that our feelings are invalid if we cannot express it as a logical argument. Therefore, the critic will experience negative feelings towards these verses and will give logical arguments against them. The defender of these verses will respond in kind by providing logical rebuttals. Even if those rebuttals are sound, they will do nothing to convince the critic, because the logic wasn’t where the problem began. It isn’t the critic’s mind that needs to be converted, it is the heart.

Thus, my response to all of the defenses that we have covered thus far is, “yes, you have some good points, and maybe it all makes sense in my head…but I still just feel sad about it.” In my next post I will try to take a different approach to addressing these concerns. I think it is time we took the matter to a higher level of consciousness. I wish to make an appeal, not the to mind, but to the Spirit. We will see how that goes tomorrow.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Too Much Certainty

As I observe all of the angry discourse in our society today, I am left with a sense that we are much too certain of ourselves.

If the other side is wrong, we are certain that then we must be right, even though in most cases that is not necessarily so.

We are certain that we know causation, when all that has been demonstrated is correlation.

In the domains of definite uncertainty, where neither God nor science has spoken, we are nonetheless certain that our opinion is ultimately right.

I do believe that some things we can be certain of, and should be certain of, and should live with passionate conviction to those certainties. But I think that those are only a few, core things, and we should be nuanced enough to call all the rest a hunch, a belief, and an assumption.

Posted on by Abe Austin

What We Are, Fundamentally- The Result of Determinism

Determinism Again)

Yesterday I spoke of the physical-materialist theory of determinism, which maintains that all of our behaviors and “choices” are actually predetermined programming. The stimuli to our senses come from an environment that we cannot control, and our reactions to those stimuli are dictated by the preset mapping of the synapses within our brains.

Input + Function = Output, and because the Input and the Function are controlled, so is the Output.

Free will and control are only illusions that arise from the fact that the environment and the brain mapping are so complex that we cannot predict the outcomes before they occur. But just because we mortals can’t predict those outcomes, doesn’t mean that they aren’t predestined. The things that we do are simply the things that we were always going to do.

Moral License)

If this theory is true, though, then I cannot be responsible for anything that I do. I might feel as though I make my own choices, that I wrestle between decisions, but that’s simply my computer-brain evaluating between two programmed priorities, until it finally settles on the option that its biological algorithms were pre-weighted towards. I was always going to come to the conclusion that I was going to come to, and I am no more responsible for coming to that conclusion than a domino is guilty of falling when pushed.

Thus, if I decide to kill another person, there was no alternative to that outcome. There was no option for me to have chosen otherwise. I might have chosen differently if I had been born to a different environment, or if I had a different composition of the brain, but the function and the parameters were already set, and so I simply had to give the only possible output: murder.

And if I were to go around proselyting for this worldview, and the logic of it were to incite a person to decide there was no morality and that he truly was permitted to do anything and none of it would be his fault, and if he were to then go out and planted bombs that killed hundreds of innocent schoolchildren, well it couldn’t be helped because his mind was already such as to take the input of my words and derive those predestined conclusions. And it couldn’t be helped that I inspired him to do those things, because I was also predestined to make those arguments. And though it may appear to the outside world that I had influence and he had choice, even though everything in our natural perception and experience screams at us that such is the case, it would all be a lie and an illusion. The creation of that terrible, bloody would have been necessary and unavoidable.

Common Sense)

The horrifying conclusions of determinism are reason enough to reject it, but even more important than the unacceptable nature of its ends is the fact that it defies so much of our common sense that we have to conclude it isn’t true. Like I said in the last paragraph, everything in our natural perception and reason tells us that we actually do choose what we do, and that the evil are guilty, and that people can decide whether to live as good or evil.

Determinism asks for an even greater level of blind faith than any system of religious morality. It not only asks us to trust its claims, but to do so against all of our perception and reason. It asks us to deny the apparent and obvious reality to accept an unprovable and theoretical one. Everything natural and instinctive about us protests that is a lie, and that would explain why its ends are so horrific and destructive. A reality based upon a lie can only end in obliteration, for a lie is the inversion of reality.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Rights and Materialism: Part Three

Thus Far)

Over the past two postsI have discussed God as a basis for our fundamental human rights, and also the natural biology of our species for a basis as well. I have explained that I believe in both foundations, but unlike a materialist/humanist, I am convinced that having the natural biology of our species as the only foundation for our rights is insufficient. In my last post I explained why, showing how from the materialist/humanist view, rights would only be an illusion invented by the species that benefits from them. We would say that humans should have a right to life, simply because if they don’t they would cease to exist, so murder is a self-destroying principle.

So long as our rights are tied only to the biology of our race, it is possible to create logical exceptions to them. I gave two examples:

  1. We could say that we are not the same race as other humans, and we only need to observe the rights of our own race, and not of others.
  2. We could say that even if the rights should be enforced by society at large, if we violate them and conceal it from society, there is no other authority that we must answer to.

Today we will consider how having our rights also based in God resolves these issues.

A New Equation)

In my previous post I gave an equation that showed the cyclical, self-contained logic of rights when based upon the natural biology of our species. I said that if we call humanity “X,” and the basic human rights “Y,” then we can say:

Y is essential for X
So X must secure Y

Now let us consider how that equation changes if we assume that God has given us our rights. We will represent God in our equation as “Z.”

Z states that Y is essential for X
So Z must secure Y for X

The rights (Y) are tethered to man (X) by God (Z). It may not seem like much of a difference, but this small alteration has massive ramifications. Introducing Z now makes X and Y reside in Z, not in each other. We no longer have a circular, isolated interdependency. The relationship between X and Y no longer collapses once we are outside of their context. Y is no longer a relative need of X, which nothing outside of X is obligated to fulfill.

Through this God-centric view, human rights are now just as universal and unchanging as mathematical truths. Just as how the Pythagorean Theorem will always be a true mathematical expression, the statement that “life and liberty are necessities for all people” will always be a true, moral principle. Even if there were no people around to observe it, the Pythagorean Theorem would still be a universal maxim between the sides of right-triangles, maintained in God, independent of man. In just the same way, even if humanity were to go extinct, it would still be a maxim in God that life and liberty are good for people and nothing would change that.

The Answer to the Problems)

Now, even if a group of people declared themselves to be a different race they would still have to answer to God if they violated the rights of other races. If individuals violated the rights of one another, and concealed it from the larger species, they would still have to answer to God. They would have to answer to God because it is He, not merely “other people,” who demand these rights for all. He demands them, and He enacts His will to see that they are secured.

And from the Christian perspective, that is exactly what has transpired throughout history. Yes, there have been long periods of various rights being violated by entire nations and individual souls, but over the years the idea of basic human rights has emerged, and in more developed countries has been applied to all, and of it has been done under the justification that “it is God’s will.”

Conclusion)

There is nothing wrong in observing the ways that our biological nature compels us to seek what is best for one another, to enshrine rules of conduct between all people, to sacrifice our own interests for the greater good. Recognizing these logical, natural realities can certainly be further evidence to help convince all people to live in moral, ethical ways.

The problem is when we try to weaponize the existence of this biological nature against the divine basis for our rights. There are those that use a new moral perspective to beat away at the very foundation that all our moral principles rest upon! How strange, when it was the perspective that God was the author of our morals that led us to implement the freedoms and rights that we have in the first place. Trying to remove that perspective is a regression, one likely to take us back to the darkest epochs humanity has ever seen, with the vast majority of the population living under all manner of oppression and suffering.

If we destroy the one, best moral grounding we have ever had, and give the next generations a flawed moral grounding instead, they will carry it to conclusions that we would never dare. And when they do, who will the sufferers take their appeal to then? The God that we abandoned?