‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn't thought of that.’... and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Based on a request from *SouthernWolf03; these are a couple of interesting theological viewpoints I have come across. Refutations and comments welcome; ‘You are a sinner and will burn in hell’ most definitely unwelcome.
First argument: that Heaven and Hell cannot coexist.
This argument is most definitely not original. Most of the credit goes to my fellow thespian Norm. He's probably not the first to advance this idea but he's the one who brought it to my attention.
This argument draws largely on the same premises as the ‘six degrees of separation’ idea and the saying ‘hell is other people’. Let us first turn this statement on its head. It is reasonable to expect that most people would not be content in heaven unless all their closest friends were there with them. (It doesn't matter if they don't arrive straightaway - they have their earthly lives to live out first, and some theologies hold that no matter when you die, everyone enters heaven at the same time because heavenly ‘time’ is different from earthly time - this also has the side-effect of allowing God omniscience without denying human free will.)
Now, even assuming each and every one of those friends deserve to be in heaven too, they will want all their friends with them too. We can assume the heavenly deserts of every friend to a certain small number of iterations, if we began with a very saintly, intelligent and discriminating person to begin with - but the process goes on forever and our saintly person is a friend of a friend of a friend of (to the whatever power) someone who by the moral standards of even the most lenient judging God does not deserve a place in heaven, if the last judgment is to be at all meaningful. I mean, what sort of test is it where you are guaranteed to pass?
And if you were in hell, the exact same argument applies. So there could be heaven (if God is blindly kind), or hell (if God is sadistic and evil and everything we've been led to believe He's not).
Second argument: that we are superior to any God who is completely and only good - whatever your definition of good happens to be.
Theism tends to take the free will path as opposed to the fatalist path; for if it is fatalist, it concludes that we are granted our fate by God (however you envision Him/Her/Them) and that any evil we perform or suffer must be a part of His will. If we have free will, however, theology attempts to explain precisely why. Some have fared better than others; the strongest position, to my mind, is the one espoused by J. L. Mackie. It basically holds that there is no merit in being good if one cannot do otherwise. If a man is not free to do evil, ought he be rewarded for doing good? After all, he had no choice in the matter. One might as well reward a cannonball for hitting its target. So we have free will, and thus the capacity for evil, so that our good deeds may have meaning and merit. Free will (or per se freedom if you prefer) becomes, in a way, the ultimate good.
So far, so hoopy. But then we run into a problem. God, by his very nature, cannot do evil. He is completely and only good, isn't he? (This argument of course does not apply to gods who might not have this particular characteristic, but there are many who do.) You could argue that the past is not a reliable indicator of the future, that just because God happened to do the ‘right thing’ the last 10 million times doesn't mean he necessarily will next time, does it? But many want to believe in a God who is ‘good’ in and of His very nature, rather than a Supreme Creator who merely happens to be good.
However, we have established that a being that is good of its very nature does not possess a free will. God is therefore inferior to us, because we have the power of choice, and so our acts, when they are good, are infinitely more so than the same acts performed by God.
One might pick out that I claimed freedom as the ultimate good and choose to use this in his definition of God, so that ‘completely and only good’ becomes ‘completely (and only) free’. That seems a lot more attractive; but we must concede that such a God would be capable of as much evil as good, and we would have no guarantee, because of the inherently unpredictable (although unrandom) nature of free will, that He would be good - even if He always had been up to now.
Third argument: that if Jesus was divine, then His sacrifice on the Cross was meaningless.
In the film The Da Vinci Code, Tom Hanks speaks the line: ‘Why does it have to be human or divine? Perhaps human is divine.’ As Catholics who know their religion will know, this is entirely missing the point. The Church teaches that Christ was truly a human being as well as truly God. Wholly, completely both natures in one being. Heh heh heh...I must have been paying more attention to Mr Van Sideburns in Religion class than I thought. This is not just a matter of semantics; I include it here so it is not used against me. The human nature of Christ is irrelevant except that if He is robbed of His divinity then it is all that is left to Him.
Okay. The point is that Christ, if He had a divine nature, had a divine will. We have established that divine will, as defined by the Catholics and many other faiths, is wholly good and thus unfree. Jesus might as well have hidden and been brought by force to face execution, rather than coming quietly when arrested and facing death with head held high. Even if He had a human will as well, the divine will would win out because an unfree will, whatever else its nature, is always certain. A free will always has a little inherent uncertainty, and thus would have not the force that a divine will would have.
But to freely choose to sacrifice oneself (whether to ‘take the world of our sins onto himself’ or merely for the mundane sake of maintaining order in His time and place) is a courageous and, in Christ's case, commendable act - if He was only a free man, and not a good but unfree God.
First argument: that Heaven and Hell cannot coexist.
This argument is most definitely not original. Most of the credit goes to my fellow thespian Norm. He's probably not the first to advance this idea but he's the one who brought it to my attention.
This argument draws largely on the same premises as the ‘six degrees of separation’ idea and the saying ‘hell is other people’. Let us first turn this statement on its head. It is reasonable to expect that most people would not be content in heaven unless all their closest friends were there with them. (It doesn't matter if they don't arrive straightaway - they have their earthly lives to live out first, and some theologies hold that no matter when you die, everyone enters heaven at the same time because heavenly ‘time’ is different from earthly time - this also has the side-effect of allowing God omniscience without denying human free will.)
Now, even assuming each and every one of those friends deserve to be in heaven too, they will want all their friends with them too. We can assume the heavenly deserts of every friend to a certain small number of iterations, if we began with a very saintly, intelligent and discriminating person to begin with - but the process goes on forever and our saintly person is a friend of a friend of a friend of (to the whatever power) someone who by the moral standards of even the most lenient judging God does not deserve a place in heaven, if the last judgment is to be at all meaningful. I mean, what sort of test is it where you are guaranteed to pass?
And if you were in hell, the exact same argument applies. So there could be heaven (if God is blindly kind), or hell (if God is sadistic and evil and everything we've been led to believe He's not).
Second argument: that we are superior to any God who is completely and only good - whatever your definition of good happens to be.
Theism tends to take the free will path as opposed to the fatalist path; for if it is fatalist, it concludes that we are granted our fate by God (however you envision Him/Her/Them) and that any evil we perform or suffer must be a part of His will. If we have free will, however, theology attempts to explain precisely why. Some have fared better than others; the strongest position, to my mind, is the one espoused by J. L. Mackie. It basically holds that there is no merit in being good if one cannot do otherwise. If a man is not free to do evil, ought he be rewarded for doing good? After all, he had no choice in the matter. One might as well reward a cannonball for hitting its target. So we have free will, and thus the capacity for evil, so that our good deeds may have meaning and merit. Free will (or per se freedom if you prefer) becomes, in a way, the ultimate good.
So far, so hoopy. But then we run into a problem. God, by his very nature, cannot do evil. He is completely and only good, isn't he? (This argument of course does not apply to gods who might not have this particular characteristic, but there are many who do.) You could argue that the past is not a reliable indicator of the future, that just because God happened to do the ‘right thing’ the last 10 million times doesn't mean he necessarily will next time, does it? But many want to believe in a God who is ‘good’ in and of His very nature, rather than a Supreme Creator who merely happens to be good.
However, we have established that a being that is good of its very nature does not possess a free will. God is therefore inferior to us, because we have the power of choice, and so our acts, when they are good, are infinitely more so than the same acts performed by God.
One might pick out that I claimed freedom as the ultimate good and choose to use this in his definition of God, so that ‘completely and only good’ becomes ‘completely (and only) free’. That seems a lot more attractive; but we must concede that such a God would be capable of as much evil as good, and we would have no guarantee, because of the inherently unpredictable (although unrandom) nature of free will, that He would be good - even if He always had been up to now.
Third argument: that if Jesus was divine, then His sacrifice on the Cross was meaningless.
In the film The Da Vinci Code, Tom Hanks speaks the line: ‘Why does it have to be human or divine? Perhaps human is divine.’ As Catholics who know their religion will know, this is entirely missing the point. The Church teaches that Christ was truly a human being as well as truly God. Wholly, completely both natures in one being. Heh heh heh...I must have been paying more attention to Mr Van Sideburns in Religion class than I thought. This is not just a matter of semantics; I include it here so it is not used against me. The human nature of Christ is irrelevant except that if He is robbed of His divinity then it is all that is left to Him.
Okay. The point is that Christ, if He had a divine nature, had a divine will. We have established that divine will, as defined by the Catholics and many other faiths, is wholly good and thus unfree. Jesus might as well have hidden and been brought by force to face execution, rather than coming quietly when arrested and facing death with head held high. Even if He had a human will as well, the divine will would win out because an unfree will, whatever else its nature, is always certain. A free will always has a little inherent uncertainty, and thus would have not the force that a divine will would have.
But to freely choose to sacrifice oneself (whether to ‘take the world of our sins onto himself’ or merely for the mundane sake of maintaining order in His time and place) is a courageous and, in Christ's case, commendable act - if He was only a free man, and not a good but unfree God.