Message body
Justin,
As always, a splendid series of interviews in the wake of the William Lane Craig debates. I admire your fairness to showcase both Craig and his chief debate opponent in the Reasonable Faith tour, Dr. Law.
As many of your listeners, I am not impressed with the Evil God Challenge of Dr. Law. I have agreed with many responses that questioned the proposition on ontological grounds, but, on first listen, I took the reasonings of the challenge to be much like the opinions we Americans had of the police in the 1960's and 70's. The references to those committed to "serve and protect" as the "fuzz" and "pigs" seemed to arise from the rebellious factions in those days, the unwashed hippy, the drug-induced youth, the drop-outs. Law's dismissal of God as evil seemed to follow these same lines, the segment of society that hinders you the most takes on some degree of demonization. However, this quick analogy does limp terribly, as you pointed out the relative strength of all analogies at the end of one of your shows. The police are corruptible, and possibilities of the forces of law enforcement to engage in criminal activity makes this quick assessment of Law's opinions rather weak.
Still, there may be something to this line of thought of declaring God as evil as an expression of perspective that doesn't allow for God being good, and His apparent evils as misunderstood by those who can't understand the ways of God in dealing with a sinful world. So, I'll attempt this second analogy, taking advantage of the fact that in viewing things historical, my American perspective should come at odds with your British understanding of events. To demonstrate that one's perspective in some issue could be lacking depth, let's examine one event in the American Revolution, the Boston Massacre of 1770. Tragic as this event was, we may consider the issues such as the specific number of loss of life constituting a "massacre." The fact that five people died may be an outrage to me, while you Justin may take issue that a "massacre" could be more the matter of burning, looting, and strewing carnage over five city blocks. We may take issue with the matter of provocation, the ill-temper of rock and snowball throwing colonials over against the muskets of the redcoat. We may argue over the acts of quartering troops at public expense, the colonial distaste at personal cost over against the British feeling of respect for those who had been stationed to protect the interests of the crown. But the view of the "evil redcoat" whose actions of firing on a crowd that they deemed correctly or incorrectly as dangerously aggressive will be seen from two different perspectives. In their trial, the soldiery was acquitted thanks to the shrewdness of one lawyer named John Adams, whose efforts ran against the prompting of his own brother Sam Adams who used the event as propaganda to inflame further revolution though more of the thirteen colonies. In the end, you Justin may defend the actions of the soldiers, declaring them not "evil oppressors," but really unfortunate men who were placed in difficult times to do their duties among an unappreciative people.
This is my assessment of Law's Evil God Challenge, engaging in a true understanding of God's activities in difficult times done in the perspective of an unappreciative heart and mind. If he envisions an evil god, could he do equal time on the premise of a possibly good god whose goodness we couldn't begin to fathom? Or could all this be such as Jesus complains of in His parable of The Great Banquet, "But they all with one accord began to make excuses ..." (Luke 14: 18a).
As always, a refreshing exchange of ideas, and I'm looking forward to continued pleasantries of opinion in your remarkable forum. Keep up this wonderful work in the new year.
Doran Fischer
Ixonia, Wisconsin (USA)
No comments:
Post a Comment