Tuesday, May 22, 2012

"Why won't God heal amputees?"

An unbeliever has thrown out the following challenge to Christians. Ten argumentative questions.

Before dealing with the specifics, let’s make a general observation. It’s impossible to make the world better in some way without making the world worse in other ways. That principle is illustrated by science fiction scenarios in which a time-traveler tries to make the world a better place by changing the past. But every time he makes one thing better, he makes another thing worse. Every improvement carries a collateral downside. He can never strike a perfect balance, in which everything is better and nothing is worse.

Every life touches other lives. Every life has consequences. Humanly speaking, every life has unintended consequences.

Suppose medical science discovers the cure for cancer. In some respects, a world without cancer is a better world. However, some cured cancer patients will end up committing crimes. A world in which no one dies of cancer is a world with more rapes, murders, domestic violence, and so on. Certain evils will occur as a result of a cancer-free world that wouldn’t occur if some patients died of cancer.

To take another example, suppose I have kids, and they have kids, and their kids have kids, continuing for several generations. Odds are, one of my decedents will accidentally kill someone in a traffic accident. Eliminating tragedies upstream can result in tragedies downstream. You’re trading one set of tragedies for another set of tragedies.

Suppose ER physicians could see ahead. Suppose they could anticipate the long-term consequences of every life they save. Should they still save every life, even if–by saving the life of the patient, they effectively take the life of someone else who dies as a result of saving the patient’s life?

Now you might say, What about a world with no evil? But that has tradeoffs, too. An unfallen world has no evils at the expense of eliminating the second-order goods you have in a redeemed world. So there’s both loss and gain.


1. Why won't God heal amputees?

i) The question is ambiguous. Is the question Why won’t God heal any amputee or every amputee?

ii) Craig Keener has cited documented cases of body-part regeneration. Cf. Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. So there’s prima facie evidence that God heals some amputees (or the equivalent).

iii) God will heal every Christian amputee at the resurrection of the just.

iv) If God healed every amputee, would that be a better world? It would be better in some respects. However, a world in which God healed every amputee would also contain some evils not present in a world with amputees.

Some healed amputees will use their regenerated limbs to commit crime. Or some amputees will have kids or grandkids who commit crimes. Or accidentally kill someone. As long as they were amputees, their prospects for marriage were dim. As healed amputees, they are now far more eligible. That can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the long-term repercussions. Indeed, it can be a little of both.

2. Why are there so many starving people in our world?

That's a variant of the first question. So the answer is the same. A world in which no one starves is better in some respects, but worse in others. Suppose no Muslim ever starves to death. As a result, you have more suicide-bombers, honor-killings, female genital mutilation, &c.

In a world where no one starves to death, more people survive to outlive their loved ones, die in a nursing home, succumb to Alzheimer’s. Every improvement is offset by something worse.

There is no best possible world. There are different combinations of good and evil. Likewise, there are goods that exclude other goods.

3. Why does God demand the death of so many innocent people in the Bible?

According to the Bible, everyone is a sinner.

4. Why does the Bible contain so much anti-scientific nonsense?

That question assumes what it needs to prove.

5. Why is God such a huge proponent of slavery in the Bible?

Once again, that question assumes what it needs to prove.

6. Why do bad things happen to good people?

i) In a fallen world with common grace, people are a combination of good and evil.

ii) Many people are “good” only so long as it doesn’t cost them anything. Likewise, many people would do evil if they could get away with it.

iii) In a godless universe, there’s no such thing as right and wrong, good and evil.

7. Why didn't any of Jesus' miracles in the Bible leave behind any evidence?

A number of his miracles did leave behind evidence–testimonial evidence.

8. How do we explain the fact that Jesus has never appeared to you?

i) If I said Jesus appeared to me, an unbeliever would dismiss that as a hallucination.

ii) I can learn far more about Jesus from the Bible than I can from a one-time apparition.

iii) My maternal grandfather never appeared to me. He died before I was born. I only know about him from relatives. So what? Should I doubt the existence of my maternal grandfather because I never met him? Should I discount what relatives told me about him?

iv) Jesus will appear to me (1 Jn 3:2).

9. Why would Jesus want you to eat his body and drink his blood?

As a Zwinglian, I deny the premise of the question.

10. Why do Christians get divorced at the same rate as non-Christians?

i) They don’t. That’s an urban legend.

ii) Anyway, that’s a diversionary question. The divorce rate among Christians is irrelevant to Messianic prophecy, the Incarnation, Resurrection, &c.

12 comments:

  1. Good job with those questions. Especially the answers to Jesus appearing to us. Your one remark,--
    "If I said Jesus appeared to me, an unbeliever would dismiss that as a hallucination",-- reminded me of how I had a blogger friend a while back, who was an atheist, proclaim this very thing to me about the Apsotle Peter, when i shared 1st Peter with him.
    He said Peter loved Jesus so much, that Peter halucinated Jesus to be risen from the dead, was the only feasible expalantion. He didn't throw out the Scripture evidence, as some do, but still would not accept that Christ did indeed rise from the grave.

    Thanks for the good thoughts and post.

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  2. "Now you might say, What about a world with no evil? But that has tradeoffs, too. An unfallen world has no evils at the expense of eliminating the second-order goods you have in a redeemed world. So there’s both loss and gain."

    So how would open theism be at a disadvantage with respect to Calvinism here? The open theist God believes creaturely autonomy to be worth the potential evil wrought by free creatures, while the Calvinist God believes displaying His glory (partly) through damnation to be worth predestining some creatures to final depravity.

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    1. i) At a generic level, both Calvinism and neotheism can incorporate the principle of tradeoffs into their respective theodicies.

      ii) The neotheist God is supposed to be more loving than the Calvinist God–according to neotheists. That's in tension with creaturely autonomy.

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  3. Replies
    1. Imprecision of usage notwithstanding, evolution has classically been defined in terms of the frequency of alleles within a population. So, the short answer is because evolution can only be said to occur within populations (or metapopulations/communities) and not within individuals.

      Sorry to disappoint you, Fred. :^(

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    2. Dang. The way David Attenborough describes it on his various BBC documentaries, its merely a matter of willing oneself to evolve whatever appendage needed.

      So you're saying I have to inject myself with bird DNA or something?

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    3. Well, you could... In sort-of an Avengers-style gene therapy procedure. But since you are still an individual, you couldn't say that you've evolved (at least in the biological sense).

      If you and several thousand of the people in your area did it, then that would be something. In that case, you could rightly say that your local population as become "more evolved" than their neighbors.

      Of course, you run the risk of unintended consequences. Maybe human bird wings some with the predisposition toward eating carrion, which the human gut wouldn't protect you from.

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  4. "The open theist God believes creaturely autonomy to be worth the potential evil wrought by free creatures"-JD

    Hopefully us rebels will surprise God, and He will be blessed with an evil ungodly soul with a tad, or a half of tad of goodness that appears in some mysterious way, and so this goodness of the open theist is appreciated by God.

    Am I on the right path here?

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    1. Not even close. Actually, I'm not even sure that sentence is intelligible. Can you rewrite it a bit more clearly? I'm not sure exactly how you are attempting to describe the open theist view, or what implications you think it has.

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  5. The Open view is that God doesn't know the future. He is all-knowing, but he limits His Omnipotence. And so sinners are capable of becoming born again without God's will, and yet god is right there, in a sort of hands off kind of way. I think that sums up Greg Boyd, doesn't it?

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  6. "However, some cured cancer patients will end up committing crimes. A world in which no one dies of cancer is a world with more rapes, murders, domestic violence, and so on. "

    Think what the world would be like if we applied that mentality to all medicine.

    "Suppose no Muslim ever starves to death. As a result, you have more suicide-bombers, honor-killings, female genital mutilation"

    Do you personally know every Muslim?

    I would like to commend you one your writing style. Easy to follow, *mostly* sound logical steps.

    I hope the points mentioned above help you, and improve future papers.

    Cheers :D

    P.S. Have a great day!

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  7. torrent5/22/2012 9:01 PM

    "Think what the world would be like if we applied that mentality to all medicine."

    You have problems following the argument. The argument wasn't that a world without cancer is worse than a world with cancer. Rather, the argument was that each scenario has its share of tradeoffs. Therefore, you can't say that one scenario is uniformly better (or worse) than another. That distinction shouldn't be hard to grasp.

    "Do you personally know every Muslim?"

    Must insurance companies personally know every teenager to know that teenagers in general have a higher incidence of traffic accidents than thirty-somethings? Assessing frequency doesn't require omnscience–just a representative sample group.

    It's a fact that suicide-bombers, honor-killings, and female genital mutilation predominate among Muslims. Since a percentage of Muslims engage in these activities, if you have more Muslims, that will raise the number of incidents.

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