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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Clifford Goldstein Weekend

Clifford Goldstein

Called by Name

The Pre-Advent Judgment

Existence of God

Maybe some of you've heard the name Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

He was a Russian writer, born in 1821 and died in 1881.

It was believed his father, a physician, had been murdered by his serfs and when he was a young man he got involved in some radical anti- czarist politics and he was arrested by Nicholas the first, convicted and sentenced to death, and they took a bunch of him and his cohorts out in a courtyard and staged a mock execution, like right up to the last minute, ready aim, and then they just, they never intended to kill him, but they shipped him off to Siberia for 4 years.

And anyway, he wrote, many ways he's considered probably, some would consider him the greatest novelist of the 19th century.

And he wrote books about the novel God and morals and poverty and crime and violence, just really psychological novels dealing with these issues and the existence of God and so forth and he had many consider his greatest novel called the Brothers Karamazov And it was a chapter called the Grand Inquisitor, which many consider the greatest chapter and the greatest novel written by many considered the greatest novelist of the 19th century.

Aloysia is a monk and he symbolizes Faith faith in God and his brother Ivan well, I don't know if you could call him an atheist, but he had a lot of skepticism about the whole thing.

And Ivan gives him this talk and he starts talking about all these atrocities that had happened to children.

He told 1 story how some surf child threw a rock and injured a dog's paw.

The surf, the manner of the surf, his dog, and how they had the boy stripped and in front of his mother the dogs went after him and ripped him apart and actually I read a biography of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Frank's biography and apparently that story and then a bunch of other atrocities that he told in this section.

He told about them throwing babies up in the air and stabbing them with bayonets and just about 1 horrible crime after another done to children.

And Ivan is going on and on and on and he was questioning, He was questioning, you know, how could these incidents ever be justified?

You know, even at the end of the age when the divine harmony is to be restored, when all the insufferable questions are answered, you know, when all God's ways are to be vindicated before men and angels, Ivan says, I want to see with my own eyes.

The hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer.

I want to be there when everybody suddenly understands what it all has been for.

But then there are the children and what am I to do about them?

For the hundredth time I repeat there are a number of questions but I've taken only the children because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear.

Listen, if all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have the children to do with it?

You know, there really are, despite, you know, Richard Dawkins, you know, he called the atheists the brights and all that.

There really are many very logical, rational reasons to believe in God.

I mean, there really are, you know, nothing created itself.

And you, you know, something had to create this, and you go back, you go back to ultimately you need something uncreated, something that was always there, that doesn't, in fact, you read physicists, some who argue the universe arose from nothing, absolutely nothing.

And you know, they're being as logical as they can, okay?

Because if it arose even from some very simple or faint or whatever, quantum fluctuation or whatever, something had to create that and it goes on and on.

But if there's absolutely nothing, it doesn't need an explanation.

And the only other thing that doesn't need an explanation is an eternal existing God who is always there.

Absolutely nothing created the universe or an eternal existing God and then I'm sorry despite all the argument Darwin and I and all this self-replicating and all this stuff, I'm sorry.

There's overwhelming evidence of a creator, a designer.

I was just talking there, I wrote an article a few months ago called the hydrogen atom, the simplest atom, the simplest element, 1 proton and 1 electron, and the mysteries, the complexity, the design, the balance in that is, oh, so the idea that this arose by chance is just absurd, okay?

Then you have what's called the moral argument.

And let's say, let's say The second world war, the Nazis won.

And let's say under the brilliant propaganda of Joseph Garibaldi, he convinced everybody in the world that if you had 1 Jewish grandparent, you deserve death.

But suppose he convinced every human being.

Morality either comes from above us, transcended, or it's a pure human creation.

Okay, many believe it's a pure human creation.

So let's say he convinced every human being that anybody with 1 Jewish grandparent deserved to die, men, women, children, whatever.

If everybody believed it, would it make it right?

Okay, and if you got a problem with that, which most people do, it shows that can't be the right answer that points to morality transcending it.

Okay, so these are just a few and where did that morality come from?

Now these arguments, now none of these arguments in and of themselves proves the existence of God.

Even all of them together don't prove it.

I mean the arguments are good as far as they go and I think they're quite powerful but you know in many ways it's not they don't go far enough otherwise everybody would believe.

Instead what I believe these arguments do is show it really is logical and rational.

There is logical and rational reasons to believe in a transcendent creator.

Now yet, however logical, however rational these arguments are, and I know people could express them much clearer than I just did, however strong an edifice for theistic faith they help form, either alone or woven together in a good tapestry.

What they don't do, what they don't do, what they don't even come close to doing.

And I don't think what they can do is approach, must less answer Ivan Karamazov's question.

The children, what am I to do about them?

Okay, however logical and reasonable, these proofs are in many ways no more logical and reasonable than the question of how could the God found at the end of the cosmological, the moral, the teleological arguments, how can he be all loving and all powerful and all knowing and all good while evil exists?

Okay, this is inevitably the most logical and rational question That I think any logical and rational person Could ask and should ask in a world where faith in God can coexist with an eight-year-old child being purposely in front of his mother, ripped apart by hunting dogs.

Here's how 1 philosopher stated the question.

If God is perfectly loving He must wish to abolish evil If he is all-powerful, he must be able to abolish evil But evil exists therefore God cannot be both omnipotent and perfectly loving.

Unless you understand what omnipotence means and what it doesn't mean, okay?

Does omnipotence mean that God could do the logically impossible?

Can omnipotence create a triangle that has 4 sides?

Uh-uh, by definition, if it's a triangle, it has 3 sides.

Why can't God create a triangle that has 4 sides?

Well, because by definition, that's not what it is, what a triangle is.

Can omnipotence create a circle with 4 right angles built right into it?

No, because the moment it has 4 angles like that, it's no longer a circle.

Again, no, because 2 plus 2 by definition equals 4.

The moment it becomes 5, it's no longer 2 plus 2.

And here's the question, what I'm leading to.

Can omnipotence create a love that is forced?

Just the moment that it's forced, it's no longer love.

Just as a triangle, to be a triangle, must have 3 sides.

Love to be truly love has to be freely given.

It's like a proton meeting an anti-proton.

Love by its very definition Must be free Otherwise, it's not love either even the God the omnipotent creator can't create a love that is forced.

God could create obedience without freedom.

God can create order without freedom, but not love.

He could force the entire universe to worship Him.

He could force the entire universe to worship him.

He could force the entire universe to obey him.

He can force the entire universe to praise him.

But he can't force 1 single intelligent creature in the universe to love him.

And here's the crucial point, and here's where I believe the crucial hinge on which the argument for evil exists.

The only way humans could truly love God, okay, the only, if they had the freedom not to love God, Because love to be loved has to be freely given.

The only way humans could have this freedom is if they had the potential to make the wrong choices, to make immoral choices.

If we wanna be moral beings, it doesn't mean anything if you can't make the choice to do something immoral.

Without that, that doesn't mean that it demands that wrong choices be made.

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Series

Clifford Goldstein Weekend

Existence of God

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

Called by Name

1h 6m

The Pre-Advent Judgment

52m

Existence of God

48m

Sound Doctrine