Continuing the discussion…
Dear BM,
Just completed my third and last B.Div paper yesterday morning - Phil. of Religion! A half-killer! (Interestingly enough the syllabus addresses some of the concerns you raised...)
Thanks again for your letter...I salute your honesty and straight-forwardness, plus I can see some familiar questions I raised meself previously (except that i was asking more out of intellectual curiosity - "How do you solve this one?" - than seeking to meet some inner need which I presume is what pertains in your case).
Whatever else I say, I hope you never think that my Christian experience/walk is a 'smooth' one...I've seen the 'dark side' of the church face to face...have gone through serious pain in the family, asked some very 'violent' questions of God (somehow the 'problem of evil' takes on a different light when it happens to you; merely 'logical' answers never work), and quite blatantly gave Him the cold shoulder (notice previously how easier it is to sin when bad things happen? it's like you think your problems give you some kinda warrant for disobedience...)
Nevertheless, I simply CANNOT deny the presence of God in my life in spite of and through the whirlwind...miraculously (I mean this), a totally unexpected job-offer came up in S'pore which helped secure some of my finances for an apartment, I met a lovely girl whom I'm about to marry next Jan(!), I was given many new wonderful friends (something we surely can't take for granted, eh?), and upon returning to K.L. I was given a 3-day/week job offer, clearing some time/space for my prayed-for social ministry and theological degree...in a word, despite the crap my family underwent I found it almost irrational to give up my belief in God due to 'tough times'...
And this is a few years AFTER my initial and very emotionally shallow sojourns into Christian apologetics, philosophy, religion, etc...somehow the best 'argument' for God is the personal communion one had with Him, and I suppose at the end of the day, it's this very heart-to-heart relationship which I want to communicate to you... as per your letter, we can both raise more questions in 5 minutes than we can answer in 5 decades, no? ;>)
So, I'll be doing my best throughout to hopefully dig deeper into your questions (and vice-versa, I'm sure), but we ought to be sure that because the Christian faith speaks of a personal God, our belief in Him would be primarily a matter of the heart; we gotta learn to give Him the benefit of the doubt in many cases, be honest with our skepticism and constantly 'check ourselves' to see if our doubts are themselves rationally grounded...
Back to your mail! ;>)
As I read your letter, I realized that your questions are mainly philosophical in nature (finding God through reason, the problem of 'natural evil', prayer, etc.)...I also see you have some pictures of God which you read from the OT which themselves raise doubts...I hope to address these first then maybe later go on to some of the 'hard' historical data...hopefully I can show you some brighter glimpses of God's character as I understand it from Scripture...;>)
For lack of an obvious good place to begin, I think I'll start by addressing a short of your paragraph below
“God seemed to regret having almost wiped out humanity in the Great Flood (Genesis 8:21-9:17), so God was not entirely perfect.”
Actually, I believe passages like these ought to stimulate us to rethink our ideas of 'perfection', applied particularly to a personal being. What does it mean for God to be 'perfect'? Assuming God CAN experience regrets, why would that imply im-perfection?
I gather you believe that a perfect being never regrets. This is another way of saying that He ALWAYS gets what He wants, His goals are ALWAYS achieved and everything in the world happens EXACTLY as He wants them to. This is, I think, the only way you can imperfection to God based on His regrets. But this is far from necessary (though it's unfortunately also how the main Christian theologies of today think). The Bible doesn't require us to hold that God always get what He wants; your passage itself proves it. But the Bible *does* say that God is Love, it *does* ascribe great praise and glory to Him - in a word, I doubt the Biblical writers would have a problem with labelling God 'perfect'!
(In fact, your verse only portrays God being grieved at wiping out humanity; passages like Gen 6:6 show Him changing His mind about having created in the first place!)
My reading of Scripture leads me to believe that God is perfect in love, goodness and holiness i.e. He is NEVER un-loving, He NEVER sins and He is always good to His creatures. This wouldn't be to say, however, that He doesn't need to judge, punish and/or discipline us at times. In fact, given His role as governor of the universe it would only be expected that He needs to maintain some form of order in the world, ensuring justice, getting rid of evil, etc. Of course issues abound here, but I wanted to make the point that this is how I understand divine perfection.
In closing for now,
I would say the Bible doesn't have a problem with a perfect God who
regrets...maybe we should question our assumptions on this...it will definitely
dove-tail into the questions on suffering you raised...what do you think?
(BM later replied):
"If I regret something, it means that I wish I had
not done it because I have seen the effects of my action and realized
I had made a mistake. But according to my conception, if someone or
something is perfect, it is without any fault or error. So if God is perfect,
he cannot err.
I mean to use the word "perfect" in its
absolute sense, though maybe you mean to say that God is perfect in a more
relative sense, meaning that nothing is closer to absolute perfection than God,
but that he can make occasional mistakes and therefore regret them. I think
that the "relative perfection" of God, if I may call it
that, is justifiable both biblically and philosophically, but I
don't see how an absolutely perfect God is possible in the world we live in if
he is also supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and all-loving."
In fact, I too use
'perfect' in an absolute sense, an absolutely personal sense (smile)...
Just a coupla points
in defense of the idea that God can *truly* regret (like I mentioned
earlier, my position seems more 'radical' than the one you're objecting
towards; I actually think God CHANGES HIS MIND, or at least has done so
many times in Biblical history, what more Him regretting things He's set in
motion. Hence, the following will be a defense of this more radical
picture of God).:
First, there are
more than a few dozen references in Scripture to the repentance of God and His
expressions of uncertainty. This makes affirming the genuine
regret/repentance of God just about as 'Biblically justifiable' as any position
can be.
Secondly,
it seems to me that God 'configured' reality such that His creatures
have the capacity to reciprocate and/or reject His love, to surprise and/or
shock Him. This capacity (more commonly known as 'free will', but I
prefer something like 'self-determination', 'agency', etc.) is
instrumental, and not merely intrinsic, and is inherently risky. If
the future consists in huge part of self-determined actions, and the SELF
is what gives determinateness to its actions, how can there be actions
exhaustively and definitely known (by God or anyone else) BEFORE the existence
of both the self and the actions which it - the self - grounds.
So I hope you can
see that I'm working from what I perceive (and what I perceive the Bible to
teach) is God's primary goal in creation - love. And love involves
risk. Risk involves unknowing. Therefore, if God desires love (as I
have understood it), this would imply that He cannot have love without risk
and, by further implication, without some element of
uncertainty. The 'errors' you mentioned would be simply the
non-alignment of God's expected and (more often than not, I
think) hoped-for outcomes with the actual outcomes. Given that the
future does not yet exist in actuality and is contingent upon the
decision of self-deliberating agents - all part of God's plan - it is improper
to speak of divine foreknowledge as if the future was ALREADY
actualised.
(I've written more
on this view - generally known as the Open View of God – here.)
Nevertheless, it
is also possible to work with a view of a timeless God knowing the
future exhaustively YET experiencing real regret. This has arguably
been the majority view in Christendom and although I don't subscribe to it (or
not anymore), I still find it plausible. From this point of view, God -
who transcends time completely - knows that which He regrets and grieves over
later...there is no 'imperfection' here because this objection would be
predicated on a view whereby God is 'in' time, but we can barely conceive of a
Person in multiple time-zones yet experiencing 'real time' let
alone someone who is 'there' simultaneously in 1900, 2002 and
2012.
The weakness of such
views, is that they need to read the Biblical depictions of divine repentance
as anthropomorphism i.e. God 'accomodates' Himself to humanity through
such language, which approximates non-reality depicting expressions
meant to convey a deeper meaning (or evoke an intended response) and NOT to
reveal something about the nature of God.
I haven't read it,
but I think 'God & Time: 4 Views' should be a good debate on this
issue (esp. with the likes of Wolterstoff involved) as is 'Divine
Foreknowledge: 4 Views' (which I have read; not bad). Needless to
say, what we believe about God's experience of time interfaces heavily with
what we think He can foreknow.
My point in all
this, though, would be that Biblical statements of God 'regretting' wouldn't
pose, IMO, an insurmountable obstacle to comprehending (and, hopefully,
embracing) the Christian faith.
Regards,
Al