Okay, so a 51-year-old guy, Doug Hutchinson, marries a 16-year-old girl named Courtney Stodden. There’s a lot of weirdness that could be pointed out here. For instance, she claims to be a Christian but acts like…um, well, sadly, 90% of Christians in mega-churches. And she’s the oldest looking 16-year-old I’ve ever seen.

But she is actually just 16. She has, after all, shown her birth certificate to some news agencies, and if there’s anything that liberals and the media (but I repeat myself) has taught us regarding our current president, it’s that birth certificates can never be faked.

So I have wonder about Anderson Cooper here. Because when you boil this video down, all it really is, is a “news” anchor mocking a 16-year-old girl on national television. I mean, it’d be one thing if he was poking fun at Doug Hutchinson and calling him a pedophile or something (even though he broke no laws in marrying her); or Cooper could go more after the girl’s parents for letting this happen. That would be fair, because these are adults that are being skewered in the news.

But instead, he goes out of his way just to mock the 16-year-old. Now, I’ve never been one who actually cared much for Cooper, so my bias against him makes me presume that he had to go after the 16-year-old because he’s not sophisticated enough to go toe-to-toe with an adult…but hey, this video gives me more confirmation for my confirmation bias, Cooper!

But you know, as I think about it a little further…maybe it’s not that big of a deal after all. I mean, sure, Cooper went out of the way to mock a 16-year-old girl, but it was on CNN. It’s not like anybody saw it.

For you see the castles they have built are sculpted hypocrisy
Denying all eternity in pursuit of expediency.
Yet when push comes to shove you’ll find interdependency
Between their claims and the morals they identify as deviancy.

For lo!, when things are looking up, the atheist is quite sure
That morals are delusions, tricks to make you feel secure.
But in reality there is nothing at all that is impure
(If there’s one thing that is certain, on this they’re not demure!)

They fight against all claims of virtue, any standards of behavior.
“We are good for goodness sake; we need not your Savior.”
They’ll do it all their own way, saying “We’ll keep that for which we labor.
While we tend to our own needs, you go grovel for your neighbor.”

They claim morality is a lie, a deceit of evolution’s wheel.
It’s nothing but serendipity, a matter of how you feel.
There’s no standard, it’s all relative, and it’s best that you steel
Yourself rather than bend the knee and kneel.

Yet let just one of them kick the bucket and they become the greatest moralists!
Telling you what you dare not say, they’re always there to assist
And order you to “shut up, shut up!”—and how they do persist
With a zeal that makes up for all the times their morals have been missed!

Let the one who died be a champion striving for non-faith
And suddenly they all realize that nowhere for them is safe;
So lashing out like little kids, they attack and they strafe
Their own troops they’ve put forth, like some evil haunted wraith.

For suddenly they’ve discovered laws that apply to you and me.
No longer are they opinion. No! They’re dogma, can’t you see?
You must submit to their demands, it is a moral decree
That one not inform the atheists of their fate in eternity.

For that would be too insensitive—wait for the corpse to cool
And give them time to forget how they live but as a tool
To the bleakness of a future built without sanity’s rule.
Truly, the more they whine and cry, the more they play the fool.

So take these hypocrites away, be done with them at last.
They played loose and free, and it ended in a blast.
And now they’re left with a mess to clean in the filth that they’ve amassed
In a wasted life spent in their own void, so infinite and vast.

Preach not to me, you atheist, you lying hypocrite
Who now deigns to condemn all that you would so easily permit
Were it not for but just one man whose body merely quit.
Such is your “virtue”, and we all know, that it is not legit.

—

It is impossible for the Left to get their priorities straight. This has been seen often in the court system where leftists victimize the perpetrator of crimes while accusing the victim of promoting the crime. Most recently, we can see this displayed in the hysterics leftist raise regarding the arrest of admitted pedophile Roman Polanski.

When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a 31-year-old warrant, Hollywood elitists went ballistic. A petition has been passed around the Zurich film festival stating, in part, that “Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Dismayed that an admitted pedophile is arrested?

“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him.”

And I find it inadmissible that a party in Jack Nicholson’s home, paying homage to massive Hollywood egos, is used by a pervert to rape and sodomize a 13-year-old girl. Somehow, one of these “inadmissible” behaviors is not like the other.

Producer Henning Molfenter told The Hollywood Reporter:

There is no way I’d go to Switzerland now. You can’t watch films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5 km away.

Yes, poor Roman! He’s going through what some Polish film-makers have called a “judicial lynching” all because of something that happened back in the 70s. He’s the victim here. Not the 13-year-old Californian girl.

I mean, really, if you read the testimony of the 13-year-old, it is obvious that Roman Polanski was the true victim.

Q. What did you do then?

A. I went into the bathroom and started drying off.

Q. Did you see Mr. Polanski then?

A. Yes, he came into the bathroom.

Q. What happened at that time?

A. He asked me if I was all right, if my asthma was bad.

Q. What did you say?

A. I said that I wanted to go home because I needed to take my medicine.

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He said, “Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. What did you do?

A. I told him – I said that I wanted to get – I wanted to go home. I said, “No, I have to go home now.”

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He told me to go into the other room and lie down.

…

Q. What did you do when he said, “Let’s go in the other room”?

A. I was going, “No, I think I better go home,” because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.

Q. What were you afraid of?

A. Him.

…

Q. What happened when you sat down on the couch?

A. He sat down beside me and asked if I was okay.

Q. What did you say, if anything?

A. I said, “No.”

Q. What did he say?

A. He goes, “Well, you’ll be better.” And I go, “No, I won’t. I have to go home.”

Q. What happened then?

A. He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “keep away.” But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.

Q. After he kissed you did he say anything?

A. No.

Q. Did you say anything?

A. No, besides I was just going, “No. Come on, let’s go home.”

Q. What was said after you indicated that you wanted to go home when you were sitting on the couch?

A. He said, “I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. Then what happened?

A. And then he went down and he started performing cuddliness.

Q. What does that mean?

A. It means he went down on me or he placed his mouth on my vagina.

…

Q. What did he do when he placed his mouth on your vagina?

A. He was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was kind of – I was going, “No. Come on. Stop it.” But I was afraid.

Q. And what did he say, if anything?

A. He wasn’t saying anything that I can remember. He was – sometimes he was saying stuff, but I was just blocking him out, you know.

…

Q. How long did Mr. Polanski have his mouth on your vagina?

A. A few minutes.

Q. What happened after that?

A. He started to have intercourse with me.

Q. What do you mean by intercourse?

A. He placed his penis in my vagina.

Q. What did you say, if anything, before he did that?

A. I was mostly just on and off saying, “No, stop.” But I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.

…

Q. At any time did he ask you when your period was?

A. Yes.

Q. When was that?

A. While he was having intercourse with me.

Q. Did he ask you about being on the pill?

A. Yes.

Q. When did he say that?

A. At the same time.

Q. What did he say?

A. He asked, he goes, “Are you on the pill?” And I went, “No.” And he goes, “When did you have your period?” And I said, “I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure.”

Q. And what did he say?

A. He goes, “Come on. You have to remember.” And I told him I didn’t.

Q. Did he say anything after that?

A. Yes. He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?” And I went, “No.”

…

Q. What happened after he says, “Do you want me to – “ was it go through the back?

A. Yes.

Q. What happened then?

A. I think he said something like right after I said I was not on the pill, right before he said, “Oh, I won’t come inside of you then.” And I just went – and he goes – and then he put me – wait. Then he lifted up my legs farther and he went in through my anus.

Q. When you say he went in your anus, what do you mean by that?

A. He put his penis in my butt.

Q. Did he say anything at that time?

A. No.

Q. Did you resist at that time?

A. A little bit, but not really because – (pause)

Q. Because what?

A. Because I was afraid of him.

I must be pointed out that Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to statutory rape. In the above, we see that his victim told him “No” and to stop at every step of the way. And as we all know, “No means no.”

Unless you’re a famous Hollywood director.

Of course, that could move into a “he said, she said” type of event. Perhaps she did come on to him. But that ignores and important fact.

She was thirteen.

Some Polanski defenders have said she looked old for her age. At the time, the age of consent in California was 16 (it’s now 18). Suppose that his victim actually did look like she was 16. Polanski was 44 years old at the time. If you’re 44 years old and you’re having to wonder if the person you’re having sex with might be underage, that ought to be giving you warning bells.

In any case, since this unfortunate “event” occurred, Polanski has been forced to live in “exile” in France. And while that generally would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, his exile included multi-million dollar homes, a wife, children, an Oscar award, fame, and recognition for making slightly better crappy movies than the other crappy movies out there. The only real tragedy is that Polanski couldn’t pick up his Oscar in LA…

Sickening.

At root, this simple fact cannot be lost: Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl. This is not in doubt—he admitted it. I don’t care if he found the cure for cancer instead of just making more money for Hollywood schlubs, he ought to be punished for his crime.

The fact that Leftists are making him into a victim shows just how morally incompetent they are.

I would have thought that this would be sort of obvious, especially for Reppert who is a professional philosopher. Apparently, however, Reppert feels no need to actually define his terms—making it very easy for him to engage in sloppy thinking without even realizing it. After all, part of the reason we define terms is so we can spot ambiguity. If you work with an undefined “evil” then it can morph depending on how you feel, such that an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph in a philosophical argument use completely different meanings of the term “evil” and yet seek to come to a logical conclusion. Not defining the terms is, obviously, poor argumentation.

Since Reppert posted another article about Calvinism and the problem of evil without defining his terms, I pointed out once again that he had not bothered to define his terms. In this case we might give him some leeway since he merely reposted an older blog post; however, given the fact that I have asked for his definition several times, I think such leeway is ultimately unjustified. Since his lack of defining terms has been shown many times, he ought to define his terms before posting another thing on the problem of evil from any perspective.

Reppert decided to respond to my request that he define his terms. He decided to first attack my definition of “good” before attempting what he claims is a definition. Unfortunately, rather than actually interact with my entire argument, presented for instance when I examined the Euthyphro Dilemma or my post on the definition of evil, Reppert decided to use quotes from one comment made on this post.

Sadly, Reppert didn’t seem to read his own post, for his first question in response to what I had written was:

At the risk of becoming tiresome, I would have to ask what definition of God we are working with here?

The post I responded to was entitled: “Is there a moral obligation to worship a Calvinistic God? Or any other God for that matter?” Apparently, Reppert didn’t think that maybe I was responding to his first question.

But it’s actually even worse than that, for in that post in response to my previous comments Reppert had already said:

Of course the divine command theory has the problem of identifying God. The standard philosophical definition of God is a being who is worthy of worship in virtue of being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. But if “good” means “commanded by God” and “God” means a being who is, among other things, perfectly good, it looks like you’ve got vicious circularity here.

I note in passing that this paragraph is basically the entirety of Reppert’s current response to me too.

If Reppert had bothered to actually read my arguments that I had linked in my comments before the one Reppert pulled out to respond to now, he would have seen that I already addressed the issue of identifying who God is. In my Euthyphro post, I said:

Now one could argue, as the Moral Philosophy site did, that that means that God could command slavery, genocide, holocausts or any number of such things. However, God could not have done so, for then God would have a different nature then the one He has. A different God could have commanded those things and been morally good in doing so; this God (Who happens to be the real God) cannot do so.

Apparently Reppert thinks that when Christians talk about God, they might mean Moloch or Vishnu.

In any case, the God of the Divine Command Theory is pretty obvious to spot. He’s the God who gives the commands. I would have thought that to be self-evident.

Reppert then moves on to the only thing that resembles a definition (and sadly, he does think it is a definition). He writes:

In my view moral obligation is created by the fact that God creates us with an intended purpose which is identical to our good, in that we as humans flourish if we fulfill that purpose.

But this simply fails as a definition of good. This definition would not enable one to examine whether God Himself is good, for good apparently is fulfillment of the purpose for which God created us. Since God did not create Himself, nor did He have a creator, then under such a definition God cannot be good.

Secondly, such a definition of “good” is not equivalent to moral goodness. It is good of me to eat food when I am hungry, but it’s hardly righteous of me to do so. If this is what Reppert implies by the moral obligation portion, then this definition remains unsatisfactory, for it is certain that God designed people needing food, yet who would consider eating breakfast to be morally good? If, on the other hand, Reppert only intends to define only what moral obligation is here, then he’s got the cart before the horse for he is using the term “good” without defining it once again.

Thirdly, and quite damaging to Reppert, in order for us to use “good” in the above, we would have to know for what purpose God designed us. How would we know what that is…without God’s commands? But wouldn’t that make Reppert a closet Divine Command Theorist?

Fourth, and most damaging to Reppert, if God designed someone to be a vessel of wrath, then by the above definition Reppert has said such an intended purpose “is identical to our good,” in which case there is absolutely no reason at all for Reppert to disagree with double-predestination on the grounds that it’s evil. Even by his own (weak) definition above, fulfilling the purpose God intends for us is the definition of good. So when a reprobate fulfills his purpose and burns in hell, that’s good by Reppert’s above definition.

Note that at this point Reppert will be required to insert a qualifier. That qualifier will be: “No, it must be a good intention.” At which point it will be demonstrated that the “fulfilling one’s purpose” definition above does NOT define “good” at all because it already presupposes some other definition of good in “fulfilling one’s good purpose.”

Reppert continues:

Further, God acts in a way that is consistent with the pursuit of that good for all his creatures.

I shudder to think that Reppert seriously is asserting that if God does not act in a way that is beneficial toward man then God is committing evil (see next blockquote too). This is so obviously anti-Christian that I would think it absurd for a professing Christian like Reppert to think that God failing to live up to our goodness is what constitutes evil, rather than us failing to live up to His goodness. But sadly Reppert doesn’t give me confidence that he sees this problem, so I mention it here.

Continuing:

Our good is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, evil is what gets in the way of that.

But again, under such a view, good or evil is meaningless of God. At best, Reppert can only use this to try to establish relative good and evil amongst mankind, but he can never examine the problem of evil for none of his “definitions” of good and evil extend to anything that God can do.

Reppert says:

On Calvinist theory there is a large gap between what makes God’s character good, and what makes us good, a gap that cannot be explained in terms of a difference in God’s wisdom or knowledge.

Well, yes there is a gap because men are sinners and God is not, and therefore what “makes us good” is Christ’s righteousness imputed to us and our unrighteousness imputed to Him, which God does not need to be good.

But more specific to our current discussion, God is the standard of goodness; we are not. Yes, that makes a wide gap. But so what?

Reppert continues:

A native may believe that men in white coats bearing long needles are mean to little kids because he lacks knowledge that the men in the white coats possess, but the standard of goodness for natives and for missionary doctors is the same.

That is because both are human. Apparently, Reppert would put God under the Law, which was implemented as a tutor to bring us to Christ, as if God needed to be brought to Christ.

Reppert continues:

Piper seems concerned to respond to the charge that God’s interest in his glory makes him selfish, since selfishness is a vice amongst humans.

There’s a difference between the one who claims something as his own having not earned it and the one who claims something as his own after having earned it. As a liberal, Reppert will never grasp this. But to help others, the next time Reppert says, “I wrote C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason” I will point out that that’s a pretty selfish thing to say. Who cares if Reppert deserves the title of “the author of the book C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason“? It would be selfish to attribute it to him and not also to me.

Reppert said:

If I were to read on someone’s tombstone “He pursued his own glory single-mindedly throughout his life” I don’t think I would think I was looking at the grave of someone I wish I had known. Glory hogs in basketball don’t help the team win.

But once again Reppert reduces God to a mere man. He never considers that the reason God can be selfish for His glory is because God deserves glory for who He is, and because we are not God we do not have the same right to pursue our own glory.

But even worse, this trivializes what God does for us in the pursuit of His glory. He demonstrates greater love than we ever could by sending His Son to die for us while we are yet sinners; He shows mercy, justice, wrath, and love; He sends rain to the just and unjust alike. And Reppert is upset that God would do this for us with His own glorification—the very thing He most deserves—in mind?

Reppert says:

It seems to me that when you say God gives commands based on his nature, it is pretty clear that we don’t have obligations to reflect all aspects of God’s moral nature in our own conduct.

How could we? It’s pretty clear that no matter how much you love someone, you will never die a substitutionary death for them, imputing their unrighteousness to yourself while imputing your righteousness to them, so that you take upon yourself the sins of another so that they might live. Maybe that’s why God didn’t command it of us, but He did ask it of His Son.

Reppert continued:

We might be rightly wrathful when someone we love is raped, but we aren’t supposed to be looking for or artifically creating opportunities for us to exercise our attribute of being wrathful at evil…

Why look for artificial opportunities when natural occurrences abound? Secondly, so what? Again, we have already established that God’s nature is not ours and that He can do things that we cannot. Why insist that God must be a man rather than God?

Reppert said:

So while divine commands are supposed to be based on the divine nature, the kind of people we are commanded to be fails to fully reflect the character of God, and there are actions on the part of God which are deemed right which, if parallel actions are performed by humans, they would contravene the commands of God.

But this last clause is true no matter what position you take. God does do things that He has commanded us not to do. And the first clause is only a problem if God has commanded us to fully reflect His character. He has not done so. He has given us the commands which we are to follow, and we do not have any right to add to them. For an easy example, God doesn’t command us to take vengeance—He claims that as His own right. Engaging in vengeance surely is an aspect of character, isn’t it?

With that said, what do we mean by evil when we ask if God is the author of evil?

Well, evil could mean simply those things as natural disasters—hurricanes, famines, floods, etc. Indeed, these are often called “natural evils” for that very reason. But most Christians would have no problem saying that God is the “author” of natural evils given the myriad examples of God causing/sending/creating disasters. A few specifics from Scripture will suffice to validate this point:

“For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground” (Genesis 7:4).

“And I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend my arrows on them; they shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured by plague and poisonous pestilence; I will send the teeth of beasts against them, with the venom of things that crawl in the dust” (Deuteronomy 32:23-24).

“Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the LORD has brought all this disaster on them’” (1 Kings 9:9).

“I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

Because of how plentiful such descriptions are in Scripture, most people who contend that God is not the author of evil ought not mean evil in the sense of natural disasters (although given the state of inconsistency that plagues a certain branch of theology, I am hesitant to be dogmatic). Instead, they should mean it in the sense of immorality, unrighteousness, sinfulness.

When we are talking about moral evils—sins—then we have to have some kind of moral framework in place. That is, we have to have a proper frame of reference to determine whether something is good or evil in the first place before the question “Is God the author of evil?” is even meaningful.

Now as I’ve argued before, since I am a Divine Command Theorist, God is the standard of good. There is nothing else that God can point to other than Himself to say “This is what the definition of good is.” As such, anything God does will be, by definition, good. That means that it is ruled out by definition that God could ever do anything evil Himself.

But saying that God is good isn’t the whole picture, for that does not tell us how we ought to behave in order for us to be good too. Thankfully, there is something that tells us what the standard of behavior we ought to uphold are: God’s commands (i.e., laws).

Now of God’s commands, the apostle Paul writes:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:7-12).

Now there is a lot to this passage that addresses the issue we are looking at. First, Paul states that “if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” Indeed, he insists “apart from the law, sin lies dead.” Therefore there is no sin if there is not first a commandment from God. That means that if we are to look at evil as a function of immorality instead of natural evil, then evil can only exists because a commandment first exists. Consequently, Paul says “I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’”

The logical conclusion of this must therefore be that it is impossible for any immorality to come about if God does not issue any commands. Yet despite this, Paul maintains “the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” We can ask rhetorically: How can it be anything but good? God is, after all, the definition of good, and His commands must be good too even if evil cannot come about unless they exist. This doesn’t mean the commands are sufficient for evil to occur, but it does mean that the commands are necessary for evil to occur.

Let us then examine the scope of the commandments. It is one thing to say that men are under the commands of God; but is God bound by those same commands? I merely point back to the above natural evils that God authors and ask, “If you did that would you be doing evil?” If you flooded the Earth and killed all but 8 people, would such genocide by considered good or evil? If you sent famines and plagues on people, would you be good or evil? Obviously you would be considered evil, yet God is not evil for doing so.

That’s because God is not under His commands but rather He issues those commands. This is why James says: “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” (James 4:12). God has the right to judge while you do not. That is why along a similar vein Paul writes: “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls” (Romans 14:4). We who have been created by God do not have the same rights as He who created us. God does not have to obey the commands that He gives us, and therefore even if we think we have seen a conflict between what we are not allowed to do and what God is allowed to do, that is not grounds for us to say that God has committed evil.

Finally, God can also use instruments of evil without Himself being evil. We read, for instance: “Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you” (1 Kings 22:23). We see that God is the one who “put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these…prophets.” We read Jeremiah’s words: “Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord GOD, surely you have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, “It shall be well with you,” whereas the sword has reached their very life’” (Jeremiah 4:10). And if it weren’t enough for Jeremiah to say God deceived fallen Israel, he also says: “O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7).

While this last passage is part of a lament of Jeremiah, it is nevertheless evidence that Jeremiah didn’t have any problem with the concept of God deceiving people for His own reasons. Yet Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie. How would it be possible for God to deceive someone without lying? One way would be by putting “a lying spirit in the mouth of [false] prophets.” For in that case, God is not the one who lies (the lying spirit lies), but God does put the lying spirit in the position where it will be believed. We see this again when Paul asserts “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11). The thrust of the passage cannot be ignored: God is the one who sends the delusion so that sinners believe what is false even though God Himself does not lie.

In other words, when God uses evil instruments that does not mean ipso facto that God Himself is evil. If God uses evil people with their penchant to lie in order to deceive other evil people that does not mean God is evil. And just as God can use a liar to establish His purposes without being evil, so too can He use other types of sinners for the same reason.

So let us take stock of where we are. Is God the author of evil? Well, He is obviously the author of natural evils, and He gave the commands without which there could be no evil at all. So yes, He is the author of evil (when the term is properly defined). The reason why so many hesitate to accept this is because they believe it would make God evil, but I have shown that despite God being the author of evil (again, as properly defined) He is not evil, for 1) God is good by definition; 2) God’s commands are for us and not for Him; and 3) we have Biblical examples when God used evil instruments that increased sin without being evil Himself.

Given this, it is improper for Arminians to claim that “God is the author of evil” is a defect of Calvinism. They must show how God’s authoring of evil actually makes God evil, and that requires them to A) ground morality somewhere and, B) deal with the Scripture I have presented above showing God using evil to increase sin without being culpable.

I already alluded to this earlier when I said that human rights aren’t arbitrary because they’re rooted in Theism. That still applies. I’m a Divine Command Theorist, so what makes something moral or immoral is the command of God (which is formulated by His nature). But if you are a secularist, then I see no reason at all why you should believe in any morality whatsoever, let alone human rights.

Jayman responded:

I’m a Christian but do not subscribe to the notion that something is good SOLELY because God says it is good. Such a view of ethics seems to make good and evil nothing more than the arbitrary decision of God. But perhaps your cryptic remark about God’s nature means you have something else in mind.

To clarify my “cryptic remark” as well as to show what kind of Divine Command Theorist I am, I would like to offer the following discussion on the Euthyphro dilemma. This was summed up on the Moral Philosophy site as follows (all italics in the original):

The most common argument against divine command theory is the Euthyphro dilemma. The argument gets its name from Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue, which contains the inspiration for it. The Euthyphro dilemma is introduced with the question Does God command the good because it is good, or is it good because it is commanded by God? Each of the two possibilities identified in this question are widely agreed to present intractable problems for divine command theory.

Suppose that the divine command theorist takes the first horn of the dilemma, asserting that God commands the good because it is good. If God commands the good because it is good, then he bases his decision what to command on what is already morally good. Moral goodness, then, must exist before God issues any commands, otherwise he wouldn’t command anything. If moral goodness exists before God issues any commands, though, then moral goodness is independent of God’s commands; God’s commands aren’t the source of morality, but merely a source of information about morality. Morality itself is not based in divine commands.

Suppose, then, that the divine commands theorist takes the second horn of the dilemma, asserting that the good is good because it is commanded by God. On this view, nothing is good until God commands it. This, though, raises a problem too: if nothing is good until God commands it, then what God commands is completely morally arbitrary; God has no moral reason for commanding as he does; morally speaking, he could just as well have commanded anything else. This problem is exacerbated when we consider that God, being omnipotent, could have commanded anything at all. He could, for example, have commanded polygamy, slavery, and the killing of the over-50s. If divine command theory is true, then had he done so then these things would be morally good. That doesn’t seem right, though; even if God had commanded these things they would still be morally bad. Divine command theory, then, must be false.

The flaw of this argument is telegraphed by the wishy-washy ending of the “second horn.” While the first horn of the dilemma is matter-of-fact, the second horn must resort to “That doesn’t seem right” language. Obviously, the second horn of the problem is the weak point of the argument.

And we can see why when we consider any standard. If we say something must be the standard, then we must define what that standard is. For instance, we say that light at the wavelength of 620-750 nm and a frequency of 400-484 THz is “red.” The label “red” is not what is important, for it is called different things in different languages (e.g., rojo in Spanish); therefore, let us say that we have defined light that is at 620-750 nm and a frequency of 400-484 THz as X.

Suppose that we create a sensor that requires light to be X in order for a machine to work properly. Do the limits of how X is defined matter then? They very much do. If I build a machine expecting X to be a wavelength of 620-750 nm and someone sends a wavelength of 600 nm, my machine ought to do nothing. If it does do something, then clearly there is a malfunction of the sensor.

Is that arbitrary? It depends on how you look at it. Sure it’s possible to create the sensor to operate at different wavelengths than the one chosen; but once one is chosen, then the sensor must have that wavelength in order for the machine to properly work. One could argue that which wavelength is chosen is arbitrary, but it is a necessary function of the machine working that some wavelength be chosen.

However, further suppose that I am pleased with the color red and I want the machine to work when there is red light; so I design the sensor with that in mind. Is the fact that the machine runs on the color red arbitrary, or is it instead a reflection of my nature and my desires?

While we could in theory expect sensors to work at different colors, in actuality they never will because I like red that much. Is red therefore arbitrary? No, because I am who I am and that’s the way that I wanted it, and therefore red becomes necessary because of my nature.

In a similar way, we have morality. People ought to behave in a certain manner. But where did that standard come from? God’s commands, which are a reflection of His nature.

See, ultimately God is the standard of what is good. There is nothing higher than God that we could point to and say, “God, in order to be good, must be/do that.” He is, by definition, the highest possible good. Therefore, anything He does is by definition good.

Now one could argue, as the Moral Philosophy site did, that that means that God could command slavery, genocide, holocausts or any number of such things. However, God could not have done so, for then God would have a different nature then the one He has. A different God could have commanded those things and been morally good in doing so; this God (Who happens to be the real God) cannot do so.

And note that it is precisely because God is Who He is that it “doesn’t seem” like an alternate morality would be just.

For further takes on the dilemma, you can look at the following too:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/07/euthyphro-dilemma.html

http://www.frame-poythress.org/frame_articles/1993Euthyphro.htm

And a global search of T-blog for all references:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/search?q=euthyphro

Therefore, I must conclude: News of Divine Command Theory’s demise has been vastly overstated.

Pro-abortion? Come on. I think there is a reasonable doubt with respect to the claim that fetuses before a certain stage have the same right to life that infants have. However, I do think human life has great value at any stage, and once a brain develops there is no morally relevant difference between the life of the fetus and the life on an infant. Given our state of reasonable doubt, I think that we should do all we can to discourage abortions, (24-hour waiting periods are parental notification are just fine with me), but a wholesale legal ban is probably not going to do what we want it to do. (I’m not sure such a law would even be obeyed at this point). Except for late-term abortions. Those should be illegal, unless the life of the mother is endangered. That won’t satisfy movement pro-lifers, but I would consider eugenics and infanticide to be morally wrong. If we got the law the way I wanted it, the law would be far more conservative with respect to abortion than it currently is. I don’t think this issue has pride of place amongst all issues, but then I asked you about that and you agreed that it doesn’t occupy that position.

Now I realize that Reppert is responding to Steve here and wasn’t intending to offer a full-level defense of his views on abortion. However, his summary is still quite damaging to his position, and ultimately exposes many of the weak foundations of the pro-choice movement. In other words, even though this is a shortened “summary” position, the conclusions are no different then what any pro-choice advocate could expand on.

Reppert begins by saying: “I think there is a reasonable doubt with respect to the claim that fetuses before a certain stage have the same right to life that infants have.” As a philosopher, Reppert surely must be aware of the ad hoc nature of this statement. At what time, or what level of development, is that “certain stage” where human fetuses “have the same right to life that infants have” such that before that stage there remains “reasonable doubt” as to the fetus’s rights? If that stage cannot be defined, then the distinction is arbitrary and worthless.

Reppert seems to imply that the stage occurs when the brain develops, for he says, “once a brain develops there is no morally relevant difference between the life of the fetus and the life on an infant.” This, however, just moves the question back one step. Why should the development of the brain make any difference? Why not the development of the kidney or the heart?

It appears that underneath the development issue, Reppert’s idea is that a fetus gains the right to life because of cognitive ability, that is to say when the fetus demonstrates some kind of intelligence (or at the very least has the organ we associate with intelligence). But if that is the case, Reppert has an untenable position regarding basic human rights, for these rights are linked to intellect. Thus, it surely must follow that the smarter the person the more right to life the person has. So in the classic Life Boat situation, the genius must be spared and the imbecile must be thrown overboard (I use “must” in the morally obligatory sense).

Reppert might wish to argue that this sliding scale is not the case; that when an intellect reaches a certain point, all have equal rights (so that the genius is not automatically spared and the imbecile is not automatically drowned). But if he does so, he is left once more with an arbitrary cut-off point to determine when someone has enough intellect. Is it an IQ of 75? 95? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because whatever point Reppert chooses must be arbitrary. There is no force of logical consistency behind it.

This is also seen in what Reppert says of late-term abortions: “Those should be illegal, unless the life of the mother is endangered.” But what is the tipping point whereby a pregnancy evolves from being “early-term” to being “late-term”? By that I mean what consistent and non-arbitrary feature is there to the late-term pregnancy that protects the life of the fetus that is not present in early-term pregnancies? It’s hard to see how “gestating x number of days” qualifies one for human rights when “gestating x-1 number of days” does not.

This is the classic problem the pro-choice advocate runs into. In an attempt to differentiate between the born and the unborn with regards to human rights, the pro-choice position cannot help but be arbitrary. Put it this way: there is nothing in nature that indicates at what level of development a fetus begins to have human rights. There is nothing in nature that indicates what level of cognitive faculty a fetus must have to gain those rights. There is nothing in nature that indicates where a fetus should be located in order to have the right to life. Each of these “standards” that the pro-choice advocate uses is completely invented by the pro-choice advocate himself.

An additional problem that Reppert has is his continual attempt to frame abortion in a bare legal manner. Thus, he says that “a wholesale legal ban is probably not going to do what we want it to do.” But that presupposes Reppert knows “what we want it to do” in the first place. I assume he means that a legal ban will not stop all abortions. But then a legal ban on rape doesn’t stop all rapes from occurring, yet I doubt Reppert would use that to argue we shouldn’t legislate against rape. So even retreating to bare legal issues (disregarding the fact that that which is moral is not always that which is legal) doesn’t help him.

Contrast that with the consistent position of the pro-life advocate, who argues that regardless of what the law says human rights are determined by human ontology. That is, it is the fact that an object is human that determines the object has human rights. And there is one thing that cannot be denied: an unborn human fetus is still an unborn human fetus.

The pro-life position argues that a human fetus has all the same basic human rights as an infant human, an adolescent human, an adult human, or an elderly human. Indeed, framing the issue in such a manner seems to be the only way to consistently and non-arbitrarily apply ethics to humans across the broad range of various stages of development. If object x is human, then object x has all basic human rights.

From the article:

The Gallup survey, conducted May 7-10, finds 51% of Americans calling themselves pro-life and just 42 percent saying they are “pro-choice” and supporting legal abortions.

The poll finds a plurality of women say they are pro-life — with 49 percent saying so and just 44 percent saying they are “pro-choice.” Men favor the pro-life position on a 54 to 39 percent margin. Both numbers are record highs for the pro-life position.

The 9 percent pro-life majority is a stark change from last year, when the Gallup survey showed a 6 percent majority in favor of abortion. Before the current poll Gallup had the pro-life percentage at its highest at 46 percent in both August 2001 and May 2002.

Luke begins his post by pointing out that he is the son of a pastor. On this point, I can empathize completely, as I too am a PK. Luke also grew up in a relatively small town. He described it as “a town of 5,000 people and 22 Christian churches (at the time).” Having lived most of my life in small towns, I understand where he comes from here as well. The last small town I lived in had roughly 800 people and we probably had 22 Christian churches too (I never did count). My dad was pastor of one of them, and when the summer tourists (read: “Texans”) invaded, I believe our church was one of the largest, if not the largest, with around 60 people.

I should note that small towns and PKs do not mix very well, and it could be that this is where problems began for Luke. Generally speaking, children of pastors are viewed in two diametrically opposed ways. One faction of people view PKs as angels who ought to live perfect lives because they’ve grown up closer to God by virtue of their parents. These people are aghast when a pastor’s son is caught smoking in the boy’s room. On the other hand, there are those who expect PKs to be demons running rampant. For them, it is no shock at all to find the pastor’s son has knocked up the Homecoming Queen.

The reality is that PKs are just like anyone else. We’re neither more of a saint nor a sinner than any other person.

In any case, personal problems can be amplified in small towns where privacy doesn’t exist. Small towns are places where rumors run rampant, and if they don’t begin true they have a way of becoming true (“Did you hear Chuck is an alcoholic?” “No, really?! Lemme buy him a drink.”). Now while Luke’s town is about six times bigger than those I grew up in, I imagine it wasn’t much different there either. These kinds of pressures exist, whether we want to accept them or not.

Luke says that he felt God while he was a Christian. For instance, he writes:

I felt the presence of God. Sometimes I would tingle and sweat with the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt led by Him to give money to a certain cause, or to pay someone a specific compliment, or to walk to the cross at the front of my church and bow before it during a worship service.

I have no doubt that Luke did, indeed, feel something. But since he doesn’t believe in God, obviously he doesn’t believe that he really felt the presence of God at all. On this point, I would agree with him.

By this, Luke exposes one of the problems with the modern church. Christians believe now that you must “experience” God in some manner, and that manner is subjective. Yet most churches never bother to try to discriminate between a typical emotional response to stimuli and an actual feeling of God Himself.

To give one example, a few years back I went to a Promise Keepers event. About a month or so before I went to it, I happened to see a concert that included one of my favorite bands, Three Days Grace. Despite what people might assume from the name, this is a secular band and as far as I know has no Christians in it. In any case, Three Days Grace played with Hurt, both of whom opened for Staind, and it happened to be in the exact same auditorium that Promise Keepers was in.

Why do I bring them up? Because when I watched Promise Keepers and they played “worship music”, the crowd behaved exactly like it had for Hurt, Three Days Grace, and Staind (sans mosh pit). In other words, people got just as into the music in a secular concert, and had the same types of reactions to the performers on the stage, as they did during the “Christian” concert “worship service.”

To put it plainly, standing in the same auditorium, there was no objective difference between the secular concert and the Christian concert as far as I felt. And I doubt my experience is unusual. So when Luke says that he felt the Holy Spirit as a Christian, I have no doubt that he felt something, but I know from Scripture that what he felt was not the Holy Spirit.

Now Luke claims that he did not leave Christianity for emotional reasons, stating:

Looking back, I feel lucky that I left God for purely rational reasons instead of emotional ones. Indeed, all my emotions were pushing the other way.

However, this is impossible to square with other things he’s mentioned. For example, he tells how he went through depression at the age of 19 “probably because I did nothing but work at Wal-Mart, download music, and watch internet porn.” This last part is key, because he concludes:

In many ways I regret my Christian upbringing. So much time and energy wasted on an invisible friend. So many bad lessons about morality, thinking, and sex. So much needless guilt.

It is clear that sexual ethics had a lot to do with Luke’s deconversion. Frankly, it is not at all surprising that someone who does little but listen to music and watch internet porn would suffer from feelings of guilt, and it’s easier to not believe what you’re doing is wrong than it is to refrain from committing sins. This reaction is not atypical at all. Anyone who is in bondage to sin will refrain from fellowship with God.

It is also not at all surprising that Luke would go through depression and connect it to this sinful activity. He had grown up in church and had known that such behavior was wrong, yet he did it anyway. This would cause cognitive dissonance in him. He was doing something that he wanted to do (view pornography) but which he thought was evil to do. Luke chose to ease his conscience by denying the reality of evil rather than by refraining from committing evil.

But this is not a rational decision at all. This is a purely emotional reason. He did not like how he felt when he felt guilty, so he acted to remove the guilt. After the fact, he used reason and logic to try to justify his new position.

The reality is that despite what Luke thinks, he did not become an atheist by thinking, but rather by emotion. The emotion was to avoid the pain and discomfort of guilt.

Now along the way, Luke didn’t get very helpful advice (if what he’s relayed is accurate). Part of the problem was that he attended an emergent church in college, and if there’s one thing the emergent folks lack it’s reason.

Luke’s experience is not atypical there either. One friend of mine (who remains a Christian) has had the same struggles with the rash of anti-intellectualism in most Evangelical churches today. For someone like Luke, who obviously is intellectually oriented, he would not have found anyone in an anti-intellectual environment to respond to his questions in any meaningful manner. Sadly, most Christians are content to let the few intellectualists go to hell rather than learn something that may hurt their brain so they can respond to those intellectualists.

None of that excuses Luke, however, for not having sought out those who could respond to any arguments he brought forward. That we are few does not mean we are non-existent, and he could have used the same internet he was surfing porn on to find answers to the questions he had.

Furthermore, it seems that Luke’s dad wasn’t very helpful either. He chastised Luke “because I was arrogant to think I could get to truth by studying.” If this is an accurate depiction of what happened, it is a travesty. It is also unbiblical. Hosea 4:6 tells us: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” And Jesus Himself said, “Is this not the reason you are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” (Mark 12:24). Studying does lead to truth.

Of course, it also depends on what you’re studying, and Luke doesn’t tell us what he was studying at the time. So his father might have had a legitimate reason to complain. After all, one doesn’t learn about quantum mechanics by studying accounting.

One of the biggest problems with Luke’s idea of Christianity is found when he writes:

I know what it’s like to isolate one part of my life from reason or evidence, and I know what it’s like to think that is a virtue.

(emphasis in original)

This does not describe my Christianity. And I’m not surprised that anyone who holds to this form of Christianity would reject it. I would too.

But that’s not what Christianity is. It is, however, what atheism is.

See, there’s a lot of Luke’s story that I identify with. The small town, the depression, the struggle with sin, the feeling that God isn’t there (or that He doesn’t care). Yet these are all things that I expect from my understanding of Christianity. These things are not surprises at all. They are, in fact, inevitable in a fallen world.

But why would looking at pornography on a computer cause you to feel guilty in an atheistic world? Why is it that our sex drive—the very impetus that fuels evolution—causes universal feelings of guilt, even in people who do not believe in God, when it is not used appropriately? Further, what evolutionary benefit would there be to deluding yourself that God exists, as all but the 3% of people who are atheists (according to some polls) do? From purely naturalistic principals, the universality of religion is impossible to explain: it must provide an evolutionary advantage, yet it is supposedly completely irrational! In other words, Darwinism has selected for make-believe, and not for the world as it actually is. And that is something that I just can’t put together rationally in my mind.

And that doesn’t even get into the problem that if Darwinism can select for an irrational worldview such as theism—something that is completely alien to reality, according to the atheist—then how is it possible for the atheist to know that he is not completely deluded in his naturalism?

Luke may very well be beginning to see this, for he writes:

In my studies I uncovered lots of false facts and dishonest arguments from Christians and atheists. Each discovery only deepened my hunger for knowledge, but also my realization that humans know very little, and with little certainty.

I have little doubt that if Luke continues down the path he is on, he will ultimately discover that to reject theism is to reject rationality altogether and to embrace nihilism. Without God, there is only uncertainty and irrationality. And for this reason, even if we discount the other evidence Luke himself provided and assume that he converted to atheism by reason rather than emotion, he will only stay an atheist if he rejects reason as impossible to obtain. Reason itself must become just as delusional as theism.

The only other option he has is to hold to reason for the same emotional reasons he once felt for God.

A girls basketball team killed another girls basketball team on the court. Final damage: 100 – 0.

The coach of the winning team is therefore fired.

Now perhaps it’s because I watch hockey where there’s no such thing as “running up the score” (if you lose 10 to 0 in hockey, about the equivalent of the above, it’s because you suck and you know it…and no one complains that the score was “run up”), but frankly I don’t get the whining over the losing team getting blown out like this. They’ve actually been rewarded for failure, getting free tickets to watch the Mavericks and such.

The team that won requested they be allowed to forfeit the game and their coach is fired. Thus, success is punished and failure is rewarded, and liberalism continues its march.

Note that at no point did anyone on the winning team violate any of the rules of basketball. In fact, I’d say they had ‘em down fairly pat!

To be fair to the losers, as far as the article goes they weren’t the ones complaining about this. It’s the “fans” who watched the game, and the freaking school administration of the winning team, that’s causing all the problems.

A very clear message has been sent to the girls who won that game. HOW DARE YOU BE BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE!

It’s one I fear they’ll learn.