Robert
Lyon is a retired clergyman who divides his time between Guelph,
Ontario and Melaque, Mexico. He taught high school English,
Latin, Greek and science, and served as an officer in the
Canadian Armed Forces Reserve, retiring in the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
His latest book, Don’t Throw Out Your Bible,
from which the essay below is excerpted, should be availalbe
by the end of the year (2023). His monograph, A Christmas
You Can Believe In, can be requested as a PDF file from
graphikos@gto.net.
WHAT
THE CAPTAIN SAID
Back in my army days, the Information Systems Officer (ISO)
issued me a laptop to take to a conference at a distant military
base. On the last morning of the conference I vacated my room,
packed the car before dawn, and headed off to breakfast and
the closing session. When the conference was dismissed, I
walked back to my car and realized – Oh, no! Where is
the laptop? The last time I had seen it was – uh –
sitting on the parking lot behind my car while I loaded the
trunk. So, quick drive back to the parking lot. No laptop
there, of course. Went to the Military Police. Whew! Someone
had found it and turned it in. It still worked, but the screen
was cracked and hard to read because I had reversed the car
over it on my way to breakfast. Next morning, anticipating
the ISO’s scowls, I returned it and apologized for my
carelessness. He received it calmly and said, without the
slightest note of censure, “Shit happens, sir.”
So it does. But why does it happen? (Apart from my carelessness,
I mean.)
Every
page of the Bible assumes a loving and righteous God, who
not only created the universe but continues to be in control
of it and sometimes actually intervenes in its affairs. So
why has the world spent three years and counting in the thrall
of a nasty COVID-19 virus that is causing anxiety, death,
and economic distress?
How
in this ‘enlightened’ age can we explain the persistence
of war – the one ended in Afghanistan, currently by
Russia in Ukraine, and prospectively in China's threat towards
Taiwan?
Why
do thieves and scammers victimize the unwary? Why are minds
and bodies ravaged by cancer and dementia? Why are innocent
people killed by lightning, tornadoes, or stray hockey pucks?
Why, as Rabbi Kushner famously asked, do bad things happen
to good people?
Saints
and scholars have puzzled over that question for millennia,
and the last word is still not in. I once heard a preacher
on a Christian radio station answer the Rabbi’s question
by saying: “Bad things do not happen to good people
– because there are no good people.” He quoted
Paul: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God.”
(Romans
3:23). Paul was right, of course, but the preacher’s
theodicy seemed to me unduly simplistic, not to mention uncharitable
and maybe a bit self-righteous.
“Theodicy”
– that is what we call attempts to answer the Rabbi’s
question; it comes from two Greek words that mean “to
justify God.” John Milton says that is why he wrote
Paradise Lost (1667): to “assert eternal Providence
/ And justify the ways of God to men.” Notice in that
quotation that Milton intends to explore providence as well
as theodicy: he recognizes that if you ask where God was in
such-and-such an event, you ought to ask the question about
all events, good and bad alike. So to answer the rabbi’s
question properly, what we really need is a comprehensive
‘theory of everything.’
WHAT
THE REFORMER SAID
The
Westminster Confession (1647), that definitive achievement
of the English Reformation, and well known to Milton, proposes
such a ‘theory of everything’ in which the underlying
assumption is the sovereignty of God:
God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel
of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever
comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author
of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures,
nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away,
but rather established.
The
Confession says that God is holy, wise and sovereign, and
at the same time that human agents act freely and may therefore
be culpable, and that secondary causation is real –
meaning that God, though sovereign, does not send lightning,
cancer, or stray hockey pucks. But one might still ask: If
God is holy, wise and sovereign, why would he create a universe
in which bad stuff happens at all? And since it does happen,
how is he then still holy, wise and sovereign?
So
we have what seems to be a contradiction – a Confession
that grasps God’s sovereignty with one hand, and grasps
human responsibility and natural causes with the other. The
Confession tries to resolve this contradiction (properly called
an antinomy) by saying that God made an eternal and comprehensive
decree that includes all “the free
actions of free agents” (A. A. Hodge).
It
seems incongruous that the free actions of free agents could
be both ‘ordained’ and yet still free. But Hodge,
with the writers of the Confession, reasons that, “If
the plan of God did not determine events of this class, he
could make nothing certain and his government of the world
would be made contingent and dependent, and all his purposes
fallible and mutable.”
If that leaves your mind feeling pulled in opposite directions,
it’s because the Confession does not resolve the antinomy.
That’s what an antinomy is: an apparently irresolvable
contradiction.
The
problem derives from the analogy between God's sovereignty
and human kingship. Yes, of course, the Bible speaks of God
as a king. But analogies are, by definition, only approximations.
To think of the heavenly King having to make a decree may
be taking the analogy too far; the idea of a kingly decree
may be an unwarranted anthropomorphism. The requirement for
God to make such a decree would imply that, like human kings
and their subjects, God experiences cause and effect as we
do, which in turn may also imply that God experiences time
as we do. But if God (as we suppose) is not a creature of
time, he may actually have no need of such a decree. It helps
to remember that the Confession was written in an age when
people were coming to view the universe as a predictable machine,
a clockwork sort of mechanism.
If that were still an accurate view of things, it might justify
the assumption that absolute sovereignty requires absolute
control over cause and effect. But what if God could be totally
sovereign (yes I know that's redundant) without needing to
control every cause and effect?
In
fact, our current understanding of physics no longer lets
us view the universe under the metaphor of a machine. We now
need a different model – one that not only allows for
both human freedom and natural disaster without compromising
divine omniscience, goodness and sovereignty, but one that
also recognizes that we live in an expanding universe whose
elementary particles are characterized by unpredictability.
Such
a model must encompass, as the Confession says, “whatsoever
comes to pass,” including such things as evil, special
acts of God’s providence, and those events that we call
miracles.
WHATSOEVER
COMES TO PASS
Before
we propose an alternative to the Westminster model, we had
better see what is included in that “whatsoever”.
We noted the ‘both-and’ nature of miracle, which
understands that in a miracle God is acting not against natural
law but through it.
If
that view is correct, then a miracle is an exceptional instance
of God’s providence. Which leads us to ask: What do
we mean by ‘providence’? Theologians distinguish
two sorts of providence: general providence, in which . .
."he makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good,
and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew
5:45) and special providence, in which . . . "in everything
God works for good with those who love him, who are called
according to his purpose." (Romans 8:28) The ‘whatsoever’
also includes two sorts of evil: evils that are caused by
human malice or negligence (like my laptop), and evils that
occur in the course of nature or, as one might say, by chance.
In
the story of Job, two of the messengers report malicious devastation
by Sabean and Chaldean raiders; the other two messengers report
random devastation by lightning and tornado. Likewise in Luke
13, when Jesus’ hearers ask him about some Jews who
had been murdered in the Temple by Roman soldiers (their blood
had been “mingled with their sacrifices”), Jesus
reminds them of eighteen other Jews who died when a tower
collapsed on them. The author of Job affirms the universality
of such experiences when he says that “man is born to
trouble, as surely as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7 NIV).
In
the sections that follow, we’ll try to understand those
four sorts of events – general providence, special providence,
human evil, natural evil – in a way that is compatible
with the current scientific world-view, and does not compromise
God’s omniscience, goodness or sovereignty.
WHAT
DR. TOZER SAID
When
Dr A. W. Tozer was the pastor at Avenue Road Christian and
Missionary Alliance Church in Toronto, I cornered the good
Doctor after one Sunday evening service and asked him how
something he had said in his sermon fit with the idea of God’s
special providence. Standing tall over me and pointing his
finger at my chest for emphasis, Dr. Tozer replied, “Providence,
young man, is God playing his checkers.” Years later,
during the 1996-97 matches between world chess champion Garry
Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue, I recalled Dr Tozer’s
analogy. Deep Blue had been programmed to ‘know’
every possible chess move, and to devise strategies for every
possible configuration of chessmen, so that it could counter
any move an opponent might make. Deep Blue was able to outsmart
Kasparov without in any way limiting Kasparov’s freedom
of play, and even without knowing his choices in advance.
Of course, Deep Blue was programmed by humans, and Kasparov
knew how to play chess as well as the programmers did, so
Kasparov was also able to score a couple of wins and draws
on Deep Blue. But the analogy between Deep Blue and a God
of infinite power and knowledge helps us to imagine how God
is always able to outplay us, without either limiting our
freedom of play (except that it is limited, anyway, by our
finiteness) or compromising his sovereignty. For if all things
in our space-time continuum are present to God’s knowing,
then he can never be taken by surprise, and he can exercise
his sovereignty at any time without having unchangeably ordained
whatever comes to pass.
To
say that in another way: God is always sovereign because,
given his immediate knowledge of all things, he is always
‘on top of his game.’ But lest we complain that
God in any way plays unfairly, we have to understand what
his ‘game’ comprises. God’s game comprises
the love of all that he has made, the vindication of his justice
or
righteousness by the gospel, and his purpose in the fullness
of time to bring all things earthly and heavenly to their
fulfillment in Jesus’ eternal kingdom (‘kingdom’
being a metaphor for something beyond our imagining). So if
God should choose to intervene in any situation, it would
be to further the objectives of his game, not any of the other
games that we may think he ought to be playing. Of course
(continuing Tozer’s analogy) the Bible insists that
God has indeed intervened in this game of checkers that we
call human history – but because God also invented the
game, he knows how to make all his jumps, captures and crowns
happen in accordance with the rules, so that his interventions
are not violations of natural law. This checkers analogy reminds
us that, like the universe, every game has a beginning, and,
just as the expanding universe cannot go on expanding forever,
so every game also has an end, whether in victory or loss.
What Tozer’s analogy does not tell us is why God tolerates
human evil, nor why he allows sickness, death and natural
disaster, nor why we may be struck by lightning or a stray
hockey puck. But the analogy does open our thinking to some
possible answers.
A
TERRIFYING FREEDOM
In
Read for Your Life, a discussion of the therapeutic
value of literature, Professor Joseph Gold says, with only
part of his tongue in his cheek, that God created people because
he likes stories. But what delight could God find in characters
whose stories he had already scripted, or whose scripts he
had already affirmed by a general decree, particularly considering
how badly some of our stories end? What sort of satisfying
relationship could be possible with such characters? By rejecting
the idea of a scripted existence, Tozer’s analogy affirms
an important condition for meaningful human life: we are free,
within our natural limitations, to write our own scripts.
That does not preclude God’s option of writing himself
a part in those scripts, nor of incorporating our scripts
into his own plot outline.
In
the 1959 hit song “Paper Doll,” the Mills Brothers
sang that they would rather come home at night to a “paper
doll, than have a fickle-minded, real, live girl”. But
you can’t have a meaningful relationship with a paper
doll (or these days, with robot dolls). Throughout the Biblical
narrative what we see God desiring is not paper dolls but
real, live girls and guys, in his own image and “after
his own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), a people whom he can
relate to, and who want to relate to him. God desires a people
who please him because they choose to, not because they must.
If we could not do his will by our own free choice we would
indeed be paper dolls, or pin-ups, or puppets; and our choices
(if we could still call them choices) could give God no pleasure
because they would lack both love and virtue. But God’s
love of all that he made includes his love of the freedom
for which he made us. It is a terrifying freedom, for it is
the image of God’s own freedom, and it invites us to
choose to be like him. Or not.
ENTROPY
When
my ISO declared, “Shit happens, sir,” he was generously
attributing my broken laptop to chance rather than to my obvious
neglect. But what struck me at the time was the matter-of-fact-ness
of his remark. As if the chanciness of the thing was to be
expected. As if chanciness in anything might be expected.
And as he said it, I recalled a line from Ecclesiastes, where
that wise man wrote: "Again I saw under the sun that
the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor
favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them
all." (Ecclesiastes 9.11)
Time
and chance. Indeterminacy. Not quite the Westminster Confession’s
view of things, but there it is in Scripture, and it seems
to be an accurate description of our human experience. So
if human freedom, including the freedom to err and the freedom
to sin, is necessary to our having meaningful fellowship with
God, then perhaps chance, entropy and even death, also play
a positive role in God’s purpose.
As
science has developed over the past century, our understanding
of the universe has changed. The metaphor of a machine or
a clockwork mechanism is no longer adequate; we now see the
universe as a dynamic organism with potential for growth and
change. But growth and change come at a cost: they occur because
matter and energy exist in a state of entropy, in which the
random behavior of elementary particles tends toward disorder.
We see entropy in the shining of the sun, which makes life
possible even as the sun consumes itself. We see it in the
geological upheavals that created lakes and prairies and mountains
– but they are lakes that can be fished, prairies that
can be tilled, and mountains that can be mined. ‘Disorderly’
events like death, decay, earthquakes, erosion and forest
fires create the stuff of new life. It is precisely this tendency
toward disorder that makes possible the changes that result
in novelty, variety, growth and evolution.
You
can’t have a fire without the wood being consumed. You
can’t grow up and become an adult without also experiencing
aging. That’s how the universe works: it feeds on itself.
Whether you’re thinking in terms of biology, chemistry,
or physics, the truth is that the universe survives by consuming
itself. That’s entropy. So the sunshine that God sends
on the evil and the good can also cause sunstroke and forest
fires; and that sun (if Jesus doesn’t come back first)
will eventually burn out. Likewise, the rain that falls on
the just and the unjust can also become a flood or a blizzard,
and if we find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time,
that entropic behavior may consume us, as it did Job’s
sons and daughters, and the eighteen at the tower in Siloam.
The tendency to disorder is necessary to the functioning of
the universe.
But
disorder does not run amok. I had a student once whose father
was a physicist; this bright lad tried to convince his parents
that he should not have to tidy his room every week because
that would just be a futile attempt to defeat entropy. His
mother, however, was not a physicist; she was an educator,
and she had other ideas. Her ideas became for Kevin a parable
of what scientists call the ‘anthropic principle.’
That is the astonishing fact that the universe as we know
it – indeed, life as we know it – survives precisely
because the universe’s necessary tendency to disorder
and chaos operates within fine-tuned limits. So the sun does
not burn up the earth, the expanding universe does not fly
apart, most of us manage to live out a full life cycle, and
mother fine-tuned Kevin’s reluctance to tidy his room.
To
return to Dr Tozer’s analogy: if my opponent at chess
or checkers did not present me challenges, threats and opportunities,
I would have no reason to choose to make any moves at all.
So it is in the natural world: chanciness within fine-tuned
limits is the alternative to stagnation. And the price of
that chanciness, like the price of human freedom, is that
bad things sometimes happen. The alternative would not be
a universe where only nice, orderly and predictable things
happen; it would be a universe (if any) where nothing happened
at all.
ENDGAME
Though
the universe is necessarily in flux, the anthropic principle
assures us that it is not out of control. For in the midst
of it God does indeed play his checkers, and on a grand scale,
too. The history of nations is part of an even bigger game
plan that embraces the entire universe, and in which both
the chanciness of nature and the freedom of human nature together
serve the purpose of moving God’s game forward to its
glorious fulfillment . . . "for the creation was subjected
to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who
subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be
set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious
liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation
has been groaning in travail together until now [like a woman
about to give birth]; and not only the creation, but we ourselves,
who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as
we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies."
(Romans 8:20-23) The ‘futility’ that Paul refers
to above (often translated as “vanity”) is a word
that he got from Ecclesiastes, the Old Testament book that
explores the theme of life’s futility: “Vanity
of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is
vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2).
The
word ‘futility’ aptly describes the state of mind
of that writer, as also the feelings that may be motivating
us when we turn to his book to try to make sense of our lives.
The matching concept in the world of physical nature is entropy,
to which that sense of futility is our emotional response.
Paul, of course, did not know the word "entropy,"
but his words “subjected to futility” (Romans
8:20) show that he grasped the idea. In that passage he says
that entropy, and the sense of futility that follows from
it, were imposed by God, so that we may understand that the
present world is not God's endgame, nor ours.
Instead,
Paul foresees a future consummation when the justice of God’s
ways will be seen by all – when we will finally recognize
that it was not God whose ways needed to be justified to us,
but we ourselves who needed to be justified to him. As Luke
observed, “all the people and the tax collectors justified
God, having been baptized with the baptism of John”
(Luke 7:29). Acknowledging that God is righteous and they
were not, they “justified God” by coming to John
for baptism and trusting God for Forgiveness.
