Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.
God is all good.Some say these four statements are inconsistent, but how do they know? Our knowledge is finite. God's knowledge is infinite. God might have a good reason for allowing evil. That reason itself might be beyond our understanding.
God is all knowing.
God is all powerful.
There is evil.
Labels: Education
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 12:10 AM
3 comments
I am a retired professor. I last taught at Ewha Womans University, mostly composition, research writing, and cultural issues, but also the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history. My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism. I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested. I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."
3 Comments:
I think St. Augustine (and Plato) had this one settled long ago.
Evil is the absence of good. It is not an active principle.
Evil is a word we use to describe the absence of good intentions, actions, outcomes, situations and words.
Other than that, we live in a universe that offers us "free choice" in our responses to our short-comings (and to our strengths). In this respect, our universe is and is not an artifice.
And I agree with you, too.
When I read the opening to Book I of Paradise Lost, with the image of God brooding over the vast abyss, I often wonder that He is pondering "all this" with incredible deliberation while being open to the infinite possibilities. Our own experience, evidently, reflects something of this vast breadth and depth. If God is to have beings he can share this with--and thus know, through the love of those beings, among other things, love--that is to know true love for Himself--he would reasonably have to make us capable of sharing in something of that experience, something of that freedom, and something of that individuality.
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