One of the hardest Biblical passages to swallow for me, and I doubt these experiences are mine alone, is the Binding of Isaac. Even reading the anonymous Hebrews author’s comments on faith, even reading commentaries and the various viewpoints that attempt to reconcile the request of a perfectly good, loving, kind God asking a faithful servant to sacrifice his promised son, this passage sits unwell within my gut. Even the story of Job I find more palatable at times, though not reasonably so, than this story. I think the story feels more visceral and relatable than the mythological, archetypal, fabular book of Job.
The problem of evil is the most difficult of challenges. I grapple with this question constantly and not as doubt but as opposition, as competition, as that foe that subverts directed motion. So I dreamt up a world without. Not a world entirely bereft of terrible things, but a world devoid of evil allowed to target that which is considered good. A couple of difficulties immediately presented themselves.
1. What determines goodness? Is goodness a spectrum? A black and white? Are there those who are “innocent” and “guilty”, and the innocents are immune to damage while the guilty are laser-sighted and hunted down? Or is goodness and innocence a graph. You can be good but not innocent, innocent and good, or guilty and evil, or varying degrees of each. This graph helps a little, because those same horrors which afflict the overall good might be justified if they also were not innocent. Is it possible to be good and guilty (not guilt-ridden, but objectively guilty)?
2. Assuming levels of goodness, what does this effectually mean in this world? Is there a standard bar like a height mark at an amusement park: only those of a goodness greater than this height are protected from this level of evil? For instance, a perfectly good human being who has commit no sins won’t even get sick, while someone who has transgressed (whatever standard determines transgression), depending on their level of iniquity, might experience colds, the flu, or even food poisoning. If their sin is great, they might even experience the greater of evils possible (as determined by randomness? God? Natural selection? Nature?)
3. Who determines goodness? And is it a balance? Common Christian belief argues that sin is final and irrevocable without grace. A murder in cold blood cannot be outweighed by a thousand acts of kindness and giving in terms of eternity, or even a million. But since I’m god of this imaginary world, what do I believe is the most culturally fair, according to conventional philosophical premises? Let’s believe that a contrite and willing soul might eradicate the stain of sin in an earthly purgatory of sorts. A good person might commit an atrocity which dips his/her soul-goodness down into evil for a short time until such time as his/her actions raise that level back into “the safe zone” once more.
At this juncture, everything is so ephemeral and intangible that this world doesn’t even make sense. So I’ll throw out a couple of analogies to add flesh onto the dust of this earth. First, we have to add a standard of goodness. There are a lot of philosophical and ethical measures by which to determine good that sages have discussed for centuries. For ease of conversation, I’m going to suggest a simple utilitarian ethics, and “good” under this system promotes love, life, kindness, care, gentleness, giving, peace, patience, honesty, and integrity. This is all a bit of an oversimplification. World-building is intricate and I have not the time for it in great detail in this thought-experiment.
Let’s say that in this world, a god decides at the end what is good and what is not, and we’ll define God by that system of good. We’ll pick a god whose entire purpose is computation: determining statistics of good, updating a few csv files on behavior of individuals, and does some server maintenance every once in a while. God isn’t arbitrarily deciding, but is following a clear system of good and evil like a computer. There is no random number generation in the decision making, only a series of variables. God is without emotional capacity in this thought experiment.
In our world, there is a type of game called an rpg, or a role-playing-game. DnD, online role playing games, or single-played versions where the user controls a character in an imagined world and makes decisions. Because this is what we are doing, of a fashion, this will provide some good analogies to our world. In these worlds, there are often a couple types of zones: Player vs Player zones, Player vs Enemy zones, and gladiator zones. Gladiator zones are really just PvP zones that you enter willingly in order to test strength; Player vs Player zones means that you enter at your risk; a stronger player might be lying in wait to destroy you. Player vs Enemy zones are the safe zones, where you can battle beside unknown players and they are unable to apply damage to your character.
This gives us a good analogy. Let’s give ourselves a spectrum of good. At each level of good (or evil), players are subject to different types of damage. If you are perfect, you are untouchable. If you are almost completely good, with light iniquity, casual evil might befall: light sickness, bumping your nose, stubbing your toe, burning your tongue lightly on tea. If the black plague hits your city, the chances of catching it are nil. And on down the spectrum: middling people experience middling evils; completely evil persons are subject to manipulation of person and evils embodying the gravest harm. The goal of this system, of course, is fairness. And it isn’t apparent goodness that determines a person, but the underlying statistics of their being. A secret murderer might appear good to his family and friends, but his internal infestation of evil would be great according to the system.
The system does not take sides. There is a natural selection of evil and good. But there are some problems. Let’s say I’m perfectly good. I’m also a daredevil. So I jump off a mountain cliff with a squirrel suit without adequate training. Do I die? I’m young and naïve, but unquestionably perfect. Am I miraculously saved? Next: I’m a perfectly evil person, and I can do what I want. I get into a truck loaded up with explosives and drive it into a preschool. What happens? All the kids miraculously survive and there is no damage? And what about situations with no criminal intent: it’s an icy day and I’m doing a little distracted driving and my car slips into the other lane and into an oncoming car. Does the system reach out and replace me like a Mario Kart vehicle?
Imagine it like this: good people possess a semi-permeable firewall spiritual membrane about their being. This firewall prevents untoward activity and negative outcome. A natural phenomenon hits the town, but they are unaffected. There is no chance of them being affected. They don’t even need faith. Abraham walking up that mountain doesn’t need faith – his goodness prevents Isaac’s death, right? And that begs another question, even about that murderer.
Let’s say that someone is a terrible murderer, in secret (let’s not consider, for the moment, who he’s allowed to murder. Let’s assume this person is very, very bad of heart), but that he’s well loved by a younger brother and his mother and father and family. They are all innocent and perfect. His death affects not only them, but everyone within his perfect community. Is that not an evil befalling the entire population? How can a nuclear bomb strike a city and kill only those who deserve it? The problem here exists that distinction of collateral damage is impossible as long as damage exists.
So we could consider another world, a world without collateral damage or damage at all. Let’s imagine that world. Nothing bad could happen. Is this the Garden of Eve without the central component: the tree of good and evil? In this situation, we also run into problems. Either there is no concept of evil – I couldn’t steal your waffle. It would be physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually impossible to steal – or evil is prevented. If evil is prevented, if I’m driving a car around and try and force it into another lane, I’m prevented from doing so by “the great preventative rules from the heavens”. In a way, these are like borderline cases in programming. Can I walk over that mountain in the video game? Not if I can’t jump over the fence or if there is an invisible wall bordering the town.
But my world isn’t working, and I’m not sure how to fix it. And if I cannot fix it, I have to remedy this world in my head, this God in my head with the perfect God that told Abraham to sacrifice his son, with innocents being sexually abused, with refugees from nations being forced out by militant extremists and terrorists, with war and famine and malnutrition for children. I have to reconcile the inequality extant with a God capable of preventing it who doesn’t. I have to walk with Abraham up that mountain, expecting the sacrifice and having faith that God will provide.
This is a harder walk. I cannot simply level-up my goodness and make achievements and rewards by following a life-checklist. I will get sick, my relatives may die, but the price was free will and humanity chose poorly.
Do I struggle with Abraham’s perspective more, or Isaac’s? Isaac the promised son, whose loving father bound him onto the altar and raised the kris above his head. Salvation was found in sacrifice, even then. It’s so hard to swallow all of this. What was God telling us about our world? What should I be learning that I am missing?
Kierkegaard wrong a novel on an imagined journey with Abraham at this time. He wrote some interesting statements that have provoked some thought along these lines.
For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)
Then faith's paradox is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual determines his relation to the universal through his relation to God, not his relation to God through his relation through the universal... Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence; and faith is then a temptation.
~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)
The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant to murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he meant to sacrifice Isaac—but precisely in this contradiction is the anxiety that can make a person sleepless, and yet without this anxiety Abraham is not who he is.
~ Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling)
I’m not certain what I think. There is too much here to reconcile in my head that I simply cannot contain it. I read and re-read this passage, and find little that is comforting in my philosophical meditations over it. Earlier I mentioned the ethical standard of utilitarianism. This is the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But this is impossible to know with our angle of knowledge, isn’t it? Without God’s understanding of cause and effect, how are we to know whether our actions will provide the greatest good for the greatest number.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer struggled with the concept of peace in the face of evil himself. He wrote:
If I see a madman driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver
He says that, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” I think about this in relation to utilitarianism. What if killing Hitler made things worse? Utilitarianism suggests that murder in this case would be a greater evil. And you cannot always know the ends to the means that you practice. So what is ethically good cannot rely on an intellectual void of chance, can it? The end does not justify the means, and certainly the means cannot justify the end, either, right?
So that which is good must be based on intention and values, a Quality of sorts, such as that present in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (by Robert Pirsig). This is a great Platonic Form, and our adhering to its designs as closely as we may, knowing only that we attempt to draw nearer to divine perfection in our actions, is good. Good isn’t actions only, but intent, purpose, belief, and heart that initiate the behavior.
And I reach the end of the trails of thought, finding myself once more at the beginning. But the beginning offers new paths that I failed to notice before, and I must travel down each, hoping I’ll find the finish line eventually. I have no answers, only rambles and empty thought experiments. Nothing of any particular meaning or anything worth taking away in the long run. There are more holes in these arguments and thoughts than a perforated straw man. It is, in a sense, a red herring, a non sequitur, but what purpose is stream of consciousness save this?
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