"The Misunderstanding of Theism – A response to Andrew Moroz’s brief skim over Christian theology"




 This article is a response to Andrew Moroz’s article
called “The Incoherence of Theism”, located in the
Secular Web Library at the following URL:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/andrew_moroz/incoherence_theism.html

Link

Mr. Moroz makes the purpose of his article quite clear – to point out the supposed incoherence and inconsistencies in the Christian concept of God:

"While the notions of God are countless, in this essay the focus will be on the Christian God, described in the following way by John Hick: "God is the unique infinite personal Spirit who has created out of nothing everything other than himself; he is eternal and uncreated; omnipotent and omniscient; and his attitude towards his human creatures, whom he has made for eventual fellowship with himself, is one of grace and love."[3] There has probably been more written on the subject of religion than on any other, hence not even a representative portion can be addressed here. However, several important incongruities within the concept of God will be revealed."


While I agree with the definition of God that Moroz quoted, I must point out that one mustn’t be too literalistic in the application. Words like omnipotent are bandied about thoughtlessly, and many skeptics become surprised at finding out that God cannot do certain things, like sin for example. After briefly quoting Bertrand Russell and David Hume, Andrew Moroz argues the following:

"When we claim that a mother loves her children, it is because she takes care of them, feeds them, plays with them, educates them, talks to them in a pleasant voice, and so on. If the same mother were to plot her children's death, poison their food, abandon them, and burn their house down, we would no longer say that she loves her children. A person who maintained that she still loves her children would be properly advised to read the dictionary more often. And yet, theists claim that God loves his creatures no matter how many people are hurt and die due to floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, and the like. Perhaps the theist ought to change the attributes of God."


The problem with this argument obviously lies in that the mother in Moroz’s analogy directly plotted her children’s death, poisoned their food etc., whereas suffering that occurs on earth is not a direct result of God’s actions. If another person poisoned the mother’s children, we wouldn’t assume that the mother herself is unloving; we would assume that the person who did the poisoning is unloving. Moroz continues by attempting to undermine theistic argumentation:

"Many theists claim that argumentation to either prove or disprove God's existence is reproachable. The concern is formulated as follows by Paul Tillich: [T]he question of the existence of God can be neither asked nor answered. If asked, it is a question about that which by its very nature is above existence, and therefore the answer--whether negative or affirmative--implicitly denies the nature of God. It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it. God is being-itself, not a being.[5] So what is left for one to base faith on?"


Andrew Moroz is blatantly misunderstanding the point of Paul Tillich. Tillich’s statements are not undermining theistic argumentation, they are undermining the statement “God exists”. Tillich posits a God who is above existence and thus should be considered the ground of being rather than a being. Tillich is questioning our assumptions about whether the term ‘existence’ can be applied to God; he is not trying to destroy argumentation about whether God is. Andrew Moroz goes on to argue that religious experience is no justification for the existence of God:

"Many people claim religious experience as such a light to truth. Let us test this proposition. On our world, does the use of LSD provide a window into an additional part of reality otherwise undetectable? If it did, we would immediately know because all LSD users' accounts would corroborate one another. That is, all "trips" would depict the same place. On our world, LSD is clearly not a gateway into an additional part of reality because (1) most accounts of LSD experience are incoherent, and (2) those that are tell of no remotely similar places. Religious experience could hypothetically be a gateway into a super-reality. In that case, all religious experiences would be of the same thing--the same god or gods, the same angels or lack thereof, and so on. Specifically, people of different cultures would report the same gods. After all, if a god exists in a part of reality accessible by prayer, then all people that pray will be shown him, no matter where they are located on the planet. On our world, as was mentioned before, differing concepts of god number as many as the stars, hence the reasonable conclusion denies the possibility of prayer revealing anything besides one's own ideas."


Moroz makes a few unwarranted assumptions in that paragraph, two being –

1. That cultural and other influence would not take place if there was one true religious ‘reality’
2. That this religious ‘reality’ is so singular that no components could be accentuated, noticed or remembered more by those who experience it

Firstly, Andrew Moroz assumes that every person, despite their culture, their presuppositions and their interpretations, should all be able to uniformly perceive the reality of God in a way they can describe identically. If there were five people, four of whom were taking different sorts of drugs and one of whom was not drugged, and they were all separately watching the same movie, of course they are going to describe their experiences in different ways, even though they were watching the same movie. The “drugs” in the analogy are:
- depth of faith
- mental state
- cultural influence
- familiarity with religious experience
- personal presuppositions
- capacity to understand
and many more possibilities of outside influences.

So, Moroz’s expectation that all religious experiences will be completely uniform is an uncalled-for one. However, Moroz argues that God exists in a separate ‘reality’ accessible through prayer, and thus, cultural influences within our ‘reality’ shouldn’t make a difference. But Moroz is failing to understand that since religious experience is a ‘tapping into’ of a ‘super-reality’, it must be decoded through our reality, which is influenced by culture et al. How are people to make sense of largely unfathomable religious experiences unless they communicate it and think it through by using presuppositions, cultural influence, depth of faith etc.?

Moreover, why is there an assumption on Moroz’s behalf that the ‘super-reality’ of God does not have many components? If five people watch a movie and are then asked to write an essay on it, different parts of the movie will remain in people’s minds than others. One person might write all about the scene in ‘Titanic’ where Jack died, whereas another might write all about when Jack first met Rose. Would someone be warranted in thinking that these people had not watched the same movie at all?

Andrew Moroz continues with his critique of theism by quoting Epicurus:

"God either wishes to take away evil, and is unable, or He is able, and unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious [malicious], which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them?[6]"


Luckily, Moroz manages to anticipate the theistic response to Epicurus’ simplistic argument:

"The common answer is that God is both willing and able, but free will was deemed more important, and, because of it, we humans freely choose to do evil. Let us examine this concept of free will. In order for a being to have free will, he must be able to choose among several choices, and act on any of those choices. If a person could not possibly do other than a certain action, we say he did the action without will--without free will. Now God, He certainly knows the future for he knows all--He is omniscient. The question can now be posed--Are not humans constrained to the specific set of actions that God knows they will perform? Do humans have any possibility of acting otherwise? The answer to both questions, according to the Christian definition of God, is no. It seems that the entire concept of free will is incompatible with an omniscient God. And if one holds that one acts freely, he is thereby denouncing the Christian concept of God."


The problem with Moroz’s argument is that it assumes God exists in a linear timeframe like us. He assumes that God knows what we are going to do before we actually do it, which seems to me a hefty assumption. God, as a timeless ground of being, doesn’t know what we are going to do before we do it and sit around waiting for it to happen. God sees everything, past, present and future, all occurring in what we call now. It isn’t a pre-ordination, but rather simply an occurrence. So without this “foreknowledge” which is integral to Moroz’s argument, his objection falls apart. We can act freely, because God doesn’t know what we are going to perform – he simply sees the performance.

Moroz continues by assuming for the sake of argument that free will and God are not incompatible, and argues the following:

"As they are defined, good and evil are diametrical opposites; good is construed as necessarily opposing evil. Why didn't God, since He is all-good and loving of his creatures, make the world such that all people freely chose to do good? The reply is that a free action cannot be brought about. That statement does have some sense to it. But let's look at creation. When God created the world, He did so fully consciously. That is, He did not just throw the pieces of the universe together randomly; rather He deliberately assembled it. Before the world was created, God was aware of how it would turn out; He knew that today there would be so many good and bad people inhabiting the planet, for He knows all, and today there are as many good and bad people as God knew there would be. Because God actually brought about the universe which contains certain exact free actions done by certain people as anticipated by Him, He, in some sense, brought about certain free actions."


Once again Mr. Moroz is assuming that God sat down and thought about what would happen before it actually did happen, which I think is not a reasonable assumption.

"God could have created the world such that today there would be one less bad person and one more good person, could He not? All He would need to do is (1) consider a creation plan, as He did before, but one slightly altered to the point where He would (2) anticipate, as He did before, that the altered creation plan would result in one more good person and one less bad person, and (3) create the universe. Steps one and two could be repeated until all people were made good, and if the original creation plan left us with free will, so would this one, because the steps are identical."


Moroz seems to think that each person who existed, does exist or will exist comes along on a conveyor belt in front of God and God just ticks them off his list after knowing that they’ll be evil anyway. He also seems to think that God could toggle through the infinite possibilities for whether humans would accept or reject him and simply pick whichever one he most likes. Since it is Andrew Moroz who is making the attack upon Christian theology, it is up to him to show that God could actualize a world in which all people accept him. I don’t see this as being plausible.

So I conclude that Moroz’s objections to the Christian concept of God are based not upon a proper consideration of Christian theology, but through a quick skim over a few of the concepts. His attempts to demonstrate the ‘incoherence’ of Christianity fall well short of any reasonable critique.

- perspicuity (CADRE Member)