Certainty

There is one thing about which I hold myself certain. One thing I consider inviolable truth. It is that certainty is poison to the human spirit. The more certain you are of something the less human you become. Witness fundamentalism everywhere.

If you are certain of something then that is something that you must do your utmost to inject doubt into. Examine under the light of many worlds, consider it as the ancient Persian would both drunk and sober, include as many more altered states as your lifestyle allows, consider whether you would believe the same if your moral basis were built upon something else. Perform experiments, physical or social as necessary, to test your understanding and the veracity of your certainty and keep notes. Make it impossible for yourself to ignore the edges of your certainty where logic or fact tells you otherwise. Because once you refuse to allow yourself to see one small facet of reality you begin to blind yourself to all of it. And thence, by all measures of psychiatry, lies madness.

I have yet to find evidence that certainty in any thing does more good than harm. However while there are truths that lack contrary evidence there are no truths that merit certainty. I accept even my initial statement in this post as a poison, it poisons my ability to make statements unambiguously and it poisons my ability to trust in the things that people say. Frankly, that may be a good thing in some cases. I accept that one poison regardless but no further. No other certainty will I knowingly accept into my self.

More on the Question of Evil

In The debatable nature of God I considered the nature of the 3 'omnis' as applied to God. Going back and re-reading it the logic doesn't hold up very well. How could an omnigood God predispose His creation to failure and evil? How could the concept of evil even possibly exist in the creation of an omnigood entity? If, as I understand God, He is constitutionally incapable of condoning, experiencing, or contemplating evil?



However God exists at a different scale from humanity. Perhaps, for Him, the short term existence of evil in Creation isn't a paradox against His nature since, as discussed in the linked post, He has balanced it all against Jesus, against Himself. Then there's promise of the cleansing at the end of things. So you could balance it against metaphysical scales or time scales. In either case you have a net 0 change in the 'quantity' of evil in existence. I'm falling back on quantitative verbiage but who can really measure these things? I merely record a refinement to the aforementioned theory.

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Semi-Random tangent: I'm also led to wonder, just how does God interact with evil? Does He see evil? Presumably, or else most of Creation would be blank to Him. (I almost used the verb 'witness' instead of 'see' but that verb has other very serious connotations) Which doesn't really make sense. But seeing evil is, in part, experiencing it or having contact with it. Perhaps it is Jesus that sees evil. But all of that consideration will have to go into another post. This one is on another topic.

The debatable nature of God

Slightly misleading title. One thing that I keep coming back to is the problem of evil. Now, here we have a logic puzzle that seems to invalidate the Christian perception of God using its own terminology. How can God be omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good (omnigood?) at the same time and yet still create and allow to exist a world as flawed and full of evil as this. An all good God would eradicate the evil, given the ability and knowledge of it. So taking the omnis as given, poof there goes God in, as Douglas Adams says, a puff of logic.

Except, consider the following. Perhaps God set us up to fall. The world certainly seems rigged against us. Let's say he did, he set up the world in such a way as to deliberately predispose man to fall into evil and sin. And then, He took that fall for us. We still sin, we are still evil, but we are required to pay none of the long term consequences of that. Changes the equation a bit. Here I was thinking I'd never have even a hint of a crack of a solution to this thorny little chestnut, and I expect the average atheist will brush that off as so much religion (which I suppose it is), but I haven't been one of those for some time now and pop this little thought appears in my brain. God is good.

Edit: Oh that's hardly a complete solution, nor by any means airtight I'm sure. But, it's a start. It's a crack in the wall. And one that I'd never have found alone.

Edit 2: Coming back to this some time later, I think a little clarification is necessary. He paid our sins, and by that act cleansed the world of evil. Evil is still in the world doing it's best to wreak havoc, but every evil act was paid before it even gets commited, it is no longer evil; God doesn't permit evil in His world, He only permits humanity to suffer trials in order to give Himself a chance to help us. Interesting ramifications.