Showing posts with label doctrine of God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doctrine of God. Show all posts

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Is there a moral obligation to worship a Calvinistic God? Or any other God for that matter?

A Catholic friend of mine once said "If Calvin's God exists, I would insist on being damned. But it would do me no good."

This of course presupposes that if God determines your fate before the foundation of the world, your actions then do not determine it, since if your actions had been different in 2009, it would have changed something that occurred before the foundation of the world, which would be changing the past and therefore impossible.

Let us set that aside for a moment, however. And let's not make this exclusively about Calvinism. Someone could say "If Wesley's God exists, I would insist on being damned" or even "If Talbott's God exist, I would insist on being damned" since you could argue that even in Talbott's universalist world, there is gratuitous evil that God should not have permitted. And let us assume further that refusing to worship an all-powerful being is the supreme sin against prudence.

The question I have, for any theology, has to do whether we have a moral obligation, as opposed to a merely prudential obligation, to worship an infinite being. If so, where does that moral obligation come from?

Thursday, April 09, 2009

God, lies and inerrancy

One of the arguments in the inerrancy debate is the assertion that God cannot lie. I want to suggest that although this claim is initially intuitive, (I mean who wants a liar for a God?), there is what seems to me a forceful argument against the claim.

1. God always does what is morally right, and never does what is morally wrong. (The doctrine of divine moral perfection).
2. Possibly, lying is morally obligatory, and truthfulness is morally reprehensible.
(I will call this position anti-Kantianism about lying.)
3. Therefore, possibly God lies.

Now of course you can avoid this conclusion by accepting the Kantian position that if you were hiding Nicole Brown Simpson, and OJ were to come to your door with a knife and ask you where she was, you couldn't tell her that she went to LAX and that if you hurry up in that White Ford Bronco, you might be able to catch her before she leaves for New York. But most of us suppose are on the side of Benjamin Constant on this issue, and accept 2.

But how can you accept 1 and 2 but deny 3? I don't think I've committed some horrid modal fallacy, have I?

P. S. This would neatly solve exapologist's false prophecy problem. God wanted the gospel spread quickly, so he planted a noble lie that he was coming back soon. It worked!