How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [14]
Taking all this fairly seriously, I transferred to Pepperdine University (affiliated with the Church of Christ) with the intent of majoring in theology. I took courses in the Old and New Testaments, on the history of the Bible, the writings of C. S. Lewis, and the historical Jesus. I stayed after class to talk to professors and visited them in their offices. I went to chapel several times a week (students were required to go twice and attendance was taken) and prayed regularly. I even told one coed that I “loved” her—in the Christian sense of loving everyone—but I am afraid she took it the wrong way. (She needn’t have worried—students were prohibited from visiting the dorm rooms of members of the opposite sex, and such sin-provoking activities as dancing were forbidden.)
A BREACH IN THE FAITH
There were problems with my conversion from the beginning, however, and I think deep down on some level I must have known it. First, my motives for converting, while sincere later, were not quite as pure at the time—my friend had a sister that I wanted to get to know better and I figured this might help. On reflection, howling coyotes are not exactly unusual, since my parents’ home is nestled high up in the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California where coyotes routinely come down from the hills to rummage through trash cans. More importantly, there were chinks in the armor: Another friend at my high school told me I had chosen the wrong path and that his faith, Jehovah’s Witnesses, was the One True Religion, making me wonder how another religion could be as certain it had the truth as my newfound one did. I was generally uncomfortable witnessing to people, especially strangers. And the normal sexual urges that overwhelm teenagers created intense conflict and frustration.
There were philosophical problems as well. I recall spending an afternoon with a Presbyterian minister whose deep wisdom I greatly respected, going over and over what is known as the “Problem of Free Will”: If God is omniscient (all knowing) and omnipotent (all powerful), then how can we be held responsible for making “choices” we could not possibly have made? If we do have free will, does this mean God is limited in knowledge or power? And if God is limited, what else can He not do? The minister, who had a Ph.D. in theology, did his best to address the problem but it all seemed like labyrinthine word games and obfuscating analogies to me. For example: “Imagine history as one long film, which God has already seen but we, the characters in the film have not, so our actions ‘seem’ free even though they are predestined.” Or: “God is outside of space and time so the normal laws of cause and effect do not apply to Him.”
Similarly, with one of my Pepperdine professors I grappled with what is known as the “Problem of Evil”: If God is omnibenevolent (all good) and omnipotent, then why is there evil in the world? If He allows evil, then He is not all good. If He cannot help but allow evil, then He is not all powerful. The best book I have read on this problem is Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People, but his solution—“God can’t do everything, but he can do some important things”—is not how most people conceive of the “almighty.”
To this day I have not heard an answer to the Problem of Evil that seems satisfactory. As with the Problem of Free Will, most answers involve complicated twists and turns of logic and semantic wordplay. One answer, for example, is based on a fundamental assumption of logic that no set may have itself as its own subset—God cannot create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it. Likewise, God cannot be encompassed in the subset of evil. Evil, like heavy stones, exists independently of the larger set of God, even though remaining within that set. Another riposte involves explaining specific historical evils, like the Holocaust, where one answer is that “humans committed these evil acts, not God.” But all this avoids the problem altogether: Either God allowed Nazis to kill Jews, in which case He is not omnibenevolent, or