It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, “Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he;
“ ‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Get it? Just as the blind men got the elephant wrong so theologians will get God wrong since theologians can’t actually see God. But this is just poetic poodoo.

First, these guys are obviously not the sharpest burritos in the hallway!¹ You’d have to be a pretty ignorant blind man (and not “to learning much inclined”) to grab hold of the first thing you touched and feel no further when the whole purpose of being there was because you wanted to find out what an elephant was like. Wouldn’t they, as they kept feeling the beast, be able to come up with a pretty good understanding of an elephant? Not only that, while they were arguing, each of them could have brought the others over to the part that they had first felt and then they would all change their minds as to what an elephant was like.

Second, notice in the story that there is one person who isn’t blind—the storyteller. The storyteller knows that the blind men are feeling an elephant and what an elephant really looks like because he, as the storyteller, isn’t blind. Thus the storyteller is able to judge that all the blind men are “partly right” but “mostly wrong.” Likewise, those who tell us that no one really knows what God is like, and that all of us might be somewhat right and somewhat wrong, put themselves in a position similar to the storyteller. But what gives them the right to be story teller? How is it that they see things so clearly as to know that everyone else’s claims are mistaken?

Third, contrary to the unseen elephant, Christianity is based on the testimony of those who said they did see God and then told us about what they saw. After all, Jesus said, “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9) and “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Thus John wrote, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us” (1 John 1:1-2).

Moral: Beware silly stories contrived to eliminate the possibility of knowing truth about God.

1. To my foreign readers: I’m intentionally mixing three metaphors here: he’s not the shapest knife in the drawer, he’s a burrito short of a combination plate, he’s not the brightest bulb in the hallway.

Ehrman complains that the “predictions of future success and happiness” promised Israel if they obeyed “never did come to fulfillment” (89). This comment surprises me since Israel, under the reigns of David and Solomon, did know tremendous success. The trouble, however, even under the reigns of David and Solomon, was that both kings sinned in ways which interrupted that happiness (David committed adultery and murder, and Solomon started worshipping other gods). Also, once Israel divided into the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah, there was never a righteous king in the northern tribes so we wouldn’t expect them to know much success. However, under reformer kings like Josiah, the southern kingdom of Judah did experience times of blessing. The trouble was that the righteous behavior in the southern kingdom never lasted long. Further, even though the king might be righteous, that didn’t mean that most of the people were righteous. In short, the northern kingdom never obeyed God’s laws and the southern kingdom did so only sporadically, so we wouldn’t expect either of them to know what Ehrman terms “utopia” (89).

Related to the above, Ehrman complains that (89):

Despite returns to God, despite godly rulers, despite attempts to be the people of God, Israel continued to experience famine, drought, pestilence, war, and destruction. Just on the military front, after the nation was overrun by the Assyrians, there came Babylonians. After them came the Persians. And then the Greeks. Then the Egyptians. Then the Syrians. And then the Romans. One after another, the great empires of the world overwhelmed and absorbed tiny Israel, leading to one political setback, one military defeat, or social nightmare after another. In no small measure, that is why the classical prophetic answer to the problem of suffering came to seem empty and dissatisfying to so many later authors of ancient Israel (Job, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, and so on, as we will see).

This is bizarre. He’s implying that the authors of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel regarded as “empty” and “dissatisfying” that at least some suffering is the result of God punishing the wicked. Not! These books don’t tell us that! It is true that a lesson from Job is that sometimes the righteous may suffer for reasons other than sin, but that is true of the classical view as a whole, and Job also affirms the classical view. For example, Elihu, the voice of reason (he was not one of Job’s “friends” who were later rebuked) said, “So listen to me, you men of understanding. Far be it from God to do evil, from the Almighty to do wrong. He repays a man for what he has done; he brings upon him what his conduct deserves” (Job 34:10-11; see also v. 26-27; 36:8-12). That’s the classical view and it is interesting to note that Ehrman never quotes one word of Elihu’s speech.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 tells us, “For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God.” Also, consider the book’s last two verses (12:13-14): “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”¹ This is also the classical view, but Ehrman doesn’t mention the book’s conclusion. I ask you, dear reader, does that sound like Solomon had given up on the belief that at least some suffering is the result of God’s punishing sin?

Daniel absolutely, positively affirms that the horrors that happened to Judah under Babylon were the result of Judah’s sin. The entire 9th chapter of Daniel is about that. Consider Daniel 9:16: “O Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city Jerusalem, your holy hill, because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us.” No wonder that Ehrman never even references a single verse of Daniel to support his contention. The careful reader of Ehrman’s book, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Daniel will quickly conclude that Ehrman is guilty of special pleading.²

Ehrman concludes his discussion that the classical view cannot account for all suffering so “There must be other answers” (90). But, this is another weird problem with Ehrman’s problem project. When he concludes that a particular answer cannot solve all of the types of problems presented, then he rules it out as being even part of the explanation. But why should that be? Why can’t one answer solve some of the problems and another answer solve further problems and so on?

Ehrman’s problem is that since he doesn’t believe that the Bible is a unified whole (contrary to conservative Christians), he therefore takes each answer individually and regards it as unconnected to any other answers the Bible gives as to why God allows suffering. Thus he comes to the “classical view” and declares that since it doesn’t answer all the problems that arise, then the answer must lie elsewhere.

But as I said, Christians regard the entire Bible as containing God’s truth and so we hold that one of the reasons people suffer, at least some of the time, is because of sin. But that’s not the only reason people suffer. Christians doing theodicy recognize multiple problems of evil that require multiple answers. As theologian John Feinberg put it, “There is in fact no such thing as the problem of evil, for at best, the expression ‘the problem of evil’ stands for a host of distinct problems that confront theologies….”³ Thus Ehrman errs again.

I’ll conclude this series on Ehrman’s “classical view” by pointing out two things. First, sin must be punished. If the God of the Bible does exist, then He can no longer tolerate rebels than a country can tolerate terrorists. If skeptics don’t understand this, it is because they fail to understand the seriousness of sin and that little sins left unchecked always, always, always lead to devastation and heartbreak.

Second, as we consider this God who punishes sin, let us remember that the God the Bible isn’t a God who stands far off and simply afflicts sinners. Rather, God allowed His Son to be tortured to death to pay the penalty for human sin. Skeptics may not like it that God punishes sin—they especially don’t like that He will eternally punish the eternally unrepentant—but everyone should remember that His Son Jesus paid for our sins by His death on the cross and that everyone who turns to Him can be saved from The Ultimate Punishment. If you don’t like hell, then trust that Jesus’ death on the cross paid the penalty for your sins and you can live forever.

1. See also 5:6.
2. The fallacy of special pleading occurs when someone only quotes evidence in his favor and ignores contrary evidence.
3. John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problems of Evil, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 19 ff. Emphasis his.

For example, Ehrman is dismayed about the destruction of the Canaanites (70):

But one might want to think about all the innocents who were murdered. Is this really what God is like, one who orders the slaughter of those who are outside of his people? It is not as if the people of Jericho were given the chance to think things over and turn to him. They were all slaughtered, even the infants, in a divinely appointed bloodbath.

I have already written two articles on God’s ordering the destruction of the Canaanites (see Resources) so I will only make some brief comments here. First, the Canaanites were completely depraved by indulging in all kinds of incest, adultery, offering their children to Molech, homosexuality, and bestiality (Lev. 18). God said that those who did those things deserved to die and there is no reason to believe that there were any adults and few children who wouldn’t have been thoroughly acculturated to their sins (today, of course, there is no theocratic kingdom so ultimate justice will occur at the Judgment). God demonstrated that He knew who would or wouldn’t repent regarding the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah: in Genesis 18 God offered to spare both cities if ten righteous people could be found in them. But except for Lot and his family, no one would repent. In fact, such is the seductive power of sin that the angels had to take Lot’s family by the hands and all but drag them out of the city (Gen. 19:6).

Then after Israel failed to obey God in destroying the Canaanites and was seduced by their sins, God similarly ordered its destruction. About this Ehrman asks, “Do we really want to say that innocent people starved to death (starvation does not hit just the guilty, after all) as a divine punishment for the sins of the nation? That the brutal oppression of the Assyrians and then the Babylonians was really God’s doing?” (54). But there were no “innocent” people. For example, before the destruction of Jerusalem God told Jeremiah in Jer. 5:1-2: “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares. If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city.” Jeremiah searched but found not even one person who followed God’s ways. No one.

Of course it is tragic that infants had to die, but as Paul Copan has rightly pointed out in Is God a Moral Monster?, it isn’t always wrong to kill the innocent.¹ Copan uses the example of the U. S. scrambling fighters on 9-11-2001 to destroy planes that might have been high-jacked to be used as bombs. Although that didn’t happen (flight 93 crashed before the fighter arrived), most people think it would have been horrible but acceptable to take some innocent lives rather than allow the plane to crash into, say, the U. S. Capitol building. Also, the idea that Canaanite infants wouldn’t grow up to wreak havoc on their new family, who had killed their old family, fundamentally fails to understand human nature. Further, if God knew that these children would grow up to seek out and participate in the practices of their birth parents (and if God has foreknowledge, then He would know that), then He does no wrong in taking their lives early.

Similarly Ehrman decries Noah’s flood: “But an entire world drowned? Why? Because God was angry. Disobedience needs to be punished and so God killed off nearly the entire human race….”(66). But, God’s judgment about man in the pre-Noah world was that “every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.” Every inclination. Only evil. All the time. If they were like the Canaanites (or worse!), then they didn’t deserve to live (see my article on this).

Ehrman and others may refuse to worship God: “Others, of course, refuse to believe in a God who is determined to exterminate the people he created because he disapproves of how they behave” (66). But we aren’t trying to defend a god that Ehrman would worship. That god doesn’t exist. We are defending the God of the Bible and Ehrman’s problem is that he minimizes the horror of sin. It isn’t that God gets mad when people “misbehave.” It is that when they give themselves fully to sin, they end up raping and torturing each other to death (see my article on human evil and suffering).

Yes, the Bible teaches that God often brings suffering as punishment for sin or to lead people to repent, and that is part of the Bible’s answer to “why we suffer.” That skeptics don’t like it doesn’t matter because “Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the LORD understand it completely” (Proverbs 28:5).

1. Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011), 49.

So far so good.

But in his next sentence he makes another bizarre turn: “A the same time, there are obvious problems with their point of view, especially if it is generalized into some kind of universal principle, as some people have tried to do over the ages” (54). Ehrman then tells us how unfair making this view a universal principle would be by bringing up things like the famines of Ethiopia, the Bosnian war, the 1918 influenza, malaria, and AIDS.

But why bring this up?

After all, his book is about whether the Bible can answer why God allows suffering, and Ehrman has already admitted that the Bible doesn’t make punishment for sin a universal principle! Also, I don’t know any Bible-reading Christian, and I mean not even one, who has generalized this into a universal principle. After all, anyone who reads the Bible at all knows the story of Job and knows about Jesus healing the blind man who hadn’t sinned (John 9:2-3). So why bring it up?

On the next page (55) he writes,

The problem with this¹ view is not only that it is scandalous and outrageous, but also that it creates both a false security and false guilt. If punishment comes because of sin, and I’m not suffering one bit, thank you very much, does that make me righteous? More righteous than my next door neighbor who lost his job, or whose child was killed in an accident, or whose wife was brutally raped and murdered? On the other hand, if I am undergoing intense suffering, is it really because God is punishing me? Am I really to blame when my child is born with a defect? when the economy takes a nosedive and I can no longer afford to put food on the table? When I get cancer?

But, again, this argument would be valid only if you generalized the “classical view” into a universal principle, something that neither the Bible (again, Ehrman himself admits this) nor even one Christian that I know of does.

But, strangely, Ehrman again bemoans the horror of turning the classical view into a universal principle when he concludes his discussion of the “classical view” of suffering on page 90:

But readers [of the Bible] over the years have sometimes extracted a universal principle from these writings and insisted that suffering comes because God is punishing us for our sin. People who take this point of view, as I have pointed out, often suffer unnecessarily from self-imposed guilt. Is suffering really our fault? Is it not the case that this very explanation—as prevalent as it was in antiquity and as it is today—simply doesn’t work in view of the realities of our world?

Ehrman then brings up tsunamis, starvation, AIDS, genocide, and so on. But, for the last time: the Bible doesn’t teach that all suffering comes from sin, Ehrman agrees that it doesn’t, and I don’t know even one Christian who thinks it does!

Maybe Ehrman does know of some bumbling Bible readers, somewhere, who hold this view but, for the most part, hasn’t Ehrman just kicked the stuffing out of a strawman?

Now, all this being said, the Bible does teach that suffering often is the result of sin. We’ll talk more about that tomorrow.

1. It isn’t entirely clear what “this” refers to. In the preceding paragraph Ehrman talks about modern Israel and then ancient Israel and complains about how the prophetic view would be unfair (we’ll get into that in tomorrow’s post), but in the sentence at hand and the sentences that follow he apparently switches back from addressing either modern or ancient Israel to talking about how horrible it would be if the “classical view” were generalized to a universal principle.

Ehrman is right that the Bible tells us that God does punish people for their sins; that Jesus suffered to pay the penalty for human sin (84); and that the Bible does not teach that all suffering is because God is punishing people for their sins: “The prophets and other biblical writers, of course, were not stating a general religious principle that was to be accepted as true for all times and places” (90).

But from there things get tangled.

Ehrman begins his discussion of the “classical view”—God is punishing people—by five pages of relating holocaust horrors. Then he asks: “Were the Jews chosen for this?” He continues, “As hard as it is to believe, there are Christians in the world who have argued that they were” (25). Ehrman points to German Evangelicals who endorsed Hitler (26).

But, so what? After all, the Bible does not teach that God brought the Holocaust on the Jews (Ehrman certainly never quotes a verse to support this notion). You can find people who call themselves Christians endorsing almost anything Scripture doesn’t teach. That some cracked-pot-Christians supported Hitler doesn’t mean the Bible taught that and to hold other Christians or the Bible responsible for their beliefs is no more than guilt by association.

Then Ehrman launches into his full-throated discussion of the Classical View:

When these things happened, how did the ancient authors explain them? One of their most common explanations—it fills many pages of the Hebrew Bible—may seem simplistic, repugnant, backward, or just dead wrong to many people. It is that people suffer because God wants them to suffer. And why does God want them to suffer? Because they have disobeyed him and he is punishing them (27, emphasis mine).

Pay close attention to: “When these things happened, how did the ancient authors explain them?” (emphasis mine). Although this sentence follows Ehrman’s Holocaust description, what does “these” refer to? Obviously “these” can’t refer to the Holocaust which Ehrman just spent five pages detailing (although many casual readers will come to that conclusion), because the Holocaust wouldn’t occur for about 2,000 years after the Bible was penned and the Bible doesn’t mention it. What “these” must refer to is that when terrible things happened to ancient Israel, the prophets attributed them to God punishing Israel.

Thus Ehrman suggests that since prophets in ancient Israel claimed the bad things that happened to Israel were due to God punishing Israel, then, by this viewpoint, the Holocaust could be due to God punishing Israel.

Now it is true that when Israel was a theocracy, its covenant agreement included protection and blessings in return for obedience, but removal of protection and curses for rebellion. But neither Christians nor Jews consider Israel to have been a theocracy since ancient days. In fact, Israel wasn’t even a sovereign nation for more than 2,000 years! Again, Scripture says nothing about the Holocaust.

Ehrman’s suggestion is no more than a suggestion. It isn’t an argument.

Now, who was actually responsible for committing the Holocaust? Humans were! Even the atheists agree with that because if there is no God then who is there left to blame? Humans, right? Humans used their free will to force Jews to strip naked and to then shoot them; humans used their free will to drop Zyklon B into gas chambers.

If you want to blame someone for the Holocaust, blame humans.

But don’t think this doesn’t have serious implications!

An undergrad one day fought back tears as she confessed to me that she was afraid that she didn’t want to go to heaven.

And she’s not alone. I’ve learned that many Christians fear they won’t like heaven. That also messes up our evangelism if the lost hear it as “repent of your sins and you can be bored forever!”

Make no mistake: this is the devil’s doing.

Thankfully, for the last 30 years I have made the glory that awaits us in eternity the focus of my teaching.

I intend to blog more about the lies the devil tells us regarding heaven, but to start, let me share with you an overview of why I look forward to eternal life.

Why I Look Forward to Eternal Life

I look forward to being with all of you, to getting to know all of you, to sharing endeavors with you and the other saints I’ve gotten to know over the years, and with all the other beings, whether human or not, that I will ever meet.

I look forward to living without guilt (can you imagine?), without tears (not even tears of joy because tears of joy spring from relief of hardship and there won’t be any hardships from which to be relieved), with no death, no mourning, no pain.

I look forward to banquets where we will enjoy the equivalent of premium wines and prime meats and doing this with all of you (He talks about banquets a lot, you know, and in His right hand are pleasures forevermore).¹

I look forward to inheriting a new heaven and a new earth.² You ask what will be in them? Simple, they will be full of purple and yellow pansies; thornless roses of every color and fragrance, water lilies, orchids, mossy trees, and water falls; canyons and mountains full of redwoods and rivers; springs and meadows, beaches and breakers; friendly lions, tigers, and bears; toucans, and tropical fish; eagles and iridescent hummingbirds; trees full of peaches, pears, and plums; every kind of grape and berry vine.

But you ask, where does the Bible say those things will be in the new Heaven and Earth? And, of course, you’re right. The Bible doesn’t say those things will be in the new Heavens or Earth, but the Creator of those things will be there. The Creator of stars and moons and planets and the Milky Way Galaxy and of yellow, orange, pink, and purple sunsets will be there. The Creator of not just worlds, but quasars, black holes, star clusters, and galaxies—with no two alike. For Goodness’ sake, He makes no two snowflakes alike. We’ll be there! Perhaps some of the things I mentioned won’t be there but, if not, we should expect better things in their place—not lesser things. In Revelation John does tell us that six winged seraphs which have four heads with eyes all over them will be there,³ and that a crystal river flows from the throne and that river is surrounded by the Tree of Life that bears twelve crops of fruit and even its leaves heal the nations.⁴

I have tasted a lot of fruits. I wonder what Life tastes like?

I look forward to inheriting these things with you and I look forward to reigning with Jesus⁵ and accomplishing things that won’t rust or decay and will never be undone.

And we know that there is One whose voice was “like the sound of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder, and the voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps.”⁶ We are told there is a throne in heaven and the One sitting on the throne was “like jasper and clear as crystal and carnelian.” There was “a rainbow around the throne, like an emerald,”⁷ and His temple was “decorated with every precious stone” including the deep purplish-blue sapphire, purple amethyst, bluish-green beryl, gold-yellow topaz, green emerald, orange-red jacinth, and pale blue chalcedony.⁸

He will be there.

I look forward to getting to know that One, The One, the Holy One, and to being with Him and enjoying Him commune with you and me.

And I look forward to doing all of this forever.

Revelation 22:4-5: They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

Amen and Amen.

1. Mat. 8:11; Isa. 25:6; Mark 14:25; Rev. 19:9; Psa. 16:11.
2. Luke 12:32; Col. 1:12; Matt. 25:34.
3. Rev. 4:8.
4. Rev. 22:1-2.
5. Rev. 22:5.
6. Rev. 19:6.
7. Rev. 4:3.
8. Rev. 21:19-20. Some of these gems come in different colors.

Consider that God, if He had wanted to, could have created only creatures like otters or golden retrievers. There would certainly have been a lot less evil and suffering in the world (assuming He also made them both vegetarians). Now I like animals, but I’m glad that there are more significant beings around—human beings—that possess a much greater freedom than that.

Consider also that free will is one of the most popular themes of science fiction. For example, Bruce, in Bruce Almighty (2003), is told “don’t mess with free will.” Minority Report (2002), Pleasantville (1998), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Steven Spielberg’s dismal Artificial Intelligence (2001), are other examples of Sci-Fi exploring the free will concept.

One plot device has humankind create a computer/robot that begins to think on its own (that is, it becomes self-aware and exercises free will), and then said machine sets out to destroy humankind. The rest of the movie is about humankind trying to destroy the computer/robot. This is the theme of the four Terminator movies (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009) and TV show; the three The Matrix movies (1999, 2003, 2004); Eagle Eye (2008); i, Robot (2004); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and a host of others.

Another plot device involves one being who tries to take away the free will of another being. For example, the Borg on Star Trek and the pod people in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie (1956 and its two remakes 1979, 2007) attempt to take away free will from humans. In the two The Stepford Wives movies (1975, 2004),¹ the men of Stepford kill their liberated, free-thinking wives and replace them with realistic replicas. But with as much trouble as real spouses can be, would anyone really, I mean honestly, want a robot replacement? Isn’t a robot spouse just three steps above inflatable?

Could we really imagine wanting to live in a world in which we were surrounded only by beings that lacked free will? I can’t, and apparently Ehrman can’t either. Certainly science fiction writers have yet to do so.

Free will is essential to who we are and Ehrman is wrong about the free will defense. His book, God’s Problem, contains many more of Ehrman’s errors. We’ll examime them in future posts.

1. There were also three TV sequels: The Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987), The Stepford Husbands (1996). Apparently the most poignant movie is yet to be made: The Stepford Teenagers.

This bothers many Christians and it used to bother me. But, thankfully, I began to understand that God has very good reasons for not intervening more than He does. First, if God intervened “all of the time,” then our actions wouldn’t mean anything. In fact, it would be a cartoon world. Johnny could be cutting his steak with a knife and the next moment jab it into his little brother, but the knife would turn to rubber and everyone at the table could laugh heartily. An embezzler could write a love note to his wife and then start to write a bad check but the pen wouldn’t work. He gets another pen, it too is out of ink, and on it goes. We wouldn’t need to take an elevator down; we could just jump out the window and float gently to the sidewalk. And why would we need to go to school because no one would ever suffer the consequence of not going?

If our actions are to mean anything at all, then natural laws must work in regular ways. Consider the words of Oxford’s Richard Swinburne:

If God is to allow us to acquire knowledge by learning from experience and above all to allow us to choose whether to acquire knowledge at all or even to allow us to have a very well-justified knowledge of the consequences of our actions—knowledge which we need if we are to have a free and efficacious choice between good and bad—he needs to provide natural evils occurring in regular ways in consequence of natural processes.¹

Swinburne is right and no adult would really want to live in a world without consequences.

But Ehrman often complains about consequences. For example, regarding the disaster of sexually transmitted disease he writes: “It is not only homophobic and hateful but also inaccurate and unhelpful to blame this epidemic on sexual preference or promiscuity. Unsafe practices might spread the disease [that’s an understatement!]—but why is there a disease in the first place?” Well, we know the ground has been cursed because of Adam’s sin, enabling every kind of disease and pestilence, and Adam’s descendants who continue to disobey God by practicing sexual immorality (whether homosexual or heterosexual) bring suffering on themselves that obedience to His commands would largely prevent. Also, does Ehrman seriously doubt that if everyone in the world became Biblically chaste that we wouldn’t soon all but eliminate, if not entirely eliminate, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases? Seriously?

Ehrman also brings up Hurricane Katrina as an example of a natural disaster where people are unfairly blamed. He complains that “some people are all too willing to blame other human beings for what happened. The levees were poorly constructed, and everyone knew it. What right did they have to build New Orleans there anyway?” (231). Now I surely wouldn’t blame the victims for what happened to New Orleans, but shouldn’t we blame the city planners and engineers? After all, the city was built below sea level, the levees were built incapable of withstanding a hurricane stronger than category three, while categories four and five hurricanes were already known to exist. Katrina’s extensive damage was due to humankind’s error. And if there is no God then, who, exactly, is there to blame? Is it not necessary to come to some conclusions of how this disaster happened in order to keep it from happening again? And if there is no God, what is the lesson? Could it be none other than, “We goofed! We built a city below sea level with walls we knew couldn’t withstand a peril that we already knew existed!” As Proverbs 19:3 says, “When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the LORD.”

So Ehrman might take back the Toontown idea that God should intervene “all of the time” and vaguely opine that God should just simply intervene more than He does. But when would Ehrman be satisfied? If fewer died in the Holocaust would Ehrman be satisfied? Instead of six million, what if only 6,000 Jews died? 600? 60? Wouldn’t he still accuse God if only six Jews were gassed in Auschwitz? How much evil is God supposed to stop and yet still enable free creatures to learn how evil free creatures can be, thus preparing them to enter heaven having learned the horror of rebellion?

If God wants us to know not only that our actions are serious but that our actions mean anything at all, then, one more time: He must allow natural laws to work in regular ways.

Consider too that things could be much worse than they are. Hitler tried, but he didn’t get the bomb first! Wouldn’t that have been a game changer! Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot and most of their henchmen are all dead. Genesis 6:3 reveals God’s decision to shorten human life to 120 years from pre-flood spans of hundreds of years. By limiting life spans, He limited both the amount of evil any one person could commit, as well as the amount of suffering any one would have to endure.

Of course, God could have made the world such that every time we looked up we saw a flaming sword dangling over our heads with the knowledge that the slightest rebellion would result in our immediate dismemberment. Then everyone would at least feign being a God-follower, wouldn’t they? But feigned loyalty is no more than rebellion waiting for an opportunity. And what would feigned loyalty accomplish? As the old saying goes, “A person changed against their will is of the same opinion still.”

If God wants people to learn the significance of their actions and to decide freely whether they are going to love Him and love their neighbors, then the universe must be such that there is enough evidence so that those who want to believe will have their belief justified; but not so much evidence that those who want to rebel will feign loyalty.²

1. Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: OUP, 1998), 188-189.
2. Apparently it very takes little evidence to be an atheist since many of them are actually willing to believe that the universe popped into existence out of nothing. How does something come from nothing? As “new atheist” Victor Stenger put it: “Since ‘nothing’ is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable. It would likely undergo a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent. As Nobel laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, ‘the answer to the ancient question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing is unstable.’” From God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Amhurst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 133. Or, as Edward P. Tyron, Ph.D., Professor of physics and cosmology at City University of New York, wrote, “In answer to the question of why it happened, I offer the modest proposal that our Universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.” As quoted in Marcia Bartusiak, Thursday’s Universe (New York: Times Books, 1986), 253.

There’s much to say on this, but I’ll be brief here.

First, the Bible says that one day all the things that cause sin will be destroyed: “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil.” (Mat. 13:41). This includes Satan and his minions, as well as all those who tasted of good and evil and ultimately chose evil. (Rev. 20:10, 13). There will be a new earth (Rev. 21:1) so that the corruptions of this earth will be forever gone; we will no longer be “one-click” from evil. Our bodies will be redeemed and we will no longer know the lusts of the flesh. (Phil. 3:21). But God waits to accomplish these things until all those who will come to Him, come. (2 Pet. 3:9).

Second, the eternal punishment of the eternally unrepentant will serve as an eternal reminder of the peril and horror of sin.

Third, I suspect that lessons learned here and at the Judgment will make sin too ridiculous to commit.¹ In other words, God couldn’t just create beings with a significantly free will and not let them ever use it wrongly, but that doesn’t mean that this world and all the evil we experience here won’t be sufficient, in conjunction with the other things I just mentioned, to make us realize that sin is something we simply won’t want to do—ever.

I use the following illustration when I teach. I will hold a pen, or other sharp object, up to my eye and ask the class if they would like to see me jab it into my eye?² Holding the pen even closer I’ll stress, “I could do it!” Then I’ll ask, “But I’m not going to. Do you know why?” No one ever answers. Finally I tell them, “I’m not going to do it because I’m too smart for that; that would be stupid thing to do.” Consider that we don’t give pens to babies because, sure enough, sooner or later they’d jab them into their eyes. But, even if I lived a billion years on this earth (as long as I still had all my marbles), I would never, ever, intentionally jab a pen into my eye because I know that would be stupid.

That is what is going on in this world. We are learning to distinguish between good and evil (Heb. 5:14). We are learning that sin is not only rebellion but that sin is stupid, hurtful, hateful, and counterproductive. We are learning that God is right, was right, and always will be right. And at the Judgment, where everyone’s evil thoughts and deeds will be exposed, we are going to get an amazing education about the horror of sin. In other words, this life prepares us to be able to use our free will responsibly in Heaven. Just like so many rebellious teenagers, we are learning the hard way—through experience—that our Heavenly Father has been right all along.

And finally, in Heaven, those who persevere in their faith, having learned here that rebellion is inane and insane, will see God who will give them the Kingdom (2 Thess. 1:5; Luke 12:32) where:

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. ~Revelation 22:3-5

1. William Lane Craig makes a similar point in a debate with Ray Bradley. Bradly asked why God didn’t just create heaven and forego this world.

   Craig: “No, Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don’t know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.”

   Bradley: “You’re saying, in effect, that when I characterize heaven as a possible world in which everybody freely receives Christ, I’m wrong insofar as that had to be preceded by this actual world, this world of vale of tears and woe in which people are sinful and the like.”

   Craig: “I’m saying that it may not be feasible for God to actualize heaven in isolation from such an antecedent world.” See: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley3.html

2. I got this illustration from a doctoral class I took years ago from Dallas Willard.

There are two problems with Ehrman’s idea.

First, it would seem that Ehrman sees a strong correlation between intelligence and goodness. Personally, I see absolutely no correlation whatsoever. I do not believe for one minute that intelligence is any indicator of goodness. Those with higher IQs aren’t more moral than those with lower IQs. After all, it was the Nazi doctors who began the genocide in Nazi Germany by killing the disabled and mentally retarded. It took great intelligence to arrange the systematic murder of six million Jews and five million of Slavic descent.

Now I suspect that Ehrman would say that he meant something different than just raw intellectual horsepower. But what would it be? How does God educate beings, like humans, who have decided that He doesn’t know what’s best for us? That He is just holding us back from something good? That He is not looking out for our best interest? That He is spoiling our fun? One student got angry with me: “There must be a way!” My reply was, “Okay, what do you got?” which only made him madder. My point is that it is one thing to just divine, “I know God could have made us so that we would be free creatures but not sin,” and another to actually explain how that would work.

Second, if I understand Ehrman correctly (again, he doesn’t develop these thoughts very far), his argument boils down to: If God can do all things, He could have created only free beings that would always choose right. But, if I do understand him correctly then I’m surprised he doesn’t know better: his argument fails because it requires God do the logically impossible.

When Christians say that God can do all things, we mean that God can do anything that is logically possible. We do not mean that God can actualize contradictory states of affairs. Indeed, Ehrman’s argument commits the fallacy of contradictory premises. Even God cannot make square-circles, two-sided triangles, married-bachelors, or a rock so big He couldn’t pick it up. And neither can He logically create significantly free beings and guarantee that they will never use their freedom wrongly. If we were “engineered” to only choose right, then we wouldn’t be free–we’d be robots. Think Stepford Wives and you’re the wife.

Perhaps this world is precisely the place where free beings are getting schooled that God does, in fact, know best. And this leads us to Ehrman’s next objection, which I will examine in my next post.

1. Ehrman only has these two sentences for this point and one summary sentence that occurs a little later on the same page. Thus it is hard to know what he means, exactly, by “intelligence” (does he mean IQ, a certain type of knowledge, some other kind of ability, or all of the above?).