Perfect, yet unpleasant
Another tired contribution to the tired “problem of evil” discussion
DISCLAIMER: I am no Bible scholar. To the extent that I write with any authority, it is the authority of someone who has 1) physically opened a Bible at least once in his life, and 2) did so with the intent of learning something, rather than cherry-picking some objectionable phrase to be outraged about.
NOTE: This is what happens when I procrastinate, cram my writing in the last day or two, and don’t proofread before publishing. Embarrassingly, I referred to “Joseph/Israel” in the original version of this post. Of course, I was referring to “Jacob/Israel”.
I wrote last week1 about the Wesley Huff-Billy Carson “debate”. When things started to go very badly for Billy, he attempted a number of ineffective distractions to include woke non sequiturs (“the Bible was written by men in order to oppress women!”) and outright fallacies (“the Bible creation myth involves water, therefore it was copied from an earlier civilization’s water-based creation myth”).
Through the endless screams and inane babble, Billy also said something that is worth discussing. How is it that, if the Bible is God’s own instruction directly to us on how to live, it also contains contradictions? How is it that the vast majority of all characters in the Bible are, to a lesser or greater extent, flawed? Shouldn’t all Biblical leaders—Moses, Abraham, Jacob/Israel, the Apostles—be paragons of virtue, exemplars of proper living?
To start, it is worth noting that the Judeo-Christian tradition does not teach that the Bible is a download directly from God. Billy may be thinking of Islam, which teaches that the Koran is literally the words of Allah, transcribed verbatim (which lends extra holiness to the physical object of the book).
The Hebrew Bible makes no such claims, although the identity of the author of any given book may not be clear.
The New Testament, even more so than the Old, is quite openly presented as the collected writings of specific people who are known to have lived (insofar as we can be sure about people who lived 2,000 years ago). For example, the four Gospel books are explicitly presented as each author’s version of events, based on his own recollections, interpretations, and research. It includes events the author was not present for and didn’t claim to have witnessed.
All of which is to say that the Bible is not, as Billy appears to believe, a set of instructions from God.
Debatably, some books of the Old Testament—Leviticus, Deuteronomy—are exactly that: collections of rules and laws that must be followed exactly. There are some religious communities that interpret them exactly in that way. However, the Christian tradition holds that the laws of that covenant, while necessary and binding at the time they were given, have since been fulfilled in a new covenant.
To be sure, there are some books in the Bible—most notably prophesies—that describe things not as they are or have been, but rather as they should or will be. However, it is much more accurate, not to mention useful, to view much of the Bible as a collection of (ostensibly true) stories and commentaries on (ostensibly real) events.
From which it follows that the people involved, being real people, will not always be perfectly virtuous; and the stories will not always be happy ones where God tells us what to do, we do it, and everything goes well as a result.
Instead, the Bible tells stories of flawed people who, even when they know what is right, sometimes choose to do wrong. In the process, they may or may not learn anything; but the attentive reader always does.
Instead of a series of divine instructions (“do thus, because I have said so”), we have a series of object lessons (“here is what happens when one does thus”). This may strike some as contrived or heavy-handed. However, these lessons have endured, and have guided civilizations for literal millennia. And as noted previously2, that’s something worth paying attention to.
But I think that this actually reflects a deeper insight into the nature of existence—both life in general and human existence specifically.
A fundamental characteristic of life is that it expends energy to achieve and maintain a local low-entropy state.
A cell membrane selectively permits certain substances to pass through, creating ionic imbalances (the sodium-potassium pump) and responding to circulating proteins.
A single-celled organism will move up a chemical gradient toward a source of energy (food), and will move down a gradient to get away from a toxin or other source of danger.
A human does the dishes, goes to work, brushes his teeth, and drives on the right side of the road. All of these acts require effort, and all of them result in low-probability outcomes that defy the natural tendency of everything to devolve into a uniform, meaningless, chaotic soup.
And since the default state is uniform, chaotic, and meaningless, it stands to reason that the state pursued by life is differentiated, ordered, and meaningFUL.
In other words, it is in the things that take effort that we find our meaning. The struggle is not just real—it is essential.
Agent Smith of The Matrix opined that “human beings define their reality through suffering and misery”. While this is the darkest possible take on the concept, I believe that Agent Smith is fundamentally correct. We find motivation in avoiding pain; we find meaning in expending effort to change our local reality from its current undesirable state to a future desirable one. The undesirability of the current state manifests itself in some form of pain (physical or emotional), and progress toward a more desirable future state moves us down the pain gradient. In other words, Pain Creates Change.
Both the Old and New Testament are consistent is describing the default state of humanity as being unrighteous. Left to our own devices, we are cruel, selfish, and wanton; we seek instant gratification and are content with it. The state of righteousness (or virtue, or salvation) is not something that comes naturally; we have to expend effort to achieve and maintain it.
The Bible goes to some lengths to explain the desirability of the future state (righteousness). But it is just as important, if not more so, to explain the undesirability of the current state (sin), even though it offers that sweet, sweet instant gratification.
For all of our intellect, the best way we learn (often the only way) is through making mistakes. And the best learners are the ones who use other people’s mistakes, rather than making their own. That’s precisely what the Bible offers: a compilation of several thousand years of other people’s mistakes; an opportunity to avoid being added to humanity’s blooper reel.
So why is the Bible filled with flawed characters? Why do humans do bad things? Why does God allow the existence of suffering?
Because that’s how we get better.
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