In Isaiah 45:7, the KJV translates the Hebrew word "rah" as "evil". More modern English translations often opt for the word "calamity" instead. Either one of these translations is viable and could be the intended meaning of the passage.
However, that God is ultimately the Uncaused First Cause of all sinful actions is clear from both scripture and reason, so even if the verse cited does not make the point, the general concept behind the question remains.
So why should we worship a God who has caused our sin?
Let's look a little closer at the question and what it means exactly.
What does it mean to say that someone "should" do something? "Should" according to whom?
In the Christian worldview, God is the one who determines what "should" be done and what "should not" be done. Any other determinations of what "should" be done are arbitrary and subjective, without any universal, objective or authoritative merit. Further, if they are contrary to what God has determined "should" be done, then they are objectively wrong or incorrect.
In other words, if Christianity is true (and it is) then we "should" worship God simply because He says we should (Matthew 4:10; Luke 10:27; Acts 17:30; Revelation 14:7).
It's important to remember that in the Christian worldview, it is incoherent to suggest that God can be wrong, mistaken, or in error. The concept of "wrong" is meaningless when applied to God, as He is the one in ontological authority. To be "wrong" is simply to be contrary to the ontological authority. Thus, if He says we "should" worship Him, then we should worship Him. From a Christian perspective, it is ontologically (inherently, objectively, necessarily, logically, naturally, essentially) incorrect to suggest the contrary.
God's Word is true. Always. The contrary is impossible.
Therefore, we should worship Him because He says so.
Comments
Here is what was asked:
If Christianity is true, then God created evil.
If God created evil, why should we worship Him?
Here was my answer:
If Christianity is true, God decides what we should do.
God decided we should worship Him.
Therefore we should worship Him.
Your response seems to amount to:
If Christianity is true, it is not the case that God decides what we should do.
I was wondering where in the Bible you see this asserted? How do you defend this claim?
Thanks!
I certainly could be wrong, but I think there is a difference between the argument you are making and the argument you think you are making.
Here is the argument it appears you think you are making:
A-P1. If Christianity is true, then it would be a sin for God to cause His creation to sin.
A-P2. If Christianity is true, then God has caused His creation to sin.
A-C. If Christianity is true, then God is a sinner.
But there doesn't seem to be any justification for A-P1. I certainly don't see this claim made in scripture anywhere, but rather the exact negation of this claim is made in the Bible (Romans 9:21-22; Proverbs 16:4). So A-P1 in this argument is false.
[continued]
Further, I think you yourself would agree that it is not inherently wrong for a creator to cause his creation to sin. Would you say that it was wrong for George Lucas to cause Darth Vader to cut off Luke Skywalker's hand? Or was Mark Twain sinning when he caused Injun Joe to sin by killing Doctor Robinson? So why is it wrong when your Creator does these same things with His creation? Why would you dictate such a double standard?
Lastly, it is necessarily true that there is only one united, eternal, volitional, uncaused first cause of all things that occur. And, it is necessarily true that this initiator is incapable of error (and therefore worthy of praise), or else reality would be incoherent. So regardless of what the Bible plainly says or does not say, every man must come to terms with worshipping the one who ultimately caused all men to sin, or else claim that reality is utterly incoherent.
[continued]
http://www.godcontention.org/index.php?qid=424
Having said that, I think the argument you are really making is as follows:
B-P1. If Humanism is true, it would be a sin for anyone to cause a human to sin.
B-P2. If Christianity is true, God has caused humans to sin.
B-C. If Humanism and Christianity are both true, God is a sinner.
This argument seems to be valid and accurate if we assume a definition of Humanism that agrees with B-P1. But this would be why I do not claim to embrace a form of Christian-Humanism like the one this argument attacks.
[continued]
In other words, your argument seems to be a (probably unintentional) straw man attacking Christian-Humanism while calling it Christianity. The reality is that you have not addressed Biblical Christianity at all.
In fact, since B-P2 is necessarily true for reality to be coherent, we can see from this argument that Humanism (and B-P1) is necessarily false.
God bless.
God bless.
Your claim assumes that acts themselves have an inherent "evil" or "non-evil" nature or essence. However, "evil" or "sin" is actually disobedience to God (1 John 3:4; Malachi 3:18; James 2:8-11). If God were to command you to kiss your wife, it would be evil for you to not kiss your wife. However, if God commands me not to kiss your wife, it is good for me to not kiss your wife. Same action, different person, different moral value depending upon the command of God.
If God commands Himself not to cause people to sin, then it would be sin for Him to cause people to sin. But He has not given Himself this command.
If God commands us not to cause people to sin, then it is evil or sinful for us to do so.
Moral good is simply obedience to God. God always obeys Himself, so He is moral and good.
Deanna Laney claimed as much in May 2003 when she bashed her kid's heads in, apparently on god's orders. Was she actually insane (as the court found) or was her brutal killing of her children actually good because god told her to do it? What do you think Tim?
Regarding discerning moral obligations, the Bible is pretty clear in most circumstances. If it is all we have from God on an issue, then we are to go with it. Sometimes God commands otherwise, and then His direct and specific personal communication always trumps His broad and general communication through scripture. (ie Acts 10-11)
I am not familiar enough with the Deanna Laney case to speak on it.
However, in general, government is to rule based upon the communication it has received from God, and the individual is to act based upon the communication he or she receives from God. This way, everyone is in obedience to God, which is the goal when dealing with moral issues.
Why does this seem to you to be a "problem"?
Now that we've cleared that up, I see that you've backtracked on your previous claims that the bible is "authoritative". Now it's just "pretty clear in most circumstances"
So that's rape, murder and the problem of loving your neighbour (or not) covered. How many more issues that the bible is hopelessly confused about do you want me to deal with?
You can see now why this "direct and specific personal communication" from god seems to be a problem to me, can't you Tim?
Given Numbers 31:16's reference to Numbers 25, it's difficult to believe that Numbers 31:18 has anything to do with sex at all. Instead of being killed with the other people of Midian, the younger women were kept as servants or slaves.
But regardless, I'm having trouble making sense of what you are advocating and what you are opposing. As far as I can tell, you seem to be saying the following two things:
A1. Tim says we should obey God;
A2. Deanna Laney did not obey God even though she said she did (Deuteronomy 18:22);
A3. Therefore Tim has to conclude that she should NOT be in prison but should "get out of jail free".
B1. Anon says we do not have to obey anyone but ourselves;
B2. Deanna Laney obeyed herself (as did the raping Israelites, Adolf Hitler, Manson and Dahmer);
B3. Therefore Anon concludes that she should be in prison.
If I correctly understand your two trains of thought, then I don't see how your conclusions follow from your premises in either case.
My question is - where's your evidence? Surely you don't just expect me to take your word for it? You could be lying or insane (or both) too. To be blunt Tim, when you say that god speaks to you, I don't believe a word of it. Give me some evidence that I can evaluate, much as you provided the evidence by which we evaluated Deanna Laney's claims of "direct and specific personal communication" from your god.
If you did not know these things, which you could not possibly know unless God informed you of them, you would have no justification for holding to the law of non-contradiction. Without justification for the law of non-contradiction, you would have no justification for any belief at all, including the belief that evidence justifies conclusions.
[continued]
To go back to my question for you, God is ultimately the one who informed you that evidence justifies conclusions. You believe Him because He is in complete control of reality, so reality always obeys Him (1 Chronicles 29:14; Job 41:11; Psalm 119:91, 135:6; Ecclesiastes 11:5; Mark 10:27; John 1:3, 5:44; Acts 17:24; 1 Timothy 1:17, 6:15; Jude 1:25); because He knows everything (Job 37:16; Psalm 147:5; Isaiah 46:9-10; John 21:17; 1 John 3:20); and because He never lies (Exodus 34:6; 2 Samuel 7:28; Psalm 31:5, 57:10; John 1:14, 1:17, 14:6; Ephesians 4:21; Hebrews 6:18). In short, you believe Him because He is the absolute authority on the issue.
If those things weren't true, all of your conclusions would be unjustified, unreasonable, unwarranted, ungrounded, and irrational by definition:
https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=irrational+definition
[continued]
Why would you care whether you have evidence of my own personal experiences when you yourself have experienced much the same thing, and you have absolute, undeniable, deductive proof of it?
http://godcontention.org/christian/an-easy-way-to-demonstrate-that-atheism-is-false
You'll find it makes just as much sense.
Any presuppositional argument ideally does 2 things. First, it shows that the opponent's view is contradictory. Second, it shows that Christianity is not. In this case, the opponent's view was that God does not communicate to humans, and also that evidence justifies conclusions. I demonstrated that such a claim is self-defeating, thus contradictory ("who told you that evidence justifies conclusions, and why do you believe them?"). I also demonstrated that there is of deductive necessity (ie. necessary in order to claim rational justification for any assertion at all) a singular omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, omnipresent God, who cannot lie, who has communicated to each of us, and that Christianity is perfectly consistent with this (Romans 1:18-20).
To suggest that I failed to prove something beyond the scope of what I intended to prove is irrelevant.
Your claim that God has not communicated to you is therefore, as I stated above, a self-defeating claim. If true, you can have no justification for it and your claim is thus irrational, since God is ultimately the only possible rationale for any claim whatsoever.
If God hasn't communicated to you, you ultimately have no reason for anything at all. At best, you have simply invented your own set of "facts" on your own authority and have no reason to believe that they reflect reality, a reality which you did not invent and have no authority over.
You are unjustified in relying on the law of non-contradiction. What is your justification for claiming it accurately reflects reality? Insults and using the word "seriously" are not justifications for using the law of non-contradiction.
The only possible justification you can have for your certainty in the law of non-contradiction is God's direct communication to you, which you claim you do not have. Therefore, if He has not communicated to you, everything you assert (since it all relies on the premise that the law of non-contradiction is 100% valid) is unjustified and thus irrational.
Who told you the law of non-contradiction was accurate and why did you believe them?
I just wanted to point out that the law of non-contradiction (or logic in general) is not evidence for the existence of God.
Logic (including non-contradiction) is accurate for the same reason it is accurate to say that "what comes up must go down" - because this is our direct experience.
However, we now have enough technology and scientific understanding of nature to observe parts of nature where these things aren't actually true.
"What goes up must come down" doesn't really apply outside of a sufficient gravitational field (that's why if we launch rockets into space with sufficient escape velocity, they don't actually come down, but just keep going)
Similarly with non-contradiction, while it applies to the vast majority of our daily life, there are natural circumstances in which something both is and is not (google schrodinger's cat, and the uncertainty principle)
The take home message here is two-fold:
1) whatever we call "laws" aren't really laws, but are observations that hold up over a long period of time. For a very long period of time, we couldn't find anything that disobeyed non-contradiction, and therefore the law of non-contradiction became an established "law" of logic. But logic is just a shorthand for "observations that hold up over a long period of time". In the end, its not a law, as we have examples now of natural things which both exist, and do not exist (such as an electron, which is a wave and a particle simultaneously, or rather a field of electron potential, the position of which you cannot accurately measure, because it simultaneously exists in a particular position, and does not exist, and when you measure it, its position is unpredictable)
2) Even if there was such a law (and there is not) it still does not follow that this law somehow is evidence for the existence of God.
Moreover, facts are not invented. You said "If God hasn't communicated to you, you ultimately have no reason for anything at all. At best, you have simply invented your own set of "facts" on your own authority and have no reason to believe that they reflect reality, a reality which you did not invent and have no authority over."
This is incorrect in a trivial sense. Facts are not invented, and authority is not assumed. Facts are observed, and authority is established within a social order. As to the invention of reality, the jury is still out on what comes first, matter or consciousness. This might be the closest to God that we get, but it is not as simplistic as God communicating the laws of non-contradiction to us, for reasons I stated earlier.
Tim, if you really can't see the problem with the phrase "Since god allegedly hasn't communicated anything to you, you can't be absolutely certain of anything at all, including whether or not god has clearly communicated with you" then the problem is with your cognitive ability. The phrase is essentially meaningless and nonsenical. There is no difference in meaning or import between that phrase and the following;
"Since god hasn't struck me down by lightning, I can't be absolutely certain of anything at all, including whether or not god has struck me down by lightning".
Can you see the problem, Tim?
"The phrase is essentially meaningless and nonsenical." I completely agree. Nonsense is what necessarily follows from your claim that God has never communicated to you. That was my whole point.
God is the foundation of human reason. Without God, there can be no reason. Without reason, we have no way of knowing anything at all:
http://godcontention.org/christian/an-easy-way-to-demonstrate-that-atheism-is-false
What if your experiences don't reflect reality, even if they do? You're implicitly using the law of non-contradiction to justify your use of empirical evidence. But who told you that the law of non-contradiction was valid and why did you believe them? Or, who told you empirical evidence generally reflects reality and why did you believe them?
In other words, by whose authority do you justify your reasoning processes in drawing conclusions about the universe around you? Is it someone in charge of the universe? Or someone without the authority to make guarantees about it's operation?
If a person keeps asking "How do you know?" you'll eventually get to the point where you just have to say that the universe appears to exist and appears to behave consistently. This is a brute fact and it makes no sense to ask "why" or "how do you know" beyond that point".
I should also point out that theists like Tim often deride the use of "evidence" to gain knowledge but bear in mind that they do this ONLY WHEN IT SUITS THEM, which is hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty.
We aren't pushing the causal question back a level -- we're answering it.
[continued]
Of course, my previous comment posts are actually about justification for knowledge claims, not about ontological causality, though the two issues are definitely related. I am arguing that knowledge claims need to be rationally justified or else they are irrational (which really isn't under debate). The existence of God is not a knowledge claim and therefore does not need to be rationally justified.
"I know that God exists" is a knowledge claim. "The law of non-contradiction reflects reality" is a knowledge claim. "Observations can assist in determining truth" is another knowledge claim.
[continued]
All of these claims need to be rationally justified or else they are irrational. Since monotheism begins with a rational source, and our knowledge ultimately results from that source, truth claims can be rationally justified. Since atheism begins without a rational source, and our "knowledge" ultimately results from non-rational sources, no claim can be rationally justified, because their foundations are all without reason.
In other words, I reduce your line of inquiry to the observation that "I think, therefore I am." and I see no reason to postulate a second "I" behind my own solely to explain my own reasoning.
That seems to me like asking myself "who gives me the authority to walk down the block and buy my groceries?" As if there needs to be a God of Walking for me to justify my ability to walk. I have two feet. I use them.
Based on what you've just said, and your earlier comment, you seem to be saying that you've concluded that empirical evidence accurately reflects reality simply because you decided to conclude that. You call it "by default", which I think means you have no reason at all, though I may be misunderstanding you.
You could equivalently decide to conclude "by default" that a man named Obama is the president of the US, or you could conclude "by default" that pink flying unicorns live on a planet 30 times the size of the earth, floating exactly 300 feet above Bangor, Maine. All three conclusions, when justified "by default" are in fact equivalently justified -- namely, not at all.
This makes them irrational, whether or not they are in fact accurate.
Perhaps you are fine with that?
"...God is not the result of anything, so there is no sense in seeking His cause" - this assertion is made without evidence and can be dismissed out of hand.
"Human knowledge is the result of something, so we ought to agree that both of these results (humans and their knowledge) have been caused. Sine they are results, seeking their cause makes sense" - see my point immediately above.
"We aren't pushing the causal question back a level, we're answering it" - no you're not, you're just making assertions without evidence.
"The existence of God is not a knowledge claim" - then what is it if not a knowledge claim?
"..."I know that god exists" is a knowledge claim" - you're contradicting what you said immediately above.