Faith Through Works
Before we all got wrapped up in reviewing for the midterm, we had discussion which ended with thoughts on a very intriguing notion and question concerning The Problem of Evil. “God must know when and if bad things are/will going to happen…so why does he allow it?” It seems like a simple enough question to pose. But I thought about this statement for a long time.
As we talked about in lecture, Philo, in Part II of the Dialogues proclaims how we must call God the “ultimate cause of the Universe.” However, Demea later describes how God’s thoughts cannot be like ours because of the difficulty there is in a human picturing absolute perfection. Both of these proclamations seem to form a paradox. On one hand, I think that if a being, like God, is the “ultimate cause of the Universe,” then He should know anything and everything about human thought, human decision making, and internal and external elements effecting humans in the world. On the other hand, because no human is perfect, how can we know what absolute perfection is? Therefore, if God were to think like us, he would also be incapable of picturing perfection. These two means lead me back to my original thought.
Let’s say God does know everything about everything and that He is the perfect being, while at the same time, can understand how and why, we (humans) can think in an imperfect way. Maybe it is the fact that God is incapable of intervening into out lives in the way that we want Him to. I believe in God, and my thought has always been, when we pray, God will answer us in ways we are not satisfied with. We want “Yes” or “No.” I believe that God works in different ways. I believe that God promised he would return to the Earthly world when he decided to/ when the time was right. Some people might think this is absurd or that I lead a blind faith. But faith, to me, is more than “leaning” on my beliefs. Faith is done by acts. It might be that God allows bad things to happen because He wants us to take an action through faith in helping to prevent these “bad things” from happening. In now way am I saying that mankind can prevent all “bad things” from occurring, but that might be God’s vision- of a world where bad things do not happen as a result of humans working through faith.
I recently was home for the weekend and went to a church service. The sermon was about how faith, without acts, is blind. It really hit me on how true that is. Sure, people say they believe in God. Others say they do not believe in God. Either way, faith in a better world is not necessarily a mirage. Faithful acts of kindness and generosity can lead to future understanding of a less “imperfect world.”