The Problem of Evil in the Mouth of Babes

His Majesty: “Maybe God doesn’t make houses fly, but He made house flies, which seems like enough of a reason to hold a grudge against Him.”

If you want a more substantial example of the problem of evil, there’s this quote from Massie’s Castles of Steel on the sunking of the Lusitania:

A ship’s junior officer swiming through the wreckage found himself listening to the cries of infants floating nearby in their wicker baskets. There was nothing he could do. Gradually the baskets sank.

I don’t know for sure why that passage has been haunting me so much. It’s like my initial reaction to a description of a partial birth abortion, or (believe it or not) witnessing the destruction of Alderaan. The mind finds itself groping in the darkness for solace.

Perhaps we are too quick to explain these things away. Not that the explanations are wrong, but that they are not the point.

Vader,
agreed. On one reading of the atonement, Christ’s second suffering on the cross was meaningful because it had no meaning. It was important because, like much of the suffering that happens to all of us, it had no importance.

Adam, is your point that the Atonement was complete in Gethsemane? Please elaborate the reading to which you refer.

As I understand the modern prophets, the Atonement started in Gethsemane, but wasn’t complete until the Lamb died.

PS. Did your three year-old see “Up” ?

Books,

I can think of several explanations for the LDS doctrine that the atonement required both Gethsemane and the cross.

1. Life Happens: For no particular reason, some of what could have happened in Gethsemane was put off until Golgotha. In other words, if one argues that the atonement was not complete in Gethsemane because the Father didn’t fully withdraw from the Son until the cross, you aren’t really explaining anything because you haven’t explained *why* the Father didn’t withdraw at Gethsemane. But, on the other hand, there is no particular reason why the atonement had to obey the dramatic unities of time and place. Life just happens. There’s a word I’m thinking of, something like quiddity, that refers to the resistance of life to being neatly packaged.

2. Voluntary Atonement
Christ suffered for our sins and for our suffering at Gethsemane fully. However, his *choice* to suffer at Gethsemane wasn’t fully voluntary because he didn’t yet know, really know, what it meant to suffer all of that. So it was necessary to to do it all again on the cross. The idea here is that you don’t really know something unless you’ve experienced it (which is true) and that no choice is fully voluntary unless you are fully informed about the consequences of the choice (which I’m not sure about).

3. Sacrificial Lamb
The full atonement required violent death, not just suffering.

4. In the house of my friends
It was necessary that Christ be made a victim by us, not just by Satan.

5. Descended below them all
To complete the Atonement, Christ needed to suffer after he had already completed the Atonement, because Christ needed to experience meaningless suffering to fully redeem the mortal experience, which includes meaningless suffering. This is a paradox, but let me at least try to make the paradox clear. I believe that not all mortal suffering has a purpose or a purpose–certainly we experience a lot of suffering this way, where any meaning or purpose we get out of it comes much later and only tentatively. Not all suffering is a needed trial or a needed wake-up call. Why we experience meaningless suffering in this life I don’t know. Probably God can’t have a world where we can act freely within limits without letting us cause meaningless suffering to each other. Probably God can’t let the world be fallen without letting things happen for no good reason. Or it may be that meaningless suffering is preparation for Godhood–because God suffers when his children reject them, and there’s no meaning to it. There is no greater good to it. It just sucks. (This gets us back into paradox territory, because we’re saying that the meaning of our meaningless suffering is that God also suffers meaninglessly, but I still think its true.) Or perhaps for human suffering to truly have meaning as a trial or as purifying experience of whatever, we have to experience it as meaningless. I suspect that an Abrahamic trial requires one to feel and believe that there is no point to the trial. Abraham isn’t being tried if his response is, O, I get it, this is just a test and what appears to be horrible about all this will work out in the end–or, at least, if that’s his response, it has to be in the face of what he’s experiencing in the trial. So, I hear you saying, OK, fine, but what about the Atonement? The Atonement is supreme suffering, but also supremely meaningful. It is the supremely meaningful act. How then can the meaningful, heroic Atonement redeem and sanctify our meaningless, unheroic suffering? My argument is that possibly Christ did everything the Atonement required in the Garden and that Golgotha was just cruelty. But if the Son of God could suffer to the extremity for no good reason, then my pointless suffering is now godlike. Hence the paradox.

I think more than one of these explanations can be true. For instance, I think both 3 and 4 are true, and I halfway accept 2.

I also accept 5. I could be wrong in application, but I believe the principle is sound. I have no idea how to reconcile 5 with 3 or 4 or especially 2.

6. Christ had to suffer death in order to overcome it, but the suffering in Gethesemane was not fatal.

But I like the others, particularly 4.

I have a slight quibble with 1. I don’t know what it means for an omniponent, omniscient Father to “withdraw his presence.” I wonder if we put the wrong interpretation of Christ quoting the first verse of Psalm 22. It is a Suffering Servant psalm, but ultimately a triumphant one, in which one of the themes is that YWHW does not forsake the Suffering Servant.

Vader,
your no. 6 is my no. 3

Adam,

Well, I elaborated a bit on it.

“But if the Son of God could suffer to the extremity for no good reason, then my pointless suffering is now godlike. ”

That sounds very Catholic, or Dostoevsky-like. (Not that I’m necessarily disagreeing with any of it.)

At some future point, those who attain (or who are designated to eventually attain) exaltation will have to fully understand it. Non-exalted beings outside of the CK may never understand it.

Extrapolating upon the principles set forth in JS’s King Follett discourse, there will be a parallel between the first-born spirit-sons of exalted couples of our generation, and the relationship that our Savior-brother has to our Heavenly Father.

I then point attention to Christ’s statement that He could only do what He saw/heard/learned from his Father. Therefore my conclusion is that Heavenly Father was either the Savior of His generation, or else had “taken upon Him” the qualities/likeness/etc of _His_ Savior-brother to such a degree that His firstborn spirit Son could look upon Him, and Him alone, and “see” the “Savior” of that generation.

Hence, I believe that all men who are to attain unto exaltation will, at some point, need to know (to the point that they can _teach_ it and have their firstborn _see_ it in them) exactly what Gethsemane and Golgotha were. That degree of _knowing_ the Atonement has scarily profound implications that I can’t seem to verbalize.

Oh, btw, the church’s web filter (a DNS server that all church facilities seem to use) which normally allows access to this blog, denied me access to this post. I assume “babes” in the title and url is a blocking word. I got a chuckle out of that.

The doctrine of apotheosis, man becoming divine, is so thoroughly grounded in scripture, ancient as well as modern, that even the Greek Orthodox believe in a (carefully restricted) form of it.

Its complement, the doctrine of God once being like man, has remarkably little support in scripture for such an enduring popular Mormon belief. The only canonical basis I know of for it is a single line spoken in a certain place. It seems to have originated in the King Follett Discourse, which has never been canonized. It was taken up with enthusiasm by some of Joseph Smith’s associates, and perhaps he taught the doctrine to them independently of the King Follet Discourse.

I find the doctrine problematic in some theological respects, but on balance I favor it, because it solves a host of cosmological problems. There are something like a trillion stars in every galaxy, and trillions of galaxies in the universe — if even a small fraction of these have inhabited planets (and certainly the modern scriptural canon speaks of many worlds) then God and Christ are stretched rather thin, so to speak, unless God and Christ are types rather than individuals.

Traditional Mormon belief about the origin of God thus solves the cosmological problem, albeit while introducing some other theological problems I needn’t go into here. But then the Joseph Field Smith/Bruce R. McConkie school tried to throw that away by making God the Father the Christ of His generation, thus nullifying Joseph Smith’s solution to the cosmological problem while retaining its other theological challenges.

Bruce R. McConkie did the Church a great service by providing a strong conservative voice in a time of considerable social turmoil. He also made a significant contribution to Mormon theology by keeping alive our awareness of the second Comforter. But Mormon Doctrine has a lot of problems.

Books.,
a member of my bishopric suggested last night that Isaiah 3-4–”and babes shall rule over them”–was a Sarah Palin prophecy.
He was joking, thankfully.

Vader: If all generations of gods repeat/replicate themselves in the same way, then someone was the Christ of Father Elohim’s generation. By extrapolation, I assume that if it wasn’t Father Elohim himself, Father Elohim had to have taken upon him the name/countenance/etc. of that Savior (to the degree that Jehovah could look upon Father Elohim and see/learn how to be a Savior himself.)

By that, I also assume that if you aspire to godhood, one of the things you must learn will be how to teach your firstborn spirit child how to be a savior for his generation.

As to cosmology: I am unclear if Father Elohim’s domain/kingdom is our entire universe, our galaxy, or somewhere in between, such as our galaxy cluster (group of galaxies). Since He “became” God prior to our beginning-of-time (since He is from eternity to eternity), I assume that was prior to either the creation of our galaxy, or prior to the creation of our universe. As He will be God _to_ all eternity, He will be God after this universe (or galaxy or group of galaxies) ceases to exist, ie, the “end” of “our time”.

The black hole at the center of all galaxies (some observed, and the rest postulated) hints that a galaxy will have an end when it collapses upon itself. These black hole endings may correspond to a “white hole” beginning of a new galaxy formed out of recycled matter.

I wonder if universes are formed, collapsed and recycled in a parallel manner.

The phrases “One eternal round” and “No end and no beginning” hint at these things.

Such collapse of a galaxy (or of a universe), ie, a “big crunch”, in which time literally ceases to exist for that galaxy/universe, also has implications on the meanings and connotations of “forever”, “never” “always” and “until the end of time.” Everything has a “reset” when its universe collapses, including “always” and “forever”, ie, a big “do over”.

I’m starting to suspect that even resurrected immortal (but not eternal and not exalted) beings have an end, or dissolution, when their galaxy/universe collapses, with their contituent particles, both spirit matter and physical matter, being returned to the “inventory” from which they were previously organized. Hence, after such collapse only exalted beings continue in their resurrected and exalted state, while all non-exalted beings eventually undergo a form of “eternal” “death”/dissolution upon the collapse of the overall galaxy or universe.

Oh well. Enough navel-gazing and looking beyond the mark. I need to focus more on faith/repentence/baptism/enduring.

But I can’t help thinking that “Mormonism” including the D&C and the KFD go a long way to reconcile cosmology/astrophysics and Christianity.

“If all generations of gods repeat/replicate themselves in the same way, then someone was the Christ of Father Elohim’s generation. By extrapolation, I assume that if it wasn’t Father Elohim himself, Father Elohim had to have taken upon him the name/countenance/etc. of that Savior (to the degree that Jehovah could look upon Father Elohim and see/learn how to be a Savior himself.)”

Agreed. This is what I mean by types.

The present scientific evidence is that our universe will not experience a crunch. On the contrary, its expansion is presently accelerating. But then it’s only in the last ten years that we’ve known its expansion is accelerating. One can easily imagine models in which the acceleration reverses itself at some point and closes the universe.

Brigham Young speculated that sons of perdition would be “recycled” in a manner much like you describe, and that this constitutes the second death.

But we’re already way beyond the boundaries of revealed knowledge at this point. I am wary of speculative theology because it is such an easy target for fools to mock.