Saturday, May 1, 2010

Philosopher here we come?

Those of you following Karen's post-employment blog know that I am now employed at Kimray, Inc., packing up oil field valves. Different from my previous (desk) job, it's very physically demanding, which I enjoy.

But as part of the whole discussion of what to do next, Karen and I decided that perhaps I should start pursuing my interest in philosophy and apologetics more purposefully. One possibility is trying to get into the graduate program at OU. But in the meantime, I've been allowing myself to get back into that world a little more. It was something that I haven't had time for very much since getting married...really since a couple of years before we got married. But it's always been an interest.

This week, we had an opportunity to go to OU and see Os Guinness speak on "Whence Evil and Suffering?" One interesting thing he talked about was the "Trilemma."
As Guinness said, a dilemma has two horns; the Trilemma, then, has three. It says:
  1. God is all-good.
  2. God is all-powerful
  3. Evil is really evil.
The problem is, all three of these cannot logically be true. Any two of them exclude the third. Guinness claimed that this is solved by the Bible's putting a "twist" on each point:
  1. Evil is really evil, but it wasn't supposed to be this way
  2. God is all-good, but he has wounds
  3. God is all-powerful, and even though we can't understand why he does what he does, we can understand why we can trust him
I've been thinking about whether materialism actually must deal with a similar trilemma. Materialism, as you might know, is essentially the worldview of an atheist: that the universe and life is best explained through it's "material" aspects alone, without a God-figure. This person most likely believes something like:
  1. The laws of nature are all-powerful
  2. Humans have the ability to decide what "good" is
  3. Natural events happen that offend our decisions about what "good" is
We should be able to see how any two of these points disallows the third, but I have to admit that it feels a little weaker than the Christian version. Why is that? Is there a better way to express this, that puts the materialistic trilemma in stronger terms?

4 comments:

  1. In the words of my 4 yr old daughter... huh?

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  2. I take that as a vote of confidence that I have natural talents in this area and should definitely pursue it. :-)

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  3. Could you find an atheist to clarify materialism's core beliefs? The right person could be a great asset. Right now the materialist sounds similar to a Gaia worshiper.

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