Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Supernaturalists are naturalists

In all the time I've spent researching whether or not I believed in God, one of the authors I always had referred to was C.S.Lewis and his book Miracles. His main discussion in that book is the difference between naturalists (people who believe that the universe we experience with our senses and logic is all there is) and supernaturalists (people who believe that there could be something outside of the universe that created it).

The more I look, I am finding that most supernaturalists are closer to being naturalists than they realize. For example, one argument for the existance of God is that we all have a sense of morality and justice, which must have been put there by a creator. It is the belief of the supernaturalist that all of our inclinations towards morality are a reflection of the thoughts of God, and He decided before our creation what was just and put in our hearts those ideas. If this were the case, I would expect that every act of God or action He approves of or commands would agree with my sense of justice and morality. If God gave me my ethics, I should wholeheartedly agree with His. However, I am hard pressed to find anyone who strongly agrees with the actions of God while establishing the nation of Isreal. He commanded killing of women and children and occasionally ordered genocide of 'evil' people groups. If our sense of justice or morality comes from God, why do his actions violate that? We should not need apologists to try to make sense of this issue, but we should find ourselves resonating in agreement with every one of God's actions. Yet, we don't.

If God truly is the origin of everything, including natural and spiritual laws, then He should be bound by no law except those he chooses to follow. Why is it that the wages of sin are death? God appears to be subject to a spiritual law he cannot overcome; he has no choice but to die for his people. If he created everything, why not create a world where forgiveness does not require death, but comes freely?

I believe that most people follow God not because they are convinced he created 'good' but because he is good. If God's commandments about love and justice are just whims of a creator, then nothing is truly good at all, but merely an opinion. In that case, God is subject to the laws of right and wrong just as we are, some deeper meaning of justice that is even greater than God.

No comments:

Post a Comment