Brown to Bloss, 3-31-98:
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MB:
-It may not be fruitfully debated, lest that Consciente Majoris take
-part.  "'Come, let us reason together', saith the Lord."  He wasn't
-inviting us to reason amongst ourselves, He wants to be in on our
-reasoning, helping to enlighten our eyes.  I really do believe that
-the better we see the universe, the more enlightened our eyes become.
-And that those that bury their understanding in human reasoning alone
-are making a mistake.  What other understanding is there than human
-reasoning?  The understanding that _is_, that which knows already
-what we do not yet know.
>What lead me away from Christianity was the lack of reason, and a
>failure to respond to paradox by saying that it just was the will
>of God.  A God who condemns to hell, yet is merciful, a God who's
>omnipotent but yet I have a free will, and the existence of evil,
>all paint an irrational view of God.
The God in question here, however, is the God of the Ontological
Argument.  That is, that being than which none is greater or more
perfect.
Such a God would have to be omnipotent, omniscient, and all good
(all rational).  Even on this model, it could be argued that God
gave man free will in order to show how wonderfully the system He
created actually works.  Anything irrational about that?  It would
be hard to argue.  The existence of Evil in the world thus becomes
no more than a way of demonstrating that God's creation was, after
all, a good thing, and the best thing which a truly good God could
have done (a God who created a world without evil and without free
will would not have created a world in which humans could
appreciate that it was good, since good is impossible to
appreciate except by way of contrast with evil, and cannot be
chosen except by free will).
What I am saying here is that there are conceptual ways of
explaining away the Problem of Evil which leave the moral
perfection of God untouched--so long as the subject here is the
God of the Ontological Argument.
A more fundamental problem lies in whether the Ontological
Argument is valid.  It claims to PROVE the existence of God, and
thus make his existence a tautology and therefore not synthetic.
But it is possible to show that the argument in fact is invalid,
even though one cannot rely on the notion that all existential
propositions are synthetic (Kant).
Another problem here is that this God is not the same as that in
the Bible or the Creeds.
The Creeds (e.g.  the Nicene-Constantinopolitan) go no further
than declaring that God is the subject of all creation, except for
remarks about his relation, as the Father, to Jesus Christ.  They
do not describe God as that being than which is none is greater or
more perfect.  As a result, one cannot hold the standard of the
Ontological Argument against the Creeds by appealing to the
Problem of Evil.
A similar problem exists in the Bible.  There are many different
conceptions of God in the Bible, not all of them consistent with
one another; but none of them describes God as 'that being than
which none is greater or more perfect'.  This latter definition
originates with Saint Anselm and is in fact a philosopher's
definition, rather than a believer's definition.
So, you pretty much have to look at each one as they come up.
Continued ...
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