Random Rambling

In my philosophy class, we were discussing on David Hume. The focus of the book centers around the idea that there must be a designer, in observation of a design – in other words God created us and everything else. But as the book progresses, the question of whether the design – a.k.a the universe (in a sense) is good or bad, therefore questioning whether or not the designer is “bad” as well.
At first we addressed the characteristics of God; or at least what people conclude about how He is and how He should be. Everyone agreed that God cannot be fully comprehensible, and we can’t fully grasp the concept of Him – at least the “Christian” God. He is viewed, and thus should be perfect in every way.
The argument for most skeptics in my class was that as long as pain and suffering exists, then we have to consider the possibility that God by default is a “bad designer”—that He may not be perfect, or good at all. So the other argument was how about Satan and Hell? Someone said, “God may have not created evil itself, but he created the source of evil – the angel himself before he became Satan.” Reasonably, God should have known what would happen to Lucifer, because he’s supposed to be all-knowing. The “flaw” that most of my classmates find in God is the question “why”. Why does God allow evil? Why does He allow people who enjoy inflicting pain on others to exist? The response, as a lot of people would’ve probably guessed, was that we can’t have good without evil, or vice-versa because we wouldn’t have the contrast or the difference to define them. Reply to that is obvious too: well then why can’t God allow us to be in a perfect, happy state where we don’t need that comparison, if He is all powerful, to make us perfectly happy – perfectly good all the freaking time?
I surprised myself with my immediate reaction. It was totally unexpected and naïve of me to feel personally unjustified, and even angry in a way. But I really had to question if I was getting stirred up because it went against my own thoughts that I’ve been somewhat conditioned into thinking, or if I absolutely believed in it. I had to hear my classmates out, because that was the only way to know for sure.
I don’t consider myself to have strong faith – but I have a lot of ideas of what it is, and what Christian life is—not to say that they are more than assumptions and biased conclusions. In the midst of trying to reconstruct my thought process and even the way I approach the bible, I found myself asking the most fundamental question: is God real and do I believe in him?
I felt a strange sense of duty to address the arguments. Perhaps it was because of guilt for not speaking up or “defending” God in class, or a nagging conscience that requires me to justify what I’ve been trying to learn all my life was not a waste.
Regardless of what was said during class, I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t deny the absoluteness of God, but I refused to even consider it. How can God be God if he isn’t absolute in every way? I don’t have enough knowledge of the bible to say I guess, but in a weird way it almost makes things easier. The way I see it is that God IS perfect and absolute, but not to the way we understand. Like the argument given, we can’t comprehend God or why he allows certain things. I feel like it keeps going back to the question of God’s ultimate control versus human free will. Obviously, God could essentially make everything to be perfect without the need to define what it means to be good in contrast to what it means to be evil. He has the ability to do that, but he did not design us in that way, therefore the argument is that he is a “bad” designer. Well…what do we define as good and evil? God did allow certain things to occur that no one can explain or begin to explain. However, can we say that all pain and suffering is evil/bad? Evidently, this is not the case because people can potentially evolve in character/knowledge through pain and suffering. We can all agree that harm inflicted onto anyone is bad; but only if we fixate on the action itself. Something to illustrate it better I guess, is “love at first sight”. Some people experience this, and claim that they just know that he/she is the one, without rationale or reasonable evidence. They start to get to know each other, and get married. From an objective point of view, if I fixate only on the instances that they fight with each other, I will conclude that they don’t love each other, and their claims were a lie. But, if I see how they treat each other collectively on a day-to-day basis, I can see that they love each other despite the hard times. How does this relate to God? Well we can see the “bad” things that happen in the world, and ask how could a righteous diety allow it? But we don’t, and we can’t see the bigger picture. In cliché but nonetheless true terms, God has a bigger plan. I don’t know if it even negates the argument, but we can only see a miniscule portion; a quarrel in a marriage (figuratively speaking).
The older I get, and even in the short life I’ve lived so far, I’ve realized more and more how relative everything is. Our definition of truth is degrading as the generations progress, and post-modernism is becoming more a part of that definition. Everything is relative – and to me it’s as if saying “anything goes”. It should be liberating, right? To me, it’s more like justifying anything and everything. People will say, truth is anything that you perceive and understand with evidence to be factual. Well then, there is no definite universal “perspective” that we can judge and even decide who is a criminal or not for example. Who we are and who we choose to be doesn’t even matter; the line between good and evil becomes hazy. I don’t want to emphasize the matter of what good and evil is, because I don’t think that’s the point of God. I feel like He’s perfect in the sense that good and evil both exist; free will is created; humans have the ability, and more importantly the choice to get to know God. Ideally, Christians want to say that they believe in God because we’ve “fallen in love with Him” in a sense, but often times that’s not the case. I can say that through personal experience and constant struggle to believe that He’s already handed everything to me on a platter – giving me space and grace to love him.