Plantinga Ch. 3: The Fall

     This chapter opens with the familiar Christian hymn "This is my Father's World," a perfect picture of shalom.  Plantinga then reminds us that although this is how God intended the earth to be in the beginning, sin did enter the earth; and now, Creation sings and rings AND groans.  In his book "Our Father's World:  Mobilizing the Church to Care for Creation," Edward Brown describes the Fall as a "shattering of relationships...like dominoes, they fall one after another."  He says that not only was our relationship with God broken, but so was our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the rest of all creation.  As an aspiring biologist/ecologist, this makes sense because everything on this earth is interconnected; it's the whole concept of interconnected-ness.  Much the same, since everything is infected with this sin, it is very hard to get rid of-like pulling out a plant whose roots are interconnected with another plant's-because "the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." 
     This chapter also challenged me to think about what evil is exactly.  According to Urban Dictionary, evil is (besides girls) "the essential ingredient for the making of humans."  Plantinga says that "evil is what's wrong with the world, and it includes trouble in nature as well as in human nature" or "a spoiling of shalom."  He also says that "sin is a subset of evil:  it's an evil for which someone is to blame...all sin is evil, but not all evil is sin." 
     I found it especially interesting when he talked about evil being a parasite on good.  Evil has no life on its own;  after all, we can't have evil unless we have good.  Plantinga says, "Badness can't be very bad without tapping deeply into goodness.  Badness is twisted goodness."  This evilness, as we've read in some of our C.S. Lewis papers, is something we are born into and cannot avoid.  This evilness "shadows" us from God's glory and the only way we can get back in the full light is through the one who created it all, because "such fixes are tainted with the same corruption that needs fixing."  Therefore, our only hope is "that God has addressed human corruption from outside the system."  We ourselves cannot save humanity, we can only plant the seeds and maybe water them.  Only through God can the shadow of sin be removed in order to allow the light to shine upon them.
    

The Poison of Subjectivism

     This paper brought up so many ideas and made me think hard about a lot of things after which I came to no greater understanding or conclusion of the matter.  This paper presented a lot of the same ideas about the Moral Law as Lewis talked about in Mere Christianity.  Lewis talks about there being "sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another." and that our feelings related to good and evil "have been socially conditioned."
     We talked in class about how it used to be socially acceptable for men to have multiple wives and how that has evolved today (in most cultures) into being frowned upon by society.  Was that because our morality evolved?  When we look at Paul's letters, we see that this change in morality happened between the Old and the New Testaments.  I find this really interesting to have happened before the Christian church really exploded.  Could it be that the evolution of Greek and Roman culture changed and since our world has been so heavily influenced by Greek and Roman Culture that the rest of the world's view of polygamy changed as well?
     Lewis talked about an overarching standard to which all morality conforms.  The views of what is good and what is evil can vary from culture to culture, but there is some center that all humanity is drawn to.  Why is that?  Can man even "create values" or a can a "community choose it's 'ideology' as men choose their clothes."  I would provide some deep theologically influenced answer to this question, but as Lewis so often says in his writings, I have no theological background other than growing up in the church and I am merely human.  Usually I avoid these types of questions because I hate not having answers; but this class has stretched my thinking zone-almost to the point of insanity.  If we knew the answers to everything though, we wouldn't need faith and without faith-our whole belief doesn't mean anything.  I really liked how Lewis talked about how God is not a human and therefore cannot be comprehended by the human mind.  The important things we need to know about God have been presented to us in the Bible and Creation-everything else, we can only try to understand.  I'm still turning this over in my mind, but here's what I have so far :)