[geocentrism] The Ethics of the Flood
- From: "philip madsen" <pma15027@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 12 May 2007 14:29:44 +1000
Great work Martin and an enjoyable read. It required of me some mental bending
to conform with Cathlic dogma, but that was reasonably easy to do, the
specifics of which as interesting they would be, I can forgo here.
Philip.
----- Original Message -----
From: Martin Selbrede
To: geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 6:24 PM
Subject: [geocentrism] Re: The Bible
Since the question of the ethics/morality of the Flood of Noah has been
raised, and not too many have ventured to answer, I thought I'd share an
award-winning paper I wrote in satisfaction of an honors project in a
university ethics course. The remarkable thing was, the professor (who was the
department chairman of the university's philosophy department) was predisposed
against Christianity on the basis of this event, among others. But he regarded
my analysis as powerful and compelling. It changed his mind. Let's see if it
changes anyone's mind here. For our consideration, my 1995 analysis of the
flood of Noah from an ethical standpoint. Note that there was a word count
limit, so I had to cover all my points within the constraints applied.
Martin
On the Wing of Abomination Comes Destroyer:
The Ethics of the Flood
Genesis 6 through 9 contains the Biblical account of a stupendous
hydrological cataclysm, the Flood by way of eminence, a disaster that left only
eight human survivors. Openly asserted to be a judgment executed by God on His
creation, the act of destroying all life “whose breath is in its nostrils” has
been challenged on ethical grounds as a supremely immoral act. The occasion of
this and similar critiques is that God indiscriminately killed everyone,
including children, infants, and pregnant mothers. The alleged immorality
stems from the supposition that these victims of God’s wrath were innocent of
any actual crimes worthy of death. Their death was, therefore, unjust.
The issues raised by this challenge are quite complex, and there are several
distinct, and not necessarily mutually exclusive, ways to answer it. The
possible resolution routes are articulated below as provisional hypotheses
which will be individually analyzed for internal consistency, conformity to
Scripture, and relative weight. Some will ultimately be rejected, while a
synthesis of the remaining hypotheses will form the core of a coherent response
to the challenge issued.
(1) There were no children, infants, or pregnant women on the earth.
(2) The children, infants, and unborn foetuses were sufficiently guilty of
sin to be worthy of death
(3) The parents, rather than God, were wholly responsible for the death of
their children
(4) Temporal death may imply eternal blessedness, i.e., infant salvation
(5) Ethics between man and man are inapplicable to God
(6) Humanistic standards of judgment are inapplicable to God by definition
Taking these hypotheses seriatim, it should be noted that the first of the
series, by denying the existence of any innocent victims dying in the Flood,
removes the enunciated difficulty by expunging the occasion of it. While this
is a trivial solution, it would be impossible to disprove it -- where is the
eyewitness testimony to the composition of the drowned masses? Nonetheless,
resting the response on this hypothesis would be supremely dissatisfying.
Granted, since a miraculous event (the Flood) is contemplated as the reason
for the challenge to God’s moral authority, it would be internally consistent
to assert that the same God Who could overflow the world with water could just
as easily close up women’s wombs for several years before the rain began to
fall. (That God has the power to shut women’s wombs is plainly asserted at
Gen. 20:18, 1 Sam. 1:5-6, Isa. 66:9, etc.) But this assertion in the present
instance is wholly speculative, and therefore only plausible. It may not even
possess an unqualified plausibility, inasmuch as Jesus taught that “in the days
that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving
in marriage, until the day that Noe entered the ark” (Matt. 24:38). The fact
that presumably heterosexual marriages were being conducted up until the first
day of the flood raises the prima facie likelihood that children, the fruit of
marriage, were being conceived throughout the pre-flood period without any
reported cessation. Fundamentally, this first hypothesis relies on an argument
from silence, which is necessarily of uncertain, or even dubious, value.
The second hypothesis asserts that the children, infants, and foetuses that
perished were worthy of death, viz, were not truly innocent in the forensic
sense. Assume momentarily that this is true. The natural question would then
arise as to why these specific individuals perished while others before and
after the cataclysm were spared who were equally worthy of death. A workable
justification of the hypothesis must address with equal cogency this question
of discrimination on God’s part.
Discrimination is indeed at the core of the second hypothesis, in the sense
that God makes sovereign, unilateral decisions in disposing of mercies and
judgments. The mindset underlying the moral challenge to God’s justice in the
Flood rests on the foundation of the presumed innocence of individuals not yet
capable of moral agency. In this framework, God arbitrarily selects innocent
individuals to massacre unjustly. The opposing viewpoint begins by positing
the guilt of infants, children, and even foetuses, and then affirms that God
sovereignly selects guilty individuals to redeem from their guilt while
bypassing others, thereby leaving them in their natural, guilty state.
These two positions have been accorded formal names in polemical theology.
The notion that humans enter the world sinless and innocent is the basis for
Pelagianism, which affirms that the Fall of Adam has had little, if any, effect
on man’s moral compass. The opposing position is known as Augustinianism,
which teaches that Adam’s Fall rendered man’s moral compass utterly worthless
and inoperable. The former view holds that man is capable of making correct
moral decisions, while the latter denies such capability to natural man apart
from God’s unilateral empowerment of the putative sinner. At the time of the
Reformation, Pelagianism compromised slightly with the Augustinian position,
and occupied a midway point known as semi-Pelagianism (popularly known as
Arminianism). This intermediate view held that Adam’s Fall indeed crippled
man’s moral compass, but not so severely as to prevent man from making, through
sheer force of dedicated will, upright moral decisions for which God was
obligated to give him credit. Against this position, Augustinianism was
restated more systematically by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Philip
Melancthon, and was soon relabeled Calvinism, by which the position is known
today by friends and enemies alike.
A full-scale apologetic defense of Calvinism is out of place here, but its
primary points in connection with the present topic do indeed enjoy Scriptural
support. “The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as
they be born, speaking lies” (Ps. 58:3). “I knew that thou wouldest deal
treacherously, and wast called a transgressor from the womb” (Isa. 48:8).
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Ps.
51:5). These passages and their various parallels support the contention that
the foetus is not exempt from the guilt of sin, and is constitutionally
depraved, being made in the image of its parents, who are also depraved. (N.b.
total depravity is Calvinism’s view that the effects of Adam’s Fall extend to
every corner of man’s spiritual and physical existence, and does not mean that
every human being acts totally depraved every waking moment. The veneer of
civility is actually an expedient for perpetuating man’s spiritual depravity,
since it enables societies of men to join together in secular rebellion against
their Creator.)
Theologians have debated the issue of how each new infant receives its soul
for centuries. Of the two dominant views, one of them offers some rational
illumination of the Calvinists’ position. Traduction of the soul entails the
forming of the infant’s new soul from the souls of the parents, much like
cellular mitosis. This theory provides an obvious pathway for the transmission
of sin from the guilt-stained souls of the parents to the soul of the infant.
Creation of the soul anew by God for each individual at conception does not
provide a ready key for accounting for sin’s direct transmission, and in fact
appears to involve its own difficulties concerning God’s alleged participation
in creating brand new souls marred by the taint of sin. The dispute between
the two theories has yet to be fully resolved, although many top scholars
believe that the creation theory should be regarded as having a slight edge
over the traductionist view, being compelled thereby to endorse Calvin’s
federal theory of imputation (that God imputes sin to man in terms of a
fundamental covenant violated by Adam as federal head of his progeny).
Traduction need not be affirmed to lend credence to the guiltiness of
infants. Such guilt can be directly inferred from its effects. The scriptural
representation is that the wages of sin are death (Rom. 6:23), which is set
forth more completely in the language used in Romans 5:12, 14, 18, 19:
“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so
death passed through all men, for that all have sinned . . . death reigned from
Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of
Adam’s transgression . . . Therefore as by the offence of one [Adam] judgment
came upon all men to condemnation . . . For as by one man’s disobedience many
were made sinners . . . .” Note the intriguing idea that death due to sin
reigned “even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s
transgression.” This phrase indicates that one need not commit an overt act of
transgression to contract guilt -- being descended with Adam is sufficient to
render one mortal, and mortality is the mark of sinful creatures, whether in
the womb or not. St. Paul here concedes that there are those who do not
directly trangress God’s law overtly in an actual act -- but their guilt in
terms of God’s absolute ethical ideal is no less real.
Clouding this issue is the jurisdictional problem that arises in both Old and
New Testaments. In judicial proceedings, men can only find transgressors
guilty of actual acts. Prosecutions can only proceed based on the external
actions of the accused, where such actions transgress the law. But the
jurisdiction God has remanded to human courts is not the only system of
judgment operating in the universe. God reserves to Himself the right to
punish sins of the heart. “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but God
looketh upon the heart” (I Sam. 16:7). Consequently, He openly exacts
punishments for offenses not falling to human courts. A series of contrasts is
set up in the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:21ff, where Jesus notes that certain
actions will bring temporal judgment in court, but others fall under divine
jurisdiction beyond the scope of human courts, entailing judgments as serious
as the fire of hell. Clearly, the guilt of any infants perishing in the Flood
must be of this latter category, assuming the second hypothesis to be the
preferred choice.
This hypothesis is consistent with the Scriptural representation that the
world is a condemned world. When Christ entered it, He did not come to condemn
it, for it was already completely condemned (John 3:17-18, I John 5:19) and
needed saving. The surprise behind the famous verse of “God so loving the
world” wasn’t that the world was so large that it took an all-embracing love to
love it in its totality, but that the world was so evil that it took a very
special kind of love to love it at all. God’s love didn’t leave the world
lying in evil, but acted to redeem the world. “Christ came not to condemn the
world, but that through Him the world might be saved” (John 3:17).
If Calvinism be accepted, it could serve a sufficient grounds for justifying
the perishing of seemingly innocent individuals, since the reality is radically
different than the appearance. Challenging this idea directly involves the
critic in the difficult task of attempting to prove that sin does not exist
where it isn’t empirically observed by its actions, which involves swapping out
God’s definition of sin and His ethical standard for a humanistic one to which
God is required to conform. The absoluteness of God’s ethical standard is a
necessary companion premise to the proposition of the Flood. One cannot
consistently discuss the Flood apart from the epistemological framework in
which the Flood is set.
Nonetheless, while the second hypothesis is sufficient, that fact alone
doesn’t make it the correct rationale for explaining the death of supposedly
innocent individuals. In fact, one can regard the Calvinistic hypothesis as
being completely true and accurate, and yet reject it as the correct response
to the initial moral challenge. Because the second hypothesis is sufficient
but not necessarily essential, if another hypothesis proves more appropriate,
the second hypothesis need not be advanced in response to the challenge,
notwithstanding its truth. (For the record, this author regards the Calvinism
to be true, but regards another hypothesis as the more appropriate response.)
The third hypothesis lays the blame for the children’s deaths at the door of
their parents. This idea has enjoyed a fascinating reincarnation in the late
twentieth century. For example, a woman who abuses heroin while pregnant can
be criminally charged for any deleterious results to her unborn infant. For
this reason, so-called “crack babies” are often abandoned at clinics so that
the mother can avoid jail time. Parallel scenarios can be elaborated, in which
the actions of the parents harm their children, for which cause the parents can
be, and are, held liable.
The years leading up to the Flood involved the complete and total breakdown
of moral order. God’s “grace period” was 120 years long, as reported in Gen.
6:3: “And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that
he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.” The
magnitude of human evil on a colossal scale was unthinkably intense. Consider
carefully the full meaning of each clause in Gen. 6:5: “And God saw that the
wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the
thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Note the cumulative impact:
not just man’s thoughts, but even his imaginations; not just some imaginations,
but every imagination; these imaginations were only evil, never anything else,
and they were only evil continually, not intermittently or occasionally.
Consequently, “God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all
flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of
all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through
them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.” (Gen. 6:12-13)
For 120 years, Noah warned the people that their conduct would destroy them.
They willingly ignored his earnest warnings and placed themselves in the path
of death. He faithfully proclaimed his message, preaching to the people, but
they closed their eyes to the oncoming slaughter. Their wickedness already
affected every person born, since all were targets of one another’s enormities
and abuses. It was only a matter of time before even their unborn would be
swept away with them, and the full weight of guilt for the disaster rightfully
should fall on the shoulders of the adults who persisted in pulling God’s
judgment down upon them and their children.
Jesus Himself sought to warn Israel of the consequences of their wickedness
by appealing to their love of their infant children and pointing out what their
actions would mean for the youngest members of their nation. “For these be the
days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe
unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for
there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon the people.” (Luke
21:22-23) Jesus reiterates His appeal while being led to the cross, saying
“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your
children. For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say,
Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never
gave suck.” (Luke 23:28-29)
Elsewhere, the pronouncement of divine judgment on evil cities emphasizes the
cruelty of the invading hordes God is sending in, particularly as regards the
slaughter of children. Babylon’s destruction at the hands of the Medes
narrated at Isa. 13:18 is representative of this species of Scriptural
prediction: “Their bows shall also dash the young men to pieces; and they shall
have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.”
Moreover, the direct guilt of destruction is clearly attributed to the
populace in the literal Hebrew renderings of Gen. 6:12-13, for “all flesh had
destroyed its way upon the earth,” so that God “will destroy them with the
earth.” The people had, in essence, destroyed themselves so completely, so
resoundingly, that God’s act functions more as a nail in the coffin than a
precipitating judgment (no pun intended).
120 years of warnings failed to rein in the world’s increasingly virulent
evil. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, God took great pains to warn a city
(Nineveh) of impending destruction, a warning that was heeded. In justifying
His compassion to Jonah, who would have gloated over the demise of any Gentile
city, God asks, “Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more
than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand; and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:11). Young children are those
who can’t tell their right from their left. God reveals His tender mercies
over the city’s infants and animals, but it must be remembered that Nineveh
did, in fact, turn from its evil ways as a result of Jonah’s warning that the
place would be ovethrown within forty days. Had Nineveh not repented, it would
have been destroyed, children and all. The Ninevite ruler and his people
responded quite differently to Jonah than Noah’s audience did to his preaching,
and the differing destinies bear witness to God’s ability and willingness to
keep His promises.
A rough analogical model can be conceived to illustrate this third
hypothesis. Imagine a dark cave in which people hide themselves to pursue
illicit activities. Someone standing outside the cave shouts continual
warnings that the cave is about to collapse, but no one inside the cave wants
to come out because to do so would mean abridging their behavior, which they
prefer to conduct in the darkness of the cave. When the cave collapses, and
pregnant mothers secreted in it perish, who is to blame for the deaths of the
“innocents”? The third hypothesis offers a coherent answer.
The fourth hypothesis offers a mitigating factor found in both Old and New
Testaments, namely, that those that die in infancy infallibly go to heaven.
Since all human beings die anyway, the infants do not suffer anything that will
not ultimately have befallen them later in life. When issuing a challenge to
God’s moral character, it is important to respond from the conceptual framework
in which God’s behavior is set forth, meaning that the Scriptural doctrine of
death is a legitimate, and necessary, component in determining the relative
weight and validity of this hypothesis.
Death evidently is something over which God has complete power. Jesus raised
several people from the dead (correlative testimony from the same source that
the Flood account comes from), and in fact is given the keys to Death and Hades
(Rev. 1:18). History concludes with the pageant of the conquest of death (I
Cor. 15:24-28), where death is forced to loose its hold on Christ’s children.
Death is asserted to be “the last enemy” which Christ is to destroy, and His
destruction of it is coterminous with a global general resurrection from the
dead. Clearly, the biblical doctrine of death is hemmed round about with many
additional concepts and doctrines that supply a more complete picture. St.
Paul, comparing temporal life, affliction, and death to life in eternity,
declares there to be no comparison at all, due to “a far more exceeeding and
eternal weight of glory” associated with eternity (2 Cor. 4:17).
The scriptural proof that those dying in infancy are saved (i.e. go to
heaven) derives from a negative inference based on Rom. 9:22, which reads
“What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured
with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction?” This
verse mandates that the wicked survive long enough for God to manifest
“longsuffering” in His dealings with them, which is excluded in the case of
infants and young children, let alone foetuses. Hence, death in infancy is
presumptive proof of the saved status of the infant.
This fourth hypothesis, by expanding upon the Scriptural doctrine of death,
offers an arguable defense. It is humanistic man that becomes fearful, even
apoplectic, at the thought of death, whereas the scriptural picture is richer
and more complex. However, death is never treated as natural -- it is the
enemy of the human race. The splitting asunder of soul and body (the strict
scriptural definition of death, as in Zech. 12:7: “Then shall the dust return
to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it”) is
the regrettable wages of sin, and is most unnatural. Humanistic anthropology
rejects this position, retreating into biological rationalism and scorning the
idea that death is an ethical consequence in any sense whatsoever.
The fifth hypothesis, by asserting that human ethics cannot be applied to
God, has the feel of a self-sealing argument. If the standard of evaluation is
inapplicable, then further dispute is vacated. But if one were to apply human
standards to God, one would have to prove that the relationship between one man
and another is completely analogical to the relationship between God and man.
Yet, God stands to man as One Who created man from absolute nothingness,
thereby evidencing a property right in His creation/creature. God is an
infinite being, whereas man is finite. God depends on no one else, whereas man
is dependent on a multitude of things just to stay alive, the majority of which
God graciously provides to man. Quite apart from any cursory observations one
may care to add to this list, the Bible itself affirms the vast gap between
human and divine thinking: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are
your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the
earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your
thoughts.” (Isa. 55:8-9) Presumably, ethical thinking would come under this
pronouncement.
Surely, jurisdictional considerations necessitate different dispensations of
justice as meted out by man temporally (via courts of justice) and God (via His
sovereign acts of mercy or judgment). Sometimes a temporal judgment coincides
with a divine mercy (e.g., the thief on the cross next to Christ who is
promised Paradise that very day). One must admit that there is a Scriptural
basis for this hypothesis, which exposes a crucial point: if one argues from
Scripture, a self-sealing argument obtains. But if one argues from outside of
Scripture, a different but equally self-sealing argument obtains. Which leads
to the sixth and final hypothesis, which relates to the preceding discussions.
Humanistic standards of judgment are inapplicable to God by definition. A
humanistic standard necessarily omits God in its formulation, per standard
definitions of working humanism in the 20th century, so that application of
such standards to a Being not contemplated to exist within such an evaluative
framework leads to a non sequitir. God can only be evaluated within a
framework in which His existence is presupposed, and the Biblical Flood can
only be legitimately debated if the narrative is not torn from the document in
which it is found, which shapes the worldview within which the Flood is set.
(Imagine that a scientist proposed to discuss carbon after making it clear that
there is no such thing as carbon. Discussion of carbon and its
physical/chemical behavior must presuppose the existence of carbon, for a
carbonless world is a deficient basis for engaging in any predication
whatsoever about carbon apart from raw negation.)
Because humanism’s agenda includes the debunking of the Bible in general, and
its distasteful teachings about the consequences of sin in particular,
critiques of the Flood story may well proceed from a mindset that is somewhat
less than objective. While one should hesitate before psychoanalyzing any
given protagonist, it must be recognized that humanists have done precisely
that with their Christian counterparts, esteeming Biblical faith to be a
delusion of the weak-minded. From a humanistic worldview, such a condemnation
makes sense. The complementary position holds that the Biblical worldview is
correct, and that the humanist’s objections are merely hypothetical objections
raised to avoid facing the moral implications of the Christian position. There
can be no quick or easy resolution of so sharply drawn a conflict.
However, this issue was debated once before in history. And those on the
wrong side of the argument reportedly drowned -- which sets up a curious
epistemological paradox inasmuch as the disputants today are putative heirs of
either Noah or those who perished, so far as their philosophies and allegiances
are concerned. In this instance, it may not be surprising that more heat than
light has been in evidence as the debate has evolved through the centuries.
In conclusion, the best single hypothesis is the third, which lays the blame
for the death of the innocent at the feet of their parents, whom God will hold
responsible for their horrific and selfish stewardship over their children.
This solution does not exclude hypotheses two, four, five, and six, but these
bear a subordinate character to the primary issue of culpability for the death
of “innocent individuals” in the Flood of Noah. While this analysis is far
from exhaustive, it points out a defensible line of argumentation to “clear
God’s name,” not letting the imputation rest upon it that He was guilty of the
unjust murder of hundreds of thousands of children whose death must be laid
solely and wholly at His doorstep. This charge against God embodies a
humanistic dream.
Works Cited
Lange, John Philip. Commentary on Genesis. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, no date.
Calvin, John. Commentary on Genesis. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979.
Herder commented that the Fall of Adam wound its way down through history,
expanding until “advances to the fall of a world” (Lange 290).
“The earth was not overwhelmed with a deluge of waters till it had first been
immersed in the pollution of wickedness” (Calvin 247)
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