Confessor
Puritan Board Senior
I wrote this elsewhere when I was thinking about ends, means, and God's will. This was sparked from a passage in Owen's The Death of Death. Anyway, please tell me what you think.
The one thing that I'm not sure about from this is how to account for God's general disinclination regarding pain, death, suffering, etc. Death especially is viewed by God as an intrinsically bad thing (Ezekiel 18:23). It can easily be seen why, for instance, murder is intrinsically bad, because in such instances God can see what the ends are for man (i.e. what the murderer's intentions are) and can be displeased with that, but when it comes to pain, death, or suffering, per se, without a sinful agent creating these through immoral actions, it becomes more difficult to understand the nature of God's dislike of such things.
There appears a contradiction: God ordains sinful events to pass because they bring about good. However, whenever humans discern under the same presumptions (e.g. deciding to kill person A to let persons B & C live), the outcome is clearly immoral. As Theodore Beza puts it, the reason God ordains any specific event is because He sees some good in it, and therefore all events are good in God’s eyes, for they all have a role in redemptive history. How do we avoid the charge that God is sinfully letting the ends justify the means?
First, it would be appropriate to point out that no means, intrinsically, is good or bad. One person cutting another’s body with a knife can be good or bad given the action’s respective end – good if done for the purpose of saving a life (as with a doctor), but bad if done for the purpose of injuring someone (as with a criminal).
However, when we see people try to justify embryonic stem cell research with the claim that killing a fourteen-day-old embryo can save thousands of others, we understand that they are immorally letting the ends justify the means. In such a case, the means (killing an embryo) is, in fact, intrinsically bad. How do we reconcile this with the above paragraph?
My solution involves the fact that there are several ends within one action. When someone decides to remove an embryo from his mother, he has two ends in mine: 1. killing human life (even if not believing they are human), and 2. saving lives. Certainly, the second end is admirable, but since it is hopelessly entwined with the first, which is a necessarily sinful end – no human has the right to take another’s life against their will (not to say that it is universally permissible to take a human’s life with consent, however, but I digress) – the entire framework crumbles, and therefore the action, removing the embryo from the mother, is sinful. The upshot of this is that if any end of an action is sinful, the action itself is sinful. Otherwise, objecting to an action with “the ends justify the means” is baseless. The ends always justify the means; it’s whether or not there are bad ends accompanying the good ends.
At this point, it should seem clear why God is not culpable of creaturely accusations. For example, by ordaining an embryo’s death for stem cell research, the person killing the embryo would be culpable because there exists a sinful end in his perspective – taking human life – which does not exist in God’s perspective. For God, all ends are admirable. As Creator, God has the right to take human life, and therefore He has the right to ordain human deaths for a greater purpose. Therefore, in the most obvious example of ordaining evil events for good (Christ’s crucifixion), God let the ends justify the means, without a single bad end in mind. The mockery, humiliation, scorn, and chastisement of Christ, while intrinsically displeasing to God, were absolutely permissible for God (since He has absolute authority over human life), but certainly not for those men doing such despicable actions.
First, it would be appropriate to point out that no means, intrinsically, is good or bad. One person cutting another’s body with a knife can be good or bad given the action’s respective end – good if done for the purpose of saving a life (as with a doctor), but bad if done for the purpose of injuring someone (as with a criminal).
However, when we see people try to justify embryonic stem cell research with the claim that killing a fourteen-day-old embryo can save thousands of others, we understand that they are immorally letting the ends justify the means. In such a case, the means (killing an embryo) is, in fact, intrinsically bad. How do we reconcile this with the above paragraph?
My solution involves the fact that there are several ends within one action. When someone decides to remove an embryo from his mother, he has two ends in mine: 1. killing human life (even if not believing they are human), and 2. saving lives. Certainly, the second end is admirable, but since it is hopelessly entwined with the first, which is a necessarily sinful end – no human has the right to take another’s life against their will (not to say that it is universally permissible to take a human’s life with consent, however, but I digress) – the entire framework crumbles, and therefore the action, removing the embryo from the mother, is sinful. The upshot of this is that if any end of an action is sinful, the action itself is sinful. Otherwise, objecting to an action with “the ends justify the means” is baseless. The ends always justify the means; it’s whether or not there are bad ends accompanying the good ends.
At this point, it should seem clear why God is not culpable of creaturely accusations. For example, by ordaining an embryo’s death for stem cell research, the person killing the embryo would be culpable because there exists a sinful end in his perspective – taking human life – which does not exist in God’s perspective. For God, all ends are admirable. As Creator, God has the right to take human life, and therefore He has the right to ordain human deaths for a greater purpose. Therefore, in the most obvious example of ordaining evil events for good (Christ’s crucifixion), God let the ends justify the means, without a single bad end in mind. The mockery, humiliation, scorn, and chastisement of Christ, while intrinsically displeasing to God, were absolutely permissible for God (since He has absolute authority over human life), but certainly not for those men doing such despicable actions.
The one thing that I'm not sure about from this is how to account for God's general disinclination regarding pain, death, suffering, etc. Death especially is viewed by God as an intrinsically bad thing (Ezekiel 18:23). It can easily be seen why, for instance, murder is intrinsically bad, because in such instances God can see what the ends are for man (i.e. what the murderer's intentions are) and can be displeased with that, but when it comes to pain, death, or suffering, per se, without a sinful agent creating these through immoral actions, it becomes more difficult to understand the nature of God's dislike of such things.