Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. We are continuing our discussion on consequentialism by looking at a third rebuttal to my position. Today, are going to be looking at how my position does not equate to a complicity with evil. This idea that my position, my inconsequentialism is complicit with evil stems some from a passage like James four seventeen. Alright.

He who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it's sin. And this rightly recognizes that there are two forms of righteousness. There's the avoidance of evil and then there's the doing good or positive justice. The rebuttal against my position here is going to argue that my position may avoid doing evil, but by not doing good, I'm promoting sin. For this, my response is going to be very similar to the episode dealing with the lesser of two evils ethic.

I believe episode three in this season. But we'll approach it slightly differently, so you may wanna listen to this again and this should be a shorter episode as well. But if you want to hear more, you can tune back in to the Lesser of Two Evils episode. First, I want to say that against the accusation that my position doesn't do positive justice, that it refuses to engage in a good just to preserve holiness. I would say that the Bible doesn't view positive and negative justice as separable.

They're not either or sorts of things. You are supposed to avoid evil, but you're also supposed to do good. And it it seems to me that if if your response to me is, well, you don't do good. My response to you could be, well, when you when you elect somebody like president Trump or when you save somebody's life, you do it by killing the unborn in an ectopic pregnancy, you don't avoid evil. It seems like I can pretty easily turn this back around and we don't really get anywhere in that discussion.

So either the opposition is going to have to show how they do good and avoid evil or I'm going to have to show that I avoid evil and I also can do good. And I think that's what my position advocates. I think I avoid evil and promote doing good at the same time. Point number two is that the accusation against my position here inadvertently is going to condemn God. And that's that's because the the reason that people will say that my position advocates not doing good is because it doesn't do immediate good.

And so if I don't lie to the Nazis coming to my door to to look for Jews, if I choose to be silent or to give partial truth and not lie, well, then I didn't do the immediate best good and so therefore, I'm I'm refusing to do positive justice. And so positive justice for the people who are are kind of trying to rebut me are are really just saying that positive justice is immediate justice. The immediate best course I can think of at the moment. And that's gonna be a big problem because that's gonna damn God. Because God seems to work through patience and and inaction or seeming inaction a lot of times.

How many Hebrew babies were killed in Egypt before God did anything? How many Canaanite children were burnt to death whose screams echoed through the the bull or whatever they they put them in? How many how many Canaanite children were flayed to death before God did anything? How many have died without God's intervention? Like the intervention with Saul on the road to Damascus.

How many people have died without knowing God because God wasn't as nice to them as he was to Saul? How many sex slaves are there in the world today who endured daily rapes? How many children are molested and tortured and killed every year throughout history? How many Jews, how many blacks, how many mentally handicapped, how many gays, how many gypsies died at the hands of the Germans? I mean, God is seemingly inactive, and there is so much evil just in the last ten seconds alone.

So much horrendous evil that has gone on in the world that is just indescribable. We couldn't comprehend it. And God didn't do anything about it. So if you're gonna say that immediacy is is what determines whether or not somebody is doing positive justice. If that's your only metric for measuring that, then you've got some problems with being a theist, particularly a Christian theist.

I mean clearly, a refusal to do good is not the only determining factor for morality. We've talked about some examples before, right? Would you say to the neighbor who withheld her kid from cannibalism in order to preserve the lives of two families in first Kings 22? Are you going to say, hey, you're refusing to do the good by offering your kid up to be eaten by two families to preserve more lives? Are you gonna tell her that her refusal to do immediate good is is evil because that's not positive justice?

Are you going to tell somebody that, well, you're not feeding your family, your family is gonna starve so you should prostitute yourself because, you know, that's going to do immediate good for your family. I mean, the the list of of things that we could say like that could just go on and on and on. We recognize that that's ridiculous because there's so much more to assessing the morality of an equation on whether or not we can bring some immediate good out of it. We have to ask a lot of other questions that go into this. And I think I've I've done a good job of elaborating on on how, especially in these conundrums, I am not saying that you don't do good.

I'm just saying that in your doing of good, you can't do evil. That's what I'm saying. So whereas I seek to uphold the avoidance of evil and the doing of good and doing both of those to the best of my ability, consequentialists see only the doing good as defined by them as the most immediate best results they can perceive. That's what their definition of good is, but they sacrifice the avoidance of evil and simply just leaving the ends in God's hands and trusting in His control and sovereignty. And this goes into point number three which is that the accusation against the immediate good, this positive good is that it presumes our omniscience.

Let's take our our last election for example and voting for Trump. Let's just say that that was embracing the lesser evil for for a perceived greater good. Let's just We'll go with that. Alright. It it was embracing the lesser evil for a perceived greater good.

This view then views my refusal to engage in winnable politics as a refusal to do good. If I vote third party or if I abstain, then my refusal to engage in a vote that has a chance to win is a refusal to do good. So my patient waiting on God in prayer in a refusal to compromise with evil doesn't count as doing good because it's perceived as ineffective. Well, people who are gonna argue this have have huge issues with the early church and and how they describe their unwillingness to go into the army but their willingness to pray. How Elijah on Mount Carmel prayed to God for fire instead of going around looking for flint and wood.

I mean, you just you just have to say that that faithful obedience and prayerfulness and trusting in God isn't a good. You know, when when all options fail you, when when there's no moral option to pursue, How is how is prayerful and patient obedience not a positive good? How is it is embracing some evil a better option? And then in our Trump example, you know, we we don't know what what voting for him is gonna do. Okay.

So he he got a supreme court justice. Maybe they'll overturn abortion. We don't know that. Maybe they will. Okay.

Maybe abortion is overturned for twenty years. And then the liberals get their court back and they never lose it again because they're so ticked. They they will always make sure that Democrats win from now on and that the justice is filled with Liberals. We don't know the ramifications of any particular action. And so judging in the immediate term is a terrible determinant for our actions because we just don't know the big picture and that's why we trust God and we follow the means that He gives to us.

And that brings us to to our final point which is that arguing that that I'm not advocating positive good devolves Christian morality into relativism. Rather than evil always being evil, we're going to say that sometimes evil is good because doing an evil in order to do a positive good is what is good. I have gone into that several times I think in the ectopic pregnancy episode. We just talked about Ray Comfort's video 180 and how when you see people saying that they'd be willing to execute Jews in Nazi Germany if they had a gun to their head because what's the point in everybody losing their lives? You know, they might as well at least save some lives, their own and their families.

And that's relativism. That's that's hopeless immorality. That's not that's not holy morality. So finally in response, I mean, I'm gonna say that my position refuses to do evil and does the best good it can while maintaining holy faithfulness. I'm going to argue that anybody who wants to say otherwise, anybody with that consequentialist ethic is going to they might get on to me for not doing as much good as they think can be done immediately, but then they're gonna have some God issues there, and His patience.

And they're also, if you look at what they do, they're going to sacrifice, their holiness, their willingness to do good. Whereas I don't think you can sacrifice either. That's all for now. So peace because I'm a pacifist. When I say it, I mean it.