Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. Today, we are going to finish our discussion on consequentialism by looking at the powerful freedom inconsequentialism brings. One reason I think many cling to consequentialism is because it gives them perceived freedom. If you're a consequentialist, if the ends justify the means, then you can shape your own ethics. It's convenient.

You can find meaningful action in just about any circumstance and you can usually see better immediate results. Right? So in terms of voting, you can shape your ethics, right? I mean, you've got two parties that have certain evils in them. Some have maybe certain economic evils or environmental evils or or whatever.

Others might have abortion or maybe family ethical issues, you think. So but you get to decide. You get to decide which one's weightier, which one are you able to compromise with. You can you can choose which one's good and which one's not even though they're both bad. You can in voting, you can find meaningful action in a circumstance because you need to vote.

You need to have control. And so you can choose your side, choose your ethic, and then perform a meaningful action. And then, you can see better immediate results, right, because you can vote and then you can see the result of that vote. And if your your group wins, then you get to see that result immediately and that's good. And Consequentialism just feels good.

If we use it in terms of lying to Nazis to save Jewish lives, you can see the immediate result. If you lie and the Nazis go away, then great, you get to see your result. In an ectopic pregnancy, you get to save a life right away. You don't have to wait and hope and pray. You just save the life.

Consequentialism gives us power and control and determination and we love that. However, there are many freedoms that inconsequentialism holds that consequentialism does not. And I know that to most people, inconsequentialism sounds terrible because it sounds like that's just the stale holiness that is binding and it prevents you from exerting control. So, I want to give you reasons why I think inconsequentialism is a true source of freedom. First, it gives us the freedom to be finite.

There's a wonderful sermon by Tim Keller on God's sovereignty. And in it, he tells the story of how he became the pastor of Redeemer. And he says, I became the pastor of Redeemer because a door was left open six inches. You know, like, what in the world is this guy talking about? Well, Keller goes on to say that through some crazy series of events, know, in Watergate, Nixon was was I guess he wasn't impeached, but he resigned because the door was left open six inches.

And because that door was left open, people found out about what went on and Reagan got out of the presidency and then Ford got in and Ford's son went to the college that Keller went to and because he went to that college, one of the professors or something who needed a visa was able to expedite their visa to get there and that's the guy who influenced Tim Keller. It's some crazy chain of events. And Keller's point in it all is there's no possible way that Tim Keller controlled those circumstances. God sovereignly got Tim Keller to be the pastor of Redeemer. And sure, Keller made decisions in that and there there he had his freedom in that.

But at the same time, God worked sovereignly to accomplish his plan. And Keller Keller's sermon is beautiful because it it talks about just the the freedom that we can have to make decisions and to be finite and to trust that God's got everything in his control. It's not fatalism and just saying, I'm gonna just leave it, leave everything up to God and not make any decisions. That's not what it is. But it's it's freedom in making choices responsibly and trusting God for the ultimate outcomes.

It's kind of like in in one of our first episodes talking about the will of God. How the Bible is very clear what the will of God is. Right? That we're sanctified, that we avoid sexual immorality, that we pray constantly, that we have contentment in all circumstances. The will of God is clear.

We do those things and we trust that for those crazy specific things, God will either make it very clear to us or he will be sovereign in our choices and we don't have to worry about that. And inconsequentialism embraces that. It allows us to be finite. It doesn't expect us to know what what result will happen when I make a particular choice or what the result will be immediately or ten years down the road. I don't have to know that.

Inconsequentialism allows us to act within our ability and within God's decree and just to act in a holy fashion according to the means of God without worrying about without worrying about the ends because the ends are God's. Number two, inconsequentialism is freeing because it gives us the freedom of integrity. We're called to be conformed to Christ's image and to live in holiness. Inconsequentialism is the position which allows us to live consistent kingdom lives now without compromise. I don't have to wonder, is the good that faithfulness gives me better than the good I can accomplish if I embrace some evil?

I don't have to ask that question. That's that's not even a legitimate question on Christianity. Faithfulness is always the answer, and inconsequentialism as opposed to consequentialism is what allows me to always have integrity and to never worry about the ends as that which is going to define morality. We may live in a fallen world, but our call is not to live fallenly in that world. Our call is to live as new creations.

Number three, inconsequentialism gives us the freedom of altruism. When we got back from Romania after after about two years there, I was walking through Target and I don't know if if I had seen this before and just didn't notice it or if things had changed in the two years I'd been gone. But I was walking through Target and I walk up towards the front and there's a refrigerated section of dog food. And I'm thinking to myself, are you kidding me? I I thought I was in, like, the Hunger Games where you've just got all of this opulence and this just ridiculousness that we're paying electricity in who knows how many stores to refrigerate food for an animal and then charge a and then people are paying a bunch of money to buy, like, gourmet food for their animals while there are people who are starving around the world.

It it blew my mind. But then I kind of got down off my high horse and I, you know, looked in my my grocery cart and I'm like, man, how many of of these things are necessities? How many people are starving and and how much of this could I do without? And that was that was convicting. So I I kinda go back and forth on on some of these things because in one sense, I've had a conversation before about supporting animal shelters.

Like, I like animals, but at the same time, when I think about supporting an animal shelter, people who donate thousands of dollars to animal shelters and people who run animal shelters, When you have human beings starving around the world or not having access to vaccinations or whatever it is, how do you justify having having animal shelters and and, like, refuges and things for animals? How do you rationalize having a pet? I mean, if a if a dog costs a dollar a day, at the end of the year, you've got a couple hundred bucks you could put towards towards somebody across the world and there are people living on a dollar a day across the world. You could double double somebody's salary in the world just by getting rid of your dog and that's not even counting the medical bills and everything that you need to get for him. But then, of course, you can you can go down that rabbit hole too with anything.

The sports you play, the the car you drive, the house you live in. You could always do with less rooms. You could do with less horsepower. You could do with you could do without so much. And you can you can spend a lot of time on this issue thinking about it and just wondering what what's good.

And I I think my ultimate conclusion here was helped so much when I embraced inconsequentialism. Because unconsequentialism, if if good is determined if morality is determined by the greatest good, then we are damned for a lot. Because when I bought that ice cream cone yesterday, that was $3 that some kid in the world needed to live. How many damnable actions do I do every day? How many how many non essentials do I buy?

And then you can go even further, you know, if I buy some backpacks for some needy kids in my community, that's very nice. Kids can use backpacks to go to school. They won't be made fun of as much because they don't have backpacks. They won't their difference won't be as noticeable. But for the price of of buying a couple kids backpacks, I could feed a kid for a couple months.

I mean, seems like backpacks not being bullied is a much less, is much less of a good than helping somebody survive. We see a similar sort of argument come up from an atheist who is pro choice and he throws this conundrum at Christians and he says, Hey look, if you were in a you were in a fertility clinic and all of a sudden there's a fire, there's a toddler trapped in one room and a thousand embryos, fertilized eggs, trapped in another room. Who do you save? The toddler? The one toddler or the thousand fertilized eggs?

Now, if you're a consequentialist, saving a thousand lives, if you truly are pro life and you truly believe that an embryo is a life, then a thousand lives is worth way more than than one. Nevertheless, everybody says the toddler. Nobody would save the embryos. And for the like one or two people who say they would save the embryos, they only say it because they recognize that they have to say it to be consistent. Nobody or almost nobody ever would save the embryos.

And the the atheist is like, I wonder why that is. It's because you intuitively know embryos aren't worth saving because they're not they're not human persons. But that's that's true on consequentialism. But on on inconsequentialism, we can go down a a different road. You know, we can say, look, God likes God loves humans.

That's true. God also loves his creation. He loves nature. And so for you to save a dog from an animal shelter, that's a good thing. That's good to do because we're supposed to steward the world.

Buying your kids an ice cream cone, I mean, you bought it for them every day or if you're you're I don't know. I'm sure there's certain idolatries and wastefulness and stewardship issues that that you can have. But is it inherently wrong to buy your kids an ice cream cone and let them have the joy of of eating one? No. I don't think so.

But that's not the greatest good that you could possibly be doing. Yeah. But we recognize that that there are many goods in the world, and it's it's not our job to to try to do the greatest good. If I buy some kids some backpacks instead of sending money to Africa for a kid to eat, that's it's good. I've I've helped kids get a backpack because in their lives, that's important for them to have to be able to go to school, to not get bullied.

I think that that's a good thing. On consequentialism, it there's pretty much nothing. No no altruism exists because I can guarantee you that just about any action you perform is never the greatest good, and that's just a problem. God's world is very good. There are lots of goods, And on consequentialism, you just can't really ever experience that.

I'll I'll dig more deeply into that when we do the series on abortion, and and I'm gonna spend a lot more time on the the toddler and embryo scenario. But the point is that that, you know, we we can choose to do a good, and and that's okay in God's good world because he's sovereign, and and God will God is happy that we are seeking to do good, in his good world. And he knows that we're finite and we can embrace our finiteness and and do do what we can. And that's what I love about inconsequentialism. It calls evil evil and it calls good good.

Consequentialism doesn't do that. Sometimes evil is good, and good is almost never good enough. Now consequentialism may provide one with the seeming ability to do good through the embracing of evil, but it becomes nearly impossible to do any good. Makes us feel like we have control, but it makes us hopeless. Well, that's all for now.

So peace because I'm a pacifist and when I say it, I mean it.