C and E

Originally posted July 07th, 2005.

Ok I'm kinda bitter at myspace right now because last night I wrote a long blog and when I tried to post it, it said myspace was down and my entire blog got lost. So now I am going to try again.

So we all know that for every effect there is a cause. Speaking with human action we know that the motivation and the action itself can be wrong at times. Sometimes the cause and the effect can both be wrong. Then sometimes the cause can be wrong but the effect right. An example of this is when you mean to do harm but it turns out for good by accident, certainly a rare incident. But what I want to talk about is when the effect is wrong but the cause is right. Now some people don't believe this is possible because it is the cause that creates the effect. But I have an example to demonstrate otherwise. Say a man became hungry. He went to the fridge which was filled with food. He removes a stick of butter and eats the butter.

Clearly eating a stick of butter is unhealthy. And the cause was his hunger. A fool might say that the reason he did something unhealthy was because he was hungry. But any wise person can see that it was the means the man took to satisfy his hunger which was wrong. Some might say that there were mitigating causes that came in between to cause him to choose to eat butter. But that is just mincing words - whether you call them intermediary causes or "means" - for the ultimate cause was his hunger.

So what is the significance of this? Well I have two points. The first is that some people argue that there can be no Creator God because he created us with an internal state that leads us to do evil. But just like the hungry man example they are wrongly believing the "rightness," or lack thereof, of the effect determines the rightness of the cause. In fact, if the cause can be used in good ways then one can say that it's rightness is preserved. And this leads to my second point.
I believe people, Christians in particular, believe their hearts are bad because their actions are bad. The truth is that God created us with an internal desire to find external perfection. That means we all long to find some form of personal satisfaction with a knowledge that personal satisfaction lies outside of us. This is why people search out material things, education, relationships, etc. (Note that I am not making a judgement on the rightness of these things) But we seem to all know that we can not find satisfaction without something outside of us. I believe God placed this desire within us so that we can search Him out. Otherwise we would be content with dissatisfaction (for of course we lack the capacity for self-satisfaction, that is on the level of the gods). Now this same desire for external perfection can be the cause for many wrongs because we take the wrong means to try and satisfy the desire. But once again I refer you to the hungry man example.

We need to believe that the root of our desires stem from our deep need for God and is nothing to be ashamed of. God created us perfectly by creating us with imperfections. For those imperfections can drive us towards the source of life.

Props to C.S. Lewis for the core of this whole argument. And pardons for myself for anywhere I am unclear.