roger wasson company - cheapersunglasses.com

the supposition that God Himself faces problems that do not
arise from His active and creative will.
Brightman attempts to locate this original problem datum as
a passive element within God’s very nature: [[340]]
[indent] There is within him, in addition to his reason and
his active creative will, a passive element which enters into
every one of his conscious states . . . and constitutes a problem
for him. This element we call the Given. The evils of life and
the delays in the attainment of value, insofar as they come from
God and not from human freedom, are thus due to his nature,
yet not wholly to his deliberate choice. His will and reason acting
on the Given produce the world and achieve value in it.
(Footnote 88: Ibid., p. 113.)
Insofar therefore as God is active and creative, His nature is
goodness. But He also includes within His nature a Given that
conditions and limits His every action. Thus the problem of
evil is soluble by positing limits to the divine power: God Himself
is finite.
By way of objection to this solution: at the outset, it may be
observed that we have already shown that a finite God is an impossibility
of rational thought: consider our discussion of the
expansive-limiting argument of presuppositionalism. If God
and evil ultimately limit each other, if evil springs from conditions
not originally imposed by the divine will; then both God
and evil are finites, and it is exactly the existence of a plurality
of finites that leads us to posit beyond them a deeper ultimate
that is their explanation and ground of existence.
Nor do I think that the situation is relieved by Brightman’s
assumption that evil springs from a Given or passive element
within the very nature of God---as if I could transform a pair of
finites into an infinite by drawing a circle around them. For if
the existence of evil is actually a self-involvement in God’s being,
what is the real meaning, in the final analysis, of saying