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Commentary on the Book of Job
Saint Joseph Edition The New American Bible
The debate which ensues consists of three cycles of speeches. (Cycle One Job 3; Cycle Two Job 15; Cycle Three Job 22) Job's friends insists that his plight can only be a punishment for personal wrongdoing and an invitation from God to repentance. Job rejects their inadequate explanation and calls for a response from God himself. At this point the speeches of a youth named Elihu interrupts the development (Job 32 - 37).
In response to Job's plea that he be allowed to see God and hear from him the cause of his suffering, God answers, not by justifying his action before men, but by referring to his own omniscience and almighty power. Job is content with this. He recovers his attitude of humility and trust in God, which is deepened now and strengthened by his experience of sufferings.
Joseph with Jacob in Egypt ( Jacopo da Pontormo)
Day 24 Tears of Joy
A Commentary
Understanding the Scriptures - The Didache Series (Chapter 6, page 123)
In time we can discover that God in his almighty providence can bring a good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral evil, caused by his creatures: "It was not you", said Joseph to his brothers "who sent me here, but..God. You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good to bring it about that any people should be kept alive." (Gen 45:8;50:20;)
From the greatest moral evil ever committed - the rejection and murder of God's only Son, caused by the sins of all men - God, by his grace that "abounded all the more" (Rom 5:20), brought the greatest of goods: the glorification of Christ and our redemption. But for all that, evil never becomes a good (CCC 312).
When Jacob heard that Joseph was still alive, he could hardly believe it. But God spoke to him in a vision once again, telling him to go down to Egypt. It was part of God's plan.
So Jacob went down to Egypt, and the whole family - seventy people, counting sons and grandsons - was reunited. Pharaoh gave Joseph's family the best grazing land in the country, and they grew even richer So, contrary to what we might have expected, the book of Genesis ends, not in the Promised Land of Canaan, but in the foreign land of Egypt.
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A Daily Defense DAY 24 The Moral Argument
CHALLENGE: “Why shouldn’t I believe in scientific materialism—the view that only physical matter and energy exist and that science is the key to all knowledge?”
DEFENSE: Because morality points us beyond the purely material and beyond what science is capable of establishing.
Moral values are real. Some things are objectively right and some are objectively wrong. Showing compassion for the poor and the weak is good; torturing babies for fun is evil. Belief in moral values is a human universal that exists in all cultures. It is built into human nature, and it cannot be suppressed.
Even those who profess philosophies denying moral realism cannot maintain the pretense. They invariably slip back into realist thinking and language, expressing either appreciation for acts they sense are good or outrage at acts they sense are evil.
But science is not capable of establishing moral values (one of several limitations it has; see Day 333). It may be capable of studying what people consider morally good and bad, but it is not capable of establishing what is morally good and bad. This is known in philosophy as the “is-ought problem.”
Certain statements are descriptive, describing the way the world is. Others are prescriptive, describing the way the world ought to be. Science is capable of investigating the former, but it does not have the ability to investigate the latter. As philosophers have often put it, you cannot derive an ought-statement from an is statement.
The reason is that science involves an empirical methodology—one based on things that can be detected and measured by the physical senses or by physical extensions of them (e.g., telescopes, microscopes, radio wave detectors).
But moral good and evil cannot be detected and measured in this way. They are non-empirical qualities. You cannot detect moral goodness with a technical instrument or torture someone in a lab and use an evil-ometer to determine how bad the act is.
We thus have good reason, based on the universal human belief in moral realism, to hold that moral values are objectively real, but they transcend the empirical. This shows that there is a transcendental realm that goes beyond the purely material and the abilities of science.
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