"The Fall"

"If only there were evil people somewhere , insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

This is essentially what Plantinga talks about in the chapter of "The Fall" - that every human being has evil in them, and that evil is not something that can be separated from good because good and evil are so closely intertwined. Evil is what caused the fall after creation. Because of the fall after creation, evil has permeated the world, and evil is undoubtedly ubiquitous. Plantinga defines "evil as any spoiling of shalom, any deviation from the way God wants things to be". In the beginning God created everything perfect, the way he knew it should be, so this shows that anything that is different from what God had originally made is evil. "[E]vil is a kind of parasite on goodness" which illustrates that we cannot have evil without goodness, or else the parasite would have nothing to attach itself to. Overall, Plantinga spends the majority of this chapter discussing corruption and how it works in our world, as well as where evil comes from and who instills it in our hearts.

If we imagine our hearts as goodness, and that parasites were created by the fall of man - the parasites are what corrupt our hearts. Each time we take something good, and add something to it that originally was not there, a parasite attaches to our heart. Over time, more and more parasites stick to our hearts, embedding themselves and getting deeper and deeper. Although we are born with a sin nature, we do it to ourselves, we make the choice of allowing another parasite near our heart. In order to reduce the amount of evil that permeates us, it is crucial to make the right decision and be mindful of what the right one is when we are faced with a choice. Like Plantinga says, you cannot cling to multiple things. "Like a sailor with one foot on a dock and the other on a departing catamaran, we have to choose" because if we try to cling to more than one thing, a person can be split. Let's look at it this way: We have to make a choice just like the sailor who had to choose either land, or the boat. God is sinless and he is the one who created everything that is good, and our hearts as well as everything else in the world are corrupt with evil. Then you tell me, what choice should we make? What should we cling to?

If your answer to the previous question was God, then please keep reading. If your answer was anything else, please stop reading now. If we cling to God (the correct choice), and the source of all goodness, we have a much better chance of fighting off those parasites and keeping them from getting to our hearts. If we stick with God we are also more likely to acknowledge "that our lives themselves have come from God and that we therefore owe God our loyalty and gratitude". If we ignore this fact, we face danger. For example, "people often take pride not only in their accomplishments but also in their intelligence, good looks, good breeding, and good coordination, as if they had gifted themselves with these things". Those of us who do this are putting faith in ourselves instead of God - when we should be doing the opposite, and thanking God for these things. Another consequence of ignoring the correct choice of clinging to God is what comes after we take pride in ourselves. If someone takes pride in themselves, they begin to make choices based on what they desire as a corrupted person. In other words, "a corrupted person turns God's gifts away from their intended purposes". Plantinga illustrates this with the example that a person "might use her excellent mind and first-class education not to extend the reach of God's kingdom but just to get rich. She wants to get rich, not in order to support terrific projects in the world, but just to move up the social ladder". This type of person is selfish, using her gift from God to please herself instead of blessing others with it, as God would want. Are you beginning to see the danger of choosing to follow a selfish path as opposed to a path that will help to restore a fallen world like God intended?

To keep the parasites away from our hearts, we need to fend them off. In order to fend them off, and keep evil away we need to find the right way of going about it in this fallen world. There are countless ways that good has been corrupted, and because good and evil cannot be separated, it is important to adhere to the truth so that we may take a stand and work to redeem what we ourselves have caused - "The Fall".