Objection 1. God doesn’t care who wins the Super Bowl. For sporting events are “of the world,” and God calls us out of the world to share even now in his divine life.
Objection 2. If God did care who wins the Super Bowl, he would be sucked into the world’s rabid competitiveness and greed, which are beneath him.
*Sed contra*: God is perfectly rational, and any agent even minimally rational would care who wins the Super Bowl, because so much ego and money are at stake; and where that much is at stake, so is the good of souls.
*Respondeo*: God does not care who wins the Super Bowl *per se*, but only *per accidens*, insofar as one team’s winning the game would help more souls to adhere to him than the other teams winning would.
That suffices in reply to Objection 1 and the contrary.
Reply Objection 2. God saved humanity from itself by letting people torture and execute him as a public threat, before rising from the dead. His involvement in the Super Bowl would serve the same end by less gruesome means.
February 3rd, 2013 | 3:41 pm
I myself don’t care a fig who wins the Superbowl, but I will be watching it with my husband, one of my sons, and two of my grandsons. I hope we win. But who are “we”?
February 3rd, 2013 | 11:09 pm
a big THANK YOU!!!! appreciated your words of spiritual sanity.
February 4th, 2013 | 6:51 am
I don’t follow football at all, but in case anybody doesn’t know, I heard on the radio that the Raisins won.
February 4th, 2013 | 11:46 am
Objection 1. That is Deism, and Deism is really anthropomorphic. It is confusing greatness and authority with distance which is a specifically human organizational dysfunction rather then the natural result of power as such. It assumes that God’s power is demonstrated by not caring what his creatures do the way human rulers don’t care about their subjects except in aggregate because of the limitations of their finite mental capacities. However, by definition God is not limited in mental energy the way a human is. It is also possibly Gnostic in assuming that “The World” as spoken of in the Bible is a denigration to athletics and other (in principal)harmless merrymaking simply because of their physical nature. When the Bible speaks of “The World”, it usually means “sinful tendencies in human society” or something of the nature, not athletics which are not sinful in principal and less similar then many things in practice.
Objection 2. The “competitiveness” of football is not sinful in itself and the game is just as much cooperative as competitive. Perhaps competition would not exist were it not for The Fall but that could be said of a lot of good things including most of literature.
Objection 3. Which has not been given. It is unsporting and rude for a spectator to try to interfere with the results of the game therefore we should not wish God to do so or pray for the success of our favorite team.
February 4th, 2013 | 12:06 pm
What does it mean for an all-knowing being to “care”? I care about an event when I attach importance to a contingency. God knows all things in all time; for Him, nothing remains contingent. God knows the outcome of every contest before it occurs (kind of like Lau Tso?), and all the events that follow from every outcome. What is left to “care” about?
Sure, I expect God would structure all things to His purposes, and there’s no reason to think that the Superbowl would be an exception. I see no reason that God would not use the Superbowl, or anything else, to help save humanity from itself. Thus, while neither team could justly claim that “God is on our side,” it might be the case that either time was, incidentally, on God’s side.
That said, it’s far from clear how the Superbowl would (or did?) help save humanity from itself. True, there did seem to be some kind of battle between the forces of light and darkness during the second half….
February 4th, 2013 | 12:16 pm
This provokes the question why anyone would petition God for any specific outcome — even of the “give us this day our daily bread” variety. Surely an all-knowing, all-loving God has arranged for His purposes to be fulfilled. If our wills play any role at all, it’s to align ourselves with those purposes — not our own.
But I see little harm in praying, “God help the Ravens” provided I follow up with “but Thy will be done!“
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