I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
Mr. Hat spoketh
Only a satanic deity would desire that: allowing people to be hurt so he can show off.
sean s.
You are assuming why God desires to display His wrath, it may be necessary to tolerate evil for a greater good in which case not He would not necessarily be satanic.
Then God is certainly NOT even approximately “all-powerful”; this “greater good” you refer to is something an actually-all-powerful deity should be able to achieve without having to tolerate any evil.
Even a not-quite-all-powerful deity should be able to achieve whatever it wants more directly than through a morass of suffering.
Given how much doubt there is regarding the mere existence of any deity, efforts to explain away evil with even more mysterious purposes that are mysteriously beyond the ability of even this mysterious deity take on the appearance of desperation, a fog of empty words.
sean s.
No “hell” is a place for justice “heaven” is a place for mercy. No one gets what they deserve in “heaven”.
That is because Jesus got what we deserve and in exchange we get what he deserves
Again God is not hiding you are instead denying his existence while he is staring you in the face.
No your “doubts” are an irrational denial of the obvious
I thought I made that clear.
perhaps because I read it somewhere 😉
You could have read it for yourself it’s pretty to get hold of a copy.
peace
And here we have a textbook example of the kind of “silly skepticism” I spoke about back on page one, which we are prone to run into from religious believers.
Contradictory evidence that should lead them to change their minds, is instead explained away with an ad-hoc hypothesis. This time, there isn’t even any particular explanation for the observation (gratuitous evil) offered, it’s just some handwaving away the evidence with a mere logical possibility.
God could have some sort of plan that involves evil eventually producing greater good somewhere down the line.
Nothing it done to try to argue WHY WE SHOULD THINK God has some sort of grandiose plan that makes evil necessary for the greater good. There is zero evidence and zero arguments offered to try justify the belief that such a plan has been implemented by God and is being carried out.
As I wrote on page 1: “You often find these types of responses to the evidential arguments from evil. For every case offered as an example of gratuitous evil that a moral person would be expected to try to intervene and prevent, the believer will concoct some sort of rationalization, of course entirely ad-hoc, to try to explain away why God would allow such a thing to happen while still be a perfectly morally good God. This on occasion culminates in the quintessential and most vacuous of all possible ad-hoc rationalizations, that it’s all just part of some grand plan we can’t know about because “The Lord works in mysterious ways”.”
So just as the “silly skeptic” in the video is a person who continously invents ad-hoc rationlizations to keep from admitting there’s evidence for the supernatural zombie hypothesis, the religious believer will keep inventing ad-hoc rationalizations to handwave away evidence against God’s existence.
What evidence is there that some great evils in history, eventually lead to much greater goods that required those evils, and are those evils really morally justified by the goods they lead to? What evidence is there that these things were planned and orchestrated by God?
Simply put, until the rationalization-concocting believers start offering really good evidence that such a plan is in effect, has been in effect in the past, and that the great evils of history were justified by later much greater goods, the rationalization should simply not be convincing (and therefore not be believed) to anyone, including the believer who is prone to make it up.
Wrath is just the proper response to evil.
The alternative is to simply wink at it.
A deity who doesn’t get mad at evil sounds pretty satanic to me but maybe you like that sort of thing.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Thanks for clearing that all up. You’re back to endorsing a satanic deity then.
sean s.
To that I would just say.
Have you heard of Jesus?
If you want to know why I trust God that is pretty much it
peace
I haven’t changed anything at all.
Apparently you just hear “bible” and think Satanic for some reason.
I wonder why that is? Perhaps you have some misconceptions of what is written there.
I would suggest that is why you go to so much effort to discredit it.
That brings us back to the original point about you holding things you don’t like to a higher standard.
Thanks Fred
peace
Yes I have heard of Jesus.
Why should I believe Jesus has a plan in effect? What evidence is there that he does? Give multiple concrete examples and demonstrate Jesus orchestrated that these evils lead to greater goods.
It is not evil to doubt a deity who hides from you.
It is not evil to ask hard questions.
It is not evil to wonder why evil flourishes.
You have your head so deeply buried in your silly ideas that you no longer even know what evil is.
A deity that permits actual evil to flourish and people to suffer has no just claim to getting mad at anyone for anything. Your hypothetical deity could fix all these problems immediately; the fact that hasn’t happened shows that either your deity is actually evil (satanic) or that it does not exist.
No deity has a need to tolerate any evil.
sean s.
fifthmonarchyman,
I’m not willing to grovel to a tyrant. I have long had an independent streak. I am not willing to sacrifice my integrity (as I see it) for an easy (after-)life. If God is anything like you suggest, he’s a twat. My hostility is towards the character you portray, imaginary though I think it is. He seems despicable.
fifthmonarchyman,
You’d have to skip past the bits about fiery lakes of sulphur and suchlike. I mean, weeping and gnashing of teeth … that’s not meant to be a threat, then? It’s one of the more consistent themes in the Bible: Hell is a bit shit.
Gnashing of teeth is just what you do when you are angry so it’s not a threat it’s a description of what the rebel does when he does not get his way.
A “lake of fire” simply is a picture of destruction we all want evil destroyed don’t we?
peace
A good therapist could help you address some of those daddy issues.
Finite, constrained beings have priorities because they have limited resources and capabilities. Is your god limited?
You should read his views on slavery.
She can’t fix stupid.
The incarnation and especially the crucifixion.
Off the top of my head I can think of in no particular order
1) Duel mastectomy
2) The death of Castro (I hope)
3) income taxes
4) a painful vaccination
Surely you can think of evils that resulted in greater good on your own.
peace
By angry human beings, probably. By an eternal, all-knowing, all-loving, god? Hardly.
The alternative is to remove the occasion of the offense (sin). Well within the capabilities of an omniscient and omnipotent entity.
A deity with emotions is not qualified for the job.
These are things humans do because we are limited in knowledge and power. So now we should worship your satanic deity because he’s only human?. You’re being silly.
If an actual deity does or allows evil, it can only be for an evil purpose or because he is weak.
sean s.
None of this constitutes evidence that Jesus is in fact orchestrating any worldly events. At all.
This would seem to be almost entirely evil. Breastcancer is terrible, and the requirement that both breasts be removed to combat it is by no means a “justifying” greater good. In fact that just seems to be the lesser of two evils.
On balance, it would be much much better if breast cancer simply didn’t exist. That way, nobody would have to have their breasts removed in the first place.
Castro’s existence is a net-negative as far as I can tell. A brutal and cruel dictator, torturer and persecutor of minorities and political opponents. What’s worse, he lived to the ripe old age of 90, well beyond the average life expectancy of a male in a western nation.
Are the thousands of people killed and tortured in his jails really “worth” the feeling of joy we might have that he’s now finally dead? I dare say no collection of people’s collective feeling of relief or joy, is a justifying reason for the torture and murder of thousands of human beings. His brother is next in line and will apparently continue his dictatorship.
Besides, if you think the end of his existence will lead to greater goods somewhere in the future, you obviously can’t use his mere existence and recent death in the now, as evidence that great evils generally do lead to greater goods. Or, as I asked you to show, that Jesus is somehow the orchestrator of these events.
Basically you’re just responding with blind faith in that it will. Again, Castro seems to have caused more evil than good. On balance, his death appears just a lesser of two evils, compared to his continued existence.
Millions of people have been killed in unimaginable pain from infectious diseases for at least a hundred-thousand of years of human history. We have only within the last century begun to be able to vaccinate against a minority of them. What the hell good has come of that? The net result of infectious diseases seems to be pain, death, agony, fear and sorrow.
If infectious diseases didn’t exist, there’d be no reason to vaccinate in the first place. I don’t think you’ve thought this one through at all.
Income taxes looks to me like an attempt to compensate for the generally terrible state society would be in, if everyone was just left to their own devices. Most people seem to despise paying taxes. Another lesser of two evils.
What all your examples have in common is that they are human endeavours. There’s zero evidence given any of these things are causally influenced by Jesus Christ. What’s worse, nothing has been done to try to make it clear that the goods these lead to, are so much greater than the evils that spurred them that the net effect is positive, rather than still negative or at best a tie.
Particularly your breast cancer and infectious diseases examples look to me like things that are mostly gruesome, and the world would be a better place if neither breast cancer or infectious diseases even existed.
No, not really. If given time, I could maybe come up with a few examples, but these would by no means constitute cases that would be diagnostic of the general state of the world. They’d be exceptions, rather than the rule.
It seems to me that, in general, the evils that persist in the world are by no means “necessary” because they might inspire something good later on. At best it would seem to constitute a whitewash.
fmm,
What is god’s priority list then? What’s #1 on the list? And, more importantly, how do you know?
If you removed the occasion of the offense the world would be a lot less interesting.
Putting toddlers in a playpen limits the opportunity for trouble but makes for a pretty unstimulating time.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Sure. It’s portrayed as a gentle place where people occasionally indicate their mild irritation at this turn of events. Sheesh.
Since all-powerful God seems wholly incapable of not having it in the first place?
I’ve put my finger on why your viewpoint engenders hostility (unfortunately, I must also forfeit under Godwin’s Law): You are essentially saying that someone akin to Hitler is actually OK, and probably has an ulterior motive which we’d forgive if we knew what it was. If he forces people to suffer under his despotic rule – well, it’s what they deserve … Nah: he’s an asshole, this God of yours.
That is why all good parents leave loaded guns around the house
Only create it.
Not sure about that but it is possible
Without knowing exactly what the plan is, I don’t think that is necessarily true.
Totally agree, it is hard to reconcile the concept of omnibenevolent deity and the existence of evil.
I disagree. I know many atheists who were devout theists well into adulthood. For a good percentage of those, the loss of their faith was a painful process. They fully understand those who still believe.
I also find that most atheists have read the scriptures of at least the predominant religion in their area and often those of other religions.
“Why do you hate god?” demonstrates an often deliberate misunderstanding of the atheist position, to be sure. Perhaps some theists genuinely can’t understand lack of belief, but even those should be understand the concept of burden of proof.
Yet you claim to know that it is possible that God does not exist.
Hubris anyone?
That Holocaust sure was interesting.
Is it impossible for god to not exist?
I think so.
sean samis, otoh, claims to have actual knowledge that it is possible that God does not exist, and that’s based on his ignorance about whether it’s impossible that God does not exist. Argumentum ad ignorantiam.
In this case it is silly skepticism from a non believer.
One doesn’t need to be a theist to do that
I think when one ascribes motivations to a basically incomprehensible being and draws conclusions from those motivations, it is not hand waving to point out one is on shaky logical grounds.
Pretty standard stuff.
If you don’t believe a benevolent God exists, there isn’t any reason to think that. For believers in a benevolent version of God ,it is necessary to reconcile omnipotence and benevolence and evil.
The Bible says so is enough for some believers, evil is necessary to test one’s faith in the wisdom and goodness of their version of God. The struggle is necessary to achieve the Good.
True, it seems what is objectively moral for humans is not necessarily binding on the divine.
To a believer there is no expectation of understanding an omniscient,eternal, omnipotent being. The supernatural is mysterious and unpredictable. Bad things still happen but you have some hope there is some logic behind it,not just random. It is meant to keep believers believing not convince non believers
Why?
For you to know that Sean is ignorant of whether it is impossible that some God exists, don’t you need to know the actual argument exists? Care to share ?
What law of nature or rule of logic would be violated if god does not exist?
Yes, I claim to know that too, based on logic.
A proposition is either possible, or it is not possible (impossible). Logical impossibility is in the broadest sense, thought to be demonstrated by deriving logical contradictions between propositions. In so far as no such contradiction can be demonstrated between the propositions, the propositions are by definition simultaneously logically possible.
Since no logical contradictions can be derived from “No god exists” and “something exists”, then it is possible that it is simultaneously true that no god exists and that something exists.
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no proof of the opposite, which does not beg the question (for example by having a premise that defines God as necessary for existence, rather than PROVING He is).
Propositions are either true or false.
Because it is God’s nature that God cannot not exist. Even God cannot will His own non-existence. That would be logically impossible, even for God.
I thank you for so succinctly committing the fallacy of begging the question.
I hereby declare that It is NOT in God’s nature that he cannot not exist. Here we are, two men with contradictory definitions of God. How do we resolve this disagreement?
Mung,
Yes, yes, existent things exist. Now, about God …
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/
http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/necessity.shtml
Mung,
Yeah, Plato will be talked about long after I’m gone, but the ‘necessary being’ argument is still moonshine.
So now there’s more than one person having a questing-begging definition in common with you. Is that how such things are really resolved?
Edit: I should add, that article merely takes an operating definition of God as necessary for granted, and then tries to delve into what that means. Nowhere is it ever shown that this definition correctly refers to something that exists in reality.
So once again, would it be possible for you to discuss the matter of God’s possibility of not existing without you simply deferring to a question-begging definition, or are you really a person that is satisfied with defining certain questions away?
It is possible to imagine such a person, to imagine a God who cannot not exist, but such imaginings do not invoke such a persons’ existence.
If your deity is fictitious or imaginary, they have no nature beyond being imaginary. Claiming that they must exist because they must exist is nonsensical.
You object to me claiming to “know that it’s possible that X does not exist” as being illogical, but then say that “X must exist because X cannot not exist”? Pray tell, how do you KNOW that?
sean s.
This appears to be a “proof from authority” argument; which is not ever valid. Nothing is true just because Plato, some other Famous Person, or the SEP says “it’s so”.
sean s.
It is in the nature of religious thinkers to engage in unquestioning acceptance of favorable authorities. After all, they are arguing that certain mysteries “explain” other mysteries and we know these mysterious “explainations” are true because the ancient philosopher Eugottabekidding and St. Whatsherface and Pope Erroneous the Pink said so.
Of course, all the other ancient, medieval, and modern pundits who disagreed were pagans and heretics so we can ignore them!
And look! The SEP agrees!
sean s.