Mindshift, for those readers who don’t know him, is a skeptic and former Christian named Brandon, who posts regularly on Youtube on various subjects relating to Christianity, and whose motto is: “Following Truth Wherever It Leads!” His channel can be found here. In the video below, he critiques another video by apologist IMBeggar on the problem of evil.
Quick remarks:
IMBeggar’s argument that a perfect world would be boring would work equally well against Heaven, which Christians believe in – or against the Garden of Eden. Also, it overlooks the fact that God didn’t need to create any world at all. Finally, God could have created a world in which some forms of evil were permitted, but not others.
Brandon (Mindshift) points out in his video that many of the evils tolerated by God in the name of freedom (e.g. slavery) are actually condoned by Him in Scripture. This is a good argument against Biblical inspiration but not against theism.
The apologetic argument that we need the bad things in life to appreciate the good is unconvincing. Do we really need billions of instances of child abuse in order to appreciate the goodness of parental kindness? Do we need billions of children’s deaths to appreciate the goodness of life?
The proposal that disease and death are an automatic consequence of sin contradicts the testimony of Scripture, which declares them to be a punishment inflicted by God. Billions of women have died in childbirth during the course of history, supposedly because God declared to Eve in the Garden of Eden, “I will multiply your pains in childbirth.”
The apologetic claim that God’s intervening to control His creatures’ thoughts would cause such utter chaos in the cosmos as to render the system unworkable contradicts the express testimony of Scripture that He frequently does so. But what’s truly unforgivable is a God Who intervenes to save some individuals from the psychological distress that they are in, but leaves others in the lurch.
The claim that there would be no greatness, victory or strength in a world where God intervened to prevent bad consequences is easily refuted. For example, God could eliminate natural disasters: there is nothing “great-making” about these. Alternatively, God could prevent Satan from confusing us.
The video by IMBeggar also falls into an “all or nothing” fallacy: we have to tolerate all evils or none. This is a non sequitur.
But even these rationales for the existence of evil are not good enough, so IMBeggar introduces immortality as a way of remedying the injustices of this world. This is tantamount to an admission that his earlier theodicies fail. Furthermore, it invites the objection that Heaven would be boring, since there is no suffering there. And it leaves unanswered the objection that a Hell from which there can be no escape is morally outrageous, as there is no possibility of rehabilitation.
Finally, the plan for the Creator to come down and live among His own creatures to show them the right way to live is a clumsy one. Even today, there are some who have not heard the Christian message. Moreover, it leaves unanswered the question: how am I supposed to know which of the world’s multiple religions is the right one? Can people who don’t know the Christian faith is true be held responsible for their choices? Do these people deserve Hell?
Wrapping up, Brandon observes that the ultimate purpose of IMBeggar’s world system is to create a testing ground to see which of God’s creatures would make willing and grateful slaves, and to reward these and fry the rest. But a world in which a large proportion of God’s creatures are failures is itself a failure.
My thoughts:
I think Brandon has convincingly exposed the inadequacies of a standard Christian theodicy. None of the proposals put forward by IMBeggar really work.
What Brandon has not done is refute theism. It is certainly possible to believe in God and immortality without believing in an eternal Hell, and many Christians do. Also left unexplored is the notion of reincarnation – although one still wants to ask why there was so much suffering in nature from the get-go. Finally, as regards horrendous suffering, the video overlooks the possibility that some individuals may freely choose to be reincarnated in a world where this hellish kind of suffering might befall them, as a form of character-building. Of course, all too often, horrendous suffering turns out to be not soul-making but soul-breaking, but a theist could argue that there is at least a possibility that it could build virtue in some people.
I’ll leave it there for now. What does everyone think?
But if you find the “natural evil” argument fulfills your apparent purpose in undermining the religious belief of others, then you are free to carry on, here or anywhere, as you see fit.
Alan:
You’re making progress. Suppose you’re right that the meanings are inconsistent. They’re meanings, nonetheless, which means that “evil” as a noun is not meaningless, contrary to your assertion.
Of course I’m free to carry on. This is The Skeptical Zone, I’m skeptical of theism, and I’m presenting an argument against it. That’s exactly the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at TSZ.
Well, it’s a bit quiet here, now. Perhaps Mahomet should go to the mountain. Is there someone you’d like to debate? Maybe they’d accept an invitation.
At least I expect Vincent will chip in when he has time.
Missed this earlier. Indeed people do make up gods. People are a kaleidoscope of good, bad, and otherwise. Ideas don’t depend on the source.
Sure, but that doesn’t devalue a fine idea.
Alan:
Let TSZ be TSZ. People decide for themselves whether to come here, whether they’re interested in a particular topic, and whether to participate in the discussion. That’s what I did.
Hi everyone. I’ve been very busy during the past few days, but I’ll have some free time tonight, when I’ll be able to respond to people’s comments at my leisure. In the meantime, I’d like to thank everyone for weighing in with their take on the problem of evil. It’s 5:37 a.m. over here, and I’ll have to head off to work in a few minutes. Have a good day.
Hi everyone. Back again. I’d just like to make a quick comment on the term “natural evil.” I can sympathize with Alan Fox’s dislike of this term. To quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on The concept of evil by Todd Calder (bolding is mine):
Alan is therefore using the term “evil” in the narrow sense, while keiths is using it in the broad sense. The broad sense requires a unifying concept to tie natural and moral evil together under one term (“evil”). One popular explanation is that both of these kinds of evil involve the notion of something defective, which is not as it should be.
That said, it seems there’s nothing defective about an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or a tsunami, as such. If these events took place on a lifeless planet, we wouldn’t call them evil. We might even call them beautiful. It’s only when they cause suffering and death that we are driven to ask the question, “Why would God allow these events to happen?” And I think that’s a perfectly valid question.
By the way, keiths, I’d agree with most of the criticisms of IMBeggar’s video which you raised in your first comment on this thread. I disagree, however, with your claim that libertarian free will cannot exist. While it’s true that neither determinism nor randomness gives us free will, I think randomness is at least compatible with the existence of free will. For instance, two sequences of 1’s and 0’s can both be random in the sense that each of them has no underlying pattern and is incompressible. However, the two sequences could also be entangled, in such a way that each is the opposite of the other; where one of them has a 1, the other has a 0, so that the two sequences add up to 1 in every column. From a physics-related perspective, a libertarian choice can be viewed as an entanglement of two or more random sets of neuronal firings. When we make a free choice, we create our own entanglements. Underlying randomness at the neuronal level is thus compatible with freedom.
I think a lot needs to be said as well about God’s omniscience. Traditionally, Christian theologians have been willing to ascribe to God not only the ability to know all actual states of affairs, but also the ability to know all possible states of affairs, and even all counterfactual states of affairs (e.g. what I would choose in any given situation). But even if God knows some counterfactuals, I see no good grounds for believing that He knows them all – especially when such knowledge is at odds with libertarian freedom, as critics of Molinism have frequently argued. Nor am I sure that God has an exhaustive knowledge of all possible states of affairs. All I think a believer needs to claim is that whatever actual state of affairs may arise, God is able to respond to it in an appropriate manner. The problem of evil can now be restated: why, then, does God respond to the bad things that occur in our world in a way that seems utterly inappropriate for a moral agent?
One answer to this question that’s beloved of many Christian apologists is that God isn’t just one agent among many: He’s the scriptwriter of the whole show, and the characters in the show can’t argue with the scriptwriter. However, I have systematically critiqued this idea before, so I won’t repeat myself here.
I must get some shuteye, so I’ll lay down my pen here for now.
Here’s a passage from the SEP article, with a key part in bold:
That’s a big “if” because from a theistic perspective, it isn’t just humans who can perpetrate evil. God himself is a moral agent and is therefore capable of performing evil actions. To knowingly create a world in which tsunamis can wipe out hundreds of thousands of people is such an action, in my opinion.
Some theists try to defend God by arguing that he isn’t responsible for natural disasters, because he doesn’t directly cause them — he just puts creation in motion and natural disasters are a later byproduct. This is a copout.
Here’s a scenario that illustrates the problem. Suppose Fiona builds a robotic device to perform some task and lets it loose on the world. The device has a known and undesirable side effect: If the temperature and humidity both fall within a certain range of values, the device will spew ionizing radiation in all directions, killing everyone within a certain distance. Fiona knows that the temperature and humidity will fall into those ranges on occasion. Sure enough, the device ends up killing a number of people.
Are Fiona’s actions evil? In her defense, she might say “I’m not responsible for those deaths, because I don’t control the weather. I didn’t make the temperature and humidity what they were. I didn’t cause the problem.” Would you find that persuasive?
I wouldn’t, because to create such a device, knowing full well that it was going to result in the deaths of innocent bystanders, makes Fiona responsible for those deaths. Her actions were evil.
As with Fiona, so with God. Being omniscient, he already knew at the moment of creation that there would be earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, etc. He knew that those things would result in suffering and death. Nevertheless, he forged ahead, and that makes him both responsible and evil.
Alan seems to agree with me on this. He writes
Being atheists, he and I also agree that natural evil doesn’t actually exist, because there is no moral agent we can attribute natural disasters to. It’s a different story for the many theists, including Christians, who believe in a omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God who deliberately created the universe, knowing full well that natural disasters would ensue. For them, natural evil exists, it’s a real problem, and it falls within what the SEP author called “the narrow concept of evil” — evil caused by the actions of moral agents.
vjtorley:
I wouldn’t consider defects per se to be indicative of evil, but they do raise questions about God’s perfection.
I agree. If no harm is being done, then there’s nothing evil about those things.
vjtorley:
You say that we create those entanglements, but how does that happen? What does this “we” consist of that is causing them, if not some combination of deterministic and random factors? The problem doesn’t go away if you posit the existence of souls, because the same question applies to them: what else can they be if not some combination of deterministic and random factors?
In your example of the complementary sequences, something has to be causally responsible for the complementarity. I don’t see how the ultimate cause could be anything but determinism, randomness, or a combination of both, which is why I think libertarian free will is a fiction.
vjtorley:
Could you elaborate on the incompatibility? I’m not seeing it. Here’s my thinking: God creates the universe in an initial state. He then “simulates” it in his mind, predicting its evolution over time. Whenever he encounters a random event, he “forks” the simulation so that there is a separate simulation for every possible random outcome. Ditto for the choices made by free agents. The result is a wildly branching tree of simulations, reminiscent of what you get with the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. There may even be an infinite number of simulations at each juncture, but keeping all those simulations in mind shouldn’t be a problem for an infinitely capable God. How does any of this impinge on libertarian free will?
I remember that you did an OP on it. It was Edward Feser making that argument, right? I agree with you that it doesn’t fly. It’s one thing to turn a fictional Gregor Samsa into a fictional insect — nothing immoral about that — but quite another to force this ordeal on a sentient person. Ditto for all the horrors that befall humans in our world.
There’s an excuse for natural evil that hasn’t been discussed so far in this thread, which is that it’s caused by Satan, not God. The argument is similar to the standard free will defense: Satan has free will, just as humans do, and free will is such a good thing that God doesn’t want to interfere with it. So Satan runs rampant and natural evil abounds.
One odd thing about this excuse is that it means, among other things, that Satan, not God, is responsible for earthquakes. How does that work, exactly? We know that the worst earthquakes are caused by shifting tectonic plates and that the movement of the plates is caused by convection currents underneath, in the mantle. How is Satan responsible? Did God create a static earth, after which Satan got his hands on it, cracked the crust into plates, and then heated up the interior to create convection currents? It’s comical.
Also, it’s subject to the same criticisms as the standard free will defense. What I wrote above about IMBeggar’s bots applies equally to Satan:
Also, this: if God has perfect foreknowledge, he can predict that a person (or entity) will do evil things before he creates them, and he can decide on that basis whether or not to create them. If he creates only those whom he knows will always freely choose the good, then he can prevent evil without depriving anyone of free will.
Free will is commonly treated as a binary phenomenon — you either have it or you don’t. In reality, it’s a spectrum. Suppose that the only truly free choice I can make every day is whether to have bacon vs sausage with my breakfast. Does my will qualify as free, by God’s standard? If not, what’s the minimum amount of choice he would require in order to consider me to be free? How does he determine that amount, and can he arrange it so that evil choices aren’t available to me? If not, why not? What’s so great about the ability to do evil?
keiths,
How are you doing?
Seems you are fine lol
Here
I haven’t seen Allan Miller for a while, but I didn’t realize he was on death row 😧
Corneel,
In spite of the evilness, one has to credit the guy for an economical use of the letter ‘L’.
Not sure that helps. Catharism, for example, was at a selective disadvantage.
Alan:
It helps because it gives proponents a scapegoat and gets God off the hook for natural evil. The problem is that it depends on the free will defense, which works no better when applied to Satan than it does when applied to humans.
That’s because it was considered heretical by Rome, not because it blamed Satan/the bad god for natural evil. The Catholic Church is fine with the idea that Satan is responsible for natural evil.
History is written by the winners. The motive for the Albigensian Crusade was not so much a religious dispute (though presented as one) but more a takeover of land and resources, reinforcing the control of the invading elite and their army of opportunist looters.
Well, if Satan is the source, it’s not natural. The Cathar religion proposed that the physical world was too evil to have been created by a “good” supreme being and therefore must have been created by a “bad” one. The goal for Cathars was to enter the non-physical world of the “good” creator, which involved abstinence from all worldly temptations including violence, sex and, ultimately, sustenance of any kind. That was why I said “selective disadvantage”.
It’s a shame Gregory Sandström doesn’t look in these days. I think I’d agree with him now how cultural evolution is shaping religious cults. Cults* need followers to survive. They need those followers to proliferate and breed.
Apologies for the synecdoche. Cult leaders, cabals?
You forgot something more important: “History is a set of lies agreed upon”
Who will be agreeing on the covid lies, Alan? Have you had your family member developed a rare disease or cancer? No problem. Everything and everything can kill you these day but the mRNA/DNA vaccines…
Keep that in mind just in case you will have to deal with what I have to deal with…
keiths:
Alan:
The “natural” in “natural evil” doesn’t identify the source — it identifies the setting. Some attribute natural evil to God; some attribute it to Satan; some blame it on nobody, and some even blame it on humans, via the Fall. (William Dembski bizarrely went so far as to claim that the Fall was retroactive. Otherwise it can’t explain the natural evil that occurred prior to the advent of humanity.) It’s still natural evil in all of those cases.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Global warming isn’t caused by the globe, coastal pollution isn’t caused by the coast, intestinal surgery isn’t caused by the intestines, mad cow disease isn’t caused by cows, and so on.
Merely blaming Satan for natural evil doesn’t entail celibacy. The Cathars took it an extra step — hence the “selective disadvantage”. In any case, the question isn’t whether blaming Satan helps any particular group to survive. It’s whether blaming Satan for natural evil gets God off the hook. I say no, for reasons given above.
Not if there’s a sufficient influx of new followers. Despite practicing celibacy, the Shakers managed to last 250 years because they replenished their ranks through conversion and adoption.
On another thread, colewd linked to an article by Pastor Tim White that contained the following rationalization of natural evil:
Isn’t an omnipotent God capable of aiming his curses so that innocent bystanders aren’t affected? Second, are we to believe that the laws of physics were different prior to the Fall, in some magical way that prevented natural evil from occurring while still permitting all of the good things that rely on those same laws of physics? Or does White subscribe to the bizarre Dembskian rationalization of claiming that the Fall was retroactive, so that all of the suffering and evil that preceded it was nevertheless caused by it?