Both Mung and KeithS have asked me to weigh in on the question of whether the existence of evil counts as a good argument against Christianity, as KeithS has maintained in a recent post, so I shall oblige.
It is important to understand that the problem of evil is not an argument against the existence of God or gods, but against what KeithS calls the Christian God (actually, the God of classical theism), Who is supposed to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. KeithS succinctly formulates the problem as follows:
Let’s say I claim that an omniGod named Frank exists — omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Suppose I also claim that Frank regards seahorses as the absolute height of evil. The world contains a lot of seahorses, and Frank, being omnipotent, has the power to wipe them off the face of the earth. Why doesn’t he? Why does he countenance a world full of seahorses?
KeithS emphasizes that it is not enough for the Christian to show that God is on balance benevolent. Rather, the Christian needs to defend the claim that God is omnibenevolent:
The Christian claim is that God is omnibenevolent — as benevolent as it is logically possible to be. Finding that the items on the “good” side of the ledger outweigh those on the “bad” side — if that were the case — would not establish God’s omnibenevolence at all.
Finally, KeithS provides his own take on the problem of evil:
The problem of evil remains as much of a problem as ever for Christians. Yet there are obvious solutions to the problem that fit the evidence and are perfectly reasonable: a) accept that God doesn’t exist, or b) accept that God isn’t omnipotent, or c) accept that God isn’t perfectly benevolent. Despite the availability of these obvious solutions, most Christians will choose to cling to a view of God that has long since been falsified.
He even suggests how he would resolve the problem if he were a theist (emphasis mine – VJT):
Suppose God hates evil and suffering but is too weak to defeat them, at least at the moment. Then any such instances can be explained by God’s weakness.
It addresses the problem of evil without sacrificing theism. I’m amazed that more theists don’t seize on this sort of resolution. They’re too greedy in their theology, too reluctant to give up the omnis.
I think KeithS is onto something here. In fact, I’d like to ditch the conventional Christian views of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence. It’s time for an overhaul.
Why a God Who constantly watches His creatures cannot be omniscient
First, the conventional notion of God’s omniscience needs to be jettisoned. As I argued in an earlier post on the problem of evil, the problem of evil depends on the assumption that God’s knowledge of our choices (and of Adam and Eve’s choices) is logically prior to those choices. In that post, I upheld the contrary view (defended in our own time by C.S. Lewis), that God is like a watcher on a high hill: He timelessly knows everything that we choose to do, but His knowledge is logically subsequent to the choices we make, which means that He doesn’t know what we will do “before” He decides to make us. I have to acknowledge, however, that this is very much a minority view among the Christian Fathers and/or Doctors of the Church, and I can only think of two who argued for this view: namely, the somewhat heterodox theologian Origen (185-254 A.D.) and possibly, the Christian philosopher Boethius (c. 480- c. 524 A.D. – although his own personal views on the subject remain in dispute, as he elsewhere seems to reject the “watcher on the hill” analogy which he develops in Book V, Prose 6 of his Consolation of Philosophy, in which he declares that God “sees all things in an eternal present just as humans see things in a non-eternal present.”) Whether they be predestinationists or Molinists, the vast majority of Christian theologians who are orthodox – and I’m not counting “open theists” here – maintain that God’s knowledge of our choices is logically prior to those choices. I haven’t taken a straw poll of lay Christian believers, but judging from Christians I’m acquainted with, the “watcher on the hill” view of God remains a popular way of reconciling His foreknowledge with human free will, to this day. I believe the common folk are wiser than the theologians here.
Why are theologians so reluctant to accept the Boethian solution? In a nutshell, because they see it as detracting from God’s sovereignty, as it makes Him dependent on His creatures for information about what is going on in the world. God has to (timelessly) observe us in order to know what we are getting up to. I have to say I don’t see the problem here, provided that God freely and timelessly chooses to rely on His creatures for His knowledge of what they do. If He wants to impose that limitation on Himself, who are we to stop Him?
But if God’s knowledge of our choices is (timelessly) obtained from observing those choices, then we can no longer say that God knows exactly what I would do in every possible situation. On the Boethian account, God does not possess counterfactual knowledge: He knows everything I do, but not everything I would do, in all possible situations. Why not? For one thing, in many situations, there simply is no fact of the matter as to what I would do. What would I do if I won $10,000,000? I don’t know, and neither does God. Nor is this a bad thing: after all, if God knows exactly what I would do in every possible situation, then it makes no sense to say that in a given situation, I could have acted otherwise. (That, by the way, is why I find Molinism utterly nonsensical.)
And what about mathematics? Does God know the answer to every possible mathematical problem? I would argue that He doesn’t, as there are many branches of mathematics where the “rules of the game” are determined by the mathematicians theorizing in that area. In a different world, we would have had different mathematicians, and different branches of mathematics, with different rules. I see no reason to suppose that God knows all possible choices that could be made by all possible (as well as actual) persons.
The upshot of all this is that while God knows everything there is to know about His creatures, He is not omniscient. There are many counterfactuals that He doesn’t know, and there are many possibilities that He never contemplates, either. All we can say is that God knows everything about what we do (past, present and future), and that we can keep no secrets from Him.
Why God is a lot less powerful than many Christians think
Second, the traditional notion of God’s omnipotence needs to be discarded. On the classical view defended by St. Thomas Aquinas, God can do anything which it is logically possible for Him to do, as God. In recent years, however, the classical view has come under fire, from the Reformed theologian Alvin Plantinga, who refuted it using the humorous counter-example of a being whose nature allows him to do nothing but scratch his ear (which he does, making him omnipotent) in his book, God and other minds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), and also from the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach, who sharply criticized the traditional view in an influential article titled “Omnipotence” (Philosophy 48 (1973): 7-20 – see here for a discussion). In his article, Geach argued that God is not omnipotent but almighty: since He maintains the world in existence, He has power over all things, but He does not have the power to do all things.
What relevance does this have to the problem of evil? On the traditional view of God’s omnipotence, God could have preserved each of us from sin throughout our earthly lives, without violating our free will, as he did with Jesus and (according to Catholics and Orthodox) the Virgin Mary: we would still have possessed full libertarian freedom when choosing between alternative goods, but not when choosing between good and evil. And there are many Protestants who believe that individuals who are “born again” are infallibly elected by God, so that even if they sin, their final salvation is Divinely guaranteed. Why, one might ask, didn’t God make us all like that? The Catechism of the Catholic Church attempts to resolve the problem by appealing to the “greater good” of the Incarnation and Redemption – a response which I find unsatisfactory, since (as Blessed John Duns Scotus argued) there was nothing to stop God from becoming incarnate even if Adam had never sinned.
For normal human beings, their personal identity is determined by their parentage, and by the gametes from which their bodies were created. (I would not be “me” if I had had a different mother or father, or if I had been conceived from a different sperm or egg.) But what if God’s act of specially electing a saint to glory also determines that individual’s personal identity? In that case, there is no way that God could have refrained from electing that saint without making him or her a different person. And if I am not elected in this fashion, but possess the power to choose between being saved and being damned, then I cannot coherently wish to have been predestined for eternal life without wishing myself to be a different person. It follows from this that while God could have made a world of human beings who were all preserved from sin, or who were all infallibly elected, not even God could make a world in which each of us is preserved from sin or infallibly elected. In that case, God is significantly less powerful than Christian theologians like to imagine.
In recent years, New Atheists have argued that the designs we find in living things are inept, and that if a Creator existed, He could have done a much better job of making these creatures. Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates reply that living things are subject to numerous design constraints, and that just because we can imagine a more elegant design does not mean that it is possible to create such a design. Picturability does not imply possibility. Recent scientific discoveries regarding the vertebrate eye (see here and here) have done much to vindicate this line of argument. (The same goes for the laryngeal nerve in the neck of the giraffe.) We are a long way here from the traditional view that God can make anything, as long as no logical contradiction is involved. Physical and nomological constraints (relating to the structure of matter, and the laws of Nature which obtain in our cosmos) also need to be taken into account.
An additional reason for rejecting the traditional notion of omnipotence is that it commits one to maintaining that God can bring about states of affairs which are not properly described. When someone claims, for instance, that God could make a horse capable of flying, like the mythical Pegasus, what, exactly, are we supposed to conceive of God doing here? And how would Pegasus fly, anyway? Are we supposed to imagine God working a miracle, by raising a horse in the air? But in that case, shouldn’t we really say that the horse is not flying (by its own natural power), but rather that God is holding it up? Or are we meant to imagine an alternative world, where the laws of Nature are changed so as to allow horses to fly – in which case, should we call the creature in this alternate world a horse, or should we rather call it a shmorse? Or are we to suppose that God could come up with a physical design for a horse that would enable it to fly, even with the laws of Nature that hold in this world? But in that case, how do we know that such a design exists? There is not the slightest evidence for such a design, and aerodynamic considerations suggest that the enterprise of attaching natural wings that would allow an animal with the dimensions of a horse to fly, would be altogether unworkable.
Goodbye to omnibenevolence
Finally, the concept of God’s omnibenevolence needs to be tossed out, lock, stock and barrel. Theologians have always maintained, of course, that God could have made a world that was better than the one He did, simply by adding a few extra bells and whistles. There is no “best possible world,” as the philosopher Leibniz falsely imagined. But that does not prevent God from making a world which is free from all natural and moral evil – which raises the obvious question of why an omnibenevolent Deity would create such a world as ours. One traditional answer, given by St. Augustine in his Enchiridion, Chapter III, is that God allows evil for the sake of a “greater good”: “For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil.” I think its time to candidly acknowledge, as Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has already done, that this kind of talk simply won’t wash:
Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent – though immeasurably more vile – is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature…
I do not believe we Christians are obliged – or even allowed – to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery.
But as KeithS has pointed out, there are problems with Hart’s own resolution of the problem of evil:
So in Hart’s bizarre world, we have a God who supposedly hates evil and suffering, yet chooses to permit them — and somehow this is all okay because it’s only temporary. Good will triumph in the end.
KeithS suggested that the problem of evil would be soluble if Christians simply acknowledged that God isn’t omnipotent or perfectly benevolent, but noted that Christians continue to “cling to a view of God that has long since been falsified.”
So I’d like to make a proposal of my own. In the first place, I’d like to propose that God is benevolent only in relation to the persons whom He decides to create. “Prior to” His act of creation, God is not benevolent at all. Thus when deciding what kind of world to create, God makes no attempt to choose the best one, or even a perfect one (i.e. one free from evil). Only after having chosen a particular world (for reasons best known to Himself) can we speak of God as being benevolent to His creatures.
In the second place, I’d like to propose that God’s benevolence to His sentient and sapient creatures is not unrestricted. After all, He allows His own creatures to be tortured to death, on occasion. Nevertheless, God is perfectly capable of setting limits to the amount of pain we have to put up with (thankfully, none of us has to suffer one million years of torture), of healing whatever wounds (physical and psychic) His tortured creatures have endured, and of bestowing the gift of immortality upon His sentient and sapient creatures (provided that they do not spurn it). Thus according to the picture I am sketching, God is ultimately benevolent, but not omnibenevolent. On this side of eternity, God’s benevolence is quite modest – but we can at least console ourselves with the thought that life could be much, much more painful than it is.
Finally, I’d like to point out that Christians have never referred to God in their prayers as omnibenevolent, but rather as all-loving. God loves each and every one of us with a steadfast, unshakable love which is greater than any of us can possibly imagine. The only kind of love we can compare to God’s love, in its steadfastness, is parental love. And most importantly, what God loves is we ourselves, and not our feelings. Thus God has no interest in maximizing the level of euphoria in the world – whether it be the aggregate level or the average level – because God’s parental commitment is to us, and not our states of mind. Being a loving Father, God naturally wants what is ultimately best for us, but He does not necessarily want us to enjoy a pain-free journey to our ultimate destination.
These proposals of mine have significant implications for the problem of evil. On the Judeo-Christian view, each and every human person is a being of infinite and irreplaceable value, loved by God. Two infinities cannot be meaningfully added to yield a greater infinity; hence a world with more people would not be a “better” world. What’s more, even wicked people are beings of infinite and irreplaceable value; hence a world with kinder people would not be a “better” world, but merely a world where people existed in a better state. Thus I would suggest that one reason why God tolerates evil acts (such as acts of rape or murder) is that there are some individuals in our world who would never have come into existence, were it not for these evil acts having been performed. The same logic can be applied to natural disasters: think of a man and a woman, living in neighboring towns, who both lose their families in a terrible earthquake, but are brought together in the aftermath of the quake, and who decide to get married, settle down and raise a family of their own. Such occurrences are by no means uncommon. Since the creation of any human being is good in an unqualified sense, God may decide to tolerate natural or moral evils, if doing so enables individuals to come into existence who would not have done so otherwise. Please note that I’m not saying He must, but merely that He may.
Fair enough; nevertheless, the skeptic might urge, the world is still a pretty awful place, and arguably much worse than it needs to be. Most natural and moral evils don’t result in the creation of new sentient or sapient beings, after all. There seems to be a lot of gratuitous evil in the world. Why is this so?
The Fall – and why it is needed to explain the mess we’re in
Traditionally, Christians have appealed to the doctrine of the Fall of our first parents at the dawn of human history, in order to explain why God allows these senseless evils to continue. John Henry Newman eloquently argued for this doctrine in his Apologia pro Vita Sua (Longmans, Green & Co., London, revised edition, 1865, chapter 5, pp. 242-243):
I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. Did I see a boy of good make and mind, with the tokens on him of a refined nature, cast upon the world without provision, unable to say whence he came, his birthplace or his family connexions, I should conclude that there was some mystery connected with his history, and that he was one, of whom, from one cause or other, his parents were ashamed. Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and the condition of his being. And so I argue about the world;— if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.
In their recent book, Adam and the Genome, geneticist Dennis Venema and New Testament scholar Scott McKnight have marshaled an impressive array of converging scientific evidence, indicating that the human population has probably never fallen below 10,000 individuals. That certain puts paid to literalistic interpretations of the Fall, but as Denis Alexander has described in his book, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?, one can still defend some notion of a Fall at the dawn of human history. Here’s how he outlines one possible approach to the Fall (although it’s not his favorite):
In the first type of approach (which has many variants), some people in Africa, following the emergence of anatomically modern humanity, became aware of God’s existence, power and calling upon their lives and responded to their new-found knowledge of him in love and obedience, in authentic relationship with God. However, they subsequently turned their back on the light that they had received and went their own way, leading to human autonomy and a broken relationship with God (“sin”). The emphasis in this type of speculation is on historical process – relationships built and broken over many generations.
My own belief is that God bestowed upon our first parents the responsibility for deciding the scope of Divine providence in ordinary human affairs. In their pride, our first parents chose personal autonomy, knowing that it would entail death and suffering for the entire human race: basically, they told God to butt out of everyday human affairs, leaving Him free to intervene only for very special reasons. To skeptics who would object that God should never have given such enormous responsibilities to our first parents in the first place, I would suggest that it is simply impossible for God to make intelligent beings without offering them an allotted sphere or domain in which they can legitimately exercise their freedom: that is what makes them who they are. As the first parents of the human race, our first parents had to have the responsibility for deciding whether they wanted the human race to be protected by God’s Providence or whether to reject God and go it alone.
As a Christian, I believe that God is just and merciful. I do not believe that it was unjust of God to test the human race at the beginning of human history; but I will acknowledge that in order to make sense of the terrible consequences of that fateful test, we need to maintain a view of history which sounds very strange to modern ears – instead of a gradual ascent to human self-awareness, as we might suppose, there was a First Contact between human creatures and their Creator. We need to envisage this as a cosmic, Miltonian drama, with our first parents as larger-than-life characters who enjoyed an intimacy and familiarity with God which we can only dream of, and who were given the enormous responsibility of custodianship over the lives of their future descendants. It may seem incomprehensible to us that they would give up their relationship with a God Who could satisfy all their needs, in favor of a death-and-violence ridden world like ours, but what they gained (in their own eyes) was the freedom to live as they chose. This, then, is why we’re in the mess we’re in. How long it will continue, I have no idea.
For those readers who would like a theological explanation of animal suffering, I would recommend Jon Garvey’s excellent online book, God’s Good Earth.
The problem of evil: A summary
We have seen that in order to make sense of the evil in the world, we need to abandon the notion of an omniscient God Who knows all counterfactuals and all possibilities, and Who knows what we do without needing to be informed by us. Rather, we should simply say that God (timelessly) knows everything we do, by constantly watching us. We also need to abandon the notion of an omnipotent God Who can do anything that’s logically possible. It turns out that there are a number of constraints which God is subject to, which prevent Him from creating any old world that we can imagine, and that prevent Him from having created us in a perfect world where no-one ever sinned. Furthermore, we need to abandon the notion that God is omnibenevolent. Christians have never worshiped an omnibenevolent Deity. Rather, the God they worship is a Parent Who loves us personally, and Who will never stop loving us. Such a God may however be willing to allow His creatures to be subjected to a great degree of suffering in the short term. He can only be called “benevolent” from a long-term perspective, insofar as He has prepared us for eternity with Him.
Finally, the sheer pervasiveness of the suffering in this world points to what Newman referred to as “some terrible aboriginal calamity” at the dawn of humanity, in which the entire human race paid the price for the proud decision made by our first parents to isolate themselves from God’s benevolent protection, for the sake of pursuing what they perceived as independence and freedom. God did not know that they would make that choice, but He gave them the power to decide the fate of the human race, and to “turn off the lights” in our world until God started turning them back on again, culminating in His Revelation of Himself to us 2,000 years ago in a manger in Bethlehem.
To sum up: the Christian view of history is capable of being cogently defended, provided Christians are willing to remove the theological barnacles that have attached themselves to its system of belief, and abandon the “three omnis,” in favor of a more intimate but less extravagant notion of God.
Huh?
The article YOU cited as putting this issue to bed concludes:
So, no. The logical problem of evil is still alive and kicking.
Regarding the goofiness of the Passion Play, IIRC, the Anglican theology I learned as a kid maintained that it wasn’t exactly Christ’s suffering that provided mankind with redemption, but rather the opportunity to believe in Christ’s sacrifice and thus the Trinity’s ineffable love that offered individuals the chance for redemption. It’s an improvement over “The Deity suffered, therefore your sin is expunged” logic.
But a small one.
YMMV.
Wow did you get that.
Your strawman conception of God doesn’t even have the same power to choose that you have. Such a God is should be pitied not worshiped.
On the contrary the real God can be infinitely good and still be a real person who can choose.
According to who? You are assuming that the most benevolent thing has to be the elimination of all suffering. That is precisely the point at issue
You need to demonstrate that there is no possible reason that would possibly justify God’s decision to not prevent all suffering all the time.
peace
no it’s not. It’s dead and has been for decades
The free will defense is just one possible justification for the presence of evil. In order to resurrect the logical problem you need to not only defeat the free will defense. You need to show that there can be no possible reason for God to allow evil to exist.
Good luck with that one
peace
The problem of evil is very simple to explain if you analyse the “temptation scene from the Bible( Mat 4-11) when satan is offering Jesus all the kingdoms (countries today) of the world for 1 act of worship. How could this be tempting to Jesus unless satan had the power over those kingdoms or countries then?
Satan was given the power to over the world for a reason…That’s why we see so much evil and more…
It was thoughtful and kind of god to create devils, such effective instruments of evil.
Yet again…….like a broken record
“I don’t agree with what God does therefore he does not exist”
Is that really all you got?
peace
How do you create free will?
I’m certainly glad he created a devil like me and loved me enough not to leave me that way forever.
I guess there would be less evil in the world if I never existed but I would not be around to enjoy it.
peace
God didn’t create evil. If He did., it would it make sense since his creatures had free will to choose evil or good. The devil chose evil…Who’s fault is that?
So god chose to create evil. You need to demonstrate that there is a damn good reason for your imaginary god to make that choice.
Good luck with that.
Are you saying god didn’t create Satan and the hosts of devils that foment evil?
And didn’t know in advance (omniscience) how that would turn out?
So … You don’t like the idea?
Well, the free will defense was the one that you offered. If I was to show that “there can be no possible reason for God to allow evil to exist.”, then I would have shown that God doesn’t exist. That’s not a claim that I have ever made (I reckon it’s impossible, given the availability of the lame-ass “God is ineffable” defense).
Your original claim was that
which claim is refuted by the citation that YOU offered, a self-confessedly inadequate defense of Plantinga. “Serious” theologians still consider the logical problem of evil a “serious” topic of conversation, your protestations notwithstanding.
Logic not your strong suit, I see. Color me unsurprised.
nope he chose to allow evil. Evil is simply a negation of the good. So it simply means that God chose to step back a tiny bit for a little while.
No I don’t, He is God so I trust he has a good reason. I trust that he has a good reason because he has given me good reason to trust him.
It’s even possible that our finite brains are not able to comprehend his reason. That does not mean that he does not have one.
There is simply nothing to suggest that there is no possible reason that would justify God’s decision to allow evil to exist.
That is what is required for you to resurrect the logical problem of evil.
That is why we can be confident in calling it a dead horse
peace
You don’t understand. Plantinga is not offering a theodicy
He does not mean to imply that free will is the reason that God allowed evil to exist. He is simply laying out a possible reason that would justify God’s doing so.
But that is exactly what the logical problem of evil claimed to do. It’s aim was to show that existence of evil was incompatible with God’s existence.
Clearly that argument has been defeated
You are simply incorrect. This one is over and done.
Time to get on with your life.
Serious philosophers still wrestle with the evidential problem of evil but only internet atheists still beat the “logical problem” dead horse.
Even keiths will acknowledge this. Just ask him
peace
I always heard that evil was the absence of good.It seems to me if God created free will as a choice between good and evil, God had to create evil when he created free will.
As I keep pointing out, the logical problem of evil is merely a limiting case of the evidential problem of evil. This is not that hard to grasp.
An omnibenevolent, omnipotent God will always act optimally. That means:
The logical problem of evil comes into play if (b) or (c) holds and the optimal course(s) of action involve(s) no evil or suffering whatsoever. In that case, even one observed instance of evil or suffering in the universe, no matter how trivial, demonstrates that the omniGod does not exist. It falsifies the hypothesis.
If we don’t know that the optimal course is absolutely free of evil or suffering — and I think we don’t — then a single instance of evil or suffering is no longer sufficient to demonstrate the omniGod’s nonexistence. This rather trivial fact is celebrated as a great victory by goofballs like fifth, who are in desperate need of good news. But while we don’t know that God’s optimal course of action doesn’t require evil and/or suffering, we also don’t know that it does. The theist’s hopes are pinned on a mere logical possibility.
Plantinga recognized how inadequate this was and developed his “free will defense” in response. His goal was to be able to say “Not only is it possible that evil and suffering are logically compatible with an omnibenevolent God’s existence — here’s an actual description of why that might be so.” The problem is that Plantinga’s proposal doesn’t work, as I argue here:
Without a viable defense, theists like fifth and CharlieM are back to pinning their hopes on a mere logical possibility. Their weak response to the logical problem boils down to this:
And as pitiful as that is as a response to the logical problem of evil, it’s even worse as a response to the evidential problem of evil. Hence fifth’s desperate attempt to reframe the issue as the psychological problem of evil, to which he has a viable response, rather than the evidential problem, to which he doesn’t.
To summarize, the argument for the logical problem of evil is a wash. We don’t know that it is a problem, but we also don’t know that it isn’t. We simply can’t decide.
Attention therefore shifts to the evidential problem of evil. And as this thread shows, the evidential problem is a nightmare for Christians.
J-Mac:
Why was Satan given power over the world? Doesn’t that seem like a bad idea to you? Something that a wise, omnibenevolent God would not do?
keiths:
Robin:
We’re talking about our world. In our world, one course of action excludes a mutually exclusive course. A world in which the dog ate the baby’s head cannot be the same world as one in which the dog didn’t eat the baby’s head.
God, in his infinite benevolence, wanted this to be a world in which the baby’s head was eaten. All praise to our Lord, whose love surpasses human understanding.
William,
No. Your own words betray you.
For example, you objected when I wrote that
You responded:
Of course your own words confirm my assessment. You described in-William as a ”reduced-consciousness aspect” of out-William. An aspect of a person is not a person.
They’re your words, William. Own them.
oh contraire the evidential problem requires a sober detached weighing of all the evidence and so far it seems that the “skeptics” are not able to do this.
All they can do is repeat horrible emotional stories over and over. At least that is all they do here.
That is not the evidential problem it’s the psychological problem.
“Stuff makes me sad therefore God does not exist”
Is that really all you got?
peace
translation
“I feel God is a meany therefore he does not exist”
LOL
peace
Reminds me of certain epistemological positions I’ve heard around here.
fifth:
Um, no.
However, I’m sure Jesus feels “glorified” by your distortion of my position. “By their fruits…” and all that.
Go Team Christianity!
fifth:
LMAO
keiths argues that the case of the baby and the dog demonstrates that God is evil. What it actually demonstrates is that keiths and those who agree with him have a very narrow outlook and cannot see things from another’s point of view. The god in the imagination of keiths might just as well be an old grey-bearded man watching the events through a two-way mirror. But if he wants to make his claim stick then he must for the sake of his argument agree that God and spirit are real. So let’s look at the events from that point of view to see if we can work out where the evil lies.
We can be fairly certain that the baby suffered fatal wounds caused by bites from the dog. We do not know how much pain was felt by the baby, if any, or its duration. People can be stabbed in a fight and not even know it until they see the evidence. He claims that God stood by and did nothing. How does he know this? Christ said, “and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”, and “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me”. How do you argue against God being there comforting the departing spirit?
Next you are arguing that God let her die. Why would this be considered an evil act? If she had died of old age, who knows what pain she may have suffered along the way. And if God is real then life is separation from Him and death brings us close to Him, so where is the evil in that. We all want to be cose to our loved ones. And as Plato has Socrates say in The Apology:
Socrates sees no evil in death, but he does see it in the injustice of false accusations.
If being “in the spirit” is to be in a higher reality than being in a body of flesh then to die should be seen as a blessing. Thoughtful Christians fear death because they know that all their life’s wrongdoings will be revealed and they will have to face them. That baby girl will have nothing to fear on that account.
Can you, keiths or anyone, give us a detailed account of where you think the evil lies?
fifth,
You think those are mutually exclusive?
That isn’t… rational.
Well, Jesus is just swimming in glory now, isn’t he?
keiths:
walto:
See if you can spot the obvious (and major) differences.
See my Socrates quote above. Or what Socrates said shorty before this quote:
CharlieM,
So if someone approaches you and calmly announces that he is going to kill you, your response will be to show gratitude and to cooperate fully?
The major and obvious similarities (obviously and majorly) trump them, IMO.
walto,
Then you haven’t thought it through carefully enough. I’ll respond later on the “Dogmatism vs. Skepticism” thread.
The implication of the definition of “omni”.
I’ve not provided any strawman; your concept of an omni-god is simply logically impossible. And the impossibility is a product of you (and others) not extending the implications of “omni-capability” to its logical conclusions and a product of you clearly not understanding what “choice” is or where it comes from.
You seem to think that human and other animal choices are some kind of power. It’s not. Choice is totally and completely a product of constraints, both internal and external. Without constraints, there’s no such thing as choice at all. There can’t be. It’s not even a question of it being pointless or unnecessary; it’s an incongruence.
Let’s just take one hypothetical. Is it possible that an omnipotent god killed everyone on earth yesterday and recreated everyone this morning, implanted memories of a continued existence, with you having the perspective that absolutely nothing changed? Of course. Indeed, it’s quite possible (and actually a given) that an omnipotent god did everything that could possibly be done in this universe instantly last night at 11:59PM. In fact, an omnipotent entity would have NO WAY of not doing everything, because anything it could possibly conceive of (which would be everything possible) would instantly occur for that entity.
Here’s the kicker to the whole issue: to be omni-anything, but in particular omnipotent, an entity couldn’t have any constraints – not even from itself.
And think about…why…HOW…could it? Could an omnipotent ever worry about its waistline and think, “hmm…maybe I should pass on that second donut…” Of course not. That would be absurd. An omnipotent entity could eat an infinite number of donuts and never gain a pound. And it’s not like it would decide after some fact to change some condition or variable so that it would not gain weight; it would be impossible for the entity to gain weight or worry about donuts or calories or eating or caring about ANYTHING from the get-go.
The thing is, no one disputes that an omnipotent entity gaining weight from eating an infinite number of donuts is absurd, but it’s just as absurd to consider any other consequence for an omnientity. There can’t be any such thing.
To an omnipotent entity, there could never be anything to “consider”; there can be no such thing as “variables”. There would be instantaneous occurrence, but no one would notice.
Nope. That’s an internal contradiction. Either your god is a myth or a wimp. The former seems evident to me.
Well, yes…having the total ability to remove suffering and not doing it is a good illustration that something is not omnibenevolent, but that’s not what I was getting to in my example above. No…far FAR crueler (and thus a nail in the coffin of the whole “omnibenevolence” thing) is inconsistency and arbitrariness. Any entity that would capriciously hold that it could apply mercy to some, but not others, is the exact OPPOSITE of benevolent, nevermind omnibenevolent. Any entity that was not consistently benevolent is not omni-anything. Any entity that has any form of immature human emotion – doubt, anger, frustration, jealousy, envy, disappointment, narcissism, arrogance, petulance, disrespect, etc, etc, etc. is simply not omnibenevolent by any stretch of any imagination.
Actually, no I don’t. I simply have to note that any form of inconsistency is a contradiction to the basis of the term “omni”.
CharlieM:
No, what I argue is that Christians have utterly failed to reconcile the existence of their supposedly omnibenevolent God with the enormous amount of evil and suffering in the world. The case of the dog and the baby is just one tiny sliver of that suffering, yet Christians have no plausible explanation for even that tiny sliver.
For example, you are now reduced to arguing that her grisly death was a blessing for that baby girl, because
What you don’t realize is that by that (bizarre) logic, all of the other babies — the ones whose heads aren’t being eaten by dogs, or who aren’t being “blessed” by death in some other form — are getting screwed, because they will have to answer for sins that the “lucky” baby girl never had a chance to commit. They aren’t “blessed” as she is.
Is that your final answer, or would you like another shot at the question?
Are you really suggesting that there can be no free will without things like shingles, cancer, achalasia cardia, adipose dolorosa, and my personal favorite, trigeminal neuralgia?
And yet neither you nor Mung are able to address keiths’ argument directly. Perhaps your confidence in that refutation is low for a reason. Stop handwaving and let’s see what you’ve got when you quote keiths fairly and attempt to refute what he’s actually written.
So your god demonstrates infinite goodness by allowing a dog to eat a baby’s head. I don’t claim to be infinitely good but I’d have stopped that from happening if I’d been there. Either your god isn’t good or it doesn’t exist.
Which raises some interesting questions about some bible stories, Noah’s flood in particular.
You’ve got it backwards. You’re the one claiming your god is omnibenevolent. That claim is not supported by the available evidence. If you want to support your claim, you need to show how an omnipotent god is incapable of preventing evil while still being omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Basically you need to demonstrate that this is the best of all possible worlds, that every moral and natural evil we observe is essential.
To be clear, no one pointing out the problems that the problem of evil poses for your god claims is talking about your god. That’s never been demonstrated to exist. We’re talking about your claims about your unevidenced entity. Those claims do not hold up to scrutiny, their inconsistency with observations being only one problem.
Behold, this evil is of the Lord. 2 Kings 6:33
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. Isaiah 45:7
What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? Job 2:10
Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good? Lamentations 3:38
Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? Amos 3:6
fifth, earlier in the thread:
You need evil to have free will
God didn’t create evil
Therefore God didn’t give you free will, pals…
We are all blessed with death at some point. From your perspective do you feel competent to judge the amount of suffering each person is willing to endure in order to have a life?
Think of all the pain and suffering you have gone through in your life. Do you consider it worth it? Or would you prefer that you had never been born?
You know the fate of that baby girl’s body, but unless you also know the fate of the spirit you are not competent to judge even though you seem to think you are.
If freedom is to mean anything at all individual beings must be given the choice between good and evil. This applies to angels and humans. And if individuals are allowed to be free to choose then evil acts are bound to occur just as good acts are. Would you like to discuss evil and suffering on a case by case scenario? My wife and I were at the health centre with our grandkids when a little boy came out of a nurse’s room with his mother. We heard him say, “Mummy that lady hurt me!”. What seemed unjustified from his point of view was fully justified from his mother’s.
Here is your original remark about the baby and dog:
Can you not see the difference between these two scenarios if the Christian God is real?
If you can’t then I was right about your idea of god being an old grey-bearded man looking on as the events unfold.
So I will ask again, can you give us a detailed account of where you think the evil lies in this case?
You have this backwards. Evil thoughts and deeds are the consequence of the appearance of beings who are destined to have free will.
Still, from a Devil’s advocate point-of-view, if an eternity in Heaven is the final destiny, why be concerned about death? ‘Tis merely a transition to Paradise. If it were only a grisly death, then that would be tough.
Okay. So all the evil allowed by God that doesn’t stem from our free will must be the consequence of God’s free will
But that’s only true for us limited resource mortals. An omnigod, even in our world, could in fact have every possible event occur. Omni-gods can, by definition, have their cake(s) and eat it to. Consuming cake would never have any impact on the existence of said cake because for something with infinite, time, resources, and capability, cakes and eating (are any object and any action) are infinite in the first and nonsensical in the second.
I think the problem people are having with my thesis is the second item above. People seem to be able to grasp and more or less accept the implication that for an omnipotent entity, there’s no such thing as limited resources. What becomes more difficult to grasp and picture (and accept) is that such entities could never “do” anything. That is, since time would be infinite, all things the entity “wanted” to do (whatever that means for an entity that could never “want”, but I digress…) would be done instantly. It would just be. There’s no such thing as Planck Time to such an entity…no such thing as “time” or “space” to such an entity at all.
So for an omni-entity, a dog eating a baby’s head and a dog not eating a baby’s head could occupy the same “reality” because for such an entity, all of “reality” is instantaneous. It’s like buckyball superpositions interfering with themselves to form interference patterns in the double slit experiments; such entities do not…cannot be thought of in terms of classical mechanics.
Now sure, we’d experience a given outcome because we do exist “within” a conditional time-frame. But what we’d experience would not be the result of the entity’s choice, but rather the constraints of space-time on our perception of what constitutes our “reality”.
Indeed. For us, the baby’s head still gets eaten I am with you that this presents a problem for those who insist that some “god” is omnibenevolent. An actual omnibenevolent god could never conceive of a dog eating a baby’s head, thus such could never be a possibility within our reality. Alas, such events do occur, which means there are no omnibenevolent entities aware of or invoking our reality.
Then PLEASE for the LOVE OF GOD commit suicide!
Oh…riiiight…you don’t actual mean what you say above. There’s actually a compelling reason to avoid pain, suffering, and death and to stick around on this planet for most people because there’s no actual evidence that death is or even like a journey and, more so, there’s something to actual physical contact and intimacy in this world that very likely nobody gets once they die. I mean…it’s not like anyone has actually come back from the dead and continued relationships with loved ones here on Earth. I know some of you believe that such can and has occurred, but oddly…there’s no reality show demonstrating such.