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.
sure there is I completely agree.
however in reality it’s not quite like that. I am an insignificant speck yet in his grace God has chosen to smile on me. That is what I call omnibenevolence
😉
peace
I do apologize if Robin’s feelings were hurt by my statement. It was not my intention.
My intention was merely to point out that Robin’s statement that it was not worth it is obviously and demonstrably false
peace
keiths,
I wish I had the time some of you guys have to spend here. I will respond to the post keiths, wrote here.
Meanwhile I hope I can give quick a quick response to one or two.
Satan wasn’t evil when he was created. He was given the freedom to choose and he chose evil. He fell.
A very good question.
Why do we give our children room to make their own mistakes? Something a wise and benevolent parent would not do?
While that is somewhat true, it’s not exactly simple or straight-forward. Consider, for example, I’ve spent an enormous amount of energy and resources having kidney transplants and learning to survive with my conditions. So it seems rather wasteful to throw it all away at this point. Also consider the fact that it’s not like I’m omniscient, so it’s not like I knew back before my first transplant how things were going to turn out. I wasn’t supposed to have two transplants, let alone five, so like a lot of aspects of life, my set of events has unraveled unpredictably. In other words, it’s possible to evaluate the overall “cost to enjoyment ratio” now that there are “costs” that I can assess. I could not have made such an assessment before any of these events occurred.
Sure, but how much did you invest in the movie? Seems to me that a life of even a year is a bit more of an investment.
From my perspective, my life has been a draw. To be sure, some of the high points have been really high, but the low points…
As to an explanation for why I’m still here, I would say it’s mostly persistence coupled with curiosity. I’m pretty good at dealing with medical procedures at this point and getting very favorable results. I don’t particularly enjoy most of them, but there is a certain satisfaction in surviving them. That and I’m always curious what tomorrow will bring. Some amazing things have occurred over my 50 years and I’m pretty sure there are one or two surprises in store for me yet.
No I’d probably panic and run.
It is a logical implication of “omni” capability once one examines and understands what the act of “choosing” entails. Seriously, what do you think the basis of human (or any animal) choice is? Do you really think that choice is a function of…choice? That we want to make choices so we do? C’mon…choice only arises because mortal, finite, limited entities can only do so much and can’t be in more than one place at a time. For an entity that has no limitations and does not experience “time” or “space”, what would there be to choose?
Of course I don’t agree with this. I have no idea what “constraining” an omni-entity would even mean. It’s like you saying that you’re going to constrain yourself by thinking of nothing but “blue”. WHAT?!?!?! That makes no sense. How could an omni-entity “constrain” its knowledge of everything? How could an omni-entity constrain itself to a given location when it’s already been everywhere, simultaneously and instantly?
Do you really think this omni-god-guy of yours has a physical form and moves through space-time like we humans do? If not, then in what sense could such an entity be “constrained”?
To be fair on that point, if this were the 1500s, I would not be part of this conversation. 😉
No, from the beings that chose that path. The paradox of free will is that it doesn’t mean being able to choose anything you think you may want. Free will means acting from within oneself without any external compulsion. When I was younger I chose to smoke. I could have listened to my better judgement and not started, but I gave in to peer pressure and so my habit began. My choice was not free.
So you intention was to tell someone how they feel is not the way they feel.Much better.
Just for the record, I’m not offended by Fifth’s comment. I mean, I did bring up my condition and have been pretty forth coming about my feelings with regard to all the crap I’ve had to deal with. A “well that’s sucky” is certainly appreciated, but not necessary. That said, I can understand Fifth’s (or anyone’s) questioning why I’ve not “existed, stage left” if things are so crappy. I’ve known quite a few people in somewhat similar circumstances who have, so it’s not like it doesn’t occur. But it just seems like a waste to me.
Boy, you’re not very good at this logic thing, Fifth. Or you enjoy making up strawmen…
Your summary is not the actual argument. The actual argument is:
lots of bad things happen and said bad things appear to happen randomly and without any association to any person or other animal’s behavior. This is inconsistent with the concept and implication of omnibenevolence, particularly if said omnibenevolence is supposedly coupled with omniscience and omnipotence. Therefore if there is an entity that can be labeled “God”, it clearly cannot be omnibenevolent. And therefore, some Christian concepts of “God” cannot be valid.
I knew you’d eventually retreat to this patently dishonest intellectual cowardice. You make claims constantly, you just lack the will and ability to support them.
You don’t believe your god is omnibenevolent? This discussion wouldn’t exist if Christians didn’t make such silly claims. It’s all a response to your assertions that are inconsistent with the evidence.
If you don’t want to support your claims, at least be honest and say so.
More Christian charity and compassion on display. Do you really think that’s how Jesus, had he actually existed, would reply?
The highest good for a creature is to achieve what it believes to be its highest good. Scratch a theist, find an authoritarian.
Moral and natural evil happens therefore an omnibenevolent god does not exist. If you’re going to paraphrase, please do so honestly and accurately.
There is no evidence for any gods. You’ve got nothing to weigh.
The only thing you’re okay with is dodging and weaving. Instead of trying to categorize keiths’ argument, try addressing it directly. The evidence so far indicates you can’t.
No, you don’t, not for any meaningful definition of “know”. Stop breaking the rules by repeating that nonsense.
Considering the distinct lack of such historical evidence, I suggest that it is far more likely that you believe in Christianity because you were indoctrinated as a child, not because of any thoughtful consideration.
And that is one of the ridiculous claims being challenged by the argument from evil. You’re the one claiming an omnibenevolent god exists. It is up to you to explain how this is the best of all possible worlds. Alternatively you can be honest by admitting that you can’t support your claim.
I certainly wouldn’t
No apology necessary. However, I don’t think you’ve demonstrated my statement regarding “worth it” to be false.
This is indeed the one that makes most sense if you believe that humans are as near as makes no difference omniscient and there can be nothing higher than humans. If you believe that there can be nothing encompassing us of which we are not normally aware.
As I guess ad homs of this nature are ok in your book, at least maybe you’ll provide the objective empirical support for your knowledge claim.
In your own case, I take it, insulting people and abusing your authority here. Others’ mileage may vary, of course. For example, I’ve known several heroin addicts. One is still alive!
ETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHash5takWU
What do you mean by destruction? What exactly do you think was destroyed?
Patrick,
This is false. I was raised agnostic and remained that way through most of college. I just recently looked at the historical evidence for Christianity and think it is compelling. If you have a good, fact based, counter argument I am interested.
How recently?
Also, what is ‘historical evidence for Christianity’ exactly? I mean, do you often run across people (other than Cartesian skeptics) who doubt the existence of Christianity?
And we know how demanding you are of your own side.
Like, no evidence being quite enough.
Glen Davidson
Quite frankly, I don’t believe you. It’s a common Christian behavior to talk about how they came to Christ after a life of sin because of the “evidence”. In the spirit of this site, though, I’ll take your claim seriously. Do you have any evidence to back it up? Did you ever participate in online fora before you became religious? Do you have any other documentation showing your lack of belief?
As far as the historical evidence goes, there is none. The contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus is literally zero. Given that, there is no way for you to have been convinced by it.
once again
This is a restatement of the logical problem of evil. The logical problem is a dead horse. It was defeated decades ago.
You can’t rationally argue that existence of evil is inconsistent with God’s existence, that ship has sailed. All serious philosophers acknowledge this
Now you are left with the evidential problem of evil which goes something like this………….
The presence of evil when weighed with all other evidence makes God’s existence improbable.
The problem argument is that it requires a serious sober assessment of all the evidence and what we’ve gotten from your side is a list of terrible stories strung together for emotional impact.
If you want to be taken seriously you need to explain why the existence of evil should make me discount the all other evidence I have and withdraw my trust in God.
Good luck
peace
I’m not making any claims.
It’s your argument you support it.
It’s not a claim it’s simply my own personal experience.
The argument from evil is not a challenge to any claim it’s an argument. Arguments require support
You need to support you argument or drop it.
peace
Every one is more demanding of evidence that conflicts with our established beliefs. That is just a fact of human nature.
The “skeptic” try and deny this and pretend that they can evaluate evidence free of any kind of personal bias.
Now that is a claim I’d love to see supported 😉
Patrick,
I could get testimony of college friends who I argued with for hours that they did not have rational evidence for their faith. That was 40 years ago. My introduction to faith was not based on rational argument but the feeling of connection. All this being said I did not believe that there was a rational argument for God until 2 years ago when, in a conversation with my son about the possibility of life on another planet he educated me about the sequence dependence of proteins. I was surprised by this because of the problem it caused for the TOE which I assumed was a solid theory. After 6 months of investigating this and writing a couple of papers one for my family and one for a scientist who was using evolutionary theory to support his cancer theory. I started writing on the blogs about 18 months ago with the intent of understanding if the weaknesses I saw in the TOE were correct.
Recently I have investigated the arguments for the Christian story and personally find them compelling.
Patrick your tendency is to deny evidence of things you don’t want to believe in.
I would be very interested if you could come up with a solid evidence based argument against Aquinas 5 ways. I read Hume’s argument and find it illogical.
Wow, way to make up a strawman and attack it with platitudes.
No one, least of all myself, was claiming to be without bias. The complete lack of a sound body of evidence for your beliefs and Bill’s beliefs, however, indicates that there is little other than bias propping up your claims and fantasies.
Glen Davidson
You say there is no sound body of evidence and I say that Christianity is the only belief system that is internally consistent and yours is baseless and obviously self refuting.
The world looks different depending on your perspective.
😉
peace
Then you are not an insignificant speck since God chose you to smile upon
amen preach it brother!!! 😉
That is the kind of God I serve, he takes insignificant specks and makes them something else entirely.
quote:
All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness.
(Isa 40:17)
and
Behold, even the moon is not bright, and the stars are not pure in his eyes; how much less man, who is a maggot, and the son of man, who is a worm!”
(Job 25:5-6)
and
But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.
(2Co 4:7)
and
God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,
(1Co 1:28)
end quote:
peace
The only reason I can think of is that God is a sick sadistic bastard.
Theists always argue that evil is the consequence of the gift of free will that God gave us. Some gift. Because I have the free will to choose between vanilla and chocolate ice cream, millions had to die at the hands of the Nazis. Because I have the free will to choose to buy a Toyota rather than a Ford, millions had to endure slavery.
If free will is such a gift, why to people like William J. Murray, Gordon (KairosFocus) Mullings and Barry Arrington get their panties in a knot when someone uses their “free will” and “choose” to be attracted to the same sex?
And if you followed the Jehovah’s Witness brand of Christianity, you would be here either. But, neither would I. Thank God for atheism.
God is not constrained by your ability to think of a reason. It’s even possible that the limited human mind is unable to conceive of any reason that would justify God allowing evil to exist.
That certainly does not mean that God does not have a sufficient reason or that the problem of evil is a successful argument.
As a theist and a compatibilist I’m not sold on the freewill defense because I’m not sold on the idea that we have libertarian freewill.
God’s reason for allowing evil doesn’t have to be and probably isn’t freewill IMO. That in no way implies that God doesn’t have sufficient reason to justify evil. I wholeheartedly trust that he does
peace
the same might also be said for my brand
unless you were a Jehovah’s Witness living in a self proclaimed atheist state like the Soviet Union.
On the other hand all of us can thank God for the good ole fashioned Baptist inspired freedom of religion and separation of Church and State.
check it out
quote:
More important was Williams’ impact on thought. He served as the first exemplar to all those Americans who would later confront power. He also largely shaped the debate in England, influencing such men as John Milton and particularly John Locke—whose work Jefferson, James Madison and other architects of the U.S. Constitution studied closely. W. K. Jordan, in his classic multivolume study of religious toleration, called Williams’ “carefully reasoned argument for the complete dissociation of Church and State…the most important contribution made during the century in this significant area of political thought.”
Roger Williams was not a man out of time. He belonged to the 17th century and to Puritans in that century. Yet he was also one of the most remarkable men of his or any century. With absolute faith in the literal truth of the Bible and in his interpretation of that truth, with absolute confidence in his ability to convince others of the truth of his convictions, he nonetheless believed it “monstrous” to compel comformity to his or anyone else’s beliefs.
end quote:
from here
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/god-government-and-roger-williams-big-idea-6291280/
peace
nuff said
And no matter how many times you’re told why that’s a failed argument, you still stick to it. What does the ToE have to do with christianity anyway?
So, you are saying that God is not accountable to anything or anyone. Reminds me of a few characters throughout history. Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jung Whatever, Mao, Dahmer, Bernardo, etc. That’s great company your God hangs out with.
When did I imply that?
I’m saying that God is not constrained by your inability to think of a reason. That does not make him unaccountable it just makes him smarter than you.
I fully trust that God has a sufficient moral reason to allow evil. And I fully trust that if you knew it you still would hate him.
peace
What the fuck? You are saying that God is accountable? To who/what? Who/what do I appeal to if I disagree with his decision? Super God?
God is a Trinity each member of the Godhead is accountable to the others.
Also since each of us has the moral law in our own consciences when it’s all said and done and we know all the facts no one will be able to say that God has been unjust or unfair,
That does not mean that rebels will be happy about it,it just means that their rebellion will look foolish to those who are rational.
peace