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.
Hi everyone,
Just a couple of quick points. Regarding the duration of evil we have to undergo: the reason why 100 billion years of excruciating pain would be an unacceptable price to pay for eternal bliss is that it would send us mad and break our spirits long before we got to enjoy the infinite bliss. We live in a world where most people have led short and painful lives, but very few have been driven mad by suffering, and even these few have died shortly thereafter. If we lived in a world where most people had been driven mad by suffering (think of what the Dementors do to people in Harry Potter), and had endured this madness for very long periods, then I do not think it would be possible to mount a convincing argument for a personal God. Numbers do matter.
Mung writes:
Wise words. Happily, Christianity has already wrought a massive moral transformation. We now live in a world where infanticide is almost universally regarded as an abominable crime, and where female infanticide is gradually dying out; where slavery has been all but abolished, although sadly it still affects about 0.4% of the world’s population; where wife-beating and polygamy are regarded as unacceptable in almost every country (although there are still a few holdouts); where suicide is viewed not as an honorable end but as a waste of life; where poverty is seen as something to be eliminated; and where people with disabilities enjoy greater rights than at any other stage in history – at least, after they are born (sadly, abortion of Down syndrome children remains all too prevalent). Most of these changes have been brought about by people who were influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethic. (Yes, I know there have been Christians who defended slavery, but it was still Christians who abolished it. And please don’t tell me that it was Voltaire or Rousseau or Bentham or J.S. Mill whom we have to thank for all these changes; only a person who was ignorant of history would claim that those Johnny-come-latelies had much to do with it. I will concede, however, that we have the Enlightenment and secular humanism to thank for the abolition of torture in most countries, the drastic reduction in capital punishment worldwide, and gains in women’s political rights.)
Not only that, but in the past two centuries, the combination of free-market capitalism and modern science (both of which were nurtured in Christian cultures, even if their modern-day exponents have no time for religion) has brought about an unprecedented reduction in poverty worldwide. In 2011, the global adult literacy rate was 84.1%, and 89.5% for youth. In 2013, 10.7 percent of the world’s population lived on less than US$1.90 a day (the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty), compared to 35% in 1990. Worldwide, the average life expectancy at birth was 71.0 years (68 years and 6 months for males and 73 years and 6 months for females) over the period 2010–2013 according to United Nations World Population Prospects 2012 Revision.
In short: we are changing the world massively for the better. I would call that “bringing heaven to earth.” Wouldn’t you?
Vincent:
Simple solution: God promises to heal your madness and restore your spirits after the 100 billion years are up.
Now are you eager to sign up? The suffering is only temporary, after all, and there’s no permanent damage.
Why isn’t there more evil on the world? Why isn’t evil simply intolerable?
Why do I get the feeling keiths and Patrick are practitioners of “unfriendly atheism”?
Bring back friendly atheism!
Here it is again for those who may have missed it.
“They may appeal, for example, to the traditional arguments for God’s existence or to certain aspects of their own or others’ religious experience.”
At least keiths got that part right. Don’t be irrational, Patrick.
I don’t have a problem with friendly atheism (as described in your quote).
I think there are a few here. 🙂
Mung: Deflect and distract.
Hi keiths,
In response to my statement that “the reason why 100 billion years of excruciating pain would be an unacceptable price to pay for eternal bliss is that it would send us mad and break our spirits long before we got to enjoy the infinite bliss,” you ask:
My inclination would still be to say no. The reason is that I simply cannot imagine being able to tell myself, during the 100-billion-year torture, “This will be over, one day.” Nor can I picture myself still wanting God, during 100 billion years of torture. Torture of that sort would induce despair and would also destroy any love of God – and hence, any desire to spend eternity with God.
I have read of Christians who have been tortured for Christ – e.g. St. Isaac Jogues, Fr. Walter Ciszek and Pastor Richard Wurmbrand. However, the records of Christians in Tokugawa Japan who were forced to endure the tortures of the pit show that many (including priests) apostasized after a matter of days. Two weeks seems to be about the human limit, when it comes to withstanding excruciating torture.
Thankfully, we live in a world where Nature does not inflict that kind of torture on us, and where only a very few have ever had to endure it at the hands of their fellow human beings.
Vincent,
Right. God allowed them to be tortured past the point of apostasy, thus endangering their eternal souls.
If he was willing to do that, what principled reason prevents him from imposing the 100 billion years of agony, which is after all a tiny, insignificant sliver of time when compared to eternity?
I hope you see the point. “It’s temporary” doesn’t equate to “It’s morally insignificant.”
Not to mention that God is willing to damn humans for eternity for temporary sins that cause their fellows to suffer. Whence the double standard that you’re suggesting?
Why is temporary suffering morally significant when inflicted by a human, but not when inflicted by God?
There’s a kind of creeping rationalization that believers can fall prey to when defending their faith. It’s a very easy trap to fall into; I did it myself during the gradual process of shedding my faith as a teenager.
It works like this:
You’re confronted with some evidence against your views that you can’t easily brush aside. To accommodate it, you make an adjustment that seems minor enough and plausible. Then some new and problematic evidence comes along. Another adjustment is needed. Then more evidence, and another adjustment; and still more evidence; and eventually you’ve constructed a rickety and unstable system of patches and hacks — epicycles upon epicycles. The individual patches may seem plausible as they are added, but the overall structure becomes a mess.
The lesson is that it’s a mistake to set your current beliefs as the default. The goal shouldn’t be to preserve your beliefs at all costs, adding patch after patch to bring them (sorta) into line with evidence.
Instead, the ideal should be at every point to prefer the set of beliefs that best comports with the evidence, even if that set is totally different from the set you started with, as if you were examining the evidence for the first time.
Easier said than done, of course, but that’s really how it has to be if one is aiming for the truth.
I’m arguing that your “promise defense” is one of those patches or epicycles.
Allowing a dog to eat a living baby’s head is obviously not a loving act. If an uncle did it, no one in their right mind would defend him as an ideal and loving guardian of the child.
Yet God did exactly what we would condemn this uncle for doing.
How can we defend the idea of a benevolent God against this obvious counterevidence? Quick — we need an epicycle!
I know: perhaps God is hewing to a higher principle — keeping a promise, say — that takes precedence over protecting the baby…
And you’re off to the races. The problem is that the “keeping a promise” epicycle creates its own problems, so that still more epicycles are needed. and the whole thing devolves into a godawful mess.
Yet there is a simple, epicycle-free solution to the problem: There is no loving God.
Why can a dog eat the head of a living baby? There is no loving God to stop it.
Why can hundreds of thousands of people die in a tsunami? There is no loving God to prevent it or to warn them in time.
Why can a priest be tortured past the point of apostasy? No loving God is available to intervene.
It’s a simple explanation, epicycle-free, and it fits the evidence perfectly. It puts the epicycle-laden explanation to shame.
Pedant:
What else can he do? It’s not like he has a prayer (so to speak) of defending his faith.
Hi keiths,
The conclusion that follows from this is that God is not our guardian, not that He does not love us. God relinquished the role of guardian because our first parents, speaking on behalf of all humanity, specifically asked Him to.
I can only assume that if God allowed them to be tortured past their breaking point, He would not hold them responsible for their apostasy. Also, there is a moral difference between not stopping a few people from being tortured and imposing torture.
God does not damn humans for temporary sins, no matter how wicked. Rather, He reluctantly accedes to their final decision to eternally shut themselves off from His presence.
Vincent,
Which brings us back to these unanswered questions from my earlier comment:
1) Why would a wise God agree to such a stupid promise?
2) Why would humans make such a stupid request of God?
3) Why should present-day humans suffer because their ancestors and God screwed up and struck an idiotic deal with each other?
4) Why wouldn’t a loving God allow the descendants to negotiate their own deal with him, having seen what a mess the earlier deal turned out to be?
5) What kind of legalistic ass would stand by as a dog ate a baby’s head, saying to himself “I mustn’t intervene. After all, I promised not to”? If you were in that situation, wouldn’t you go ahead and break the damn promise? Why wouldn’t God?
You’ve given up the other omnis. Why insist that your God be an omnilegalistic nitpicker determined to uphold every dumb promise, consequences be damned?
That’s not what follows. That’s one of several possibilities. Given the totality of the ways that the loving God demonstrably fails to act in ways one would expect a loving person to act, the simplest explanation for all these facts is that there is no loving God.
But instead Christians imagine, every time, a new ad-hoc hypothesis to try to explain it away. God once upon a time entered into some sort of agreement with humans that lived back then. Or God has some sort of great plan in the future that’s going to make it all make sense one day.
But why believe these ad-hoc excuses? What merits them? What empirical justification is there for belief that these after-the-fact rationalizations are really the reason that loving God doesn’t intervene to prevent the dog from eating the baby? It seems to me there is no such empirical justification.
Even if we grant that Jesus Christ actually existed, that He was God in human flesh-form, that He performed miracles and all the rest, that still would not constitute empirical justification (as in evidence) for the belief that loving Jesus God refrains from intervening because there’s some sort of future plan of cosmic moral significance (or that ancient humans entered into some sort of binding agreement with God that applies to all subsequent generations). That is and remains completely, entirely and absolutely an excuse. A dream. A hope. A wish. The only thing it has going for it is that it feels nice to imagine.
WHAT other evidence for God?
I’d like to know about that evidence for the existence of God. Where is it?
God is GREAT.
Is that what God said? I certainly don’t remember anything in the Bible or other commonly-accepted Christian sacred text saying as much. Were Joseph of Cupertino and those who saw him levitating being left with no guardian? How about when Jesus was healing the sick and raising the dead?
The real question is, what should we expect from physics in a world lacking in supernatural intervention? As far as we know, probably about what we see in this world. Opportunistic evolution produces diseases and parasites, you fall and you get hurt, those sorts of things. The whole “fall” thing seems to be using an ancient moral explanation for the origination of evils that more realistically appear to exist because physics happens. So now the Fall becomes a reason for why God doesn’t intervene, even though there’s really no revelation that God doesn’t intervene. The miracle we are to see now is that God doesn’t intervene?
Yet God did intervene during evolution–at least at the “beginning” (whenever front-loading occurred)? But God won’t intervene to, I don’t know, make P. falciparum go extinct?
It’s a lot of “explanation” for why things look like God apparently doesn’t do anything that a moral being is expected to do. Somehow it gets back to the fact that things are as if God doesn’t exist. Could it be just because God doesn’t exist?
I know, the problem is that it would be very nice to believe that while God intervenes little or not at all, we will live after we die because God will intervene. Surely that would be nice (not all scenarios would be, yet one could generally come up with some that would keep us alive and happy far longer than our lifespans, at least), but I really don’t see the point of making one’s case for it on the lack of any persuasive evidence for something or Someone who can make it happen. God intervening during evolution to produce us as morally concerned beings, only to fail to intervene as a morally concerned being himself, just doesn’t convince.
How could it?
Glen Davidson
Rumraket, to Vincent:
Amen.
That doesn’t change the fact that your asserted “evidence” for your god is immaterial because any evil is incompatible with at least one of the omni attributes you claim for it. Which one are you going to give up?
Mung:
Rumraket:
Mung gets nervous when people ask him that question.
He’s been dodging my version of it for days:
Odd that a guy so ostensibly obsessed with evidence can’t provide any of his own.
I’m only unfriendly to theists when arguing online. I have an aunt and uncle who are the nicest, kindest people I know. They’re also fundamentalist Baptists.
If being a friendly atheist means accepting that there are rational reasons for belief in gods then I’m going to remain unfriendly by definition. Faith is based in emotion and indoctrination, it is the antithesis of reason.
Other theists here have said that asking for evidence for gods isn’t allowed. You should get your stories straight. I suggest doing so in the octagon — whoever is left at the end obviously has the better god.
Every theist who practices apologetics disagrees strongly with you.
And that’s why.
ATTENTION MUNG! This is what you need to address directly if you think you can refute keiths. Let’s see what you’ve got.
Very nicely put. Perhaps Mung would care to directly address this as well.
It’s a straw man which means it needs to pointed out and laughed at
And another straw man
You’re asking me to be irrational. Not today. Sorry.
But why should nature be that way, or humans for that matter?
If keiths were not all over the map with his “argument” it might be possible to address it. It appears to be a constantly changing target.
Why on earth would you ask me to deny what I know to be true by personal experience? To put it another way, why are you not taking into account all available evidence?
A string of endless questions isn’t an argument. Every evolutionist knows this. I could raise endless questions about evolution. Defenders could add epicycle after epicycle. Oh, wait …
Sure. Let’s just hand the victory to the theists! God exists. Now can we talk about what kind of God it is that exists? Let’s do theology.
By personal experience? You can’t be wrong about the nature of those experiences?
At best, your personal experiences would be evidence to yourself only. That’s what the word personal signifies. Otherwise you’d have to contend with conflicting personal experiences by people from all sorts of different and mutually exclusive religions.
Yes, assuming God exists, you still don’t have good evidential justification for the belief that God is a good God.
Technically, to make an evidential argument against something you don’t have to weigh all the evidence pro and con, for the argument to actually constitute an argument that implies the existence of the entity is less probable.
Even if we were in a position where, say, the pro-Christianity evidence implied there was a 99% posterior probability that Christianity is true, an evidential argument from evil would reduce that. Even if it only reduced it by 0.1%, that would still be evidence that implied the truth of Christianity is less probable than you would otherwise believe.
What Mung is asking for is the posterior probability of Christianity, all evidence considered. But I’m not aware that anyone here has claimed they have calculated the posterior probability of Christianity. And they don’t need to, to argue that the evidential argument from evil is in point of fact, evidence against it (as in, evidence that makes the posterior probability less, all else held equal).
I’m glad you don’t just see this World as a rehearsal for the next. And I agree that life for many has vastly improved since the Middle Ages. But the fact that [reducing the effects of]* famine, pestilence and war have removed death control on the human population means we have to move on from Medieval attitudes to birth control. Climate change is being driven by our burgeoning World population. The Roman Catholic Church’s continuing to preach against the rights of women, denying them control of their own reproduction, is deplorable.
ETA*
From the wisdom of most of the major religions and spiritual traditions we are told that in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment, to work our way to the spirit, humans must undergo pain and suffering. There is no other way.
Buddhism is founded on this fact. The four noble truths of Buddha begin with suffering.
In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna is filled with foreboding about the battle in which he must participate. Krishna advises him not to turn away from the fight, it is something which needs to happen.
The quest of Jason, the twelve trials of Heracles, as with all these stories, are imaginative pictures of the trials and tribulations suffered by the human soul on the road to enlightenment.
From The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas A Kempis, Chapter XII”
Where is God in all of this? It would seem that the God believed in by millions has abandoned us.
Allow me a personal note. I grew up in a family that were not particularly religious, nominally Christian but my parents never went to church except for the occasional wedding or funeral. Like many here, as a teenager and young man I was looking for answers. There were many contradictions in the Bible that gave me more questions than answers and in my experience the church did not provide any of the answers I was looking for, but I had always believed in Christ.
The only answers that have ever made any sense to me are in the works of Rudolf Steiner. He gave a picture of the separate religions being complimentary rather than being in conflict. Christ did not come to found a new religion, he came so that all of humanity could ascend again to the unified spiritual existence from whence we came but now with individual consciousness. This is the turning point of time. Evolution becomes an evolution of consciousness and we humans are at a stage where we must take responsibility for our own actions as individuals and as a group. The distressing photos provided by Rumraket are a consequence of human actions.
Christ became the Spirit of the Earth and when in the Gospel of Matthew it is said “They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots”, this is an allusion to the way we divide the land up amongst ourselves. And fighting over the possession of land leads to much of the woes of the world.
Humans were originally spiritual beings but without the clear consciousness we possess today. We descended into materialism and lost consciousness of our spiritual origins through no fault of our own. Through the sacrificial act of Christ uniting with the Earth, humans are now able to reascend to the spiritual realm which in fact has only seemed to be non existent due to our inability to be consciously aware of its presence.
Spiritual beings are far more intimately involved in our life and development than any of us realise.
Rumraket:
I’ve explained that to Mung already, but he just doesn’t get it:
Mung,
Care to share your personal experience and explain why your interpretation of it is correct?
No, I’m asking you to demonstrate that you can actually refute keiths rather than repeatedly claiming to be able to do so. He laid out his position quite clearly. Let’s see what you’ve got.
Or you can keep squirming and running. Here’s where the rubber hits the road and we see what your real intentions are.
How do you refute someone who is irrational and refuses to admit it to an audience of others who are likewise irrational and refuse to admit it?
OR, as you put it in another post:
“You appear to have an inflated sense of the value I place on your responses.”
keiths has said a number of times that his argument is not the logical argument from evil.
refute: prove (a statement or theory) to be wrong or false; disprove.
I cannot “refute” his argument because it’s not the sort of argument that can be refuted. Try again.
So now you’re backing down and refusing to even try to do so?
You could start by demonstrating the irrationality of what keiths wrote:
Why can a dog eat the head of a living baby? There is no loving God to stop it.
Why can hundreds of thousands of people die in a tsunami? There is no loving God to prevent it or to warn them in time.
Why can a priest be tortured past the point of apostasy? No loving God is available to intervene.
It’s a simple explanation, epicycle-free, and it fits the evidence perfectly. It puts the epicycle-laden explanation to shame.
If you can’t demonstrate that this is irrational, you can directly address his point.
If you do neither there is no reason to believe your claim that you can refute him.
There’s even less reason to believe that I said I could refute him. His argument is supposed to be probabilistic, not deductive.