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.
Notice the appeal to an entity that DOES NOT EXIST to EXPLAIN an event in the world. That’s irrational. The same answer applies to the next two questions and their faux explanations.
Why does it rain? Because God doesn’t prevent it from raining. Why doesn’t God prevent it from raining? Because God does not exist. Why does it rain? Because God does not exist. You want me to waste my time trying to refute this?
You’re still just commenting without engaging his actual statements. I’m beginning to think you’re here for the attention you get rather than to participate in any meaningful way.
That’s a nonsensical interpretation of what he wrote and a transparent attempt to avoid engaging in the actual discussion. You’re just trolling, Mung.
Yes, I know this, Rumraket. How many times to I have to say it? I told Patrick the same thing earlier in this thread. In fact, that’s exactly the nature of the argument that keiths is supposedly making. But he denies it!
From the IEP
You agree. Patrick agrees. I agree. Now if only we could get keiths to agree. But for that to happen he would have to admit he was wrong, and we all know that isn’t going to happen.
Christ.
Excuse me but there is a huge difference between:
and
and
and
Whoa. I go away for a few hours, and when I return Mung has progressed to a full meltdown.
Imagine if Mung’s God actually existed and was watching his pitiful performance.
Heck. Perhaps I never even had the experiences I think I’ve had! Maybe people only think they experience evil. Maybe they are mistaken about the nature of those experiences. Where, exactly, does this sort of discussion get us?
Don’t you see that this can be turned right back at the atheist? Is keiths experiencing objective evil? Has he experienced personal evil? At best his personal experiences would only be evidence to himself. If he’s saying his atheism is rationally justified based on his personal experience of evil, well, more power to him. He should consider becoming a Christian. 🙂
And the point would be?
Care to share your own personal experience of evil and explain why your interpretation of it is correct?
As a professed physicalist, what, exactly, is evil? Explain it. If evil does not exist as an objective fact in the world, then you have never actually experienced it. You have no experience of evil. If have no experience of evil, you have no evidence of evil. Whose experience of evil does your argument rely on?
Given your past actions and statements here, do you think I really care what you think? Can you posture more? Strut a little maybe?
As I said:
We could turn this into another “Testing Evolutionism” thread, with lots of meaningless back and forth. Or we could discuss the actual arguments. I’ll wait until someone responds to mine.
Hi everyone,
A few quick responses.
Rumraket:
I could point to the classical arguments for the existence of God, but they’ll only take you as far as the God of classical theism. If you want evidence of a loving God, it’s easy enough to find: all you need to do is open your eyes – literally. The evidence is out there, right in front of your nose. The world is staggeringly beautiful – much more beautiful than we have any right to expect it to be. It’s hard to find so much as a nook or cranny in the entire cosmos which is actually ugly. What’s more, Nature turns out to be beautiful at all levels: we are still awed by its beauty, whether we look at it through a telescope or a microscope. And if we look at the mathematical equations describing the laws of the cosmos, we discover a beautiful mathematical elegance there, too. This gratuitous beauty of Nature constitutes a very strong argument, to my mind, for the existence of a bountiful and generous God. Nature was made by a beautiful Mind.
You can point to evil. Sure, it’s real. But evil is local (we can only find it on earth), whereas beauty is global: it’s everywhere in the cosmos. In the evidence stakes, global trumps local, any day. Even if I had no answer to the problem of evil, it would still be rational to believe in a loving God, on the basis of the argument from beauty.
You also wrote:
Um, no. If there is good evidence that Jesus performed the death-defying act of rising from the grave, and if there is historical evidence (from the Gospels) that he promised to return some day and judge the living and the dead, then it’s perfectly rational to take that promise seriously, and look forward to an end to the sufferings of this world.
keiths (to Mung):
See my remarks above on beauty.
I haven’t had any direct experiences of God in my life. A couple of times I’ve had a sense of the presence of God which lasted for a few seconds, but that’s about it.
But like most people my age, I am a parent. The birth of a child is a joyous event, which I would describe as an everyday miracle. It happens naturally, but it nevertheless deserves to be called a miracle, because there is so much that Nature has to get right, in order for a human being to be born. And the amazing thing is that it does, so often. Not always, but often.
It is amazing that the laws of Nature work at all. It is even more amazing that they permit the existence and emergence of life. And it is simply staggering that they permit the existence and emergence of conscious and even self-conscious life. When I think of all the things that could go wrong in the world but don’t, and when I contemplate the everyday miracles that occur all around us, my reaction is one of gratitude. And that is why, when I held my newborn son for the first time, the first thing I did was to turn my face heavenwards and say, “Thank you, God.”
Alan Fox:
I’ve discussed world population in Part I of my 2011 online book, Embro and Einstein: Why They’re Equal, and I discussed Third World problems in Part H. I won’t repeat myself here, except to say that if we were more open to developing thorium reactors and small-scale nuclear reactors, we could meet our energy needs in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner, and we could probably feed a much larger population and preserve more land if we were all willing to live in 100-story high-rise apartments (or even underground apartments) and eat laboratory-grown meat developed from tissue cultures, instead of killing animals in order to obtain meat. All we have to do is change our preferences.
In any case, speaking of the Catholic Church, I don’t think you could call Pope Francis’ attitude to birth control medieval. He’s on record as saying that Catholics don’t have to breed like rabbits. And if you look at the Population Reference Bureau’s list of total fertility rate by country for 2016, you’ll find only 50 countries out of 210 where it is equal to or greater than 4.0, and that the level for the world as a whole is 2.5 (2.1 being replacement level).
keiths:
Imagine you’re a human being who’s ticked off at the thought of a Voice from Heaven continually telling you when you’re doing the wrong thing, all day long. Sure, the Voice has its uses: it also warns you of approaching danger, enabling you to avoid the risk of injury to yourself and your loved ones. But you’ve decided that what you want, first and foremost, is autonomy. You want your own space, where you can breathe and do your own thing – and, yes, make mistakes – on your own. There’s only one way to do that: tell the Voice to go away. What do you do?
Now imagine an entire planet full of people who feel as you do. You can see why people might forego Divine protection, if they were hell-bent on doing their own thing.
And now imagine you’re the Voice. An entire planet full of people has shut you out, telling you in no uncertain terms to go away. They’re rational beings, exercising their God-given free will. You may not like the way they’re exercising it, but what else can you do, but respect their choice?
I’ll close with a quote from John Henry Newman’s letter to J.R. Mozley, dated April 1, 1875:
Newman’s admissions in the passage quoted here strike me as very honest. I have defended the scenario I put forward, but I don’t claim any certainty as to its truth, and I acknowledge it may well be mistaken. But as I’ve written above, the evidence for a loving God still seems to overwhelm the contrary evidence from evil.
Patrick seems to despise epicycles and then hates it when I don’t create them. Just no pleasing some people. 🙂
Is acid (the colors!) the way to understand that beautiful Mind?
Or are mental states not really strong indicators of gods, spirits, or even of beauty existing “out there”?
Glen Davidson
If mental states are not good indicators of what exists, are they perhaps good indicators of what does not exist?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder.
I don’t think he has. For example I asked him if his argument uses Bayes’ Theorem. A simple yes or no was all that was needed. I received neither. People who are trying to be clear don’t obfuscate.
For if his argument is probabilistic, don’t you think it reasonable to ask whether it is Bayesian or not? He assured us it was not deductive, a fact that you still seem to be struggling with.
Mung,
That, too.
God so loved us he made the earth the home to evil in cosmos full of beauty.
Vincent,
The “beauty defense” doesn’t really work. Who, after suffering in excruciating agony for weeks, wouldn’t gladly sacrifice some beauty in a galaxy 5 billion light years away in exchange for relief? How is beauty a sign of love, when you don’t know, and can’t show, that the beauty was created for our benefit? And why wouldn’t a loving God keep the beauty and ditch the evil and suffering?
Regarding the “promise defense”, I’d like to point out something very telling: you aren’t led to that defense by the evidence; rather, you’re using it in an attempt to protect your Christian beliefs from the evidence. Doesn’t that strike you as a little, um, backward?
Shouldn’t the goal be to come up with a set of beliefs that fit the evidence, instead of coming up with arbitrary and contrived excuses for hanging onto your pre-existing beliefs in the face of disconfirming evidence?
VJT: Beauty is NOT ‘global’. It is in our head.
Vincent,
There isn’t only one way to do that. You could also ask God to give you your space, but to be on call in case things got out of hand. Isn’t that obvious? Do you really think that among those thousands of people, none were smart enough to think of that? And that if they were that stupid, present-day humans should suffer because of that instead of being allowed to negotiate their own deal? And do you really think a wise and loving God wouldn’t have suggested one of these smarter alternatives to them?
The whole thing makes no sense.
There is an alternative hypothesis that makes perfect sense: there is no loving God.
Vincent, quoting John Henry Newman:
The bolded bit is completely unjustified. Newman does not know at all, much less “doubtlessly”, that there is an answer to the objection just waiting to be discovered. This is sheer wishful thinking.
The mere possibility of a solution is pretty thin gruel when the evidence to date overwhelmingly undercuts the hypothesis of a loving God.
According to Vincent, this child is suffering because of a promise God stupidly made to a third party thousands of years ago.
All praise to this wise and wonderful God who knows what’s really important: He makes promises, no matter how stupid, and he keeps those promises, no matter how ghastly the consequences. He is a legalist extraordinaire, and we all know that legalism is the acme of morality.
Who can look at this photo and deny the greatness and goodness of God, who loves “each and every one of us with a steadfast, unshakable love which is greater than any of us can possibly imagine”?
Even the child is falling to his knees in gratitude.
For goodness’ sake, Vincent, snap out of it.
h/t to Rumraket for the photo.
I recognise that gratitude. When I held my newborn daughter for the first time, the first thing I did was turn to my wife and say, “Thank you, Jo”.
And she responded by thanking me likewise.
That is what a loving relationship looks like. A two-way understanding and partnership between equals. I would never, ever stand by and do nothing if my loved ones were hit by disaster. My failure to act would be incomprehensible.
Theologians of course readily admit it: God is incomprehensible.
Here is what I don’t get: when we see so much suffering in a world upheld by an incomprehensible being, why would you ever put your trust and faith in him? That just makes no sense, unless perhaps you are really, really afraid of the alternative.
God has personally slaughtered (and done nothing to prevent the slaughter of) countless infants – but the moment VJT has his own baby he’s falling over himself to give thanks to this monster?
I’ll have a look.
I’m in agreement that we should be re-examining nuclear options as a medium term solution.
Eating less meat and more plant food is something we could all (except for vegetarians, of course) do now without hardship and likely benefits to our health.
Well, that’s a step in the right direction. I concede that over-population can’t be entirely laid at the Catholic Churches door. Indeed Trump’s action in withdrawing funding on aid to Africa is despicable.
I see Japan is doing its bit to counter population growth though the demographic distortions that is producing is another problem.
More meta-discussion, still no content. It’s all about Mung.
In theory you could. In practice you have yet to do so.
More blather, still no content. It’s all about Mung.
And keiths changes his argument yet again. I suspect he keeps it a moving target for a good reason.
Tell me, keiths, is your argument one of competing hypotheses? Because it sure hasn’t looked that way to me, and the way that Patrick presents it, it isn’t.
Can you set it out in a way that people could recognize it as an argument? You know, premises, conclusion. When you just ask a question, readers are left to try to figure out on their own what the actual premises are and what the conclusion is, and the nature of the argument itself, and that leaves room for all sorts of ambiguity and obfuscation.
People who want to state things clearly avoid things like that.
faded_Glory:
Yes, and imagine telling your child, “Well, I talked it over with someone who insisted that I should never help you. I agreed, and hey — a promise is a promise!”
You would never make such an idiotic promise in the first place. And even supposing you did, what kind of a parent would refuse to break that promise if his or her child were suffering like the one in the photo above? Making and honoring such a promise would be morally monstrous. I’ll bet Vincent wouldn’t do it, yet he’s making excuses for a God who does.
I’m pretty sure VJT is opposed to abortion. Should we add abortion to the list of evidences for evil?
The Many Faces of Evil
John S. Feinberg
Chapter 12
Evil and Evidence
Count me among them.
That’s certainly what the evidence indicates.
Hi keiths,
Some quick responses.
About that photo. Poverty porn, I’d call it: frankly, I’m disgusted to see unbelievers pasting pictures like that on the Internet, to prove a point. It looks like it was taken during the Ethiopian famine of 1984. Please take a look at the pie graph on this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Ethiopia
See any atheists there? No? Thought not. That 0.7% figure for “Other” won’t help you either: it includes people of various faiths, such as Jews, Bahais and Buddhists. In fact, Ethiopia is the world’s most religious nation: 98% of people living there say religion is very important in their lives, according to a 2015 Pew survey. Ophelia Benson was actually able to dig up a couple of atheists in Ethiopia – yes, two! Guess what? Neither of them converted to atheism because of the poverty over there; instead, it was because of the books they read. One found the Bible disgusting; another was led to atheism through philosophy.
And what about the child in the picture, and for that matter, the child’s parents? I’d wager none of them is an atheist. Ask yourself: why? Priestcraft? Poverty? Illiteracy? Those are patronizing explanations, which can all be rephrased: “They’re stupid; we’re enlightened.” No. The real reason why people in Africa believe in God is that their everyday experience tells them that there is one. They can see and feel Him all around them. And the real reason why so many Westerners don’t believe is that we’re poorer than they are: we live in a gilded cage that cuts us off from the most real and intense experiences in life – and we think we’re lucky!
To your other points:
You write:
Yes, it’s quite obvious, and of course, I thought of that, too. What you’re assuming is that your priorities are the same as God’s. You might think loss of life is the worst thing that could happen to you, but God happens to think that sin is. Here’s a quote from Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (chapter 5): “The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.” Horrifying words, but they make sense. If God exists, then what matters most is our relationship with our Maker, since God is the reason why we’re here, as well as being our Ultimate Destiny. Consequently, asking God to warn you about impending disasters but neglect to inform you when your soul is in peril would be the height of illogicality, from God’s point of view.
What you want is a God Who would provide you with information on your terms. God’s not that dumb.
You also write, regarding my “promise” defense, that I’m not led to that defense by the evidence; rather, I’m using it in an attempt to protect my Christian beliefs from the evidence. First, I’ve freely admitted that my “promise” defense is a tentative belief of mine: it may be wrong. Second, it’s not backward to construct a defense in order to explain the evil in the world if one already has overwhelming reasons to believe in the existence of a wise and loving God.
You also write: “How is beauty a sign of love, when you don’t know, and can’t show, that the beauty was created for our benefit?”
First of all: if it wasn’t created for our benefit, then for whose benefit was it created? Alec the Alpha Centaurian’s? I’m not being flippant here: as far as we can tell, we’re the only intelligent, self-aware beings in the cosmos.
That brings me to my second point: Neil Rickert’s remark that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. He is half-right here: it takes a mind to appreciate beauty. In a lifeless cosmos, it would make no sense to speak of beauty.
Third, it is incorrect to think that beauty is purely a mental construct on our part, like fairies. Rather than repeat myself ad nauseam, I’d invite you to read my online essay, Why the mathematical beauty we find in the cosmos is an objective “fact” which points to a Designer. The beauty of mathematics is real, and cannot be dismissed as a cultural construct. At the same time, it takes a mind to appreciate that beauty – and it takes a Mind to create it.
I’ll close with a thought from Newman – I’m afraid I can’t find the passage, but it goes like this. We may look at other people and think that they have been treated unfairly by God. But each of us will have to admit: “God has been good to me.” It is other people’s suffering that inclines us to atheism, rather than our own.
All good discussions must come to an end somewhere, so I shall lay down my pen here.
I can’t wait.
Mung to keiths:
Uh, yeah, it’s all fine then.
Well, unless there’s something inherently wrong with letting children suffer and die from famine.
What in God’s name do you think you’re doing with these red herrings? I don’t believe they convince anyone here, including the theists, and they certainly don’t provide meaningful answers for the questions raised.
Glen Davidson
The evidential argument from evil is an argument by which atheism might be rationally justified. It’s not the theist that needs convincing.
Meaningful answers might be given if it were possible to formulate a meaningful problem.
Given that you say in your OP that you weighed in, at least in part, because I asked you to, perhaps I can prevail upon you for at least one more post.
Which premises of Keith’s argument were your responses directed at? Are you able to say?
Vincent,
You’re disgusted that someone would post a photo of suffering and say “This is real. It’s horrific. It matters morally”? You’re disgusted that someone would argue that this kind of suffering can’t be brushed aside as merely temporary and far less important than the keeping of a foolish promise that should never been made in the first place? You think we should avert our eyes from suffering, lest we appreciate its true magnitude?
I find it far more disturbing that a believer can look at that photo and then say, with a straight face, that God loves “each and every one of us” — including that child — “with a steadfast, unshakable love which is greater than any of us can possibly imagine”.
You would never allow that horror to befall your own child, if you could prevent it. Your God does. Why are you making excuses for him?
You’re smart enough to see the ridiculousness of that, Vincent, and smart enough to recognize that the “promise defense” doesn’t succeed.
You’re also smart enough to recognize that what you’re doing here is trying to defend your existing views against the evidence, rather than coming up with a set of views that best fit the evidence. At some point you need to decide whether it is more important to a) defend your Christian beliefs or b) seek the truth, wherever it happens to lie.
I chose the latter and have never regretted it. If God exists and is truly benevolent, would he resent or punish you for doing the same?
Yet there is no exodus of Christians to lead that noble life. Weird
vjtorley,
Vince,
If you would like some feedback from a person who so far hasn’t participated in the discussion, I’m afraid that was some of the most incredible nonsense I have ever seen on the web. Details if you are interested.
The cosmos is lifeless, with a small error margin. If we make ourselves extinct, then what?
Disgusting. And a good insight into the minds of people like you.
Vincent doesn’t get out much if he supposes that every person in the world thinks that God has been good to him or her.
vjtorley:
keiths:
vjtorley:
Vincent,
Apart from being horrifying (as you concede), that argument makes no sense whatsoever. If God thinks that sin is the worst thing can happen to us, with disaster and suffering a distant second, then why did he make a foolish promise that subjects us to both? Thanks, God!
You are describing a God with a profound intellectual disability — a special-needs deity.
keiths,
You’re overlooking the ultimate reward. Heaven!