The late Mennonite theologian, John Howard Yoder (to be sure a fallen man himself), crtitiqued theodicy with the following questions. I’d like to hear from both the theists and atheists on this site what their responses are to his questions:
a) Where do you get the criteria by which you evaluate God? Why are the criteria you use the right ones?
b) Why [do] you think you are qualified for the business of accrediting God/s?
c) If you think you are qualified for that business, how does the adjudication proceed? [W]hat are the lexical rules?
Phoodoo,
Don’t know.
Sal
Ok.
But were you not being brave until you (non) answered?
Oh please.
Defining Critical Thinking
I don’t see myself evaluating God. Perhaps I am just blind to it.
When something happens to me that I wish had not happened to me I tend to ask what I can learn from that event. When I do something I think I should not have done I don’t blame God or Satan, I blame myself.
We are witnessing a sellout in stcordova pandering to atheists and a self-proclaimed atheist now claiming to be ‘religious.’ Isn’t this a pretty thread?
Mung,
I predicted you’d give a mush answer to Keiths, and observation agrees with theory.
Keiths,
I sincerely thought you had a good question. And Mung looks like he punted.
It made me consider what would be my answer.
The Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament took delight in destroying people in Deuteronomy. If hypothetically this is the true God (which I believe), then the law he Intelligently Designed and expressed in a contract (covenant), as far as I can tell, doesn’t specify how He will treat people except to lay out lots of cruelty and occasional mercy. So He’s kept up his end of the contract (covenant).
What you are asking is strikes me as saying, “Is there a way that we can make God likable given the cruelty He pours out.” As someone whose family has been the victim of crime, I guess I can only say some explanations work for me, but not for other people — i.e. ex-pastor Bruce Gerencser hates Jesus now. See:
But to illustrate why I find the idea of God being exempt palatable, consider the parable of someone’s sore being licked by dogs while he starved to death:
God is able to restore and heal. The bad uncle can’t do such restorations. God inflicts injury, but he can heal.
Jesus claims the blindness was designed. In regards to Paul at Damascus his blindness was designed, but then Paul was healed. God has the right and ability to injure and the ability to heal. He does it for His glory, not ours. We make Rube Goldberg machines for our amusement, delight and glory, not the benefit of the Rube Goldberg machines. Creation, and the laws that govern it, including the laws of how humans are to treat each other, is for the benefit of the creator, not the created.
But in the case of Jezebel, the design God had in mind was prophesied:
and it was carried out
I take it God won’t restore her to health on judgment Day.
Maybe not the answer that satisfies you. It’s good enough for me.
petrushka,
True. Some questions matter and others don’t. It would be silly to treat them all as equally important.
The lack of an answer to the problem of evil is a strong argument against the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God (such as the God most Christians believe in).
Sal:
He didn’t have much of a choice. It was 4th and 19.
The funny part is that he tries to pretend it was 1st and goal, but that he punted because he just didn’t feel like advancing the ball any more. Yeah, right, Mung.
Not really. As I explained to Mung above, the question isn’t whether we like God’s behavior or consider it moral by our standards; it’s whether God’s behavior matches the morality that is ascribed to him.
It’s just that people conveniently tend to ascribe their own morality to God. Since most people would condemn the uncle for allowing the dog to eat the baby’s head, they think that God would condemn the uncle too. But then they have a tough time explaining why God should be exempt from condemnation when he lets the dog eat the baby’s head.
The problem of evil isn’t the reason Gerencser hates Jesus:
Sal,
But by your own reckoning, he doesn’t always do so. Then there is the question of hell itself. I don’t know what you believe about hell, but for Christians who believe that God punishes nonbelievers for eternity, the problem of evil looms large.
If the uncle had the ability to heal, would it be okay for him to let the dog chew away while the baby screamed in agony? Especially if the uncle was doing all of this for his own selfish glory?
And how does it glorify God to kill 230,000 people in a tsunami and then leave them dead? Or to let a dog chew a baby’s head off and do nothing to make things right again?
I think you need to get used to the idea that the God you worship is a dick.
Mung,
Given that the questions are appropriate and relevant to the topic being discussed, it shows that you can’t answer them.
No one is suprised. We know that your faith is irrational and that you cling to it despite having no answer to the problem of evil.
It doesn’t. The argument stands on its own, and you have no counterargument.
Jackson,
Yes. I take “omnipotent” to mean “able to do anything it’s logically possible to do”, and “omniscient” to mean “knowing everything it’s logically possible to know”.
“Omnibenevolent” I take to mean “striving to absolutely maximize the good and minimize the evil and suffering in the world”. That leaves room for “necessary evil” or evil in the service of a greater good.
The problem is that theists can’t tell me what greater good is served by dogs eating babies’ heads or people being drowned by the hundreds of thousands.
And let me point out that the “free will defense” doesn’t work either. From an earlier OP:
A similar technique could be used to prevent murder, rape, genocide, you name it — all without violating anyone’s free will.
Note: All of the above assumes the existence of libertarian free will, which is an incoherent concept. Many Christians insist on it, however, so I assume it here for the sake of argument.
I agree with Richard in one sense. Yes, people are often similar in their religion to that of their parents. That is not surprising as parents also impact our speech, culture, and many other things. It isn’t clear to me that that has much bearing on theism having warrant or not. Truth is…I don’t care much for the word religion. It does so happen that my path is in some ways pretty similar to my parents, but in other, important ways, pretty different as well. I’d rather talk about the good news, the ideas lizzie was kicking around earlier, than religion and “right” doctrine/belief. What propositions one mentally assents to are not the most important question in my mind. I think if one has the audacity to believe and follow the good news (as described earlier and also is found in Matt 5-7) salvation for society and individuals is possible.
As to the arguments for theism…I am content that I have given them a pretty fair reading, but I haven’t concluded quite that they are “all refuted.” Can objections be raised? Sure. Are the objections defeaters for the argument? It doesn’t appear that way to me. And I think most reasonable people would assess, after reviewing the relevant literature, that at the very least the jury has been out for a few millennia and doesn’t appear to be coming in anytime soon with a conclusive verdict. Having said that, I would not attempt to coerce you, or anyone, that you should shift your thinking. If you find the objections to be defeaters, then so be it. I don’t find them so.
I don’t know the answer to your last question, but if I was guessing, I would say yes. Would I have some variant beliefs? In all likelihood. I think it is common knowledge that our parents (and greater society) impact the whole of us.
It seems to me from a sociological standpoint that most people are theists. Birds sing, frogs jump and people pray…as they say. People seem predisposed, to me, to theism.
So your questions to me and my failure to answer them are irrelevant. And it’s somehow my fault for sussing this out and not being fooled. Mea culpa!
You seem to make far more of my failure to answer your questions than is warranted. The argument from silence is notoriously difficult. But you’re up to it, right?
As for whether or not I have a counter-argument, that remains to be seen. What is your argument?
haha. Over at UD you changed the content of my posts to make them appear as if I wrote something other than what I actually wrote. You also consistently deleted my posts. In response to my good questions you were punting? Yeah.
Mung,
Not at all. It’s obvious that you would love to be able to defend your faith effectively against critics. The Bible even demands it of you:
I am asking why you continue to have hope in the Christian God when you are utterly unable to give an answer to the problem of evil.
You don’t answer because you can’t.
I guess I’m like proverbial girl who likes bad boys.
But more seriously, with respect to humanity, a God who sends people to hell for eternity (which I believe because I see him doing such horrific things today), he’s not the Designer most people want to believe in or hope exists.
Such messages won’t fill up the pews in church, so most pastors and parishioners want a more sugar coated version. When they figure out just how cruel Jesus can be, they start hating him. It says of Jesus wrath:
When ir-Reverend Gerencser realized who Jesus of the Bible really was, he decided:
You wrote:
That’s probably what the birds and their families thought when Darwin was blasting away with his gun on them just for sport. Cruelty in the world isn’t evidence against God’s existence any more than cruelty by Darwin on birds was evidence against Darwin’s existence.
FWIW, in that respect, as far as most of humanity is concerned, most would hope Richard Dawkins is right and the Wrath filled Jesus of the Bible is false. I don’t like the human condition. I accept it is by Intelligent Design even though that is a most unpleasant inference as far as human wishes go.
But as you said, this doesn’t have anything to do with your argument. Your argument, to quote you, “stands on its own.”
I assume this means that my response, or lack of response, is irrelevant to your argument. Is there something I’m missing?
keiths:
Your argument does stand on it’s own, right? You’re not now going to backtrack and claim that your argument depends on my answers to your questions, are you?
The rules don’t limit me to a single argument, Mung.
Think.
keiths:
Sal:
I used a different metaphor in the other thread:
Sal:
keiths:
Keiths,
I appreciate your sentiments here:
Apparently He gets glory demonstrating His power on those far weaker than him. Not very nice, but I don’t believe God is always nice, but a consuming fire.
Speaking of Tsunamis, here are the Merry Christmas greetings from the Christmas child-turned-man himself:
Now why do I believe Jesus is the Intelligent Designer? One of the reasons is that it seems He’s prophesied what will happen. He knows it because He is the one who Designs the troubles on the world.
There is a population explosion that all the climate laws will not curtail. The environment is going to pot. Iran and North Korea and who else is arming with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Human nature will destroy the world. And I don’t know what sort of horrible deliberate or accidental bio terror will result now that Craig Ventner and others gain mastery of re-wiring the software of life.
A few bad apples can make life miserable on this planet (just as we see with drug addicted Jihadists), even though the majority are reasonably benevolent. Science and technology amplify our ability to kill each other.
I also see that parasites are evolving to be ever more virulent, all the while our bodies are genetically deteriorating with each generation.
I wish at some level, all things will evolve for the better on this planet, but I’m not putting money on that bet. It seems to me that Jesus told it like it really is and he described what to expect from what He has intelligently designed for the Earth.
Of course, most don’t believe my characterization. At some level, I’d like to think the Lord isn’t ordaining the world to be such a bad place, but I can’t deny the trouble I see on the news wires.
Some think we can spread “science and reason” and the world will cure its problems — just like all the “science and reason” on display by the ambassadors of “science and reason” in Elevatorgate:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elevatorgate
Any way, thanks for responding. I think you raise legitimate objections.
Sal:
No, Gerencser makes it clear that he is not talking about the Jesus of the Bible:
The rules don’t limit you to making an argument or to making no argument and claiming that you’ve made an argument.
The rules don’t insist that if you say “the argument stands on its own” that you’ve actually made an argument at all.
But this is, again, another red herring. You don’t care what the rules say.
Sal,
Unless you believe, as most Christians do, that God is perfectly loving and benevolent. Then the cruelty, evil, and suffering in the world is a huge problem for you.
That doesn’t apply to you if you acknowledge that God is not perfectly good, or not omnipotent, or doesn’t exist at all.
My impression is that you are mostly worried about your own eternal fate, and that you are willing to suck up to a selfish, prideful, vindictive, and cruel God if doing so will get you to heaven.
And you are worried that openly acknowledging that this God is a dick might endanger your future.
Poor Mung. All of this to avoid answering a few simple but devastating questions:
You have no confidence in your ability to defend your faith, Mung, and neither do those of us watching you flail.
It’s ok keiths. You have an argument, or arguments.
You accused me of making a false accusation against you.
Still waiting…
Focus, keiths:
If would help your position of you presented your argument(s).
Mung,
My questions have frightened you into trying to change the subject, but the topic of this thread is the problem of evil, and my questions are relevant:
Well, in the end your impressions are not the final judge.
I think you still had good and reasonable objections, and I’m glad to see you really taking Mung to task.
Agnosticism and Atheism are my second choice as far as world views vs. any other (like Islam or Hinduism, or whatever 10,000 religions out there).
I like you guys, and at some level I’ve almost hoped you were right, that science and reason can solve the human condition, and that Bill Nye’s vision of perpetual discovery and wonder would be realized. I sort of rooted for him when he debated Ken Ham. He came across as more reasonable. After all, having an engineering background, I’m a bit of a closet materialist and believer technology is the answer to all our problems even though I know better.
stcordova,
Do you really believe that God decides every drop of rain, and every act of every soccer mom and mugger?
Because if you don’t believe this, then God is not the one who is deciding to cause the evil in the world. And if you do believe that, well, I think that is weird.
Sal,
True. But are my impressions incorrect?
I haven’t claimed “that science and reason can solve the human condition”. I just think they’re the best tools we’ve come up with for ascertaining truth. For that reason they should be embraced — not rejected — when evaluating the truth of claims, religious or otherwise.
I sincerely don’t feel that way. I love God because I think He’ll work things out for me, maybe not for the rest of the world.
As far as the rest of what you said, they don’t call me slimy Sal for nothing. 🙂
phoodoo, to Sal:
phoodoo,
Do you believe God is omniscient and omnipotent? And do you believe that omniscience includes the ability to foresee the future?
If so, then everything that happens in the world happens with God’s express permission.
in my example, it was the dog who decided to chew the baby’s head off. The uncle and God let it happen while the baby screamed in agony.
Would you let them off the hook if they said “Hey, I didn’t chew the baby’s head off. Blame the dog!”
keiths,
First I think an atheist-materialist calling a babies head being chewed off as being fundamentally different than a tree losing leaves is being hypocritical. Its all just nature and nature isn’t good or bad from a materialist perspective. If you feel it is, that is just an illusion.
Secondly, to the non-atheist, conscious beings can only experience their own consciousness. So when the baby is killed, whose experience of evil are you talking about? The babies? The parents?
We are all going to experience tragedy in the world. People we love will die, or we will die. There will be suffering and their will be pleasures. And each person posses their own ability to deal or not deal with that truth. As I said before, anyone who truly believed that on balance the deal of life is not fair, has the choice of not life. You seem to be saying that if God has the choice of life or not life for the universe, you prefer he choose the perfect life for you. Maybe that is not an option in this world. I have already explained one reason why.
People close to me have also died. Just because you paint it as graphic as you can, by imaging a dog killing a babies head, doesn’t change the experience humans have of losing things they love, and gaining other things they love. We can only live our own internal experience. Is losing the baby worse than losing a beloved grandmother? To whom? The people who lose family in a way that you think they shouldn’t perhaps have different capacities to deal with this than you.
So I don’t by into the premise of God deciding every evil act and event. I buy into the premise that any experience between God and myself is my own experience, and my only ability, all of our only abilities is to evaluate that. I can not change or demand the universe be some way I prefer.
You seem to want the power to decide that the world should be the way you want it, in order to agree with it as being good. I think that is narcissistic and pointless. You are not a God, so don’t pretend you can solve the decisions of a God, or even know what it means to make a decision. What is YOUR experience about dogs and babies, that is all you can know about. Your frustration that you can’t know why others have their experience is your own thing to deal with.
Non-atheist is a theist. I hope this helps.
phoodoo,
That’s why I asked these questions…
…and made this remark:
If God is omniscient, he knew that the dog was going to chew the baby’s head off. If God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the tragedy with less effort than it takes you or me to lift a finger.
I would condemn any uncle who stood idly by while his niece’s head was being chewed off by a dog. I’ll bet you would too. If so, why praise or worship a God who does the same thing?
phoodoo,
How would you complete this sentence?
God allowed the dog to chew off the baby’s head so that ________.
…Keiths could complain that the world is not the way he would make it, even though Keiths can’t make worlds and knows nothing about it; much like a toddler that complains and wants to know why he can’t have ice cream for dinner every night.
Richard thinks agnostics are theists. Interesting.
Wrong, once again of course, but interesting.
So how would you complete the sentence?
keiths,
I just did. Once again, you are struggling with the reality that everyone doesn’t do things the way YOU want them to do it.
Sorry for your disappointment in not getting to be a God in this life Keiths. Maybe in the next one?
phoodoo:
No, you didn’t.
What would you put in the blank, phoodoo?
God allowed the dog to chew off the baby’s head so that ________.
Also:
I would condemn any uncle who stood idly by while his niece’s head was being chewed off by a dog. I’ll bet you would too. If so, why praise or worship a God who does the same thing?
Yes, that is correct. The atheist-skeptics here try to deny that reality with their ideologies.
Not a surprise.
We know already that IDism is a neo-creationist ideology. What is demonstrable in many of those who promote it is a fanaticism that bends faith into ‘inference’.
The difference between Jackson and Salvador is so great as to display a chasm across Christians.
One way to bridge this is to simply admit that YECism is a baneful ideology in the evangelical USA church and that IDism is not a ‘strictly scientific’ theory.
To extend the IDist ideology to the problem of evil displays gross negligence of wisdom, far beyond what any of the ID leaders could have imagined or foreseen at Pajaro Dunes in 1993. stcordova is a remnant of this mistaken ideology, which he buries himself with his own words.
keiths,
Blank- : …Keiths could complain that the world is not the way he would make it, even though Keiths can’t make worlds and knows nothing about it; much like a toddler that complains and wants to know why he can’t have ice cream for dinner every night.
If you can’t know whether it’s a particularly bad world because you’re too ignorant, then you can’t know whether it’s a particularly good world either. It goes both ways.
That does’t make sense. I’m keenly aware that most of the world’s people are theists. In what way do I “deny that reality with my ideology”?
Do you genuinely believe that is the reason god allowed a dog to chew off a baby’s head? If so, does that strike you as a good reason for that?
One would think an omnipotent and all-knowing god could think of a less barbaric and grotesque way to allow Keiths to complain about the world.
You are so profoundly confused. He’s assuming god exists, aka that materialism is false, in order to derive an absurdity. He’s criticizing theism on it’s own terms. A reductio ad absurdum. He’s now succeeded in showing that you have failed to fully account for the logical consequences of the theistic morality you espouse. It leads to nonsensical and absurd propositions.
Rumraket,
By what standard are you saying the world is barbaric? More barbaric than no world at all? Or just not the world YOU say it should be.
Its like if someone says, I am going to give you a free car, its a Ford Focus. You can have it, or no car at all, its up to you, its free. And the person says, no, wait, I want a Bentley. And the person say, well, no its a Ford Focus, you can take it if you want, or not. And the person says, you are so barbaric, why won’t you give me a Bentley, right now!
You didn’t answer my question Phoodoo. Were you taking the piss, or do you actually believe god allows toddlerheads to be chewed to pieces by dogs so that people like Keiths have something to complain about?
It doesn’t really matter what standard I use to declare that letting a dog eat the face of a toddler is babaric. Clearly, if you saw a dog trying to eat a toddler’s face, you’d try to prevent it. It strikes you and me both as something we should try to prevent because, whatever we might believe, it would be “bad” to let happen.
The point is that in so far as you just assume god is somehow morally good by definition, you automatically open the door for anything happening to be ad-hoc defined to be morally permissible (because after all, god is not intervening to prevent it). And if no good would come of it, then there’d be a contradiction between a morally perfect being allowing a bad event from happening without intervening. Which means in order to solve the contradiction and retain belief in the existence of god as a morally perfect being, you elect to solve the contradiction by positing the idea that “god knows best”. In the grand cosmic context we don’t have enough information to judge whether that dog eating that toddler’s face is something god should have prevented. We don’t know what kinds of moral goods it could potentially lead to.
So you lose the ability to criticize anyone for anything too, because you aren’t in any better position to judge the ultimate outcome of any human action than an atheist is. After all, god could have some huge plan with whatever evils we see in the world. That is what you’re doing right now. You’re excusing god for allowing a dog to eat a toddler’s face because you’ve defined god to be morally good by definition, which means that for god to remain morally good while allowing evils you yourself would prevent, there must be something you are missing about the big picture that means god has a plan for allowing that dog to eat that toddler’s face. It will presumably lead to some greater good in the future.
But notice what you’ve done, you’ve implicitly acknowledged that a dog eating a toddler’s face is bad despite god allowing it to happen, because YOU feel it is bad, that’s why you’re now making up the excuse in the first place. The excuse that we are too ignorant to judge what god allows to happen. You could have simply stated that you don’t believe there’s anything wrong with a dog eating a toddler’s face. You could excuse any action with that too. Whatever happens is not truly evil, because god allows it to happen, and since god is a morally perfect being that would never just let evil happen for no reason, when and if evil happens, it isn’t actually evil (otherwise god would be intervening).
So since you simultaneously want to retain belief in god as a morally good being, while also wanting to clearly distance youself from admitting you don’t know whether a toddler having it’s face chewed by a dog is a good or a bad thing (because after all, like me you feel that you DO know that a dog eating a toddler’s face is a bad thing you should try to prevent), you’re forced into this kind of ad-hoc rationalization about grand plans we cannot fathom.
But since you are in the business of excusing evil actions happening you yourself would prevent, you also lose the ability to criticize anyone for anything, because the exact same excuse could be made to fit any and all scenarios. You could be seeing people murder and rape each other all around you, but since god isn’t intervening, the same excuse could apply.
All this, instead of just admitting that either god isn’t morally good, or doesn’t exist.