Monthly Archives: January 2022

5 ways to clarify the Problem of Evil

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We’ve been responding to a Christian argument, but now it’s our turn. Let’s look at the Problem of Evil in five new ways that Christians rarely touch. (The first article in this series is here.)

1. Must all worldviews answer the Problem of Evil?

The basic idea behind the Problem of Evil (PoE) is, Why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good people? It’s a contradiction: an all-good and all-powerful God apparently coexists with loads of bad in society. It doesn’t make sense.

Some apologists play games with the Problem of Evil, trying to redefine it, but this only admits the problem is unsolvable on its face. The atheist has no PoE to deal with—eliminate the god, and the problem vanishes.

And here’s the irony: not only is the atheist free of the PoE, but you needn’t even leave Christianity to avoid it! Marcionism and Gnosticism—flavors of early Christianity that have since died out—say that the god in charge on earth is a different guy than the one who sent us Jesus. In other words, complain all you want about the idiot in charge of the world. Jesus and his (unnamed) father wouldn’t mind because they’re not in charge. They throw the demiurge (the Gnostic name for the god in charge) under the bus, and responsibility for every imperfection in the world goes along with him.

But because early Christianity saw itself as a flavor of Judaism, it’s stuck with the Old Testament, in which the Jewish god claims credit for creating the world and the problems in it. Oops.

They make God into a conservative radio pundit, warning about the erosion of family values and threats to gun rights.

2. We are this way because of God

The buck stops at God’s desk. If God wants us to have a courageous and compassionate character, he could have made us that way. God could put into us any lessons we learn from adversity—he is omnipotent, remember.

We can work free will into that. You’re free to hit your hand with a hammer, but no one does that. We could’ve been created with a similar aversion to sinning. That is, we could sin, but the idea would be as attractive as hitting yourself with a hammer.

And consider that God already curtails my freedom. I don’t have the free will to use my laser eyes. He also prevents me from using my telekinetic killing power. If he has no problem eliminating these capabilities, why not prevent me from using a knife to kill someone?

You might say that handling knives is part of reality and telekinesis isn’t. And that’s true—after God created us with one ability and not the other. It’s arbitrary (as an aside, this is exactly what the hand of evolution looks like).

Imagine God at his drafting board designing us. Is there is a simple algorithm that separates abilities that we should get from those we shouldn’t? If so, explain that algorithm. If not, out of an enormous set of abilities, God chose the ones to prohibit, and stabbing someone could’ve been one of them.

3. Christians admit they don’t know

Christian apologists have a poor argument when they argue against the PoE, and they often admit as much. They might even play the “I guess I’ll have to ask God when I get to heaven” card.

Let’s be clear on what they claim about God: they’re not saying that it’s possible he had a good reason for every evil from a murder to leukemia to the Holocaust. They’re saying he did have a good reason.

Okay, then what was the reason? For example, what good came from the Holocaust to outweigh the bad? What did we learn from the 200,000 people killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to make it morally worthwhile?

The Christian will plead ignorance, of course. And that’s fine—I won’t insist on the explanation. What I insist on is an explanation. Give me plausible explanations where the net good outweighs the bad for cases like these that are especially troubling. Without this, your defense of God against the PoE becomes just a retreat.

I have four demands of apologists who make the “God could have reasons to allow evil that we can’t even imagine” argument. First, admit how bad the PoE makes God look. Regardless of whether God is justified, admit that he looks to us like a Bronze Age barbarian when he allows evil that he could effortlessly prevent—evil that we would prevent if we could.

Second is the point discussed above: if you say that God could have his reasons, you must give some. That is, move from vague, ungrounded, “Oh, you’ll gimme that one, right?” handwaving to specific, plausible reasons for actual evil events in the world. They don’t have to be God’s actual reasons, but they do have to be convincing enough to show us that God could’ve had reasons.

Third, does “God” even exist? We can worry about God’s reasons for evil after we have solid grounding that he exists.

Fourth, why would God allow suffering when any goal he can achieve through human suffering, he can achieve without it?

4. Christians, do you understand God or not?

Christians boldly step forward to explain the puzzles to which they feel they have a solid answer but dial back the confidence when they aren’t so sure. God is understandable here but inscrutable there, and for some reason this confusion is fine with God.

This is part of the larger problem of the Bible’s “difficult verses” and the popular principle to interpret difficult Bible verses through the lens of easy verses. The problem rarely is that the difficult verse really is hard to understand. More likely, it’s unpleasant or causes a contradiction. The “difficult” label is a euphemism, and there are thick books of “Bible difficulties” that try to paper over the awkward passages.

Here’s an example. God said “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), but he also killed everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24–5). Is the latter passage difficult to understand? Not at all. It may be unpleasant to see God so destructive, but the meaning is clear. Or take the passages where God drowned everyone in the Flood or God approved of slavery or God demanded human sacrifice. It may be painful to imagine the anguish God’s policies caused, but they’re not hard to understand. Drop the insistence that God must come out looking good, and it’s easy to take these at face value.

Here’s a problem God’s defenders don’t embrace. The more effective they are in backing away from those verses they don’t want to understand, the less trustworthy they will be when they actually do claim to reliably understand other parts of the Bible such as the inherent wrongness of same-sex marriage, euthanasia, birth control, or abortion. They make God into a conservative radio pundit, warning about the erosion of family values and threats to gun rights.

But given the doubt they admit to, how can we trust any of their moral claims come from God?

5. Are we being gaslighted about our moral intuitions?

Suppose you see someone being assaulted. Before you jump in to help the victim, ask yourself if this is part of God’s plan. You can’t see the big picture, but God can, and perhaps this assault is part of his plan. Perhaps it will create a net positive.

Perhaps, but who acts that way? No one stops to wonder if they’re in Alice’s Wonderland and that what seems to be the obvious best moral action is not. If I stepped in and violated the free will of the attacker, I assume I’m the good guy in the story.

Or consider a parent grieving the loss of a child. What parent would be satisfied with, “Well, it’s all for the best”?

But if God has a plan, doesn’t that erode your confidence that you know the right moral path? Shouldn’t it?

On one hand, we’re told that Man was made in God’s image, so we should share a moral sense. Both Abraham and Moses debated morality with God and talked him down from a more violent position. But then the Problem of Evil forces God’s defenders to ignore that shared morality, telling us that God’s ways are not our ways and undercutting our confidence in our moral sense.

When God demanded Abraham sacrifice his son, this was a moral test, and the correct answer was No! But apparently that’s wrong, because this was actually an obedience test, and a sick one at that.

We’re being gaslighted! Christians’ moral reality is being challenged, and when they are no longer sure which way is up, they can be used by the religious Right.

One’s mind can play tricks, they’ll say. Suppose the thought crept in that same-sex marriage is good for some people, and really, what’s the harm? Or the thought that the abortion focus would be more effective if it moved upstream, reducing unwanted pregnancies rather than making abortion illegal. Or that no, America really isn’t a Christian nation.

Luckily we have our local pastor to correct those moral failings and how to vote.

When we don’t understand God

When skeptics see God in the Bible acting like a petulant Iron Age king, the Christian response is that we don’t understand God. God’s ways are not our ways. But if his actions make no sense, what’s he good for? Why introduce him in the first place? Imagining God explains nothing. It just gives those Christians an angle to attack our understanding of moral reality.

John Allen Paulos in Irreligion said about God, “Is there such a shortage of things we don’t understand that we need to manufacture another?”

You either have a god who sends child rapists to rape children
or you have a god who simply watches and says:
“When you’re done I’m going to punish you.”
If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would.
That’s the difference between me and your god.
— Tracie Harris, The Atheist Experience

Christians who attack atheists need to know their opponent

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We’ve already explored supposed atheists who want the atheist community to acknowledge the benefits Christianity has provided to society and the powerful arguments in favor of Christianity. Why don’t such “atheists” just declare themselves Christian?

Here’s another example, an atheist who laments the consequences of the atheist worldview. Dozens of Christian articles gushed about this atheist attacking atheism, but the first was “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” (2014) at the Cold-Case Christianity blog. I’ll first respond to the atheist’s points and then consider Christian apologists’ reactions.

An odd atheist 

I’ll use a masculine pronoun for this anonymous atheist because he was dubbed “John” in the original article. He begins by stating the atheist’s position, with a goal of showing that we’re all alone.

We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself.

Not exactly. It’s an accident in that there’s no evidence for it being intentional, but there are scientific laws which govern the formation of universes and the creation and evolution of life. Rolling dice is “random chance,” but natural selection tuning life to be well suited for millions of environmental niches is not.

While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, [and] civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Someone needs a dictionary. These words are clearly defined, and, as defined, they exist. What I think he means is that there are no objective forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.

This error is widespread among Christians, but from an atheist? Perhaps this atheist isn’t especially experienced in the typical Christian arguments and the fallacies to avoid.

John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife,” but he forgets that nothing in King David’s world stopped him from killing a man (Uriah) and reproducing with his wife (Bathsheba), either.

John again:

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a dim corner of a basement café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche and smoking Gauloises as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.

One could wonder if this is a parody (and it gets worse), but since the Christian community has taken it as an honest statement, I’ll interpret it that way, too.

See also: Does This Atheist Have a Point? Or Is This a Sycophantic Poe?

John fights reality

John describes those “dreams, loves, opinions, and desires” as “fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses … that’s it.” Humans nurture children, create, and build only because out genes tell us to. We’re just bags of DNA. “Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.”

He says this as if it’s a dark, embarrassing truth, but it’s just reality that well-adapted adults deal with easily. John’s problem is approaching the effect at the wrong level. Let me illustrate with another example. You could talk about love at the chemical level or, worse, at the quantum level, but why would you? Not much poetry about love is written at this low level—you focus instead on the personal level. We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.

Are you marveling at the importance of love, or is the topic neurobiology? Pick one.

Or another example: you can talk about how evolution works with the different species represented as game pieces that Evolution pushes around like pebbles pushed by mindless waves, but there is no human emotion or meaning at that level. Return to the level of the individual if you want to talk about laws, civility, and morals.

And back to John’s approach: yes, you can look under the hood to see how synapses, genes, and DNA work, but why then add dreams, love, creativity, and family to the same sentence? It’s like a magic show: you can enjoy the show in the audience, or you can peek behind the curtain to see how it’s all done, but these two approaches don’t mix.

This reminds me of Christian apologist William Lane Craig in anguish when, as a child, he learned that we all die. Yes, Dr. Craig, we all die, but that provides no evidence for Christianity. And yes, John, we can focus on synapses and DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t move on to consider love, dreams, and meaning.

And now, morality

John really jumps the shark when he moves on to morality.

Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Nothing in your world stops you from raping and murdering? There is in mine. Penn Jillette nicely slaps this one down:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife,” but he forgets that nothing in King David’s world stopped him from killing a man (Uriah) and reproducing with his wife (Bathsheba), either. The Christian could respond that God punished David for his sin, but that misses the point. John claimed to have found a weakness in the atheist worldview not shared by the Christian worldview, and he failed (h/t commenter epicurus).

Humans are social animals, and evolution has favored pro-social behavior—trust, empathy, compassion, and so on. According to John, however, atheists like me who don’t ’fess up as sociopaths are “inferior” and “just a little bit less evolved.”

He’s so out of touch that I do wonder if this guy’s for real, but let’s set that aside. What’s more interesting is how he’s been received within the Christian community. They should instead poll atheists to see if many think this way. I know of none.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-8-28.)

Problem of Evil: the Soul-Making defense

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Why do bad things happen to good people? How can God permit the destructive chaos in his world?

The is the conclusion of a two-part look at the Problem of Evil (part 1 here). We’re critiquing a Christian defense of God, and the argument this time is the soul-making defense, in which adversity in life is God’s way of making better people.

Those nutty evil angels and too many miracles

But first, a palate cleanser. Here are two final points made to support the free-will defense, which says that God allows free will so that we can freely love him, despite the bad that free will brings with it. (The Christian argument is in italics below.)

God’s creation needs to be regular so we can depend on it, good or bad. A hot stove will burn you, without exception. A boulder falling down a mountain will hurt you if you’re in its path, without exception. God capriciously nudging boulders out of the way (but only sometimes) creates a world we can’t depend on.

So your argument is that if we had lots of miracles, the world would be confusing and undependable, so God does pretty much no miracles. Yeah, I’m sure the rape victim would’ve hated to have been confused, so I guess that’s a net good.

But it still seems that a god who is omniscient could’ve created a pain-free world.

Fallen angels are supernatural beings with free will who could mess with things. Maybe they’re behind the covid pandemic.

Angels? Seriously? God’s Perfect Plan® sounds increasingly like Pandora’s box.

Argument 2: suffering is soul making

Or maybe the reason for God allowing suffering is soul making, such that adversity in life builds character. For example, we become more courageous due to dangers faced and more compassionate due to misfortune.

Then why is the world only this bad? God could make it far worse (and make the hardship more uniform across the world and through time) to create even more soul-making opportunities. But then this sounds like the plan of an all-bad god, and Yahweh has become Beelzebub. If your hypothesis sends your god in a Beelzebub direction, maybe you should rethink your hypothesis.

The Bible says that God is good, of course, but lying about being good is just what a bad god would do. Given the condition of society, how sure are you that a good guy is in charge?

And what kind of clue to God’s good character do we take from the existence of evil in our world? A theologian in a world with no evil would not conclude that there couldn’t be a god. In fact, a god would be a good candidate to explain the absence of evil.

Conversely, imagine that theologian in a world with evil. If no evil in the world points to a god, evil should point to no god. I marvel at Christians who see the vast evil around us and think that this world practically screams out the name of its creator.

It’s just speculation

To be clear, this is not guidance from the Bible or God himself but speculation from philosophers and theologians.

Right. This is speculation that starts with the conclusion (God exists, God is loving, and so on) and then selects evidence to support that conclusion. This isn’t honest research that follows the evidence. It’s not given as a good explanation but as the best explanation that they can put together given the evidence and arguments available. And maybe it is the best explanation, but it’s definitely not good.

Here’s an analogy: just because a chess grandmaster’s move makes no sense to me doesn’t mean that it was a bad move. And just because a theologian’s argument explaining the evil in the world isn’t watertight doesn’t mean God doesn’t have a good reason. The skeptic who’s not omniscient shouldn’t question the grandmaster or God.

If I’m a chess novice, I’ll accept that the grandmaster’s move probably makes sense in ways I’ll never understand. But note what we start with: we all agree chess and chess experts exist. Should I expect that a chess grandmaster made a smart move, given chess and grandmasters? Yes.

But consider the God question: we don’t start by assuming God’s existence, God’s benevolence, and the Bible as an infallible history book. Should I accept that God has a good justification for allowing suffering on earth and that this doesn’t conflict with the Bible’s claims that he is omnipotent and all-good? Of course not! That makes no sense even within Christians’ theology. I evaluate all that and find that “God” is a hopelessly contradictory collection of mythology and wishful thinking. The chess analogy fails.

God’s Perfect Plan® sounds increasingly like Pandora’s box.

But it’s all okay because Jesus!

“In the midst of adversity, God has given us himself in human form…. If God came down to our level and entered into the human drama, experiencing both its peaks and its valleys, then that does seem to cast things in a different light.”

What light would that be? Am I supposed to conclude that life on earth must not suck so much after all if Jesus stayed for a bit? Or perhaps I’m to marvel at how brave God is to visit us in this dangerous ghetto. Neither puts the Lord of all Creation in a good light.

This touches on the sacrifice Jesus made through crucifixion, which I’m not much impressed by. Christians point to the sacrifice of Jesus’s life through crucifixion plus the miracle of his resurrection. But if he was resurrected, then he wasn’t dead at all but only out of action for a day and a half, which isn’t much of a sacrifice. For him to have made a substantial sacrifice, he would’ve stayed dead, but in that case there’s no miracle. Sacrifice or miracle—pick one.

Where do we see benefit from Jesus’s sacrifice?

How lucky for us that Jesus stepped in and took one for the team to save us from Adam’s sin and the results of the Fall. So then every tear has been wiped away? The consequences of the Fall are in humanity’s distant past? Of course not. According to Christian theology, we still live in a fallen world, and millions suffer when they go to bed hungry or are drowned in a tsunami or are killed by covid.

The benefits from Jesus’s sacrifice are never more than promises.

I think it’s important to realise that
when two opposite points of view
are expressed with equal intensity,
the truth does not necessarily
lie exactly halfway between them.
It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
— Richard Dawkins

Problem of Evil: the Free Will defense

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I can’t let flabby Christian responses go unanswered. In a recent article, I summarized a long Christian defense of God’s response to the deadly covid pandemic (or lack of response). It gets points for honesty—it made clear which sections were speculation and where the Bible was contradictory—but the simple, naturalistic “There is no God” explains more and leaves fewer questions unanswered.

That Christian defense was “Why would God allow pandemics?” from the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Let’s critique its arguments defending God from blame for the pandemic.

Why the pandemic?

Maybe covid is God punishing us. (The Christian argument are in italics.)

Maybe, and we find precedents for that in the Bible. God sent snakes against the Israelites for whining during the Exodus, he inflicted the Ten Plagues on the Egyptians, and the Babylonian exile was punishment for worshipping other gods.

On the other hand, God made clear that Job’s suffering wasn’t punishment. And Jesus provided counterexamples: those who died when the tower in Siloam fell weren’t singled out for being bad, and the man who was blind from birth was not bearing the consequences of his or his parents’ sin.

Christians can cite their infallible holy book for either side of a debate, but that’s not a good thing. A pliable, contradictory Bible is useless.

The world is broken

We shouldn’t be surprised by pandemics. “[Our world] is fundamentally out of joint, broken at a deep structural level.”

The Christian is walking a tightrope here. On one hand, anyone can see that there are problems within society. Millions are sick or hungry, and the world is a carousel that spins from one natural disaster to another—hurricanes, drought, wildfires, and of course pandemics like covid. But on the other hand, how can a loving and omnipotent God have created such an inept rough draft?

More contradictions.

God didn’t want this.

Is God omnipotent or not? If God created humans, don’t blame the humans for being imperfect. If Creation is screwed up, blame the Creator who created it. Christopher Hitchens noted the contradiction: “We are created sick and commanded to be well.” And yet somehow all this is part of God’s plan.

But of course, blame can’t land at God’s feet. We must treat God like a baby.

God promised to make things right.

We’ve heard that before. In the first chapter of the Bible, God created the world, and “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

That might’ve been true for a while, but things aren’t perfect now. With this guy’s track record, let’s not be too confident about a perfect afterlife.

And remember that Jesus was an Apocalyptic prophet. That is, he wasn’t just preaching about the end, he was preaching about the end happening very soon. Apocalyptic thought held that the end was within the lifetimes of the hearers of the message. Jesus’s moral preaching looks quite different if it’s not rules governing your entire life (and your children’s and theirs and so on) but temporary rules until the End mere months in the future, or a few years at most.

You can be good just until Christmas, can’t you?

See also: Why Is Christianity Conservative? Shouldn’t it Be Leading the Charge for Change?

Argument 1: free will defense

To the credit of the author, he admits that this is speculation. God doesn’t make his motives clear, so his human followers must step in to speak for their silent god.

God values love highly, and love depends on free will. It’s not love if it’s forced or programmed.

Yes, free will is important, but in your eagerness to extricate God from blame, you’ve trampled on how love works and made God into an abusive partner. You earn love, you don’t demand it. This isn’t hard: love comes after someone demonstrates that they’re worthy of love. If love isn’t happening, don’t blame the presumed lover. The problem is the lover doesn’t find the lovee worthy of love. And if you read the Old Testament, you’ll see God has work to do in the being-worthy department.

Megachurch pastor John Piper made clear that likening God to an abusive partner isn’t libel. He celebrated it: “God is more glorious for having conceived and created and governed a world like this with all its evil.”*

In response to questions about whether God ordained the deaths in the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11, he channeled Job: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.… Where would we turn if we didn’t have a God to help us deal with the very evils that he has ordained come into our lives?”*

So you’re supposed to turn for help to the guy who brought you the calamity in the first place? You’re on the ground after a punch, and then you thank the guy who punched you when he helps you up? How lucky for us that there’s no good evidence that this bully actually exists.

Free will applies to things besides love. You are granted the freedom to follow God or not, though hell awaits those who freely choose the wrong answer. When the first commandment says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” that’s a commandment, not an invitation.

What’s the point of free will if you’re punished for eternity for using it?

How can a loving and omnipotent God have created such an inept rough draft?

Maybe it’s all the humans’ fault

Free will has the downside of allowing humans to cause harm. Don’t blame God for evil caused by humans.

Again we’re protecting God from blame for human imperfection when God made humans in the first place.

Do people dislike being in hell? Then God is violating their free will by forcing them there. And God is no champion of free will if he watches injustices by the millions—murder, rape, robbery, assault, and so on—but does nothing. If you must, say that God can’t restrain the murderer to protect their free will, but then God’s inaction means the victim’s free will has been violated.

Think about what this means for prayer. If apologists insist that God can’t infringe on anyone’s free will no matter who gets hurt as a result, that constrains prayer. Prayers for protection against church shooters or religious terrorists, for example, must always be ineffective.

We can even find God deliberately messing with people’s free will in the Bible.

  • “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron” (Exodus 9:12).
  • “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples” (Psalms 33:10).
  • “It was the Lord himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy” (Joshua 11:20).

The New Testament has examples, too (see Romans 9:18, Rom. 1:26, and John 12:37–40). And many theologians rationalize away some of the problems with their theory of hell by assuming free will is constrained in heaven.

It’s strange that Christians see it causing so many problems when God has already figured out how to create a world with free will but with zero downsides. That world is heaven. If free will is essential for human well-being here on earth, surely heaven has it, too. And if heaven is sin-free because, say, everyone is given great wisdom, God could give us that wisdom here on earth.

But if heaven can’t have free will because free will can never exist without evil, then God’s gift of free will is part of the problem. Again, I ask: why blame the humans when it’s not their fault?

“Free will” appears in the Bible exactly zero times. Not even the Bible supports the idea that free will is a big deal.

For more on why the complexity of Christianity argues against its truth, see The Argument from Simplicity

Living forever with God is the endgame,
so what’s the point of creating this elaborate,
blink-of-an-eye, soul-filtering machine called Planet Earth,
where beings have temporary bodies made of meat?
WTF?! Just create everyone in “Heaven” to begin with,
and none of the rest of this horror-show ever has to happen.
— commenter Kingasaurus

*Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God (Wipf & Stock, 2011), 64–5.

The problem of evil: What would Ockham do?

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Have I ever explained how I use a magic spoon to boil water? I fill a pot with water, set it on the stove, and turn on the burner. Then I use the magic spoon to stir the pot once (no more) and always clockwise. And in a few minutes, the water is boiling! It’s a pretty marvelous sight if you’ve never seen it.

With that example in the backs of our minds, let’s consider another example of magical thinking, “Why would God allow pandemics?” from the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. Here’s their explanation for why an all-good and omnipotent god could allow the evil from the covid pandemic, which has so far caused five million reported deaths worldwide. Add in the excess deaths that are not on the official tally, and covid has probably killed more than those who died in the Holocaust.

Christian justification for the Problem of Evil

Let me summarize the article. One possibility is that evil is God punishing us, and we find support for this in the Bible, but the Bible also gives examples of adversity not due to God’s punishment, and while the New Testament sees the world as broken, we must find a way to avoid blame for God (since he surely wouldn’t call this a perfect world, and he’s promised a good ending to all this).

Okay, we’ve got the preamble out of the way. Sit up straight, tighten those abs, and let’s move on to the explanation.

One explanation for human suffering is the free-will defense, in which God supposedly cares deeply about free will because that is the foundation for honest love, and a robotic, automatic love won’t do, but free will has the downside of allowing humans to cause harm, but on the other hand, the covid pandemic is (at least largely) a natural evil, which is hard to blame on humans (but don’t blame anything on God), but perhaps fallen angels, who also have free will, are behind covid (but don’t blame God for them, either), and it’s also possible that nature must have good and bad components, but instead of a capricious world in which God sometimes turns bullets into butter before they hit their target and sometimes not, he gave us a reliable world that’s easy to count on but sometimes dangerous, but this requires that God’s miraculous interventions be very rare.

You’re in your happy place. Deep, slow breaths. Ready? On to the second explanation.

Or maybe the reason for God allowing suffering is soul-making, in which the world is full of adversity but this is all for the best, and we become more courageous due to dangers faced or more compassionate due to misfortune—but let’s be clear that this is not guidance from the Bible or God himself but speculation from philosophers and theologians pushed by these dilemmas to come up with something, and that this being the best they’ve got doesn’t mean it’s correct—but this is more a reflection on humans’ inability, since just because we can’t come up with any better explanation doesn’t mean that there isn’t one (but let’s not blame God for our mental limitations or for making his perfect plan unclear), and we can find a parallel in chess in that just because I can’t understand a grandmaster’s move doesn’t mean that it was a bad move.

Home stretch!

Let’s not forget the gospel’s punchline, which clears the ledger and makes all this worthwhile, which is God coming to earth in human form, as a person who died having suffered and experienced life’s misery firsthand, and we can see the logic of this with an example: your daughter must have blood drawn and is understandably afraid, but you ask the nurse to do it to you first to show yourself experiencing the pain as well, and while this doesn’t eliminate her pain or explain the necessity of it, it does show your love for her, and we can think of Jesus’s disciples who, after the crucifixion, saw only a bleak and pointless ending to the story but later realized it as God’s greatest redemptive act.

Alternative explanation

Or, there is no God.

What Would William of Ockham Do?

Have I ever explained how I use a magic spoon to boil water?

What’s wrong with my magic-spoon explanation for boiling water? It’s that the magic spoon is unnecessary. It doesn’t add anything to the story. In a similar way, God is unnecessary to explain the bad in our world.

We’ve all heard the slogan, What Would Jesus Do? It’s meant to encourage us to take the moral high road at any fork in the path of life. I applaud the idea of pausing to consider if the more difficult route is the more moral one.

For the Problem of Evil, we need another slogan: What Would Ockham Do?

William of Ockham (d. 1347) was an English friar and theologian. He is best known for Ockham’s Razor, a principle that tells us to cut away unnecessary parts of an explanation and to choose the simpler of two explanations, all else being equal.

What was wrong with the Christian’s long, breathless explanation of the Problem of Evil with maybe this explanation or maybe that one and let’s make sure at every turn that we don’t step on God’s toes? It’s that “there is no God” is far, far simpler, and it explains the facts much better. Sure, there’s bad stuff in the world, but we have naturalistic explanations for most of it. God is an unnecessary addition to the story, a solution looking for a problem. “God” brings in more questions than answers. Like Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French astronomer who famously omitted God from his monumental book on celestial mechanics, we have no need of that hypothesis.

My very abbreviated summary of the apologist’s argument (above) takes 500 words. The original article, 2700 words. And the original argument could’ve been far more involved by considering other metaphors for the calamity in life on earth: it’s a crucible that burns away imperfection, it’s a test, it’s a classroom, and so on.

The explanation that does the better job neatly cuts the Gordian Knot and takes just 4 words: There. Is. No. God.

The ratio of the huge amount that [evolution] explains
(everything about life:
its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design)
divided by the little that it needs to postulate
(non-random survival of randomly varying genes
through geological time) is gigantic.
Never in the field of human comprehension
were so many facts explained by assuming so few.
— Richard Dawkins in the Edge

Christian apologist avoids chance to demonstrate objective morality

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A couple of years ago in a town in central England, a tragedy happened that could have been the archetypal “evil stepmother” fable, but this was no fabrication. A six-year-old boy was murdered by his stepmother, with help from his father. He was tortured by being fed salt-laced meals and being denied food and water, and his death was from a traumatic brain injury. The maternal grandmother said of the boy’s guardians: “I think they are cold, calculating, systematic torturers of a defenseless little boy. They’re wicked, evil.”

Christian apologist Jim Wallace pointed to this murder to ask how we know what “evil” is. He imagined an objective component of evil, and he sees morality as grounded outside humans. Humans aren’t necessary for objective moral truths to be in force.

(The story with the surprise conclusion is story #2, but I’ll use this brief look at the first story to make clear Wallace’s position.)

This is the standard apologist’s playbook: insist on objective morality and take it as a given or, at most, argue for it with nothing more convincing than, “I’m sure we all agree that X is wrong.”

I see zero evidence for such an objective morality. Look up the word “evil” in Merriam-Webster and the first definition is “morally reprehensible.” There’s no objective anything here, no hint of a Big Book of Morals in God’s library that we can consult. This might surprise Jim Wallace the retired police detective, who seems to have trouble understanding how morals work in society—from how laws are made in a legislature to how they’re interpreted by the courts. Where do we find this morality that’s grounded outside humans? Where in the legislative or judicial process is any appeal to objective morality? That we share a moral sense is nicely explained by all of us being the same species and our species having been shaped by evolution.

Story #2: Does Google uphold its “Do no evil” motto? Should it?

So far, this is the standard apologist’s playbook: insist on objective morality and take it as a given or, at most, argue for it with nothing more convincing than, “I’m sure we all agree that X is wrong.” But with this second story, Wallace makes clear the weakness of his position.

This story, which broke at about the same time as that of the death of the boy, is Google being sued by several ex-employees for violating its “Don’t be evil” motto. Those employees had protested Google selling software to aid the work of U.S. immigration authorities, arguing that Google’s policies call for “acting honorably and treating each other with respect.” They claim that “Don’t be evil” wasn’t a throwaway line and that Google’s own employee contract made it binding on their work as employees.

Note the difference between these two stories. A six-year-old is tortured and then murdered. We bystanders conclude in an instant that evil was done. But the Google story is different. The court will decide after a long, boring trial, and it’s not obvious which side will prevail—perhaps even which side we want to prevail. No part of this trial will appeal to objective morality.

The podcast cohost outlined his approach to this case:

We need to look at something outside the employees and outside Google, some other, transcendent moral law. We need to look to that so we can compare the opinions of the people involved to the ultimate authority.  (@20:12)

The apologist demands to know how we ordinary humans can resolve moral problems. Answer: by God grounding objective moral truth. Look at the murder case—we all just know that evil was done, and that’s thanks to God.

Objective morality: put up or shut up

But with this claim about the Google case and ultimate authority, the Christian apologist’s fig leaf is torn away, and the flabby argument is made plain. If they have the secret recipe for resolving moral cases, they can demonstrate that by resolving the Google case! The resolution is not at all obvious, which makes it the perfect proving ground. That they don’t show how to judge the case is obviously because they can’t.

Compare these two cases. If there is an ultimate authority that shows us right from wrong, we don’t need it in the murder case. The moral judgment there is easy. But the Google case is messy, and an argument could be made for either side. This is precisely the opportunity to roll out that “ultimate authority.”

This reminds me of a carpenter’s workbench. Wallace could’ve laid out and explained the moral axioms needed for the task, like a neat row of carpenter’s tools. He’d show them to be objectively true and then apply them to the Google case to demonstrate how God as the ultimate authority can be reliably applied to thorny, real-world problems. But he doesn’t. He ends his episode making clear that he has no such technique. I’m sure he doesn’t even realize that we followed him to the brink and then watched him walk away, unable to make the demonstration on which his own examples insisted.

He’s preaching to the choir, and they let him get away with this, but we skeptics can see behind the curtain. The emptiness of apologists’ claims for objective morality is plainer than ever.

You don’t need religion to have morals.
If you can’t determine right from wrong
then you lack empathy, not religion.
— seen on the internet