This happens all too often. I’m (mentally) yelling at the screen, wondering how a well-respected apologist—sometimes even an apologist with a PhD—gets the basics of their own field so wrong. Are they lying? Being deceptive for some imagined greater good? Or is this a good mind deluded by unsupportable supernatural beliefs?

In the naughty corner today is Greg Koukl, who recently wrote “How to Respond to the Problem of Evil” (podcast and transcript here). The Problem of Evil (PoE) is his bread and butter. How does he get it so confused?

The Problem of Evil

The PoE is often stated this way: Why would a good God allow bad things to happen to good people? Here’s Koukl’s version, which (at this moment) sounds good to me.

You think God is good and he’s powerful . . . but if he’s good, he’d want to get rid of all evil. If he’s powerful, he’d be able to get all rid of all evil. But there’s evil, right? So, there you go—God probably doesn’t exist.

This is roughly the PoE as given by Epicurus in the third century BCE.

Dwelling on how Koukl defines the PoE may seem like an unnecessary detour, but it’s important to get this in writing. Before the cock crows, Koukl will deny knowing this argument.

Flaws in the PoE?

But first, Koukl wants to push back against the PoE as he described it above: “When you press the issue, you can’t build a valid argument from those facts.”

Or maybe you can. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a more comprehensive argument and declares that it is indeed valid. But let’s set this aside.

To prove his point, Koukl took one of the premises in his statement of the PoE—if God is good, he’d prevent all evil—and argued that it fails with this example.

[A vaccination is evil from the standpoint of my daughters] because it causes them pain, but Daddy makes them get shots, so why does he do that? Because Daddy’s evil? No. Because I know that the short-term evil to them is going to result in a longer-term good. And so, there is a moral justification for the shorter-term bad.

Right—that’s a moral justification for a human. God is omnipotent, while Daddy and the medical profession aren’t. God could achieve any goal, whether it’s the vaccination of one child or the worldwide elimination of a disease, without side effects. That’s what “omnipotent” means.

There could be a morally sufficient reason for allowing it because it leads to something good, okay? Or maybe something bad that prevents something even worse from happening. . . .

Now, the possibility [is that God] could have a reason; we don’t have to tell them what that reason is.

And you’re already backing away from your own argument. I don’t blame you—I wouldn’t want to defend that either—but yes, you do need to give a plausible reason.

4 mandatory steps before objecting to the PoE

And there’s more: I have four demands of apologists who make this “God could have reasons that we can’t even imagine” argument.

1. Admit how bad the PoE makes God look. Even if God had some non-obvious justification, admit that he looks like a Bronze Age barbarian when he allows evil that he could easily prevent.
2. You say that God could have his reasons? Give some. That is, move from vague, ungrounded handwaving to specific reasons for actual evil events in the world. I suggest you start by listing plausible benefits that would justify World War II and the Holocaust. (Do you seriously think a God a billion times smarter than you couldn’t come up with anything more benign than the Holocaust to achieve his goals?)
3. Does “God” even exist? Let’s worry about God’s reasons for evil after we have solid grounding that he exists.
4. Why would God allow suffering when he has magic? He’s omnipotent! Any goal he can achieve through human suffering, he can achieve without it.

(I expand on this list here.)

Follow this list, and when you start struggling to find explanations for God’s absence (or might it be . . . nonexistence?) you begin to see the problem. Nonexistence explains the evidence so much better.

Evil happening to people vs. other animals

A rock could tumble down a mountain and hit a person or a deer. Is there a moral difference? Accidents, disease, and natural disasters hit both humans and other animals.

When a calamity hits a person, we often critique the event to search for a silver lining. Maybe someone broke their leg, but the downtime finally prompted them to begin writing that book. Maybe a teenager lost a parent to cancer, but that pushed them to become a doctor or missionary.

Christians could see God using these disasters for his Grand Plan, but is that what this really looks like? Animals by the billions die in pain. Most will die outside of any human awareness as mere statistics, and no moral benefit comes from these. Why then imagine moral benefit from human suffering? (h/t commenter Ignorant Amos and author John Loftus)

Koukl declares the PoE defeated

Remember the type of objection that this is: [it’s a strong defeater to the conclusion,] “It’s not possible that there is a God because there’s evil in the world.”

I’m easy to please—just show me where the preponderance of evidence is.

I don’t say “it’s not possible” for God to exist, and in fact, neither do you! Remember that you ended your summary of the PoE (above) with “So, there you go—God probably doesn’t exist.” There’s a big difference between “God probably doesn’t exist” and “It’s not possible for God to exist.”

But let’s revisit your characterization of the atheist position: “It’s not possible that there is a God because there’s evil in the world.” I’ll actually accept that. You’re not talking about some ill-defined supernatural something-or-other but Yahweh of Christianity. Given Yahweh is as Christians bill him now—all-good, omnipotent, and omniscient—he is indeed incompatible with evil.

Conclusion next time: Koukl tries to turn the Problem of Evil from a liability to an asset (with limited success) and redefines it here.

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Image from Kat J (free-use license)
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We can understand the universe, but why? Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician Eugene Wigner said in 1960, “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural science is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” Albert Einstein expressed a similar thought: “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”

What some Christian apologists claim

Many Christians have seized on this, claiming that an understandable universe points to God, both because God would want us to understand it and because only a theistic approach can explain such a universe. Christian apologist William Lane Craig gave this religious interpretation:

It was very evident to me that [naturalists are not] able to provide any sort of an explanation of mathematics’ applicability to the physical world, and this was self-confessed. . . . Theism [enjoys] a considerable advantage in [being able to answer this question].

Philosopher Nicholas Maxwell added:

Why should the physical universe, utterly foreign to the human mind, nevertheless be comprehensible to the human mind? We have here, it seems, an utterly inexplicable link between the physical universe and the human world. . . . Of course if God exists, the comprehensibility of the universe is entirely understandable.

This needs some pushback. These interpretations make a huge, unstated assumption that a godless universe could not look like our universe, but what supports this? Do they think that the dependability of physics is only due to God? Do they think that a godless universe would be unstable, with constants, exponents, and relationships continuously changing? Perhaps in this universe, e = mc² would be valid one moment but then e = mc^2.1 the next and e = 17mc^3.5 the next?

And why imagine that the physical facts of the universe must baffle us? Some aspects are counter-intuitive, of course, but evolution adapted us to be in tune with physics—at least the physics of our not-too-big and not-too-small world. For example, the inverse-square law says that radiation intensity falls off as the inverse of the square of the distance. Stand in front of a campfire and you soon get an intuitive understanding of this law.

That our physics wouldn’t look like it does without God is a very bold claim, for which I see no evidence. Furthermore, “God did it” is unfalsifiable, which is a fatal trait for any theory, let alone one that claims to explain all of science’s most perplexing problems.  (I give a more thorough analysis here.)

But hold on—is the universe understandable?

Let’s reconsider the initial claim, that the universe is understandable. Sure, we can find simple relationships between aspects of reality with scientific laws such as the Ideal Gas Law, Ohm’s Law, and Newton’s Law of Gravity, and so on, but things become more complicated. Corrections for relativity must be added to Newton’s Law of Gravity (F = Gm₁m₂/r²). Ohm’s Law (V = IR) ignores capacitance and inductance, which make calculations of time-varying voltage or current much more complicated. And the Ideal Gas Law (PV = nRT) makes assumptions about gases that limit its applicability.

Nature often isn’t particularly reliable, at least at first glance. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant, but that speed varies depending on what medium it’s going through. The boiling point of water varies around the world (only at one precise pressure does it boil at 100 °C). Weather and natural disasters are hard to forecast. Chaotic systems are deterministic but not predictable. And so on.

It might make sense after we get used to it, but beforehand, it can seem to be a random jumble. For example, what’s the simple law that tells us which isotopes are radioactive and what their half-lives are? Things outside our familiar middle world may never be intuitive. As Richard Feynman noted, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”

If the comprehensibility of the universe points to God, what does its incomprehensibility point to?

It’s not that the universe is understandable. Rather, what we understand about the universe is understandable, which isn’t much help in anticipating how science will continue to progress as we push the frontiers. How much about the universe will we eventually understand?

What we know vs. what we don’t

Knowledge about the universe can be divided into four categories, as illustrated by the Venn diagram above.

1. What we know. This has expanded dramatically since the modern period of scientific discovery beginning around 1800, which includes scientists such as Maxwell, Mendeleev, and Tesla, and even more so since the Enlightenment period, which might include Galileo, Newton, and Pascal. Imagine how small the “What we know” ellipse was 500 years ago.
2. What we will know. No one knows if we’ll continue learning about the universe at the current rate, but it seems a safe bet that we’ll know much more a thousand years in the future (assuming human society stays safe).
3. What we’re capable of knowing. What more could we understand if we only asked the right questions or if super-smart aliens taught it to us? Theoretical physics, like science fiction, can only take us to places that its practitioners can dream up.
   Another limit is our finite ability to create technology. Scientists and engineers have built the Large Hadron Collider, the Laser Interferometry Gravity Observatory, and the Hubble Space Telescope, and they’re planning next generation versions. But what if we eventually need versions that were a thousand times bigger or more expensive? Or a billion times? Human society, even far into the future, might have limits. Without these monster machines, unimaginable truths might remain unimagined.
4. All foundational knowledge of reality. The final ellipse is everything—not trivial specifics like the atmospheric composition of Alpha Centauri’s fourth planet but every concept, law, and theory needed to describe life, the universe, and everything.
   Our imperfect brains have limits. Imagine an alien species that is smarter than we are to the same extent that we are smarter than chimpanzees. While we share a common ancestor with chimps from just six million years ago, we can find in chimps only the rudiments of higher-order intelligence such as humor, problem solving, and morality. Chimpanzees are our closest living animal relative, but human children surpass their intelligence at perhaps four years of age. These aliens would intellectually be to us what we are to chimps. If chimps can never understand algebra or geometry, let alone calculus or quantum physics, what would these aliens be able to understand that we could never hope to learn? And if chimps will never understand all the science behind reality, why do we think we will?
   Now take it a step further and make the aliens’ cognitive gap the same as between us and lizards. Our understanding the new science these aliens could teach us might be as unlikely as a lizard understanding a joke.

A pessimistic look at our understanding of reality

The figure above gives one version of what we know (and will know) compared to what we won’t, but that’s just an optimistic guess. Imagine if the four ellipses actually look like this:

With this interpretation, we will still make a lot of progress from what we now know to what we will eventually know, but this more pessimistic version imagines the overwhelming majority of science out of our reach, either because imagination or lack of data let us down (third ellipse) or because it is beyond our cognitive reach (fourth ellipse). Will humans eventually understand 99 percent of the science behind reality? Or 0.1 percent?

Most frustrating, we can never know how big the third and fourth ellipses are! We can never understand the size of our ignorance. We will always perceive only ellipse #1, never sure if we’ve learned most of the science or a tiny fraction, never sure if we will learn much more or if we’re near our inherent limit.

Let’s return to our marvelously understandable universe. The universe is indeed understandable . . . but only to the extent that we can understand it. And how far is that? No one will ever know. “The universe is understandable” is an empty statement.

Here’s an interesting connection between Nature’s counter-intuitive laws and the growth of religion.

The cause of religious belief in human beings is intimately related to the desire on the part of individuals to have an explanation for various phenomena, and in fact, if nature possessed easy, simply-discoverable laws, it is doubtful that religion would have ever developed. As it happens, however, natural law is by no means simple, and thus it undoubtedly appeared to the primitive mind that the forces of nature were chaotic and unpredictable. From this point of view, however, it was but a short step to attributing an anthropomorphic character to nature: Unpredictability became whimsicalness; the raging storm became the work of an angry god who, like an angry man, will become calm again in time; the personal calamity became the punishment of evil-doers; the occurrence of an unusual event became a sign that the deity was engaged in something special that would affect his minions; and so on.

If Christians want to find proof of God in there somewhere, they must imagine a God who tantalizes us with some bits that are understandable, makes us work very hard to understand more, and refuses to tell us just how much of this mess we will ever understand. Doesn’t sound like a proof of anything to me.

See also:

• The Argument from Mathematics Doesn’t Add Up to God
• Stupid argument #36: Nature is intelligible.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 8/19/16.)

Image from Olga Reznik (license CC BY 2.0)

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I recently explored a specific kind of puzzle in “Counterintuitive Puzzles that Should Be Easy.” I’ve explored other puzzles to shed some light on the religion question: the Monty Hall problem and the Puzzle of the Hidden Dots. There is more to be said about the odd ways the human brain works, but let’s postpone that and simply enjoy a few more puzzles for their own sake this time.

Write your answers to the puzzles that were new to you and check them with the answers below.

Got any good puzzles that you use to stump your friends? Tell us about them in the comments.

Quick ones

Let’s start with some quick ones like those in the previous post. See if the intuitive answer is correct.

1. If fence posts are put in every 7 feet, how many posts are needed to make a fence 77 feet long?

2. If it takes a chiming clock 3 seconds to strike 6:00, how long does it take to strike midnight? Ignore the duration of the sound of each chime. (h/t commenter Richard S. Russell)

Word sense

3. An online parser can make sense out of the following sentences. Can you?

Here’s an example of a confusing sentence: “While Anna dressed the baby played in the crib.” That probably sounds odd until you mentally punctuate it like this: “While Anna dressed, the baby played in the crib.” Now try these:

• The old man the boat.
• While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods.
• I convinced her children are noisy.
• The coach smiled at the player tossed the Frisbee.
• The cotton clothes are made up of grows in Mississippi.
• The horse raced past the barn fell.

Easy physics puzzles

These are physics versions of the puzzles that should be easy to answer.

4. Where does the length of a year come from?

5. Why is it colder in the winter?

6. A rowboat is floating in a swimming pool. Inside the rowboat is a cannonball. Take the cannonball and drop it overboard. Does the water level on the side of the pool rise, fall, or stay the same?

Something must be wrong here

7. A friend of mine was from Iowa, and he said that there was quite a rivalry with the neighboring state of Missouri. Jokes were told in Iowa about how stupid Missourians were. They claimed that if Iowa gave those counties that bordered on Missouri to Missouri, it would raise the IQ of both states.

But wait a minute—there has to be something wrong with that. Both states can’t improve, right?

8. Proof that 1 = 2

• Let a = b
• Multiply both sides by a:

a² = ab

• Subtract b² from each side:

a² – b² = ab – b²

• Factor both sides:

(a – b)(a + b) = b(a – b)

• Cancel (a – b) from both sides:

a + b = b

• Substitute (remember that a = b):

a + a = a

• Collect:

2a = a

• Divide by a:

2 = 1 (But something has to be wrong here—what is it?)

Increasingly difficult puzzles

9. You’re in the middle of an island covered uniformly with a dense, dry forest. Lightning sets the north end of the forest on fire, and the wind is blowing to the south. The coast is cliffs all around, so you can’t jump into the water to wait out the fire. The fire will reach you in an hour, and all you have is a backpack with things typically taken on a hike. What can you do to save yourself?

10. You and I are going to meet at a cafe. The server delivers a coffee with milk on the side just as I get a text from you saying you will be 15 minutes late. Being the polite person that I am, I want to wait for you before drinking my coffee. If I want it to be as hot as possible, do I pour the milk in now or wait until you get here?

11. Suppose we have 6-sided dice that don’t have the usual numbers 1 through 6 on them. If my die has a 6 on every face and yours has a 5 on every face, we could roll our respective die and I would beat you every time. Now suppose I change to a die with faces {6, 6, 6, 6, 1, 1}. My die is still the better one, but now I would beat your all-5s die only 2/3 of the time. It’s easy to imagine die A being better than B, and B being better than C, but the puzzle is to make this loop around. That is, create dice such that A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A.

12. Does the balance tip to the right, tip to the left, or remain unchanged?

Click on the Continue below for hints and then answers.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/21/16.)

Image from stevepb (free-use license)

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