Tag Archives: Problem of Evil

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

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

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

If the Problem of Evil Is Uncomfortable, Just Redefine It Away

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This is post #1500 of the Cross Examined blog! Thank you everyone for making the Cross Examined community a vibrant place to share ideas. I’ve probably learned more from your comments than from any other source. If it weren’t for you, I’d be doing something else!

This is the second half of a critique of Greg Koukl’s recent podcast “How to Respond to the Problem of Evil” (part 1). To get out of a bind, Koukl will redefine the Problem of Evil, not once but twice. He’s so casual about it that I wonder if he’s unaware that he’s doing it. Or if he knows how that looks to observers.

The PoE as an argument for God

This is Koukl’s primary argument. He knows the Problem of Evil (PoE) is a liability, but he wants to flip it into an asset. Given that evil exists:

This helps us. Evil is on our side, in that sense, because if there were no God, there would be no evil at all . . . because there’d be no lawmaker.

Nope. This won’t work when at every turn God is invisible. God ignores every chance to swoop in and overtly resolve some problem. He’s always a no-show. Why imagine this lawmaker of yours even exists when he’s indistinguishable from nonexistent?

A precedent in the Bible

Remember the public bonfire-lighting contest of Elijah, God’s last prophet, versus the priests of Baal? The hundreds of priests went first and were having no luck rousing their god. In one of the Bible’s rare bits of humor Elijah mocked his opponents:

“Shout louder!” Elijah said. “Surely he is a god! Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” (1 Kings 18:27)

And that’s my encouragement to Koukl. Is God asleep? Using the bathroom? Getting his hair done? Pedicure? God is no more obvious than Baal. Maybe shout louder?

Koukl is now celebrating evil, but in so doing, he’s digging deeper the hole of God the Bronze Age barbarian. Remember the four-point list from part 1 (admit how bad the PoE makes God look; turn your vague assurance that God might have reasons into specific justification for the Holocaust; show that “God” exists; and justify suffering when God could achieve his goals without it). To give your argument any kind of standing, you need to respond to that list to show that you’re taking seriously the consequences of your argument. And those consequences aren’t pretty.

Objective evil?

The only supportable statement that can be salvaged from Koukl’s attempt to turn this lemon of an argument into lemonade is: Without God, there’s no objective evil, though there would still be the ordinary kind, which we find in the definition of “evil” in the dictionary. Koukl would dearly love to be able to defend the idea of objective morality, for which he has no evidence.

He next wonders how the naturalist explains evil.

[With no God,] it’s just molecules clashing in the universe. Okay, so then, what is “wrong”? Says who? Your grandma? kind of thing.

Says who? Says our moral programming—thanks, evolution. If we were honey badgers or meercats or Klingons, evolution would’ve given us different programming for how to behave among our peers.

So if there is no God, how can there be evil? . . . [If] there’s no lawmaker; there would be no law, right?

That’s a cute argument for children. Not so much for adults.

Rivers don’t meander according to the all-loving direction of a divine lawmaker. Natural principles are sufficient. And natural explanations are also sufficient to explain human morality.

The sun is about to rise, and the cock is about to crow . . .

At the beginning of Koukl’s podcast, he summarized the PoE this way: “[If God is] 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.” I agreed that that was correct.

And now, six paragraphs later, the PoE is so hard to rationalize that Koukl wants to redefine it away. That first definition has become inconvenient, so let’s just discard it. Who will notice?

Here’s the new version. You can play “Spot the Differences!” at home.

You [atheists] just complained about the problem of evil. There must be evil in the world, right? So, what do you make of evil now that God doesn’t exist? How do you get traction to even complain about evil in the world? You can’t. . . . People think that they somehow solve the problem of evil by getting God out of the equation.

Yes! You do solve the Problem of Evil by getting rid of God! Your first definition correctly stated that the PoE requires a God, so remove God as a presupposition, and the problem is gone. QED.

This is so crazy that I must repeat it. Koukl’s Problem of Evil was: Given a good and powerful God, how is there so much evil in the world? And now, four minutes later, that definition no longer exists. It has been disappeared like a nosey journalist raising uncomfortable topics in a totalitarian state. The Problem of Evil is now, How do you respond to evil without God to define evil?

Deliberately conflicting definitions

I frequently see evangelists use two contradictory definitions. It’s one of their tricks to keep the disjoint Christian story together. They will use one definition of a word for the Christian insiders and a different definition for the skeptics. Or maybe it’s one definition to make sense out of Bible passage A and a conflicting one for passage B. For example, there are two definitions of “faith.” And there are many definitions of “morality.”

Usually the incompatible definitions will be in different articles, giving evangelists some plausible deniability. Koukl’s podcast shows an especially abrupt redefinition and nicely illustrates the problem.

It’s been said that you can’t ride two horses with one ass, though evangelists desperately try.

Problem of Evil, redefined

Koukl has now clumsily jumped to the other horse. Let’s see how satisfied he is with his new mount.

You [atheists] got God out of the picture. You didn’t get rid of evil. You still got all the things that you used to call evil. They still are existing, and you still probably consider them evil. Okay, now solve the problem.

Okay, there is no God. Problem solved. QED.

And did you catch that? That’s his third definition of the Problem of Evil! The problem is now: Evil exists in the world, so what are you going to do about it?

That’s not the actual PoE, but I’ll respond. Evil is easily understood. Reality has no obligation to be fair or nice. That’s the Petri dish for the evolution of life: there’s good luck and bad luck, some individuals live long lives and some don’t, and not everyone passes on their genes. We can call things we detest “evil,” but that’s no support for a claim that objective morality exists.

Well, heck—let’s just declare victory anyway

His argument is in ruins around him, but Koukl pops up from behind the rubble to declare victory.

The point I’m making is, atheism can give you no traction to even make sense out of evil to begin with. . . .

See, our answer makes sense of all the facts. We don’t have to play games like that. The world is broken. That’s why there’s evil in the world. . . . We broke it. And so, we’re responsible.

You can make sense of “the facts”? “We broke the world” is no fact. Nor is it an argument. It’s just dogma.

Koukl changes definitions in plain view. He points to the Garden of Eden as if it’s an argument. He declares that his perfect, omniscient God somehow let his human experiment get out of control. And it’s the atheists who are playing games?! I can see the irony even if he can’t.

Natural explanations make clear why the world isn’t perfectly tuned to our wishes and why we see evil in the world. That’s much easier to digest than evidence-free supernatural presuppositions.

If there is a God, his plan is very similar
to someone not having a plan.
— Eddie Izzard

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I form the light and create darkness;
I make peace and create evil; 
I, the Lord, do all these things.
— Isaiah 45:7

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Image from Valerie Everett (license CC BY-SA 2.0)
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BSR 24: God Wouldn’t Allow Evil and Suffering

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Summary of reply: free will fails as a response to evil from humans, and God is hardly a defender of people’s free will. “It’s all your fault” is a surprisingly frequent answer from Christians trying to protect their fragile God, but it fails. And the obligatory appeal to objective morality is made with no evidence.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: God wouldn’t allow evil and suffering

Christian response #1: Are we talking about evil done by other people? God may allow us free will to do evil because free will is a requirement for human love. But there will be a reckoning where God will right these wrongs.

BSR: God as a champion of free will? Tell that to the victims who had their free will violated by rape or murder while God stood by, ignoring them.

If free will is as essential to human wellbeing as you insist, heaven must also have free will. But if free will is indirectly the cause of so much evil on earth, will that make heaven as bad as earth? If not—perhaps people in heaven get the wisdom to use free will properly—then God can clearly allow free will while avoiding evil. Blame God that that’s not the situation here on earth.

And if the issue is love for God, he can earn a loving relationship like anyone else. By being indistinguishable from nonexistent, he’s not making his case.

Let’s move on to the promised reckoning where God will right the wrongs. According to Christian logic, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who became a born-again Christian in prison, is in heaven now. Mahatma Gandhi, Indian pioneer of nonviolent resistance, died a Hindu and is now in hell. How is that justice?

According to Christian logic, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who became a born-again Christian in prison, is in heaven now. Mahatma Gandhi died a Hindu and is now in hell. How is THAT justice? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Are we talking about natural evil like floods or earthquakes? Some of that is our own fault, and some of that is part of life-giving nature.

BSR: I get so tired of hearing that every instance where God could be at fault relabeled as our fault. God doesn’t answer prayers, God created hell, the Bible seems contradictory—it’s all somehow our fault. This is the “God is a Sensitive Baby” argument. Can God accept any criticism? Heck—can he simply come here himself and address these issues instead of having you do it for him, poorly?

We’re told that natural disasters are our fault, or at least putting ourselves in harm’s way by not being clairvoyant and knowing where they’d strike. We build where there are tornadoes or hurricanes, and we should’ve known better.

Sure, now we know better, though that’s thanks to science, not God. What about centuries ago, before science taught us about how natural disasters work? And what remedy do you recommend? What fraction of the US Midwest should be off limits because of tornadoes? Should the east coast from Florida to New York have a 50-mile uninhabited coast because of hurricanes?

I wonder if the trillions of dollars spent on these busywork projects could be better spent helping those whom Jesus called “the least of these brothers and sisters of mine.”

The last part of the argument, “some of that is part of life-giving nature,” says that tornadoes come with rain-giving thunderstorms, and earthquakes are a consequence of a process that recycles minerals. But this, of course, is irrelevant to a god who can speak the universe into existence. A magic god could get the good without the bad.

Is everything our fault? This is the “God is a Sensitive Baby” argument. Can God accept any criticism? Can he simply come here himself and address his problems instead of having the Christian do it, poorly? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: What standard are you using when you label something “evil”? Objective rightness is grounded on an unchanging, transcendent God.

BSR: You ask what standard I’m using. I’m using my own—whose would you recommend? Obviously you imagine that there are moral truths that are objective (correct whether humans are here to appreciate them or not) and reliably accessible. That’s a fascinating claim for which you’ve provided zero evidence. The ball’s in your court.

With no objective morality, your grounding argument fails, leaving no reason to believe in your God.

And what is this “unchanging” aspect of God that you imagine? The Old Testament god walked in the Garden of Eden, sent scouts to check out reports about Sodom and Gomorrah, and spoke to Moses “as a man speaks to his friend,” but today he’s an omnipotent and omniscient god who transcends time and space and created a universe with several trillion galaxies.

Morality has changed as well. Today, slavery, genocide, and killing everyone in a worldwide flood are beyond the pale, but they were part of God’s songbook in the early days. All that’s unchanging is that whatever correct morality happens to be at the moment, “unchanging” God has adapted and is now on board.

Slavery, genocide, and killing everyone in a worldwide flood are unacceptable today, but they were part of God’s songbook in the early days. Whatever passes for correct morality at the moment, “unchanging” God is apparently on board. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 25: Believing in God Is Like Believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster

For further reading:

[Your comment] is a mixture
of ignorance, stupidity, wishful thinking
and a very large dose of Kool-Aid.
— commenter epeeist

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Image from Peter Forster, CC license
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4 Steps Christians Must Take Before Responding to the Problem of Evil (2 of 2)

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In part 1, we looked at the Problem of Evil, which is a powerful attack on Christianity. Christians often respond by saying that God is unjudgeable by mere humans. That fails in a number of ways, but that’s not the point of these two posts. Rather, I want to insist that Christians delay their God-is-unjudgeable argument until they’ve taken four steps that lay the groundwork necessary to support such a claim.

The first step is to admit that the Problem of Evil makes God look like a sociopath.

2. You say that God has his reasons? Like what?

There’s a second necessary step before we can consider rationalizations for God’s apparent immorality. Don’t just tell me that God could have a good reason for a child dying of leukemia or a parent killed in an accident or 100,000 dead from a tsunami, tell me what those reasons are (or could be). Give it your best shot and sketch out something plausible. If you’re embarrassed by the result—maybe it makes God look petty or immoral or not particularly omnipotent—you need to own that.

3. Are you confident that “God” even exists?

The third step is showing that trust in this God is justified. Here’s what we must avoid: an elaborate “God’s ways are not our ways” kind of argument that merely concludes that we can’t rule out God belief. Okay, but “You can’t rule out God” is no more compelling than “You can’t rule out Zeus” (or Quetzalcoatl or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster). Now that we’ve not ruled out pretty much everything, the Christian must show that God is likely.

This is another variation on the Hypothetical God Fallacy: “Well, if God exists (and is omnipotent and all-good), then he must have good reasons for evil.” Is there any reason to accept that if-clause?

If it’s plausible, like “If you wake up with chest pains,” then what follows is something that might be relevant in the real world. If it’s not plausible, like “If you wake up in Wonderland,” then what follows is irrelevant. It has no bearing on the world we live in.

Which one is “If God exists”? Our Christian opponent must show that there is a good reason to believe that this God exists so that “God could have his reasons” isn’t built on fantasy.

4. Why would God allow suffering?

The idea of the Christian god has a lot of baggage, so let’s simplify things and just imagine the Greatest Possible Being (GPB). Would the GPB allow suffering?

The GPB would be omnipotent and morally perfect and would therefore prevent all unnecessary suffering. Any necessary suffering must achieve some goal, and this goal must be logically possible to achieve. Since the omnipotent GPB could do every logically possible thing, it could achieve every such goal itself, which means that achieving those goals through suffering would be unnecessary. Given the choice, the GPB would obviously opt for achieving its goals without suffering. Therefore, a world ruled by a GPB would have no suffering.

(This is a bit dense. I’ve also made this argument slightly differently, if you want a different take.)

If God is a GPB, then he, too, would achieve his goals without suffering.

Conclusion

Next time you argue the Problem of Evil, look for responses of the form, “God’s ways aren’t our ways” or “We imperfect humans can’t judge God.” Those responses skip over four steps that the Christian must address first.

  1. Acknowledge that, even if they’re hoping that God isn’t a sociopath, he certainly looks like one. Our world is full of unevenly distributed pain and hardship. In addition, God’s actions in the Old Testament make him look as cuddly as Genghis Khan.
  2. Make a plausible (even if embarrassing) list of any reasons God could have to kill innocent people, either individually or in the hundreds of thousands.
  3. Show that trust in this god is justified. There has to be a real being, not just mythology, to be the god who has these incomprehensible reasons for evil in the world.
  4. Show that either God is not a Greatest Possible Being or that a GPB would be obliged to allow suffering.

The Bible can be made to say that God operates on moral principles that are incompatible with those that make sense to humans, but it can also be made to say the opposite. Christians take a path through the Bible’s doctrine, picking up a piece here and ignoring a piece there to create their concept of God.

The point of insisting on these steps is to force Christians to pause and see what they’re cobbling together. Like Dr. Frankenstein, you must face your Creature. Have you created a god, or have you created a fallen angel?

We stopped looking for monsters under our bed
when we realized that they were inside us.
— Charles Darwin

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Image from Eden, Janine and Jim, CC license
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