The Problem of Evil

So following on from yesterday, I’m going to do a piece on the problem of evil. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s the argument that uneccesary and gratuitous evil exists, and therefore the idea of God held by theists cannot possibly exist, because if an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God did exist, then there would be no suffering, because he would want to, and would be able to, prevent it. Hopefully that makes sense.

Anyway there are various ways this is explained away by Christians (I say Christians only because that’s the religious group I’m most accustomed to, I daresay it applies equally well to many other religious groups), depending often on what kind of Christian they are.

Fairly traditional Christians may point to the Fall as an explanation. They say that God created the world perfectly without sin, without death and without suffering, but man turned away from God, and this brought sin into the world. The punishment for sin is death and suffering, so it’s all our fault (as usual in Christianity).

This Fall doesn’t make sense unless you’re a creationist, for a fairly simple reason. If someone uses this as an explanation, all you have to do is ask when the Fall supposedly happened. If they say it happened in the Garden of Eden about 6,000 years ago, you can point to geology and evolution to prove them wrong as usual. But if they’re a theistic evolutionist, it doesn’t fly, because animals were killing each other and eating each other and dying from the word go, there was no time when there was no death, certainly not right the way up until anything resembling humans came around within the last 200,000 years. That’s how natural selection works. When you’re in the middle of a debate it’s quite useful, as Stuart demonstrated once, to ask something like “so when did the Fall happen, before or after the Precambrian?”, because this divides the creationists from the theistic evolutionists. I also used this with a street preacher and he was left saying “erm erm erm” because if he’d said “in the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago”, then everyone listening would have laughed and walked away.

I did once hear a curious answer which took me by surprise and stopped me using this argument for a while because I thought he’d put a hole in it. A geologist said that it didn’t matter when the Fall happened because whenever it happened, it had ripples of effect both forwards and backwards in time and space. Think about that, he means that it could happen in the future… weird eh? That sounds pretty solid but actually it isn’t, that’s impossible too. If humans did it, and then it had effects corrupting the creation throughout history as well, then that means in some other now-corrupted reality humans must have evolved without death and suffering, and as I’ve said, that’s impossible with natural selection. So the Fall only works if you’re a full-blown creationist.

Another way the problem of evil may be explained away is through Free Will. As you may have read in my last post, God’s Free Will is on shaky ground anyway but let’s carry on regardless. The argument is that God created the world perfectly, but he gave us Free Will and some people have chosen to cause suffering, and that’s the source of evil.

Well, first of all, not all suffering is caused by people choosing to cause evil. What about diseases? What about natural disasters? What about accidents? At this point they may try and cover the gap with the Fall argument, but then you can just go back up to the last argument. One person did try and come back to that with the argument “well, a natural disaster isn’t evil in itself, people being close to it causes the suffering”, which threw me off for a second, but then a bullet isn’t evil in itself, but if I shoot you with it then it is. If people aren’t causing it, then in Christian thinking that leaves God. God is killing people using natural disasters. Brilliant.

Other Christians may explain evil away by saying that evil is caused by Satan, and goodness is caused by God. Well it’s kind of wishful thinking really to attribute all the good things to God but all the bad things to either people or to Satan, fairly arbitrarily. But this argument (and both the above) is fairly easily knocked down by pointing out that God is supposedly omnipotent and whatever is causing this evil, be it people, the Fall or Satan, God should be able to overcome it and prevent suffering. That’s what a loving, perfect God would do.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if someone did something evil, say, shot someone, but then the suffering caused by that evil didn’t happen. Say the victim got shot but was still alive and felt no pain and had no adverse affects. That way the suffering is being prevented but God isn’t affecting Free Will. What if disease and natural disasters happened but didn’t harm people. Then suffering would have been prevented, but the Fall will still have happened. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Wouldn’t that be a good reason to believe in an all-loving God?

I think this is fairly solid but if you can put a hole in any of what I’ve written, or you can think of another way of explaining evil away, go ahead and leave a comment.

God: arsehole

You may know these lines from Dawkins’ The God Delusion:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

These are very famous words, and Christians etc will often point at them as an example of ‘fundamentalist atheism’, if there is such a thing. But it’s an easy statement to back up, all you have to do is read the Bible with a critical eye and you’ll see the terrible things he does and advocates. He destroys civilisations for next to no reason, he damns humanity for eating an apple, he turns a woman into a pillar of salt for turning her head around, he’d rather have 2 of Lot’s daughters raped by a mob than 1 man. There are all those crazy laws set in place (which aren’t limited to the Old Testament, btw). An example of good behaviour is Abraham preparing to kill his son for no good reason! First of all, surely an omniscient God would know whether Abraham would have done it or not, there was no need for the test. But more importantly, all this God wants is blind obedience, with no critical thinking whatsoever. How is this in our interest?

But that stuff’s easy to pick out, I want to look at the things that get assumed or taken for granted by Christians, things that are so engrained into our culture that we don’t often look at them for what they really are.

So, big number 1 on the reasons God is an arsehole is the problem of evil. I’ll dedicate a whole post to this soon, I think, as I haven’t really touched on it that much, but I think this is a justifiable reason not to believe in God. Christians blame it on the Fall or Free Will (we’ll get onto that soon enough), but neither of those explanations stand up to scrutiny. Maybe I’ll be writing about that tomorrow. If I was God, you wouldn’t have to pray to me to cure your child of leukemia, I’d just do it, or I wouldn’t have let the child get it in the first place.

Anyway, next up is this free will bollocks. Here’s a series of videos which do the job of explaining much better than I can. Be sure to watch all three parts.

God wants us to choose because he doesn’t want a bunch of mindless drones in heaven with him, and yet one of the choices results in a punishment imposed by him. Say I asked you if you wanted chicken or beef, but that if you chose chicken then I’d blow your brains out, would that be a free choice? Not really. Maybe I really want chicken but because of the punishment I choose beef. Is that what God wants? Surely that’s just the same as having mindless drones? I haven’t chosen God, I’ve just chosen not-hell. It’s blackmail.

It’s ridiculous, and just like in the Abraham story, it’s totally unneccesary. Why bother with Earth when he knows who’s going to choose him and who isn’t? Why not just only create people who he knows are going to choose him? Why create people who he knows are destined to burn in eternal hellfire, like me? It’s sadistic.

Related to this point is what’s required for salvation. Remember, God is making the rules here, he supposedly created everything! First of all he needs a blood sacrifice. He can’t just forgive. That doesn’t sound like an omnipotent God to me. In fact it sounds distinctly like the musings of some stone age barbarians influenced by paganism. Secondly according to Christians, the only way to be saved is by believing in Jesus Christ. Not just being good, not helping other people, just believing. If I were God, I wouldn’t have salvation based on belief in something ludicrous despite the lack of evidence, that would leave me in heaven with a bunch of gullible idiots with no critical thinking skills. No, my requirement would be something like “don’t be a prick”. I wouldn’t care if someone believed in me or not.

So God’s an arsehole. In fact, he’s such an arsehole that even if there were proof of his existence, I’d like to think I wouldn’t worship him. I’d sooner worship a complete stranger, the odds are they’re more moral than the God Christians claim to know and love.

Skepticamp 2009

We had an excellent night at the Edinburgh Skepticamp 2009. The two Alexes gave presentations on statistical fallacies and paranormal investigations, respectively, whilst someone I’d never met before called Terry spoke about how best to win over the believers, and I concentrated on alternative medicine with homoeopathy being the main focus.

It was the last Q&A section that started the most vigorous debate, where we were speaking about whether it would be easier to win over a fundamentalist or a moderate believer, with all of the speakers up on stage. One man stood up and asked the question “What’s wrong with being a believer?” to which someone on stage replied that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong (depending on what you mean by ‘wrong’), as long as it doesn’t affect other things. The man agreed, but continued with the sentence “it’s wrong for religionists to force their beliefs on others, just as it’s wrong for skepticism to be forced on others”.

This struck me as rather curious because he was comparing two very different things, religion being a set of dogmatic beliefs, and science and skepticism being a method best suited to acquiring the truth. So I said so and he replied that, for example, ‘evolutionism’ was a belief that we were forcing on others. Somehow then we got into a discussion about the evidence for evolution and established that although it’s not a fact, it’s about as close to a fact as we have in science. But this man maintained that since it is not a fact it should not be forced onto others.

I struggle to see what his point was. Was he seriously suggesting that it’s just as morally wrong to teach a child about evolution, with all the evidence in favour of it, as to teach the child about creationism which has no evidence for it whatsoever? It’s obviously more wrong to ‘force’ a lie onto someone than a truth, and although we can’t possibly know for sure whether something is true, that’s not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. We can put them in order of what is more likely to be true, based on the available evidence, and we do know that some claims cannot be true based on the current evidence.

But that’s missing the larger point that skeptics don’t force their beliefs on others! Skepticism is about criticising other people’s beliefs and claims, picking them apart and saying “this is unlikely to be true because A, B, C.” We may then propose another belief that is better supported by the evidence, but skeptics would be more than happy to defend their beliefs from critical argument, if only because at the end of the process we’ll be one step closer to the truth! It’s all about the free interchange of ideas, something that skepticism and science do well, because they are always changing, and something that dogmatic belief systems like religion do very badly, since they don’t change at all.

I’m reminded of this video that PZ Myers posted on Pharyngula this week of Wendy Wright from American Women Concerned for America or something. I only watched the first part because I’m short on time right now, but that’s enough to see that she’s asking for a ridiculously high level of evidence for evolution (her version of evidence is ‘if you can’t put it in my hand, it’s not evidence’), whilst allowing her own beliefs to slip completely under the skepticism radar. Take a look, here’s the first part and I’m sure you can find the rest of them.

New addition to the blogroll

Stuart, former president of the Humanist Society at the University of Edinburgh, now has his own blog which is sure to include thoughts on psychology, plenty of film and book reviews, and rants on religious arguments. Check it out, it’s called Time out of Mind.

Very quickly

Simon Singh has apparently been denied permission to appeal against Justice Eady’s ridiculous ruling. More over at Jack of Kent, and I’m a little busy now so go there for more information.