I Changed My Mind
I have to say that as of yesterday I have changed my mind about something. I was quite skeptical of the argument from evil as a valid argument against Christian theism. After having read Loftus' chapter on the argument from evil, I have to really credit John for opening up my eyes to the cogency of the argument. I used to be quiet skeptical but I believe that's because I really didn't understand the argument as well as I thought I did. But I have changed my mind. The author whom John quoted in his beginning paragraphs said that those Christians who are not bothered by it don't understand it. I guess all this time I have never really understood it and even as an atheist I never understood it.
I don't know why it just never took me by grip until yesterday. After having read it, I was nearly in tears. I composed an e-mail to John last night telling him that I was just about in tears after having read his chapter. I am now wanting to read Michael Martin's book on atheism and his sections on the argument from evil. I just don't know how I could've not been fully persuaded of it earlier. I am at a loss for why I never was much impressed by it until now.
I was prompted to give it another look after reading from Charles Templeton. Templeton once recalled what killed his faith in the Christian god. He looked at a photograph of a mother holding up her dead child, looking up to heaven, as though expecting an answer as to why god would let her child die, when rain could've helped to prevent a drought bringing about the baby's death. I can see how Templeton would've disbelieved any god of love was capable of letting that happen. I, too, cannot see how a god of love can allowed that to have happened.
I am just not sure why it took so long for me to see the cogency of this argument. Why did it take so long for it to "dawn" on me? I want to say that I am appreciative that John Loftus challenged me to take another look at the argument. I am glad that I did and I credit John, again, with helping me to see how good an argument that it really is.
I am reminded of a fellow skeptic and atheist Richard Carrier. For some time he was skeptical of the Big Bang. He wasn't a outright disbeliever in the Big Bang but honestly didn't know if there had been one. A fellow skeptic and physicist/cosmologist, Vic Stenger helped to convince him that it happened and Carrier changed his mind. I, too, have changed my mind regarding the argument from evil and I am glad that John helped me out!
Matthew
I don't know why it just never took me by grip until yesterday. After having read it, I was nearly in tears. I composed an e-mail to John last night telling him that I was just about in tears after having read his chapter. I am now wanting to read Michael Martin's book on atheism and his sections on the argument from evil. I just don't know how I could've not been fully persuaded of it earlier. I am at a loss for why I never was much impressed by it until now.
I was prompted to give it another look after reading from Charles Templeton. Templeton once recalled what killed his faith in the Christian god. He looked at a photograph of a mother holding up her dead child, looking up to heaven, as though expecting an answer as to why god would let her child die, when rain could've helped to prevent a drought bringing about the baby's death. I can see how Templeton would've disbelieved any god of love was capable of letting that happen. I, too, cannot see how a god of love can allowed that to have happened.
I am just not sure why it took so long for me to see the cogency of this argument. Why did it take so long for it to "dawn" on me? I want to say that I am appreciative that John Loftus challenged me to take another look at the argument. I am glad that I did and I credit John, again, with helping me to see how good an argument that it really is.
I am reminded of a fellow skeptic and atheist Richard Carrier. For some time he was skeptical of the Big Bang. He wasn't a outright disbeliever in the Big Bang but honestly didn't know if there had been one. A fellow skeptic and physicist/cosmologist, Vic Stenger helped to convince him that it happened and Carrier changed his mind. I, too, have changed my mind regarding the argument from evil and I am glad that John helped me out!
Matthew
12 comments:
In my introductory theology courses, there was no more powerful argument against the existence of the theistic God than the problem of evil.
Matthew, we are all on an intellectual journey here. Sometimes what each of us think about something can change with new information, so we should never cease learning and growing.
I'm glad that what I wrote made sense to you and that it spelled out the true nature of the problem of evil from a Christian perspective. When my debate with Mr. Wood is available, others can listen in on some of the reasons why I think that the existence of intense suffering is an empirical refutation of the existence of the theistic God.
Only when Christians have actually looked at this argument and understood it, can they see why I think it's crystal clear that a good omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenelovent God simply does not exist. Superficial objections by Christians to this problem simply reveal that they just don't understand it. So I've issued another internet challenge to debate this issue. And as I've evaluated would-be challengers, they have all shown a basic lack of understanding of the problem itself, for the most part.
Matthew,
I suppose I've always been on the opposite side of the fence from you: I have never been able to see past the problem of evil.
I have read free will theodicies, and those which promised some inscrutable "higher good" was worth the price of evil, but found them, on the whole, completely unconvincing.
I think that this argument was a sort of "thorn in my side" as a Christian, which became abcessed and eventually rotted out my faith. I think a lot of what transforms it from an abstract problem to something which breaks your faith into pieces is personal acquaintance with some tragic things.
Living in a shell of goodness and plenty, the "God of love" is all you know or think of. A quick trip to Africa or a volunteer experience in a hospital in the ghetto would quickly change that [lack of] perception. I really agree with what Sennett wrote with respect to the PoE -- if it doesn't keep theists up at night, they haven't given it enough thought, or, more likely, they simply have the same measure of compassion as their purported God: not much at all.
I had an experience similar to Matthew's. It wasn't until a couple years after becoming an atheist that I heard decent statements of the problem of evil from Internet Infidels and my philosophy 101 prof. One problem, I think, is a tendency to look at evil in a nebulous sense rather than specific examples from the real world. When real-world examples are examined it becomes clear that many of them are not just evils but pointless evils, things which an omnipotent being could have no reason for allowing, at least as far as anybody is able to determine.
1) God is a necessary being and exists in all logically possible
worlds.
2) God is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent
3) Therefore , suppose a omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent
being exists in all possible worlds
4) Many logically possible worlds contain large amounts of suffering
with no redeeming features.
5) Therefore these logically possible worlds do not contain a being
who would alleviate pointless suffering
6) Therefore there are logically possible worlds that do not contain
an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being.
7) But this contradicts 3, showing that there is no necessary
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being
Adding my .02,
In these discussion(s), I often see examples of grandiose suffering. Tsunamis, Rwandan genocide, Hitler, Stalin, etc.
My question is on the much simpler situation--what would be considered a smaller event. One child suffering child abuse by having her arm broken. Why would God consider that one time occurrence, not seen by billions and billions, so “necessary” that He could not prevent it? Would the entire system of Free Will completely collapse by preventing harm to this child? Would the world no longer be the best possible world, if that child has their arm broken?
Is that one incident too much for God? He is so busy stopping all the suffering and pain and harm across the rest of the universe, that this was just one item too many on his “to do” list?
What possible excuse could there be for God to look down and say, “If I stop that one broken arm, the universe would spin out of control.”
I find the problem of evil compelling as well...this was one of the issues that convinced me that there was no God in any meaningful sense, ergo probably no god at all. I came to this understanding through Richard Carrier's book, Sense and Goodness without God. But to me, it is more compelling to understand the scope of the evil that goes on every day in the world. One broken arm...well, God could have reasons we don't understand, okay. But to say there's a reason that god allows 6 million children to die of malnutrition-related causes before they are 5 years old, every year....no way. That is impossible to rationalize, impossible to square with an omnipotent benevolent god, no matter how you spin it. I don't understand the intellectual dishonesty of theists who dismiss facts like that.
Over a century ago, Ivan Karamazov's response to the "Free Will" argument settled the matter of whether an all-good, all-powerful God exists. From the Chapter "Rebellion" in The Brothers Karamozov by Dostoevsky (you can read the whole chapter here:http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72b/chapter35.html)
________________________________
You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price . . . Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature — that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance — and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”
“No, I can’t admit it. Brother.”
You can count me among those who do not find the argument from evil compelling.
Robert,
What is your theodicy?
Probably a combination of Boethius' and Leibniz' views.
Robert,
Now that's interesting, as those two seem very different. I'd love to hear more.
Are you an orthodox Christian? I mean, considering that neither of these theodicies are Christian in the "orthodox" sense:
Boethius was anti-Augustinian, anti-Pauline in his conception of judgment and punishment of the wicked:
"...anything which turns away from goodness ceases to exist..." (Book IV, 125)
believed that wrong is done in error:
"...the mind seeks its own good, though like a drunkard it cannot find the path home" (Book III, 80)
One of the most serious flaws I found in Boethius was when he asked Lady Philosophy (Book V, 149):
"But is there room in this chain of close-knit causes for any freedom of the will? Or does the chain of Fate bind even the impulses of the human mind?"
and she answered,
"There is freedom," she said. "For it would be impossible for any rational nature to exist without it."
Yes and no. Freedom of will and freedom of action and freedom of knowledge are all separate, and must be thought of as such.
i) The will cannot choose to act upon that which it does not know
ii) The knowledge of a creature is determined by God - experiences, senses, and revelation
iii) The limits of action are twofold -- a) what the will can choose among its options; b) and what the person can physically accomplish
iv) Apropos (b), God sets the limits of human physical freedom by their bodily functions, their environment, their resources, etc.
v) Therefore, from the top to bottom, we see the crucial consideration of how God limits "freedom", from the very knowledge that the will sifts through to choose, to the will itself choosing among options which are available to it, to the creature being able to act upon that which it has chosen
Lady Philosophy talks on to Boethius:
"Whatever by nature has the use of reason has the power of judgment to decide each matter ... "
Again, the question of what humans know, and who controls that knowledge, is operative
"Human souls are of necessity more free when they continue in the contemplation of the mind of God and less free when they descend to bodies, and less still when they are imprisoned in earthly flesh and blood."
Then one must wonder why it is that humans were imprisoned thusly.
"They reach an extremity of enslavement when they give themselves up to wickedness and lose possession of their proper reason ..."
This sounds like a claim describing how our natures are made: we get "enslaved" to wickedness, and thus "lose" reason. But does it have to be such? Could the nature of man not be made (by the God, or whatever) such that "dabbling" in wickedness is possible, and retaining ones wits in the process thereof? His claim that doing wickedness = done in error = malfunction of the mind seems to clearly indict the maker of the mind with fault. This claim reinforces the ultimate responsibility of the maker of the nature of man. Did man's nature have to be made such that his mind can be "like a drunkard" and "enslaved" and "lose reason"? Does this theodicy solve the problem of evil at all, or merely describe it?
Of course, Boethius is more Plato and Aristotle than Paul and Augustine. I find that interesting, given that I thought you were an orthodox Christian of some sort or another.
On the other hand, Liebnitz seems an odd one to hybridize Boethius with. Unless you claim that the nature of man is the "least evil, greatest good" that it could possibly be -- that God could not have altered man's mind, man's knowledge, man's choices, man's freedom of action, to reduce evil further and increase good further? Perhaps this is how they hybridize?
Liebnitz argued that this was "the best of all possible worlds", and that this world had the greatest good and least evil possible -- his "sufficient reason" arguments.
In response, I would point to those sorts of evils that have absolutely no plausible explanation insofar as a "sufficient reason" -- clear accidents that did not involve human will, natural disasters (like the earthquake of Lisbon that all but killed the will of those defending Liebnitz' argument), etc. It is implausible to argue that God found it necessary to allow that evil in "the best of all possible worlds".
The natural disasters of the earth were necessary? God could not have made a world in which there was no need for earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, etc.?
As Pangloss satirized in Candide, "the bay of Lisbon had been formed expressly for [Jacques] to drown in": is the sufficient reason of these natural evils that God made them so that humans and other animals would suffer their consequences?
Or are we to believe that the evil of those things is the least that it could be? That there really could be no fewer earthquakes and volcanoes, no fewer famines and droughts? Again, if God is in control of Nature, this argument reeks of absurdity from an evidentialist standpoint. From a logical standpoint, perhaps you could mount some sufficient reason, however unlikely or unbelievable (such as limits on the nature of man, or on God's creative freedom).
To claim that there is "sufficient reason" that a 1-year-old child died after a fall from a head injury, when trying to learn to walk, would be an interesting claim. It involves no natural processes, other than gravity, it involves no true sense of human free will, etc., etc. It becomes even more incredulous if you tack on something about the fate of the person's life, considering the necessity of their birth in the first place, if they were destined to die thusly, and also consider the people who have been allowed to live and inflict great harm on humanity (Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.).
Perhaps you can enlighten me with more details? A post on your blog?
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