Ciaran McArdle On Philosophy and the Mysterious Witness

McArdle has a YouTube channel and sends out several emails a week, like this:

One thing that I like about John Loftus is that even though he has a PhD in philosophy, he refuses to join apologists in the Philosophical weeds. The Christian god, exists just above our head, sniffs animal carcases and impregnates virgins. As Stavrakapoulou puts it in Anatomy, the Christian god has hands, feet, a penis etc. Loftus sticks with the specific theism. Pine Creek Doug does this also. In that philosophical locking of horns betwixt Michael Jones-town and Phil talk, my head was spinning. My mind was trying to keep track of all of these invisible abstractions: "agents" "minds" "predicates" etc. And in my view, this is a deliberate apologetic ploy. 

Yahweh is a carcase-sniffing tribal god with a massive cock. In Ezekiel, we are told that god has a glorious fiery penis. Retreating to all of this highfalutin philosophical talk is simply a red herring. 

Loftus will even call out other atheist philosophers for being too philosophical. One thing that  I like about Loftus is that he did not call his anthology: God and The Evidential Problem of Evil—which is the fancy schmancy philosophical term for what is under discussion—but instead: God and Horrendous Suffering. 

"Horrendous Suffering" is more concrete. Good fiction writers talk about "this-ness", i.e. ‘good writing that immerses the reader in the sights and sounds of the narrative’. "horrendous suffering" has this-ness, whereas "The Evidential problem of evil" is a lot more sterile and abstract. Babies and young children drowning to death like Butters in South Park in the seat of their murderous parents' car has this-ness. Children being physically abused by their parents, escaping, and then being returned to their abusive parents by the cops before being subsequently murdered has "this-ness". 

This anthology is littered with concrete examples of horrendous suffering, which, in my view, no Omni god would ever allow.

Aberfan is my favourite example. We can either hypothesise that a personal, omnipresent omnibenevolent god watched scores of children being buried alive in coal slurry... and did absolutely nothing to alleviate this situation... or we can simply surmise that no such Classically theistic god exists. As per Occam's razor, the latter hypothesis is more likely to be true than the former. Oh, undoubtedly "moves can be made"—as per William Lane Craig—to square a Classically theistic god with Aberfan... but guess what: the hypothesis that no Classically theistic god exists needs no such moves to be made. Children being buried alive in coal slurry is what we would expect given the total absence of a Classically Theistic God. Molecules of coal are utterly indifferent of either being stationary or being in motion. Molecules of coal are utterly indifferent as to whether they exist safely in a Welsh mountain, or lethally above a Welsh school child.

A god who watched Aberfan happen, and did nothing, would not be a god worthy of being worshipped, even if He existed. If one of the coal miners infallibly knew the day before that a coal-slurry avalanche would occur, and failed to raise the alarm... well this fellow would rightly be someone worthy of being hated. Like Pine Creek Doug, I have very high standards for God. I expect God—at the very least—to act as well as the average specimens of His creation.

The mysterious witness, by way of analogy, makes a personal God watch the kidnapping, rape and burying alive of a young girl, and refusing to intervene. At Aberfan, we have children buried alive in coal slurry. The great thing about Christianity is Jesus! Thanks to the Hypostatic Union—whatever that is!—Jesus is true God and true man. Jesus is personal... indeed your personal Lord and Saviour.

And so imagine Jesus at Aberfan. Imagine Him at sunrise. God is all-seeing. Imagine Jesus looking at that Welsh Mountain with the coal-slurry bin, knowing, infallibly, the carnage that in an hour or two, would ensue.

Skylar Fiction once said that if God turned off His invisibility cloak, but left everything else the same, then people would soon get sick of Him.

I guess that while Jesus—who is omnipresent—was sauntering about Aberfan, He was just being all mysterious, or something.