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I had mentioned this debate yesterday. Here is my planned opening statement:
My focus is on heinous, hideous, horrific levels of horrendous suffering given the belief in a theistic God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect good. Unless we focus on that kind of suffering, the kind that seems needless and absolutely inexplicable, we’ll fail to see this problem for what it is. Instead of focusing on bruises, sprained ankles, slaps on the cheek, a clump of hair being pulled out, or sicknesses like colds and the flu, let’s focus instead on people who have been burned alive, boiled alive, and buried alive.
God may well have good reasons to allow for a modest amount of pain since we have physical bodies and we will all die. So we can set aside that kind of suffering as largely uninteresting in this discussion. Horrendous suffering, by contrast, should be our focus. My perspective is a “minimal facts” approach to the problem of suffering. I’m arguing that God should not allow a specific kind of suffering, horrendous suffering. Failing to focus on it is a failure to honestly search for the truth, for when horrendous suffering is our focus, the standard theodicies don’t work.
My contention is that the theistic God probably doesn't exist given the existence of horrendous suffering. Just ask what we would expect to find if we woke up one morning for the very first time. Would we expect to find so much horrendous suffering on this planet? I submit that people would never guess there would be as much horrendous suffering as there is in our world if such a God existed. For it’s clear that God should never allow it. We wouldn’t expect the existence of God since he could prevent it, should prevent it, yet doesn’t prevent it.
It gets worse. The theistic God allowed horrendous suffering even though he should have prohibited it. He could have prohibited the many global earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wildfires, droughts, famines, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and blizzards. He could have banned the ubiquitous kill-or-be-eaten law of predation in the animal kingdom, along with the horrendous suffering we human beings inflict upon others without making a valid distinction between good and bad people, or adults and children.
Given this present world, horrendous suffering exists because species evolve through an evolutionary process whereby the fittest species survive. There shouldn’t even be a debate about this. The amount and the degree of horrific suffering on earth throughout every millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, and second should prove, all on its own, that James is abysmally wrong.
Just think of this in terms of who has the greatest moral obligation to help someone who is suffering. It’s the person who knows of the suffering, who cares the most to alleviate it, and who has the greatest ability to alleviate it. Therefore, the person who has the greatest obligation to alleviate horrendous suffering is a theistic God, if he exists. Anyone who is wholly good would be morally obligated to prevent horrendous suffering, especially if all it would take was a “snap” of the fingers.
Think also in terms of good parents. They would never allow their children to experience horrendous suffering for any reason. While they’re not omniscient, they couldn’t possibly conceive of any circumstances that might justify its use for a greater good. They would never allow it under any circumstances. Parents would protect their children from horrendous suffering regardless of any lessons they might learn from it. They would certainly want all predators, killers, and rapists locked in jails and prisons away from their children, because having a safe society is eminently more valuable than allowing really bad people to run amuck.
Consider D’Angelo Hill, a severely disabled 5-year-old boy who suffered “critical, life-threatening burns” in an apartment fire. If an omniscient God couldn’t have kept him away from that apartment fire, then an omnipotent God should’ve secretly extinguished it as soon as it started. Otherwise, a perfectly good God should’ve created us with a gland that injects morphine to deaden severe pain when needed.
Concrete examples like these go on to show God doesn’t do any miracles to alleviate suffering. For if God doesn’t stop the most horrific instances of suffering, there’s no reason to think he stops any lesser instances of suffering. If nothing else, the more instances of horrendous suffering, then the less likely God exists. Now do the math.
We’re told God infinitely cares for every single individual, enough to die for us all. So it follows that the sufferings of individual people cannot be justified by hindsight lessons learned from their sufferings, from, say, the Holocaust. Otherwise we would be mere pawns used by God to teach lessons to later generations. If God were to exploit us like that, the ends justify the means, and we wouldn’t have any intrinsic value. We would only have instrumental value. But if we lack intrinsic value, then God would never send his son Jesus to die for us.
If theists object, then at a fundamental level they don’t think much of God’s infinite love. For surely God would place his infinite knowledge and power into the service of his infinite love.
Let’s turn to four concerns God should have for us.
1) The first concern for God would be that we don’t abuse the freedom given to us.
The giver of a gift is blameworthy if he or she knowingly gives gifts to people who will terribly abuse them. Any parent who gives a razor blade to a two-year-old is culpable if that child hurts himself or others with it. God, like a good parent, should’ve done likewise when it came to giving us free will. He should waited until we could use it responsibly.
God should have kept us from abusing our freedom by creating us with a stronger propensity to dislike wrongdoing, in much the same way that we have an aversion to drinking motor oil. We could still drink it if we wanted to, but it’s nauseating. Such a deity could keep a person from hurting or killing someone if at the very thought of it, the person began to suffer severe nausea.
A theistic God has many other means at his disposal to keep us from harming others. A heart attack could have killed Hitler and prevented WWII. The Zyklon B pellets dropped down into the Auschwitz gas chambers could have simply “malfunctioned” by being miraculously neutralized.
Furthermore, children shouldn’t have to suffer severe punishments for their actions when they err. A little pain was a good thing so children could learn from their mistakes. But no caring father would let his children suffer the full brunt of their mistakes, certainly not broken bones or being beaten within an inch of their lives.
God can supposedly read our minds so he can judge our character by our intentions alone. After noting our intentions to do harm, God could implant good thoughts into our heads to prevent us from actually carrying out our bad intentions.
2) The second concern for God would be that the environment he placed us in will not cause us excessive suffering.
At the very minimum, God should prevent all natural disasters. If such a God exists the 2004 Indonesian tsunami that killed approximately a quarter million people should never have taken place. If God had prevented it with a miracle, by stopping the underwater earthquake before it happened, no one would have been the wiser, precisely because it didn’t happen. By doing so, God could have remained hidden, for some hidden reason. Then with a perpetual miracle he could keep it from happening in the future. Such a God could stop all naturally caused horrendous suffering in this manner, and none of us would be the wiser. We would just conclude this is how the natural world works, with much less suffering in it.
A theistic God should not have created predation in the animal world either. The amount of animal suffering is atrocious, as creatures prey on one another to feed themselves. The extent of animal suffering cries out against the existence of a good God. This horrific suffering is perhaps the most difficult problem of all. In lieu of this, God should have created all living things as vegans like herbivores such as rabbits, deer, sheep, cows, and hippos. And in order to be sure there is enough vegetation for all of us, God could have reduced our mating cycles and/or made edible vegetation like apple trees, corn stalks, blueberry bushes, wheat, and tomato plants grow as plenteous as wild weeds do today.
An all-powerful God didn’t even have to create us such that we needed to eat anything at all. God could sustain us all with miraculously created nutrients inside our biological systems throughout our lives, and we wouldn’t know anything different. Such a deity could simply do a perpetual miracle here as well. In fact, there is nothing prohibiting God from feeding us by the process of photosynthesis, just like plant life, thereby not requiring animals at all.
3) The third concern for God would be that our bodies provide us a reasonable measure of well-being.
A God should have created all human beings with one color of skin. There, that was easy! There has been too much institutional racism, race-based slavery, and too many tribalistic wars because we don’t all have the same color of skin.
A God should have created us with much stronger immune systems so there would be no pandemics that decimate whole populations, or chronic diseases like cancer, emphysema, leukemia, or for that matter, babies born with deformed limbs, blindness, deafness, muteness, and so on. This is horrific suffering that God should never have allowed in his creation, or as a punishment for the sins in Eden, or our own sins. We know God can do this because of animals with much higher immune systems like ostriches, sharks, alligators, bats, hyenas, and vultures.
Such a God could have created us with self-regenerating bodies. When we receive a cut it heals itself over time, as does a sprained ankle or even a broken bone. But why can’t an injured spinal cord heal itself? Why can’t an amputated leg grow back in a few weeks? If that’s all we experienced in this world we wouldn’t know any different. Many animals can regrow parts of their bodies that have been damaged or severed. Lizards can grow new tails. Sharks can replace lost teeth. Spiders can regrow legs. An octopus can regrow their arms. Starfish can even grow an entirely new body out of a severed arm.
Such a deity should also have made all creatures capable of sexually self-reproducing, like zebra sharks, Komodo dragons, and others. If God had done this it would eliminate gender discrimination and gay hate crimes, since there wouldn’t be any gender or sexual differences between us.
4) A fourth concern for God would be to prevent a wide diversity of religions in the world.
If a good God exists he should have made it a priority to prevent religious diversity by clearly revealing himself in this world such that only people who consciously refuse to believe would do so. There would be no such thing as reasonable nonbelief in the one true sect-specific religion, regardless of when and where we were born, or how we might be culturally indoctrinated otherwise. Such a God would have made his revelation available to every culture and buttressed it with some astounding evidence-based miracles. This deity would provide a naturalistic moral code for everyone that excluded all religions that were misogynistic, racist, homophobic, nationalistic, and otherwise barbaric. In this way, he’d prevent religiously motivated wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, suicide bombers, and terrorists.
As historically understood the problem of horrendous suffering did not faze Christian crusaders, inquisitors, witch-hunters, slave owners, or the raiders and plunderers who destroyed indigenous peoples as they conquered the world. Only with a civilized view of the world where good, decent, respectful behavior is prized could we consider horrendous suffering to be a serious problem for a perfectly good, omnipotent God. So if God didn’t want this problem to be as serious as it is, he could simply abandon cultures to barbaric moral codes.
Now if Christians wish to credit their God with producing a civilized society, then it follows that by doing so God made horrendous suffering a very serious problem for good, decent, civilized people to believe in him. Maybe he shouldn’t have outta done that!
Only if theists expect very little from their God can they defend what their God has done. Either their God is not smart enough to figure out how to create a good world, or God doesn’t have the power to create it, or God just doesn’t care.
End of Opening Statement.
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Additional Material
One strategy used by apologists is to maintain that God can’t help us when free will is involved, or he cannot help us very much. God needs to let our free choices play themselves out.
But as it stands, theists are the first ones to say unrestricted freedom is not a good thing. In the case of heinous crimes we put criminals in prison. We do not let them roam the streets once they are discovered. They lose their freedom in the interests of having a safe society. Safety is a higher value than freedom. The theistic God has a mixed-up sense of what is more valuable, for that God thinks human freedom is more valuable than having a safe society.
All of us have a very limited range of free choices anyway, if we have any at all. The limits of our choices are set by our genetic material and our environment. It does absolutely no good at all to have free will and not also have the ability to exercise it. Some people don’t have the strength needed to stop an attacker, while others don’t have the rational capacity needed to spot a con artist. I could not be a world-class athlete even if I wanted to. Our free will to do what we want is limited by our age, race, gender, mental capacity, financial means, and geographical locality. Since we already have limited choices, then God should further limit our choices if we seek to cause horrific harm to others.
Another strategy used by apologists is to say that God cannot do away with horrendous suffering because suffering is a necessary byproduct of causal natural laws. To have the one is to have the other.
However, the apologist believes God created the universe from nothing, along with the laws of nature. So, if God can do that, he can also create a different universe with different laws of nature without any horrendous suffering in it. It just doesn’t make any sense that God chose to create this world with so much horrific suffering, when he could’ve created a better one without it.
Even if God failed to create a good universe initially, he could still do miracles in this world to correct any errors in it. An omnipotent miracle working God can do anything in the material universe, or he’s not a miracle-working God. Even apologist Richard Swinburne agrees: “God is not limited by the laws of nature; he makes them and he can change or suspend them—if he chooses…. He can make planets move in quite different ways, and chemical substances explode or not explode under quite different conditions from those which now govern their behaviour.” ["Is There a God?" Rev. ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 7]. Swinburne also said during a debate that God could “raise this stadium into the air.” However, from what I can see, all God does in today’s world is to imprint an image of Jesus on a potato chip!
Since this world is causing so much horrific suffering, the question for the theist is why the laws of this world are fixed and necessary when God could intervene to alleviate the most horrific kinds of suffering. If changing the world requires some miraculous adjustment, what’s the problem? People should matter enough for God to do that. I wonder if theists have really thought through the implications of a God who prefers this present set of natural laws with its sufferings over constant miraculous maintenance. Does their God care? Is their God lazy?
When apologists defend the miracles in the Bible and elsewhere, they will talk about an omnipotent God who created the world out of nothing, who sent fire down from the sky, and parted a sea that allowed three million Hebrews to pass on dry ground, Hebrews who lived in the desert for forty years where their sandals never wore out, and who were fed by manna from Heaven. “An omnipotent God can do anything,” they’ll say. It even says so in Matthew 19:26: “With God all things are possible.” Their God is a miracle-working God. So it shouldn’t be difficult to believe God does miracles, they’ll add. Yet when it comes to alleviating horrendous suffering, many apologists seem to argue that God can’t do that. This appears to be nothing less than intellectual dishonesty.
I maintain that the burden of proof is upon apologists to show why any of my suggested changes to the world are improbable for an omnipotent miracle-working God. Nothing short of this will do. I am suggesting there are several things an God could do to eliminate horrendous suffering without producing a chaotic world, or inhibiting our character development, that would help draw us to him, all of which are easy to conceive and already found in the animal kingdom. Since God, if he exists, could have done differently but did not, he is to blame for all horrific suffering in this world.
A third strategy used by apologists is to say evil is a privation of the good, that evil doesn’t exist except as a parasite on goodness.
However, suffering exists in our world, lots of it, a massive amount of intense suffering that is caused both naturally and morally. It exists. No Platonic alternative redefinition can deny this fact. How does suffering not exist in reality? Sentient creatures all experience pain as real. How should we accurately describe children who are born addicted to cocaine or with cystic fibrosis, Down’s syndrome, congenital heart disease, or leukemia? Do we really want to say they are experiencing the absence of goodness? Does this language even make any sense at all?
This strategy is pure sophism. What we have here is a language reversal. For rather than “the problem of evil,” we now have “the problem of less good.”
A fourth strategy is to argue, as C.S. Lewis did, that in the natural world nothing can count as evil for the atheist, since everything that happens is part of nature, and therefore natural. So atheists have no objective basis for arguing that evil in the natural world can count against the existence of God. If God does not exist, atheists cannot know evil exists to argue that it counts against a good God.
This too is sophistry. The argument I’m making is expressed in terms of “suffering,” not evil. Horrendous suffering exists. Everyone knows it exists. There is no debate about what I’m referring to. As a matter of logic, if an infinitely good, all-powerful God exists (which is something I do not accept), then there shouldn’t be any horrendous suffering. The fact of horrendous suffering is undeniable. Whether it’s considered enough of a problem for faith in God is the subject of debate. I am talking about pain—horrendous pain—the kind that turns our stomachs. Why is there so much of it when there is a caring omnipotent God?
The dilemma for Christian theists is to reconcile senseless suffering in the world with their own beliefs (not mine) that a theistic God exists. It is an internal problem for theists, so it doesn’t matter what the beliefs are of the person making this case. I may be a relativist, a pantheist, or witchdoctor and still ask about the internal consistency of what a Christian theist believes. The conclusion doesn’t even lead to atheism, or naturalism for that matter, since a God lacking one or more of the key theistic attributes might still exist.
Atheists, as nonbelievers, are simply using the logical tool for assessing arguments called the reductio ad absurdum, which attempts to reduce to absurdity the theistic belief in God. The technique is used to force a claimant to choose between accepting the consequences of what he or she believes, no matter how absurd it seems to them, or to reject one or more premises in the argument. The person making this case does not believe the claimant and is trying to show why those beliefs are misguided and false to some degree. It is that simple. If we cannot use this argument on this issue, then we should disallow all reductio ad absurdum-type arguments.
That this is a theistic problem can be settled once and for all by merely reminding Christians that they would still have to deal with this problem even if atheists never raised it at all. Again it’s an internal problem that would still demand an answer even if no atheist ever argued for it. Christians would still have to satisfactorily answer the problem for themselves. So to turn around and argue that atheists must have an objective moral standard to make this case is nonsense. The problem of suffering is one of the reasons why Process theologians have conceded that God is not omnipotent. It didn’t take atheists to persuade them to abandon God’s omnipotence at all. The problem speaks for itself. While I certainly don’t like pain and cruelty, it’s to be expected given who we are on planet earth.
When atheists are challenged to say what evil is, we say evil is horrendous suffering. There, that was easy. It’s always undeserved suffering. Causing it, or allowing it when we can stop it, is evil. It’s the same moral standard for God.
A final strategy used by apologists is to punt to mystery by claiming we simply cannot understand God’s reasons for allowing horrendous suffering in this world.
The truth is that it seems very likely we should be able to see God’s reasons for allowing it, since most theists also claim God wants us to believe in him, and will condemn us in the afterlife if we don’t. More importantly, this answer cuts both ways. We’re told we can’t understand God’s purposes, and this is true. We can’t begin to grasp why there is so much suffering in our world if a good omnipotent God exists. But if God is omniscient as claimed, he should know how to create a better world, especially since we do have a good idea how he could’ve created it.
So which is more likely—that we cannot begin to understand God’s omniscient ways, or that we can have some kind of idea about them? If we consider the idea that we’re all created in God’s image, the answer seems obvious. We should indeed have some kind of idea about God’s omniscient ways. Since this is so, and since we have good ideas on how God might have done things differently, the most reasonable conclusion is that an all-powerful, omniscient, perfectly good God does not exist.
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