Combining HuffPo with the new, wooish reincarnation of TED is likely to prove a toxic combination. Sure enough, HuffPo has begun featuring essays based on TED talks. The latest one, “Why do evil and suffering exist?” by Jeffrey Small (based on a nonreligious talk by Phil Zimbardo), is dire. It’s garden-variety theodicy dressed up for HuffPo readers. As Small puts it:
But theologians continue to struggle with a fundamental question: How can a purported loving, yet all-powerful, God permit evil and suffering, especially when they strike saint and sinner alike? Witnessing the reality of the human condition leads many to ask whether God is truly omnipotent, omniscient, or loving, or to conclude that maybe God simply does not exist at all. Why wouldn’t God prevent a young child from being struck by cancer, killed by a deranged shooter, or drowned in a tsunami? The common retorts that God’s ways are “mysterious” or that God has an overarching plan that we cannot know are unsatisfying both emotionally and logically.
To any thinking person not brainwashed by upbringing or desire, the answer is clear: there isn’t any God. (The less parsimonious theory is either that God is malicious or that, as John Haught posits, He’s relaxing on his celestial throne with popcorn and a Big Gulp, enjoying the show.)
The “evils” of the world, both manmade and natural, are simply a result of evolved animals living in a dynamic and unstable world. There is predation, parasitism, and disease. Humans hurt others to advance themselves. The tectonic plates move, and multitudes die in earthquakes and floods. This is precisely what you’d expect if there is no God.
But of course that conclusion is unacceptable to the faithful. Small, who is religious, offers a version of the “free will” explanation—presumably involving dualistic free will, or a ghost in the machine:
Evolution only works because of freedom in the natural world: a freedom of genetic mutation, a freedom of natural selection, and a freedom of randomness. This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans, but by necessity the same freedom also causes cancer, disease, natural catastrophes, and even extinctions. The paradox of existence is that death and destruction bring forth new life. Spring follows winter.
As unpleasant as the physical and emotional sensations of pain and suffering may be, they are neurological adaptive responses necessary to protect us from harm. Similarly, human freewill, in conjunction with a biological self-interest for preservation, are programmed into our natures to ensure our survival. But these same qualities when unchecked can also lead people to commit atrocities. [JAC: Couldn’t God check them?]
“Freedom” of genetic mutation? Is that the unpredictability of mutations that might rest on quantum phenomena? Well, God could have stopped that had He wanted. In contrast, there’s no “freedom” in natural selection and other sorts of randomness, which is determined at bottom. And even if we have “choices”, God could made our choices ones that didn’t produce evil.
If you accept compatibilist free will, things become worse, for that’s not the kind of free will posited by the faithful. To them, at each point we must be able to choose between good or evil. In the end, Small must conclude that his God could have tinkered with the world—and with evolution—to prevent suffering, but chose not to do so.
But Small wants something more—meaning. He’s already provided it from a naturalistic perspective, but needs to explain why God permits preventable suffering.
While science can explain the cold-hearted mechanics of the human condition, it leaves us wanting something more: meaning. Can we combine the insights from religion and science in making sense of death and suffering?
What a rhetorical question! Does one expect the faithful to answer this in anything but the affirmative? (My answer is “Yes, you can make sense of anything—including Auschwitz—using the theological sausage grinder.”) Small gets in deeper:
What if instead of viewing God as a cosmic judge punishing us for our misdeeds or as a capricious chess master toying with our lives according to some mysterious plan, we think of God as the power of being itself — a power that supports all existence as its creative ground but does not make a choice as to which unfortunate events to change? Thus, the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective: from a micro view we lament the sufferings of humanity, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of existence itself — an existence that on balance is good.
The nature of existence is such that humankind must be free. To be free, we have the ability to do evil, to turn away from God, the true ground of who we are. Thus, the reality of evil and suffering is built into the very fabric of life as a requirement for life to be.
“Power of being.” “Ground of being.” Those are the weasel words of theologians who don’t know what they’re saying, and so emit fancy phrases to cover their ignorance like a blanket of snow. What, exactly, is a “power of being”? Is it benevolent and omnipotent? If so, the question remains.
And what about all that evil and suffering not caused by human choice: children getting leukemia, thousands wiped out by natural disasters like tsunamis, and all those animals whose suffering is as painful as ours? Why is that a “requirement for life to be?” Why couldn’t an omnipotent god prevent tsunamis and kill those cancer cells? How do these things play into the “greater good”? Small doesn’t tell us.
If the fabric of existence is good “on balance,” well, it could be even better on balance if the Power of Being could turn our choices to the good, or could tinker with geology. If the P.O.B really is omnipotent, he could do stuff like that.
It’s never been clear to me why God supposedly gives us free will, knowing that we’ll “choose” bad actions, and then punishes us for making the wrong choices. He even knows what wrong choices we’ll make! What is gained in all this?
In the end, Small finds meaning in a kind of powerless, watered-down deity who would not be recognizable to most religious folks as God:
Our individual lives are short, inconsequential in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old. We are finite. We suffer. Yet the faiths of the world also teach us that we can transcend suffering and death because we are part of something bigger than us. Behind our everyday realities lies an Ultimate Reality, what we might call God, Allah, Elohim, Nirvana, Brahman. By transcending our individual egos, our wants and desires, and connecting on a deeper and broader level with this Ultimate Reality, we can find true peace.
Yes, some religions, like Buddhism, can give us tips for dealing with suffering, but their lessons are secular, for Buddhism is more akin to philosophy than religion. But dealing with pain still gives us no evidence for an “Ultimate Reality.” The Ultimate Reality is pain, and some joy along with it. For most animals, it’s a joyless search for noms and an eternal avoidance of predators.
If after reading Small’s piece you want more pain, peruse the readers’ comments, many of them pure religious nonsense. But one smart commenter reprises the argument of Epicurus:
Of course he’s not God—he’s the Power of Being? Get the difference?
Small’s HuffPo biography gives these details:
Jeffrey graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. He earned a Masters in the Study of Religions from Oxford University in England where he was a member of Oriel College.
So how can such a smart guy spout such nonsense? The next line in the biography tells the tale:
Jeffrey is active in the Episcopal church, but he has also studied Yoga in India and practiced Buddhist meditation in Bhutan.
To paraphrase Steve Weinberg: “With or without religion, there are some people who say smart things and some people who say dumb things. But for a smart person to say dumb things—that takes religion.”
Finally, my advice to atheists: your best chance to change the minds of religious people is to make them justify evils—both manmade and natural.
Small’s driveling rationalization reminds of that famous mench, Dr. Pangloss.
Yup. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Voltaire skewered that kind of stuff centuries ago. And Leonard Bernstein set it to music. We need to revive the adjective “panglossian” in our counter-apologetics.
But unfortunately the word got poisoned by an evolutionist using it to attack evolutionary theory, so it no longer means what it ought to.
Somehow I missed that…
I understand, from your earlier complaint about Sheldrake, that you think TED is inextricably aligned with woo. But surely it is not altogether fair to TED to make the equation above just on the basis that Small has taken Zimbardo’s TED talk and transformed it into a bit of liberal Christian special pleading. As you point out yourself, Zimbardo’s talk is secular, so in what way does TED contribute to Small’s nonsense?
I agree. The sentiment may be accurate, but the example related in the OP does not support it.
While there is some indirection, TED is apparently in some agreed upon arrangement, meaning,they formally associate their name with whatever woo comes out the other end. I doubt they gave Zimbardo veto authority over this article.
So … was the New York Mayor, whose name has already escaped me, something to do with Doonesbury? … is attempting to cure the Problem of Evil ™ by banning “Big Gulps”, as an attempt to get God off his lazy posterior and out into the world fighting evil in the way that Only He Can.
Well, compared to some things I see, that makes relatively good sense.
“…popcorn and a Big Gulp…”
Perhaps He just likes a good tear-jerker, like us.
Tear-jerker? More like a Quentin Tarantino over the top ruthlessness gore pron festival.
“Pope Fiction”
Weasel words indeed. Particularly the way he uses ‘free’ in ‘freedom’: “freedom of natural selection, and a freedom of randomness”, which in those contexts can only mean something like a physicist’s ‘degrees of freedom’. By this priming he hopes, by association, to slip in ‘free will’ and make it sound just as naturalistic.
This reminds my of Plantinga in his “Advice to Christian Philosophers”:
“First [in the outside world of philosophical academia], Christian philosophers and Christian intellectuals generally must display more autonomy-more independence of the rest of philosophical world.”
If one’s Christian intent is not to let any inconvenient philosophy dissuade you from your chosen path then this indeed is good advice. What an abysmal approach to philosophy though! Plantinga’s ‘independence’ and ‘autonomy’ is clearly not what we would ask of critical thinkers, to think for themselves, but a prescription to adhere to their Christian beliefs, against all external presuasions to actually really think independently. Weasel dishonest words!
“… Christian philosophers must display more integrity – integrity in the sense of integral wholeness, or oneness, or unity, being all of one piece. … Perhaps ‘integrality’ would be the better word here.”
His ‘integrality’ is more in keeping with what he is suggesting: let’s stick together; get our story straight; we don’t want any ‘splitters’ [Monty Python] – in other words, to hell with integrity and honesty. The precise opposite of what he is proposing.
I do like that paraphrase of Weinberg!
Ik ook!
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That was my first thought too. Okay, so you think God is the operating system or principle on which everything runs/depends. Why should I worship that? What the frak does that have to do with salvation, potential afterlives, or any guidance for how I should live my life?
And yes the freedom argument is mostly a dodge. The concept of freedom in physics would not prevent a god from revealing himself to us and telling us his plan. Theists still have to invoke the inscrutability and/or grand design defense to deal with hiddenness, so IMO not having to invoke it for physics doesn’t actually get them very far.
Of course he’s not God—he’s the Power of Being? Get the difference?
He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!
It’s the standard bait ‘n switch technique of the deepity: use a word which has several meanings and go back and forth between the reasonable one and the supernatural one, thus making it seem as if they’re either the same thing — or that one proceeds necessarily from the other.
Small seems to be invoking what I used to call the “God of Gravity.” This is a god which is neither good nor evil, caring nor uncaring, but simply is what it is, working the way it works, and no more to be blamed for the results of a natural process than gravity can be blamed for someone falling off a cliff. The God of Gravity is not moral; it is not immoral; it is simply amoral.
Okay. Got that? Fine. So now that we’re no longer blaming god for evil and suffering, we can go back to treating God like God: worship, praise, love, and having faith that God always does what is best for us … in the end.
Hey, don’t blame the apologist for your whiplash. That’s just the natural result of your head spinning that way.
Finally, my advice to atheists: your best chance to change the minds of religious people is to make them justify evils—both manmade and natural.
That won’t work with Calvinists. They’ll just state that humans are worms who deserve everything we get (like Jonathan Edwards’ famous visual of God holding a spider above a fire ready to drop it in). They believe that any grace that Gad bestows on a few celestial lotto winners shows how great God is. Calvinism is the most twisted theological system ever conceived.
+1
“It’s never been clear to me why God supposedly gives us free will, knowing that we’ll ‘choose’ bad actions, and then punishes us for making the ‘wrong choices’.”
The meme of contra-causal free will (soul control) is the perfect justification for focusing blame and punishment on the individual alone while exonerating distal formative factors (God, if you’re a Christian; genetics and environment if you’re an atheist). As B.F. Skinner pointed out, the myth of autonomous man is an effective tool for social control since people take themselves to be the ultimate source of their failings, not their institutions, living conditions or leaders. Having seen that we don’t have soul control, we’ll be more likely to address the material inequalities that account for so much human dysfunction – not a welcome development for conservatives, hence their antipathy to naturalism-determinism.
To most religious people, other than theologians, this is not even a question they consider.
You never hear of believers dismissing ‘miracle cures’ or survival from plane crashes as merely their god moving in an indifferent mysterious way.Prayers answered – God, prayers not answered failure of believer.
Good stuff – he gets the credit, bad stuff who knows? Asymmetric woo.
“Behind our everyday realities lies an Ultimate Reality, what we might call God, Allah, Elohim, Nirvana, Brahman.”
Are all of these really equivalent? They are, it seems, to Small. He’s so far past the question “but is it true?” that he doesn’t appear to remember that it is a question at all. Surely there are a few disagreements (minor, I suppose) among the followers of those various deities as to what is true. (and how does he lump “Nirvana” in with deities?). Guess I’m just not deep enough to understand.
He’s obviously a big Kurt Cobain fan.
Smells like Holy Spirit.
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Maybe we can avoid the problem and just call Ultimate Reality …. reality. That way there is no reality behind our everyday realities, there is only reality.
This attempt to define God as “Ultimate Reality” always looks like a helpful bit of ecumenicism designed to eliminate religious differences by defining them away:
“Look, forget the details — when it comes right down to it, can’t we all agree on reality? I mean, can’t we all say that whatever is real is real? Existence is? Can’t we get together here? Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist — and atheist? Reality is real? Being exists? Okay? Then YEA! WOW! WE ARE IN AGREEMENT! And I have discovered the magic key to end all religious discord!!!11!1!”
“Now … so far, so good. Here we go: can we all agree to call this reality ‘God?’ Or are the atheists going to be poops about this again?”
Yeah, here we go again… objection.
“The nature of existence is such that humankind must be free.”
You could have a world filled with intelligent beings that rarely if ever chose to do evil, even though they had the freedom to do it.
I have never in my life seriously injured another human being, even though a handful of times the opportunity to do so presented itself. Does this mean that I never really had the “freedom” to do so?
Yes, I think the ‘least evil person’ is quite an effective argument. We could all have the natural perosonality/tendencies of the most pacifistic pacifist, and that wouldn’t break the free will system (unless the theist is willing to claim that person is a soulless automoton certain to go to hell. Which they don’t, and sounds very no true scotsmany anyway).
BTW this same argument works when discussing suffering, too. Whatever human suffering might be necessary for free will or salvation or whatever the theist wants to claim, there is no reason why any of us has to suffer more than the least suffering human being with free will/salvation etc.
+1
There’s also the idea of ‘best of all possible worlds’, which can be defeated by levels of suffering.
I remember one time, I woke up at 3-5 AM with horrific indigestion. I was in excruciating pain, and nothing I could do would allieviate it. There was no appropriate medicine in the house, and all the drugstores were closed.
And so, I had to spend several hours in agony. And at least some of it was unnecessary. The lesser pain, the mere discomfort, would have been enough to get me to take some Pepto or to sit on the toilet. But it wasn’t merely enough to get me to perform the actions I needed. There was the bursts of pain so severe I screamed out. Those bursts did not change my course of action at all.
Now, this is hardly the worst thing that happened to anyone. I dealt with it, got to the Rite-Aid a block down at 7 AM, and it was over. A couple of hours, with no lasting effect.
But why did I need that at all? Once the pain reached a level that it made me stay in the bathroom and take pepto-bismol, further pain served no useful purpose.
What is the best of all possible worlds? I have no idea, but I can think of a world better than this one. One wherein the exact same thing happened, but without the occasional burst of agony. Nothing else would be different. There is no greater plan that would have been served by making me cry out in pain, only to be heard by no-one.
It’s just a straight up reduction of suffering.
And you never ate Taco Bell again.
Consider the toothache. Consider the life of humankind prior to the invention of dentistry. Consider the suffering that must be endured by animals in the wild without access to dentistry.
And yet God must have designed caries. And designed it to be most affected by the food that tastes good to us.
Spider Robinson has an interesting short story called God is an Iron. (If a person who commits felony is a felon, and a person who engages in gluttony is a glutton…) The human system seems designed to get the most good feeling from excess. If there were a Designer, he’s a real son-of-a-bitch.
As others, I’m not convinced byt the advice to atheists.
A pastor once said us “Some will ask you what happens to people who never heard of the good news of the Christ. That’s not a question to ask, or to try to answer. Both YOU & ME can be only saved by the message of Jesus Christ. Leave the rest to the Lord.”
In other words, don’t think, the Lord thinks for you. So the answer to the question “How to justify evils”, the answer is simply “God knows, why should I think?”.
Depressing. Once my (born-again)father-in-law told me “There is an exposition where artists express their view about time. I will not go. I know what Bible says about time, and it’s enough”. I was non-practicing believer, in those times. But such a blindedness made me more & more suspiscious about the real effects of religion in general. Whoever deliberately seeks ignorance seems misguided to me.
If you can get a Master’s in religion from Oxford for that sort of drivel, then I’m feeling particularly hopeful for my finals in philosophy next year at the same institution.
“Jeffrey graduated summa cum laude from Yale University and magna cum laude from Harvard Law School”
What a sad waste of an intelligent mind. If only he could get on with using his abilities in a productive way. Well, this is one reason religion makes me angry. It’s so bloody wasteful.
“What if … we think of God as the power of being itself ”
“the problem of evil is ultimately one of perspective”
What a load of feces. This is the thing about the religious: They think that thining about things affects the reality around them (beyond their own personal state of mind.)
Believe something and something will happen in reality. Belief is the important thing, not deeds or reality.
And this:
“from a micro view we lament the sufferings of humanity, but from a macro view we can understand that this suffering is part of the very fabric of existence itself — an existence that on balance is good”
How is this any different from an athiest looking at the universe and thinking: Well, yes, it is a hard, cold inhospitable place. But I’m going to enjoy my brief moment in the light to its uttermost? The god hypothesis not required.
As Dr. C. noted: Theodicy re-tread.
But you are an atheist, therefore you are incapable of rising above your miserable existence. To do that you gots to have the faith, dontcha know?
Enjoyed this.
Theologians sometimes answer the problem of evil by saying it is possible this world is better off with evil than it would be without evil. Of course it’s possible but they fail to give me reason to think it’s likely. Yet these folks seem satisfied, even joyous, at the possibility of the existence of an unpredictable, immaterial consciousness that is God.
Well, it seems that without pain there is no possibility for an individual to rise above it and better himself. If everything was perfection, there would be no obstacles to overcome and no satisfaction at having overcome them. Think about the orthodox Christian view of heaven: perfection, no pain, no sorrow and no suffering. As much as I don’t like to suffer, I would NEVER want to live in a universe in which it did not exist. You can’t have white without black and you can’t have joy without suffering.
I don’t think the problem of evil is that big of an impediment to believing in a God. The better argument is that there is no evidence for a God, so the rational position to take is that there is no God.
Pain is not equivalent to evil. Pain is simply the brain signaling harm. It is by no means a perfect adaptation that a benevolent God would create. We have to trick our brain into shutting down its pain function to perform surgery, for example. Another example is feeling pain when holding a warm object in one hand and a cold one in the other..wtf?
The assertion that joy requires suffering is not supported by evidence (that I am aware of). At a very young age I had seen my child giggle and smile with no detectable event of suffering in the young lad’s life.
Pain is not equivalent to evil.
There is no such thing as evil; there are only preferences about what is good and what is bad. There isn’t a devil running around conjuring up lies and deception. So I’d argue there is no problem of evil. There is a problem of pain and suffering.
Some suffering is pointless and defies the existance of a benevolent God (tsunamis wiping out millions, children with leukemia, etc). Other suffering is good in that it requires us to face our challenges, strengthens our resolve and allows us to rise up and better ourselves by overcoming it.
At a very young age I had seen my child giggle and smile with no detectable event of suffering in the young lad’s life.
But you only recognize it as joy because you know there is a condition where joy is absent. If there was no suffering, there would be no joy in the state of not suffering. And I’d argue you’re wrong about your own child. He does know suffering whether it is pain, hunger or the absence of human contact. When that suffering is absent, joy is present.
None of this is evidence for a God, of course. But I don’t think the problem of pain (or evil) is a particularly compelling argument against God. This is coming from a former evangelical Christian of over 30 years.
Again, the assertion that joy requires suffering lack evidence.
“And I’d argue you’re wrong about your own child. He does know suffering whether it is pain, hunger or the absence of human contact. When that suffering is absent, joy is present”
This idea of pleasure being the absence of pain is quirky. Am I suffering since I am not in a perpetual orgasmic state? Nope. Is I’m glad my brain is capable of signaling pain when needed, but I prefer no such circumstances that require its use. We all try to avoid suffering and to purposefully impose pain on someone is well….evil.
“Absence of joy” is not equivalent to suffering. Sleeping babies also experience absence of joy. Moreover I think from a biological perspective you’re just wrong; pleasurable brain centers could absolutely be triggered without any necessary biological feeling of pain.
Moreover, there are people in this world that never suffer hunger, but are happy. There are people in this world that never suffer disease, but are happy. There are people in this world that have never frozen from the cold, but are happy. So these things are obviously not necessary for humans to live happy, joyful lives – unless you want to start claiming that healthy wealthy equatorial people are subhuman and incapable of true feeling. Are you willing to do that?
“When that suffering is absent, joy is present.”
I disagree. Right now I am not suffering, but nor am I joyful. I’m somewhere in between. I have had a few episodes of feeling joyful today, but no suffering at all. I don’t think it’s quite as binary as you’re making it out to be.
I don’t think it’s quite as binary as you’re making it out to be.
I didn’t say it was. I recognize that joy exists. I recognize that suffering exists. I recognize that states in between those polar opposites exist. My point is that if there was no suffering, it would be difficult if not impossible to recognize joy or happiness. If we lived in a perpetual state of happiness, how would we ever know what happiness meant?
The whole point of this thread was to point out to billrabara that it is possible that a world with suffering is better than a world without suffering. It is possible that a world without suffering would be a joyless one where is was impossible to distinguish between the goodness of different states of being. Perhaps I failed to make that srgument fully. If so, no big deal. I do believe that my argument below that the God of the Bible suffers therefore his creation must suffer is a valid one from a theological perspective. That is, a Christian could argue that suffering is inevitable in world which a suffering God created. Of course, you have to begin with “God exists” in that line of argument. That is the weakest point of the argument. There is no evidence for God so the whole argument falls apart.
Rationality is what will eventually destroy Christianity, not appeals to why God made the world the way he did.
I think your argument can be granted and yet the atheist’s objection carries the same weight: it is not the presence of suffering alone, but the amount of it. A little struggle may make the achievement sweeter — but too much struggle and too little achievement negate that. In order to justify a God responsible for the entire cosmos, you would have to include even the extremes of “too much struggle” and “too little achievement” — and now we’re getting firmly into the area where the argument that it’s good for ‘us’ breaks down. “We” are not a monolithic block: the pointless tortured suffering of the least of us is monumental.
This approach also made me suddenly wonder: if there is no good without evil, then how could God be perfect? Did it need to create imperfect, miserable humanity as contrast — lest it exist without being capable appreciating its own state of perfection?
That just seems wrong.
“My point is that if there was no suffering, it would be difficult if not impossible to recognize joy or happiness.”
So I assume you believe that there is pain and suffering in Heaven otherwise they would not be able to experience true joy….right?
Heaven, as commonly believed, is without pain and suffering and is suppose to be unmitigated bliss and joy.
BTW, is there free will in heaven?
So I assume you believe that there is pain and suffering in Heaven otherwise they would not be able to experience true joy….right?
What part of “I am a former evangelical Christian” did you miss? I don’t believe in a heaven, a hell or a God. Your argument is a good one though. If God supposedly gave people free will because he loved them, he obviously won’t love them quite so much in heaven because how could there be free will if there is no suffering?
how could there be free will if there is no suffering?
I think your question is backwards. Why do you think there has to be suffering for there to be free will? I don’t see any necessary causal connection between the two concepts. Why couldn’t someone have free will and never suffer?
Yes, that connection does not follow for me either. One must have suffering for free will…what??
Another question about God. How does God know he is God and not a simulation. Would not a highly advance entity be able to simulate a God with all of the properties of God in a simulation such that God believes he is God and has all the simulated powers and awareness of god. This god can not get past this question it seems to me. Even god would not know if it was a simulation or the real deal.
BTW: I think the whole concept of god is incoherent and impossible.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2055#comic
(Hover over the red dot at the bottom of the comic for more.)
No offense, but that sounds like nonsense to me. If you only ever experienced joy in your life and knew nothing else, you might not recognize it as a distinct state, but you would still have the experience of joy.
That’s because joy is not the same thing as a lack of suffering. Those two things aren’t actually dependent on each other.
If one was born into a world where pain and suffering were all they knew, they’d still know pain. They’d still know suffering. Not experiencing something’s opposite doesn’t prevent you from experiencing the thing itself in the first place. It’s not as if a creature born into pain would think to itself, “Since this is all I’ve known, I feel neutral.”
Years ago my husband met a middle-aged man in the neurological wing of a hospital. This patient had undergone an operation which had changed not only his life, but his personality. He had always been a cranky, angry, bitter person, quick to find fault and impatient with others. But something had happened when he broke his nose or something and had to have his head x-rayed: doctors discovered a very large (benign) tumor. It had clearly been there for a long time — quite possibly from birth.
“But haven’t you been getting headaches?” he was asked.
“Headache? What’s a headache?”
They removed the tumor — and that’s when the guy found out what a headache was. Not because he had one. Because for the first time in his life, he didn’t have one.
Apparently he had been in pain and didn’t know it because it was base-normal to him. And now that this massive growth in his skull was removed he was overcome with delight — and was the sweetest, gentlest, most patient person. Or so it seemed to his wife.
So because all he had ever had was a headache, it felt neutral. But he obviously still suffered. He had still been unhappy — it just revealed itself through something else.
devilsfan,
Other suffering is good in that it requires us to face our challenges, strengthens our resolve and allows us to rise up and better ourselves by overcoming it.
I addressed this “bettering ourselves” argument in my response to your previous comment.
But you only recognize it as joy because you know there is a condition where joy is absent.
This claim seems dubious, but even if it’s true, so what? What benefit is there to “recognizing” joy (“Ah, so this is what joy feels like!”) rather than simply experiencing it.
None of this is evidence for a God, of course. But I don’t think the problem of pain (or evil) is a particularly compelling argument against God
It’s obviously not an argument against an evil or weak God. It seems a pretty compelling argument against the omnipotent and benevolent God of Christianity. That’s why Christians themselves have been wrestling with it for so long.
The problem of evil is a very big problem for belief in hundreds of specific variations of gods. The best “thinkers”, err . . . apologists anyway, for many of those variations of god belief say so themselves, and have devoted enormous amounts of words to try and rationalize the massive incongruencey.
The problem of evil is also very commonly one of the reasons given by people who deconvert for why they lost their faith.
I agree many believers stuggle with the idea of suffering, and it is a primary reason why many leave the faith, but in my opinion it is due to a misunderstanding of the problem.
If you read through the Bible, you’ll see countless instances in which God is said to suffer. For instance, he grieves over the state of humanity before he destroys it with a flood. He expressed regret at numerous things he has done including creating humans and choosing the Israelites. He expresses contempt when he is rejected or defamed. He is distraught when Jesus is crucified such that he tears the temple veil apart, darkens the skies and causes a great earthquake. The point is that God suffers just like we suffer.
Now all Christians will agree that God cannot create something more perfect than himself. In fact, he creates man in his image. So if God suffers by nature, then humans must also suffer by nature. I don’t see any way to get around this. There is no alternative other than an existance in which suffering is inherent.
So there is no problem of pain. God suffers and you suffer. That’s just the nature of reality.
As a former Christian who struggled with this very issue for many years, I finally came to see it for the non-issue that it is. Granted, most believers won’t take the nuanced view that I have here. Jerry is right that the argument will probably sway many believers away from their faith, but I think the argument is a bad one to begin with. Just my opinion. Others will disagree and that’s fine. The bottom line is that God is nonsensical and unnecessary so why bother?
There is a huge disconnect between the idea that God is Perfect (omnipotent and omniscient) … and yet God suffers. It’s as if there are two mental modules or tracks running when people think of God. One of them is the transcendent track (mystery, glory, creation, perfection) and the other is the personal hero track (“O no, how will God figure a way out of this problem and help us???”)
devilsfan,
So there is no problem of pain. God suffers and you suffer. That’s just the nature of reality.
So there’s suffering in Heaven? That seems to be a rather unorthodox Christian view.
If Heaven involves more suffering or the same amount of suffering as the mortal world, why is Heaven better? If Heaven involves less suffering, why didn’t God make the mortal world with less suffering too? Or simply create us all in Heaven in the first place?
Devilsfan is right when he says that evil does not exist. The concept is simply a primitive human construct invented by ancient primitive superstious humans to explain undesired outcomes. I cringe every time it is used, whether by theists or nons. Its use only reinforces superstitious beliefs and promotes clinging to those.
Nitpicking over what “evil” means or whether it actually exists is pointless with respect to this discussion. Surly you understand that we are arguing against theist beliefs? Surly you understand that it is the results that are attributed to “evil” that are important to the argument and not whether or not the theist concept of evil is accurate? It doesn’t matter and is beside the point. Call it needless suffering, call it bad behavior, or whatever else you need to. Most people understand by context what is meant by the word evil.
In my experience the word “evil” is directly and inextricably linked to the existencee of supernatural agency. Its use reinforces belief in Satan/demons, in direct proportion to the fervency of the believer, regardless of how the term is used or by whom.
Not inextricably. There are too many secular understandings of “evil” that leave off the idea of magic essences and focus on things like ‘unnecessary harm.’ Your belief that the term logically entails supernaturalism might be the result of being personality raised surrounded by woosters. That’s my guess, anyhow, and understandable if those are the circumstances of your experience.
But I think that arguing that there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ if there is no God would be throwing the baby (secular version) out with the bathwater (supernatural version) — and feeding into the feverish fantasy world of the religious and their monstrous, unhappy, nihilistic view of the atheist.
In reply to Sastra @3:01 pm below: I wish I had written “… inextricably linked … to supernatural agency” … by religious believers. It is that group, for those of us who comprehend multiple contextual meanings for the word evil, that presents communication challenges. It is members of that group who believe the term “evil” logically entails supernaturalism, which is why its use creates barriers difficult if not insurmountable to breach. I was not raised surrounded by woosters, but for a bit over three decades now I can hardly turn around without layng eyes on one. Evil is just a word, unfortunately laden with prejudicial presupp baggage, one of the most useful arrows in the religion quiver, and not remotely essential to any argument about anything except theism. Why cling so resolutely to it?
Oops! I mean to say that evil is not remotely useful to any argument, particularly theism. Too much baggage, tainted, not worth wrestling for ownership of meaning. Gives ammo to the enemy. The strategy ought to be to starve the enemy of ammo, not supply it.
Only for those that are believers already. The point is that in the context of arguing with those believers that their god is an evil prick if he does indeed have the characteristics described in the bible and other religious writings, the supernatural concept of evil works just as well, no, better than any secular concept of evil.
By all means let them be thinking of the supernatural concept of evil. It only makes the argument more troublsome for them. In fact the whole idea is to counter their claims using their own beliefs.
The problem of “evil” is a problem because of the claims theists make.
It is a legitimate argument against the god theists actually posit.
Even if we understand that the term “evil” is most often used metaphorically.
“As much as I don’t like to suffer, I would NEVER want to live in a universe in which it did not exist.”
If you did live in such a world, you wouldn’t care now, would you? We are keyed to benefit from suffering and measure the contrasts because that’s the world we live in. There’s no intrinsic reason, with a creator in play, why that should be the case.
devilsfan,
Well, it seems that without pain there is no possibility for an individual to rise above it and better himself.
So what? Why is suffering from pain and then “rising above it” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) better than not suffering from pain in the first place? Should we withhold pain meds from people so they can “rise above” their pain and “better themselves?”
If everything was perfection, there would be no obstacles to overcome and no satisfaction at having overcome them.
Again, so what? Whatever satisfaction you may get from overcoming obstacles, it can’t be better than “perfection.” Nothing can be better than perfection. So how is this an argument against perfection?
Okay, fine. Let’s grant them that some suffering is a net good. The question then becomes whether the world has an excess of suffering of whether it’s at the theoretical minimum.
If a family in Africa starves to death with no one watching, was it absolutely necessary or could God have given them some food and water? Is every life saves with antibiotics doing a net harm to the world as we fight against God’s plan? If suffering is good, are people in Western nations being deprived because so few of us will face starvation?
I think it’s pretty obvious that we are far from an ideal balance. Arguing that “some” suffering or pain is required is a long, long way from arguing that the level we see today is required.
Yes. White, middle-class 21st century Americans must need fewer moral lessons than poor people throughout history stuck in hell-holes of pestilence, violence, flood, and famine. Our appreciation for God gets sufficiently strengthened when our team finally overcomes a losing streak.
“But these same qualities when unchecked can also lead people to commit atrocities. [JAC: Couldn’t God check them?]”
Indeed God supposedly can check then if one accepts that the bible has any fact to it at all. That’s what all of the miracles do, abrogate free will in order to change outcomes per what this god wants. This is why free will prated by theists fails entirely *if* they want to claim their bible is true too. Free will only works if a god is *entirely* hands off. If it isn’t, then no one can do anything without its approval.
It seems to me that this also fails the “what about your heaven?” test, as most theodicies do.
The word should be theo idiocies…
This may be due to my being brainwashed with TNG as a youngling, but I always thought that if there were a god, he’d be something like Q, i.e., a sadistic jerk who ruins the lives of mortals for fun.
I would much prefer Q to the god of the bible. The god of the bible has no sense of humor. I don’t picture him as doing it for fun but rather because he is a twisted, sadistic piece of shit who can’t get off unless he brutalizes other living things.
Small’s HuffPo biography gives these details:
The only thing missing is a Templeton Grant.
What about the Power of Love?!
Ask Huey Lewis. “It don’t take money/Don’t take fame/Don’t need no credit card/To ride that train.”
To paraphrase someone else, whenever I hear ‘Ground of All Being’ or ‘Being Itself’ and similar deepities I reach for my pistol.
No doubt as I am only a lumpen, insufficiently thoughtful and unsophisticated atheist I don’t have the requisite intellectual acuity and understanding of these arcane matters to fully grasp its wondrous meaning and significance, but somehow I don’t think that the vast majority of the faithful cruising the churches, cathedrals, synagogues, mosques and temples of the world are on their knees expecting an answer from Being Itself.
“This freedom led to the existence of conscious humans…”
…just the way god planned it.
Questions, questions…
If God has a reason for suffering and is loving, then the suffering we see should be at the bare minimum to achieve God’s plan. So shouldn’t we follow his example and refuse to intervene?
If there’s a reason for natural disasters like famine or disease, why are they so concentrated (in time & geography). Are we being deprived because we haven’t had a big influenza outbreak like in 1918/19? Are Africans unfairly targeted for famine (and is God a racist)?
If bad people suffer, and we all have free will why are so many bad people in Africa and areas close to tectonic plate boundaries?
Why do some people feel compelled to hurt or kill others but I don’t? Do I lack Free Will?
Why does God tolerate so much inequality? Does he have favourites? Does he prefer white folk over everyone else?
“So shouldn’t we follow his example and refuse to intervene?”
excellent point.
Brilliant point, which leads to the following scenario:
“As a religious person, I refused to intervene and help that person because I believe that I would be interfering with a necessary amount of suffering, without which the Universe would be less of a good place.”
*dons Catholic apologist hat*
Jeebus commanded us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and all the rest.
Why doesn’t God do the same? As the creator of the rules, not only is God exempt from the rules, but also has his mysterious reasons for not doing those things. Who are you to question God’s eternal plan?
lol.
Well perhaps we should now all refer to HuffPo as HuffPuff.
lol
A tangential point:
Jerry said “Buddhism is more akin to philosophy than religion”. This is only true for some Buddhist schools, which happen to be relatively popular in the US. Religious Buddhism is more popular globally, and features many supernatural and so nonsensical elements – such as describing reality as a cast of reincarnating people and devas interacting on a set of a huge number of parallel universes ranging from what actually exists to visions of hells as bad as anything Dante dreamt up.
Agreed; I know that some forms of Buddhism have miracle stories, accept reincarnation and the like (I think the Dalai Lama is a reincarnation buff, which makes has of his claims that his faith is compatible with science). I was referring, as you note, to forms of Buddhism like Zen.
I thought that’s what you meant; it just wasn’t clear. And even some Zen schools are very heavy on supernatural mysticism.
Re. the Dalai Lama: That’s a good example. The whole concept of a tulku lineage is deeply creepy. The criteria for identifying the supposed reincarnate are inadequate and sometimes explicitly random. On that basis, Lhamo Döndrub was drafted to be the 14th Dalai Lama when he was 2 years old. Informed consent does not seem to be a requirement.
But that all is off-topic to this post.
Or believing that reality is an illusion Or doing hundreds of postrations to purify your bad karma or meditate a lot to attain enlightenment (someday) ….Buddhism is like any other religion same nonsense different wording.
That might not be entirely true. Theravada (the older form of Buddhism, which apparently does not consider Buddha as a god) seems to be the more popular school everywhere outside Tibet, especially in South East Asia.
Not considering Buddha as a god isn’t the same as not having supernatural elements. Theravada Buddhist teaching still envisions, without evidence, a large number of parallel realms populated by beings of various kinds.
By your standard, I know of no branch of Buddhism that qualifies as being just a philosophy (including Zen Buddhism). Indeed, by that standard almost all ancient philosophies (including Aristotelian physics) are full of supernatural elements.
However, it is no doubt true that some branches of Buddhism (such as Zen and Theravada) are much less invested in the existence of supernatural beings, and more susceptible to rationalism than most other religions. After all, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, rationalism seems to be part of the dogma of Buddhism, however much some Tibetan Buddhists might try to deny it.
Secular Buddhism does exist. It is a small fraction of all Buddhist schools, and a small fraction of all Buddhists. But it happens to be disproportionately popular in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Power of being? He definitely got that from Deepak.
Yeah, that sounds like something Woopak Chutzpah would say.
Karen Armstrong is the originator of the “ground of all being” meme. Or at least the most-recent popularizer — probably some ancient Greek thought of it.
When it comes to theology, there is absolutely nothing new under the sun, nor has there been for millennia.
My explanation would be that graduating from Yale, Harvard or Oxford is not a necessary or sufficient indicator of being smart.
GW Bush: Yale ’68, Harvard (Business Sch) ’75.
Enough said.
A certain amount of pain and suffering is inevitable given free will and is actually necessary for true happiness and flourishing, says the sophisticated theist.
Ok, so I should expect some amount of suffering in heaven, or else I cannot have free will and will not be happy.
No wonder Mother Theresa achieved sainthood so quickly.
Actually, one can put this as a dilemna to the theist who uses the free “will defense”.
Is there free will in heaven? If not, why not? Do we lose it? If yes, then surely it is possible to sin in heaven? If yes (“Satan”) then isn’t heaven as fooked as Earth?
If no sin in heaven, then why can’t earth have been created like that?
I think it is made to easy for the religious by calling it the problem of evil. Really it should be the problem of gratuitous suffering – how does a ghost in the machine justify earthquakes?
That being said, I have never understood why so many people consider the problem of evil such a big argument against gods because it can trivially be solved by postulating a non-benevolent, non-omnipotent or non-omniscient god, or with divine command theory (the world is good because everything that god does is good by definition). Or in other words, the problem of evil is only relevant for a triple-O god anyway.
I find the observation that the universe simply looks so totally uncreated to be (when considered together with the principle of parsimony) a much stronger and simpler argument against any type of god than the problem of evil.
I think the problem of evil resonates with more theists (and more atheists) because the underlying reason people believe the universe looks like someone made it is because they think it has been set up with a moral agenda. It’s supposed to be fair. Good and evil are important and real. Humans are not an accidental byproduct and things don’t just happen for “no reason.” There’s a plan and it’s connected to social concerns like justice or things being where and how they belong.
The Divine Command Theory creates more problems than it solves.
Besides, God needn’t have created the universe. There are some popular versions out there (particularly in the east) which co-evolve with the universe, or which emerged from a pre-existing nature — yet they manage to still be important and god-like because they are still connected to ensuring that justice and rightness triumphs…
Even Genesis (1, at any rate) doesn’t have god creating everything besides himself. That’s a later accretion. (Look at the stuff about “the waters” or “the deep” – where did that come from, if the “in the beginning” is true?)
Oh, “the waters” is only a metaphor for M-branes, just as “fiat lux!” is a metaphor for the Big Bang.
/@
It isn’t a great argument against multiple warring gods or against deistic non-interventionist gods, but it’s a great argument against God because he’s supposed to be all of these omni-max things. Plus, as the original issue said, if this would-be god isn’t powerful or benevolent, then why call it god?
It’s not really an argument against *any* god, just those that most humans have appealed to, setting moral standards, worth the worship it apparently demands, etc.
Sastra:
Of course divine command theory does not convince me, but it seems to work find for many believers even if the nicer ones would not admit it, perhaps not even to themselves (see below).
Alex T:
What people say or even think they believe is not always what they actually do believe. Quite a few people would say that their god is O3 but when you do not phrase the question that way, when you talk with them from a different angle, when you see how they live their daily lives, it often becomes clear that they don’t really believe in such a god.
For starters, the relaxation of omnipotence happens already whenever any theodicy is constructed that starts with “maybe god lets evil happen because that is the only way…” No, sorry, if that god cannot find another way to let X happen without all the evil then he is by definition not omnipotent, so people who argue that way don’t actually believe in an omnipotent god.
Likewise, I doubt that people _really_ believe in omnibenevolent and omniscient deities, not least because those attributes are ill-defined and lead to internal contradictions (omniscience, for example, kills the free will defense). When they try to visualize their god doing or deciding anything they have to visualize a non-O3 god, whether they admit it or not.
The funny thing is that many of the earlier ‘Christian’ sects had a much more coherent explanation for evil and suffering. They had various forms of dualistic beliefs where God and the Devil, or good and bad demiurges, ruled the world.
Strange how they were suppressed or exterminated by the One Good God team.
You know what’s most frustrating about this — this is exactly the language that a compatibilist atheist might use, but then he just adds a god that does nothing to the mix. I could easily rewrite it thus:
It’s exactly the same sentiment but without the god (and most of the teleology) language.
Meanwhile, in heaven, do we no longer have /bin/freewill installed, or does god somehow have the power to keep his believers from evil? That’s the part I’ve never understood, even as an indoctrinated child.
*Or freewill.app or freewill.exe, or whatever heaven would be for you. 🙂
And don’t make the common mistake of thinking you can ln /dev/urandom /bin/freewill either 😉
Ha ha. No, that’s a symbolic link at best.
And anyway, this is more popular today:
$ cat /dev/urandom | /bin/freewill
devilsfan,
I think you’re confusing hardship or misfortune with suffering. We might need a few bumps in our life to appreciate the highs, but we do not need to have terminal cancer or be starving to death in order to be happy.
If that idea wasn’t transparently obvious (and I think you seem a little delusional for proposing such a daft idea), then we can just look at the world around us. By your argument, the happiest people in the world should be those living in refugee camps or the people in famine-struck Africa and we rich westerners should be living hollow, empty lives devoid of meaning. It’s absurd.
I dare him to try telling a rape victim that what happened to her is only a “micro” phenomenon.