Australia, though a pretty nonreligious country compared to the U.S., still has its pockets of faith. One was recently emptied on the Australian Broadcasting System’s (ABC’s) site “The Drum,” in piece written by Simon Smart, a man described on the ABC’s site as
. . . a Director of the Centre for Public Christianity and the co-author with Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein and Rachel Woodlock of For God’s Sake – An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion. A former history and English teacher, he studied theology at Regent College, Vancouver. He is the author of a number of books including Bright Lights Dark Nights – the Enduring Faith of 13 Remarkable Australians.
All it takes is a degree in theology to screw up one’s thinking, or so it seems in Smart’s piece “Fry vs. God: the comedian’s concerns aren’t new.” In it, Smart attack’s Stephen Fry’s short response on theodicy in his interview with Gay Byrne on Irish television (I’ve put it below in case you’ve forgotten it or haven’t seen it.) Asked what he’d say to God if he encountered Him, Fry responded that he’d ask God why there’s so much unmerited evil in the world, like kids getting cancer.
Fry’s short response has caused a lot of consternation among Christians. I’m a bit surprised at that, because the problem of evil, which spawned the discipline of theodicy, has been around as long as Christianity itself. Fry didn’t say anything that the Old Atheists didn’t say decades ago. But the old arguments need to be raised again with each generation of believers, and Fry is, after all, an immensely smart, popular, and likable man. His comments demand an answer.
Well, Smart has responded to Fry. As with all attempts to give a religious justification of evil, though, he fails miserably. Here’s how Smart explains why an all-loving and omnipotent god tortures children (my emphasis):
Ultimately when a Christian stops to consider the struggle of human existence they will want to point to the death and resurrection of Jesus as the centre of a very long, and still unfolding, story of how God launches a plan to redeem the world from its misery – a portrait of a God who has not remained aloof from the suffering but rather has become part of it.
The resurrection of Jesus points to God condemning all the things that have destroyed life, and promising a day when the weight of history and all the centuries of human cruelty, sadness and loss will be overcome. Is it enough? Not everyone will think so.
The biblical picture offers a promise of the possibility of a new beginning when murdered children will be raised up and restored, where families torn apart by violence will find peace and harmony again. It presents a vision of a time where crushing loneliness will be a thing of the past, where bodies broken and ravaged by disease or old age will be restored to strength and vitality, where people who have experienced grinding poverty will find abundance, where children ripped from their mother’s arms in a tsunami will be ushered in to new life. In the end Christianity is a story of the denial of the powers of darkness and violence and cruelty and hatred and heartbreak. And in their place the victory of goodness and mercy; kindness and love.
Every aspect of this vision is predicated on Jesus rising from death. If that didn’t happen, then it is right and proper to join Stephen Fry and to throw the whole thing out the window.
This is completely insane. It simply says that because of Jesus all things wrong will be made right in the next world. But that doesn’t answer the question at all, for the evil has still already occurred in our world! Even if there’s a new beginning, the end was often pretty bad. And God could have prevented those bad endings.
Is it better to have a kid who dies horribly of cancer subsequently find peace and harmony in heaven, or for that kid to not have gotten cancer in the first place, causing horrible suffering for herself and her parents? Which way of ordering the cosmos would be better? I would have thought that a truly good God would create a world in which there was no suffering of innocents and people went to heaven as well. Or why not just have a heaven that everyone lives in, and cut out the middleman? In fact, why make people in the first place? Smart gives no answers.
This week I’ve seen more than one Christian use similar arguments to justify evil, and they all seem blinkered to the problems. If God is omnipotent, he can do anything he wants, and if he makes innocents (or animals) suffer horribly, there must be a good explanation. The only credible ones left to believers are a). That God is sometimes evil, as he was in the Old Testament, or b). We don’t understand God’s ways. Any other explanation is pilpul. The most parsimonious explanation is, of course, that there is no God and “evil” is simply expected in an evolved world, a world where mutations cause cancer, people get infectious diseases, the tectonic plates move, and animals and microbes evolved to kill other animals.
At least Smart has the honesty to admit that if there were no Resurrection, then Christanity crumbles at its core. But his argument that the Resurrection justifies natural evils doesn’t hold water.
In the end, Smart plays his trump card: even if we don’t know whether there is a God, or why, if there is a good God, he creates evil, we have to keep the myths alive because of the Little People:
We may even, as Fry claims to have done, conjure up a degree of optimism in the face of the implications of a godless universe. But if we arrive at that point it would be fitting to acknowledge that, while doing nothing to rid ourselves of suffering we will have removed a source of profound hope that for centuries has sustained millions of people in the face of life’s joys and sorrows.
h/t: Phil
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The ultimate vaporware. As Douglas Adams might say, Sorry for the inconvenience caused by v1.0, but v2 will be much better.
So, WTF is God waiting for?
Simon Smart seems as intelligent as Maxwell Smart (Google it).
It saddens me to think that some people, even some USians, will indeed have to google Maxwell Smart. Or they’ll think, “Oh yeah, that movie starring Steve Carell.”
Missed it by that much!
Sorry about that, Chief!
I think we should use the Cone of Silence for this one.
What’d you say? I can’t hear you — you’re in the Cone of Silence!
Hold on…my shoe is ringing….
b&
My first email address was Janet@shoephone.apana.org.au. Apana died so I don’t have it any more.
Did it die, or is the server just under the Cone of Silence?
b&
They went public and started expecting to be paid. Since I only kept it out of sentiment I decided to let it go.
Would you believe 99 percent of the population are unaware of the series?
Its kinda like some hawkish defense of Guantanamo Bay. It’s perfectly justified because the guilty will be punished and innocent set free…eventually. If that doesn’t wash with you (and it shouldn’t), neither should Smart’s argument.
That’s the point I was going to make. If I went all Torquemada on some toddler for a year or three, but then bandaged her up and sent her on her way with a suitcase filled with a few million in unmarked small bills, would that make the torture okay? Maybe if it was a few hundred million in a numbered Swiss bank account?
…no?
Then why the fuck is it the greatest thing imaginable when Jesus does it? And, worse, why wait until after the torturous death for the grand payoff?
What the hell is the point?
b&
Another failure of this line of reasoning (pointed out elsewhere) is that it doesn’t compensate for the suffering of parent, siblings, or friends.
Albigensian crusaders under a pope named “Innocent” would say: “Kill them all. God will sort it out in the end”.
It reminds me of the time that I discussed the story of Job with an Orthodox Jew. She was all ready to defend what went on, until I asked what would happen if it were *your* family that was killed, or worse, you were one of the bystanders. No answer, of course.
He actually said that ridding the wold of religion will do nothing to curb suffering???
You’re right, he is completely insane.
I doubt this is Smart offering a way to falsify Christianity. I think it more likely this is Smart stating where the line is for his personal faith. He might concede that some of the claims of Christian mythology are not actually true, but for him the buck stops at the ressurection.
The funny thing is that even if we were to grant that “Jesus makes it up” in an afterlife there’s still the not minor issue of the pointless suffering of nonchristians … and of those who have gone before. Do only God’s special followers of today count?
Apparently — but not necessarily because the problem here has been considered and answered. Too many believers seem to put on faith goggles with accompanying rompers, reverting to the mindset of someone listening to a children’s story when they go into Spiritual Mode. Only the main characters (and that’s you, my child!) really merit attention. Everyone and everything else is filler.
Its not pointless. The point is to punish anyone who doesn’t believe.
Which makes perfect sense if the order is coming from humans trying to maintain and grow theocratic power. Not so much sense if the order is supposedly coming from a perfectly merciful tri-omni God.
I listened to an atheist/theist debate many years ago and when the theist was asked what happened to all those who were born before the coming of Jesus and hence had no chance to hear the word of god and be saved, the theist replied to the effect that god arranged things such that only those that were destined to go to hell were born before the coming of jebus.
It’s like you say, solipsism run amok, the believer is the center of the universe and the rest are but extras.
I wish I could remember the names of the debaters.
Geez what bloody-mindedness. Did it not occur to the theist that God could’ve just done the opposite? Had people destined to be saved live B.C. because hey, if they’re destined for heaven, they don’t need to hear the message to get there?
With some people it’s like, if there’s a way to interpret their theology to make more people suffer, that’s the way they’ll interpret it.
Anne Frank, what about her?
Oh, Jesus made sure the Mormons have her covered.
That is so sad.
But Jesus didn’t really die, since he(God) knew since the time of the OT that he would not really be “dead” and would rise again.
Plus he hasn’t given a way to falsify Christianity, since “Jesus rose from the dead” is weasely unfalsifiable. (to Christiaans at least) — Why? Cuz it’s true.
I didn’t know Theodicy was a real discipline. I thought it was a joke, a blend of ‘theology’ and ‘idiocy.’ Reading theodicy always confirmed what I had thought.
Why is acceptable for a god to do such horrible things, everything Fry described in the videos, but not humans? What god is doing according to Simon Smart is surgery without anaesthetic and only performing surgery on the damage god is responsible for.
Being eternal must have really messed up his sense of time. God could have fixed everything anytime he wants to, or just made everything fixed because he’s supposedly omnipotent and pretty clever. His poor timing also explains why god took so long to start creating the universe anyway, not surprising he rushed it.
When the first anesthetics were brought into use, there were doctors and surgeons who felt that they should be banned as it was mankind’s “lot” to suffer, especially in childbirth (sez so raht in da Babble!).
Anjeze Gonxha Bojaxhiu ( AKA Mother Teresa) thought similarly, so she did not give pain-relieving medication to her dying patients, though she accepted palliative medicine when she was dying.
Ha! I made the same mistake at first. I also couldn’t believe they were actually called apologists. “I’m sorry this argument isn’t very good…”
Oh, yeah. It’s been a while now, but I remember being dumbstruck that “apologist” was the actual term for these people. Maybe it’s better than “excusers.”
An “apology” is originally something said in one’s defense at a trial. I guess then the terms “apologist” and “apologetics” in this context is sort of revelling in (possible) martyrdom, after a fashion.
Interesting!
But given its modern connotation I’m rather surprised they haven’t changed it.
In science, the more questions you get answered, the clearer things become; with religion, the answers just create more confusion.
Probably nothing pushed me away from religion more than the absurd and offensive answers to the questions I had.
Very much like lying. You tell a lie, then you end up having to tell more lies, and so on and so forth, and it all gets more complicated and confused, and less believable as things snowball.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave…
Indeed, he also isn’t saying much that a theologian might not ponder, even if s/he already knows the pat answer in advance.
I also apprciate the quotes around “evil” as something to be expected in the world. True “evil” requires agency. A comic book foe who creates a tornado to destroy the superhero’s city is evil; a naturally occurring tornado is a product of inanimate forces: we call the ensuing catastrophe “evil,” as we might call child illnesses and so on, but that’s our interpretation. Lots of people I am sure believe in a non-interventionist God but then worship it as the perfect, immortal magician all the same. A non-interventionist God would still have created the system in which beings suffer; any explanation that doesn’t accept this is doomed to contradiction and failure. To anyone paying attention, that is!
This quibble comes up a lot in these sorts of discussions, but it’s somewhat of a red herring (no offense meant). Theodicy is considered to cover both the problem of human or agent-based evil, and the problem of unnecessary suffering from inanimate forces (theologians call this ‘natural evil.’). Jeffrey Dahmer is a theodicy problem…but so is a volcanic eruption.
So, you can discuss both here, or one or the other. Whichever suits your fancy. 🙂
Interesting. And if the Dahmer-volcano-type issue is a challenge, again, it’s very much the same question Mr. Fry raises of “how can God …” Or “why would God …” for Mr. Fry it’s part of the proof of non-existence; for theologians (theodicists? Theodiots?) it’s a question to be answered, and mostly you-know-who is still presumed “good” and not “evil.”
(no, I’m not that one, I have a brother Stephen, but he’s not that one either)
God could have created a universe without suffering e.g. wasp larvae that didn’t gestate inside a live caterpillar eating it from inside out, tectonic plates that stayed put, and asteroids that never deviated from a collision-free orbit. But he didn’t, he created this one.
The existence of suffering is not proof that a God doesn’t exist, but it does prove that a “good” God doesn’t exist, given a reasonable definition of good that includes not creating suffering when you have the power not to.
When all said and done, Christians need to choose one of these:
1. Your God does not exist
2. Your God is not good
The invention of “Theodicy” is a pathetic attempt to avoid making that choice.
Very nicely put!
And by most religions, he *did* create a place where suffering is supposedly impossible – heaven. So …
“but that’s our interpretation. ”
Our judgement of the villain’s behavior is also our interpretation. All good and evil is subjective.
That’s why in the philosophical literature theodicy is generally described as ‘the problem of suffering’ rather than the problem of evil. Suffering is, at least in principle, something objective and quantifiable, whilst evil is neither of those things.
Indeed – but it is still intent we are judging with a villain. Sure it’s all relative, but nature has no intent.
That’s true, but you can’t forget that theists claim god created us, loves us, and wants the best for us. So god’s interpretation of “evil” should be the same as our own. If a theist tries to argue that god’s interpretation might not be the same as ours the response would be “if god doesn’t interpret childhood cancer as evil then why couldn’t he have arranged so we don’t, either?”
The main problem with the deistic concept of a “non-interventionist” God is that the non-actions of an all-powerful being create as much of an effect as its actions do.
It’s like a clock on a mantle shelf: if I wind it, it keeps time and if I keep winding it, it continues to keep time. If I do not wind it, it runs down- in one case I am having an effect on the clock by doing something; in the other, by NOT doing something.
When the universe’s very existence is ascribed to the agency of an all-powerful deity, then anything, ANYTHING that occurs within that universe is entirely due to that Deity’s choosing to act, or not to act, upon it.
Yes. The buck doesn’t *simply* stop with god; it *necessarily* stops with god.
was it impossible for god to create Adam such that his actions were all righteous and that is all we would inherit? Why did we have to inherit sin?
Well, “free will” is the typical defense. I don’t find it compelling but even if we accept it for sake of argument, there was a couple of pretty damn easy fixes God could’ve implemented.
1. Have the fruit carry with it a penalty of “itchy rash” rather than “brings death to the entire universe and everything in it.”
2. Have the fruit grow 200′ off the ground instead of 6′ off the ground.
Well, he could even have had the fruit inedible
Or not plant the tree altogether.
Or he could have put some clothes on those poor people, for Pete’s sake and treated them to a nice meal of burnt offering instead of vegan dishes..
I’d have much preferred it had he let us stick with fur. So much easier & cheaper.
This omnipotent seems to me to have been short of options.
Where’s the fun in that?
If the bible were accurate I’d say that the bad little super-being boy-child in the Star Trek Episode The Squire of Gothos
is a much better interpretation of the god of the bible than what the typical Sophisticated Theologian portrays.
If only Eve had the knowledge of good and evil so she could know that the snake was evil and was tempting her into eating the forbidden fruit that contains the knowledge of good and evil.
But that’s simply not how the Lord works. He demands what our German neighbours call “befehl ist befehl.” Orders are orders. Who even needs a discussion about ‘morality’ and ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Those are all just words anyway. Submission and total obedience to an unquestionable supernatural entity is the way to go.
The best illustration of Hitchens argument that religion = politics is right up there in the very first chapters of the bible.
I think the reason Stephen Fry’s answer is causing such consternation is that it is, quite simply, so obvious that he’s right. Religious leaders can feel followers drifting to the side of reason with every syllable he so beautifully ennunciates, and they have no coherent response.
I think that’s true, but another reason is simply that he’s so well-liked that even believers listen to what he said, and, because they know he’s popular, and will reach a wide audience, many of them have attempted to refute his…well, I say argument, but it’s really just a sharp tug at the emperor’s cloak.
What Fry says is so blindingly, embarrassingly obvious to everyone, including believers, that it’s less an argument and more an axiomatic truth.
Important truths need to be repeated at least once a generation, because humans don’t learn by osmosis. Fry probably caused much ado because he reached relatively ‘new’ people who hadn’t thought about it. Not just us old people who have.
Yes. It’s easy to assume everybody thinks about this stuff as much as we do, but for a long time I couldn’t have given a flying saucer’s fuck about religion, atheism or science.
Actually Heather, I think there is a perfectly good explanation for theodicy…
http://pictoraltheology.blogspot.com/2014/08/to-boldly-go-where-no-excuse-has-gone.html
I don’t think that’s the way Larry Moran sees it, although I think you’re on the right track.
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/stephen-fry-blows-it-by-assuming-he.html
Larry Moran in that link has completely missed the point, and he gets straightened out by a number of his commenters.
*Has a look.*
Wow, I completely agree with you. Moran often seems more contrarian than it’s healthy to be.
Heather Hastie:
Well I think one other reason, the reason that dare not be spoken but that almost certainly motivates a lot of the Christaian backlash, is well …… that little matter of a wedding in January that Mr. Fry had.
Christians love this man but hate his sin. (yeah right)
“How dare “one of those” tell us anything about our God!!” (me channelling a thousand Christian head voices)
The joy in this restoration to happiness disappears when it’s not framed into the familiar hero-narrative where someone comes in and solves a problem. God is supposed to be the ultimate cause of everything, including the problems, all created for a glorious purpose and in full knowledge of all consequences.
The biblical picture now presents a vision of a sadistic control freak who tortures those it “loves” in order to increase the rejoicing when they stop. A mother abandons a child just so she can swoop in much later and cuddle them close; a doctor injects a patient with a horrible disease so the provided remedy is welcomed with great relief; the thief impoverishes their victims so that they can sense real gratitude when they give everything back … and then some. It’s become a macabre theater where happiness isn’t good enough unless you can contrast it with enormous suffering. The more he makes you suffer, the happier you will be.
That, by the way, is one of the most popular theodicies of all. You can’t know joy till you know sorrow.
Of course, this justifies any amount of cruelty.
Isn’t that called Stockholm syndrome?
Yes. Or Battered-Wife Syndrome (praise him, praise him for his mercies!)
“A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
All that science-y stuff is hard. Goddidit is so soothingly magical.
In similar vein: “CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.” Ambrose Bierce.
Australia is as you say a ‘pretty nonreligious country’ but one of the most religious must surely be Ken Ham, who although living in the US is a Aussie by birth.
But think of WHY he moved to America. (;
The sheep were getting too obviously nervous around him…?
b&
Hey, that’s New Zealand.
Where Men are Men, and sheep are nervous…
(Bloody Aussies, pinching the credit for everything…)
I didn’t know Ben was from downunder!
Ben isn’t, Ken Ham is.
It was the credit for the nervous-sheep saying that I was concerned with, of course, not Ken Ham, the Aussies are welcome to him.
It is truely ironic, we are of the time when once god saved it is now time, to save god.
As they say, good luck with that!
David Quinn also responds in the Irish Independent:
Why I just can’t believe in Stephen Fry’s ill-considered atheist outburst
His “response” is to change the topic:
1) Fry believes in Free Will, so has some ‘splainin to do to other atheists and
2) “But matter cannot produce a moral law.” Therefore, given atheism, morality is man-made and Fry has no grounds to judge God. “Similarly, Fry affords himself the luxury of denying the existence of God while holding on to belief in an overarching, objective moral law against which the actions of others, including even God (if he exists), can be judged.”
These non-responses are neither novel nor deep. Fry’s original statement assumed the existence of God ad arguendo, and showed weaknesses in the theist position. Christians tell us not only that God exists, but that we were “created in His image”, so it seems to fair to presume that God’s morality should be similar to our own.
If Quinn were to follow through on his own arguments in the way he insists Fry should, I should ask him to clarify that he has just made an argument that bone cancer in children shouldn’t be considered a bad thing by God.
Quinn uses the same essentially irrelevant free will argument in an old clip of him arguing with Dawkins I think.
And Fry didn’t mention anything that presupposed an assumption on his part that morality is objective(which I’m glad about). He referred only to suffering, which, unlike good and evil, is objective and, in principle, quantifiable. On top of that Fry was measuring God by His own criteria, not anyone else’s.
A source of hope nicely evolved to content people down the centuries with oppression and penury, while aristocrats and churchmen lived in privilege and comfort. Christianity is a degrading, slavish belief system.
Did somebody say “opiate?”
It seems this whole line or argument originated with William Lane Craig:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaughter-of-the-canaanites
“Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.
So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged?”
He repeated this in a debate but I can’t find it.
I’d be astonished if WiLCo was the first christian to use the ‘they all go to heaven so stop whining’ defence.
I wonder if WLC goes to hospitals and tell terminally ill children that they are happy to quit the earth and have ‘incomparable joy in heaven’. Joy would certainly be incomparable for those children, for God made sure there was no such thing on earth for them.
That’s rather neatly put.
I wonder if he goes and tells that to those children’s parents.
Not only that, suffering and misery is clearly unevenly distributed in life.
Many people live clearly happier, less troubled and more fulfilling lives on earth than others. Obviously this includes Christians who it is assumed go to heaven.
So on one hand you have people born with terrible disease whose earthly lives consist of horrendous physical and emotional suffering ending in an early childhood death.
And in other you have people who live long, healthy mostly happy lives and who luckily die without protracted illness.
Yet the latter end up in heaven for eternal bliss as well!
Gee, I guess all that suffering ISN’T required to enjoy an eternity with God.
Some folks apparently are just lucky to get both heavenly bliss AND a happy fulfilling time for their one shot on living on earth.
Lucky them!
Of course, maybe the children dying of horrible diseases were “necessary” to show the ones living in comfort that they have it good. God: “See, I could have done to you what I let happen to them! So live it up!”
Religion is simply voluntary acceptance of misery. All can be explained with the transcendent. Selfish and disgusting.
Why can’t people see that religion pushes away empathy for fellow humans than any other mechanisms ever invented by mankind?
I think that describes the effect of many ideologies, not just religion.
For one person, happiness might be forever walking outside in the sunrise. Another one wants to stare with their beloved husband or wife into the sunset. A kid might want to play in the afternoon alone. If those souls are “persons” they are going to have different ideas about what makes them happy, and here is conflict. How cruel would it be when a baby stays a baby forever and how annoying for the parents? If it ages, it dies. If souls could be any age they wanted, it makes agreeing on a perfect Christian family re-union even more of a soulache. People tend to die at different times and no “perfect moment” ever exists. My parents are children to their parents, who are children to their parents. It cannot exist in one snapshot as such infantile Christians imagine. If all those heavenly realities are separate instances, they aren’t the “real thing”. The other souls in your heaven-instance are just ghostly actors that play their part so that you, the protagonist soul, feels happy. Would that make you happy? Would that be perfect?
Their heaven is an incoherent nonsense and cringe-worthy that seemingly adult people can take such infantile fantasies seriously.
Exactly. Even Mark Twain made fun of it.
A few years back I was in a library book discussion for The Lovely Bones, a murder story which has a dead protagonist, a young girl who describes what it’s like to be in heaven. It was interesting listening to the other members cautiously trying to advance their own ideas of heaven in front of an atheist (me.) They seemed to recognize that the description in the book (your favorite house! and your pet greets you!) was silly, but they couldn’t really come up with anything which sounded both specific and not-silly to their own ears.
I could be wrong, but I had the impression that had I not been there they would all have let their freak flag fly and wallowed in exchanging lavish details of sparkly rainbows and angel kitties and ice cream every single day.
And bacon! Lots of bacon!
Not pig heaven then…
That’s my thought too. What do competitive sports people and card players do in heaven? Does everyone win? That seems lame, not heavenly. Do they sometimes lose? Also not heavenly, unless ‘heavenly’ includes being upset and angry. Do they not get to compete or play at all? Definitely not heavenly. Maybe God alters their desires so they don’t mind losing or don’t want to play? Most definitely not my idea of heaven.
I’m reminded of the conversation between Mr. Smith and Neo in one of the matrix movies. Smith explains that they initially set up a paradise-like matrix but none of the human subjects would buy it and it failed miserably.
One time when Stephen Fry was visiting Salt Lake City, a Mormon was explaining his faith to a crowd of onlookers. “We believe that when you die, you are reunited with your family for all eternity.”
Fry looked at him and asked, “Yes, but what happens if you’re good?”
😀
Thanks for that!
Reblogged this on Almost Rational.
If the answer is that “[all] will be made right in the next world”, then why didn’t Gos simply create “the next world” in the first place, avoiding the apparently-unnecessary prior step of the evil and suffering of this world?
I dare say there are answers to that question, but I doubt they’ll be particularly compelling.
In what other context would any rational person accept the argument that, if someone stands idly by and watches a toddler drown in a mop bucket, it’s simply a matter of the rest of us not understanding his ways?
Nicely put.
and if evil is a necessary part of god’s plan, the theist has the quite onerous burden of justifying every single instance of suffering that occurs for all time. for example, if we could tally the number of children that have died (presumably god can), how would god’s plan have been sabotaged if just one child from that lot had been spared?
But at least one child was spared – they are the ones that are not dead (survived cancer/car crashes tsunamis etc). So it has already happened silly!
This theodisopologetics stuff is easy!
yeah, it would look even more embarrassing for an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent creator to oversee a world of nonstop suffering where no one ever survived disaster or disease.
because apparently it’s not incongruous for an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent being to be also incompetent.
Omni-incompetent, even.
O/ O? O? …..O!!!
stupid shift key — the slash should be a ?
This may be a novel anti-God argument. If God’s by definition the best at everything, then he must be the best at incompetence. Since he’s also the best at competence he ends up canceling himself out.
The nauseating Swinburne has an explanation. Suffering offers ‘opportunities’. Gets your soul in order for an eternity in the company of religious zealots.
Reminds me of a tagline I saw – ‘Oh God, not _another_ learning opportunity!’
It gets even more daft when you add in the old ‘the sin of Adam which caused the fallen world’ chestnut. The thought of god holding up her hands and saying ‘ hold on folks, sin? Evil? Nah mate it was all your fault ‘always brings a smile. I harbour a secret desire to open a secular humanist school in place of my local catholic place when it eventually fails and the school crest will be a serpent. To my mind anything that encourages people to seek knowledge deserves to be a symbol of education. Until then, I think the best option is to point and laugh at the nonsense spouter?
I just watched the Stephen Fry clip again to make sure I had not misremembered it, and I hadn’t. It really is as measured and reasonable as I have ever heard him speak. Astonishingly, the commentariat in the online UK newspapers that I read refer to his answer variously as a tirade and a diatribe.
God is a very rotten evil low life scumbag since he enjoys when people suffer.