Category: theodicy

Once again, theologians get paid for making stuff up

July 16, 2025 • 9:00 am

I am in fact surprised that two Iranian philosophers (yes, from the Department of Philosophy of Science, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran) are even allowed to publish this paper, which refers to God, not Allah, and doesn’t mention the Qur’an.  Well, that’s a good question, but not the question masticated in this paper in the journal Open Theology (click title to read or see the pdf here.

What we have is the usual kind of Sophisticated Theology™: a paper raising a question based on unsupported premises (there is a god that is kind, omnipotent and loving), and which then goes on to make up an answer about how certain baffling phenomena in the Universe can comport with such a god. Normally the topic of such inquiry is theodicy: why there is evil (especially “natural evil,” like childhood cancer or earthquakes) in a world made and run by such a god. This time, though, the topic is randomness. How, the sweating pair of theologians ask, can true randomness, untouched by God, exist in his Universe? More than that: how can true randomness, as part of the evolutionary process, unerringly wind up producing a species made in God’s image. As the authors ask, pretending to be puzzled:

. . . . from a theological perspective, the randomness and lack of purpose in the evolutionary process appear to conflict with God’s power, sovereignty, and wisdom.

Theologians cannot let this stand, for nothing can be allowed to conflict with God’s assumed wonderfulness and power. Nor do they assume that the randomness and lack of purpose in evolution comes from—could it be?—Satan.  No, in the end it’s all part of God’s plan.

The authors first discuss two types of randomness: stuff that appears to be random to us but in reality could be understood, or even predicted, if we had perfect knowledge. Whether a coin comes up heads or tails (or edge!) is this type of randomness.

The other type, which the authors take it upon themselves to comport with God, is fundamental, unpredictable (“ontological”) randomness—chance inherent in a system that cannot be predicted, even with perfect knowledge.  Quantum-mechanical “randomness”, or quantum probabilistic outcomes, are of this type. As the authors say:

In contrast, the real challenge for the relationship between God and the world lies in the existence of ontological or metaphysical randomness, which suggests that chance is an inherent aspect of the world’s structure and is inseparable from its dynamic nature. Ontological randomness cannot simply be viewed as a reflection of our inability to gain a certain understanding or a cognitive deficiency in comprehending the physical world. In other words, ontological randomness suggests a type of randomness inherent in the fundamental indeterminacy of the natural world. When every explanation of cosmic, macroscopic, and even biological phenomena relies on the principles of particle physics – which itself is characterized by intrinsic indeterminacy and stochastic events – it appears that we are confronted with ontological randomness.

. . . Ontological randomness. . . refers to events that cannot be predetermined in principle. Contrary to the views of proponents of ID, evolutionists argue that randomness is inherently non-purposeful. It is not merely a matter of attributing randomness to mutations due to our limited epistemic capacity to analyze the complex systems involved in the causal processes – similar to our inability to fully understand the causes of earthquakes or the movement of airborne particles. Rather, the fundamental indeterminacy of these processes means that no one can predict when they occur, much like our lack of access to the origins of nuclear emissions from Uranium-238.

Now the authors assume that evolution is driven by ontologically random mutations (“random” meaning, in the evolutionary sense, that the chance that a mutation will occur has nothing to do whether it will increase or decrease the bearer’s reproduction).  This itself may not be a good assumption, for, if we had perfect knowledge, we might be able to predict when and where a change in the DNA might take place. The role of quantum phenomena in mutation (if there is such a role) is still unknown.

But let’s be charitable and assume that yes, mutations in the evolutionary process are like movements of electrons: ontologically unpredictable. How could such a process not reflect decisions of God and yet wind up with his most desired of all “creations,” Homo sapiens.

Here’s the authors’ answer:

Our preferred reconciliation does not view the relationship between God and the natural world as a dualistic one. Any dualistic perspective ultimately leads to the problem of interaction and, consequently, the “God of the gaps” fallacy. Instead, we embrace the open theistic view, which holds that the world exists within God. Although the divine transcends the natural world, it is also immanent within it; thus, the evolutionary process occurring in the world unfolds as a manifestation of God’s self-expression and self-consciousness.

The world is progressing toward God’s self-consciousness through the evolutionary process, which has culminated in human beings who exist within the natural world, are part of nature, and possess awareness of both their surroundings and of God Himself. In this perspective, the process of evolution becomes a revelation of God’s nature. God reveals Himself in the universe by becoming increasingly self-conscious, and this self-consciousness fosters freedom; true freedom arises from autonomy rather than heteronomy, and autonomy is rooted in self-awareness. The divine is indeed the sovereign designer and intelligent architect of the world, but does not merely create from a position of supreme distance. As Carl Schmitt notes, “The sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs by itself.“

If you detect a whiff of pantheism here, you’re right, and the authors admit it (bolding is mine):

According to our panentheistic and open-theistic view, God is the designer of the world, which serves as a revelation of the divine mind and nature. God does not reside outside the world; rather, the divine is immanent within it and transcendent of it. The world does not operate on autopilot. The randomness we observe in the world signifies divine sovereignty and omnipotence, granting the world the necessary freedom to reveal its nature, which simultaneously unveils the nature of God.

Of course that last bit is totally made up, for the authors have no way of knowing that this is true of God (remember, they can’t even show us that there’s a God). This disproves the idea that the “clash” of ideas instantiated by freedom of speech will eventually arrive at the truth.  Theology is one disproof of that idea, for it and its understanding of gods haven’t advanced one iota despite many clashes of ideas.

But of course God being all-knowing, somehow must have realized that the randomness He himself created would produce, with the help of natural selection, a creature made in His own image. Isn’t that special?

These lucubrations are part of what is called “open theology,” in which God grants the world freedom. Not just physical freedom, but its result, real free will (which of course the authors see as ontologically unpredictable, though it isn’t).  In their drive to make up a concept of God that comports with ontological randomness, they hit on an answer that isn’t new: God wanted a world with maximal freedom because such a world is the best of all possible worlds:

The traditional view of divine sovereignty is often characterized by the notion of God having full control over every event, leading to the idea of eternal predetermination. This dominant perspective in the history of Abrahamic religions posits that the existence of ontological randomness implies that the entire system is not under God’s control, allowing for procedures that operate without purpose under divine sovereignty. However, according to open theism, we should comprehend God’s sovereignty in harmony with divine mercy. Thus, divine sovereignty does not imply a paternalistic control over all things; rather, it embodies the granting of freedom. The truly powerful agent bestows life and freedom, enabling others to flourish instead of confining and controlling them. The Almighty is not merely an omni-controller or authority but a liberator, allowing all creatures to choose their own paths according to their inherent potential and encouraging them to reveal their capabilities. This process of world disclosure is itself a manifestation of God and contributes to divine self-consciousness.

So God’s at the wheel after all, and the freedom he bestowed on the world includes the freedom of children to die of cancer and of the tectonic plates to cause death-dealing earthquakes and tsunamis. (This kind of theodicy the authors don’t explain.)

I can’t bear to go on much longer as I watch the sweat-sodden authors make a virtue of necessity, but I’ll quote one more bit to show how they do this. As one sees so often in Sophisticated Theology™, they simply attribute their solution to another theologian, as if citing yet another shill somehow justifies their own “solution”:

As Bradley eloquently explains, power, when understood in the context of mercy and love, does not necessitate complete control; rather, it signifies the full endowment of freedom and life. The omnipotent is the one who most effectively enables creatures to experience life freely, filled with love and happiness. Certainly, God has a distinct plan, a desired program, and a unique teleology for creation; however, this teleology unfolds through its manifestation in nature, as the natural world evolves through its history.

. . . From this perspective, the randomness present in mutations reflects the freedom that God grants to all creatures. Through the evolutionary process, the world progresses toward an outcome of self-consciousness. Consequently, human beings emerge as the result of this evolutionary journey, possessing the capacity to understand their place in the world and, as part of the natural order, becoming aware of the world itself.

It always amazes me that theologians who can offer no convincing proof of a god’s existence are so sure about god’s nature and his methods.  How do they know this stuff?  The answer is that they don’t: they are either making stuff up or stealing ideas from their predecessors.

You may have noted that yes, there is teleology here. There is surely not complete freedom, as a rerun of evolution, if quantum mechanics has any effect on mutations, would not necessarily produce either consciousness or humans. And yes, the randomness isn’t true ontological randomness because it is biased towards getting what God wants (my bolding):

. . . . if we see God as immanent in the world and, so, in a panentheistic view according to which God is transcendent of the world but is not separated from nature, then we can explain why nature is biased toward the marvelous. The reason is that nature is manifesting God’s marvelous beauty.

To that, all I can say is “oy vey!”

In the end, then, the authors have produced nothing new. They’ve espoused pantheism, in which the God-who-is-in-everything has set up the world so it produces “the marvelous”, i.e. H. sapiens. This is not novel, and it’s not even ontological randomness. It is hooey. And two Iranian philosophers of science have gotten paid to produce it. The only question is not why they go on about this stuff at such length, but how the journal Open Theology was willing to publish a paper with such a mundane answer. Do they apply no critical standards? The answer is in the second word of the journal’s title.

The biggest question, though, is how I can be on an Arctic trip and have time to go after such bushwah. The answer to that one is that today is a sea day, and I don’t have a book to read or wish to watch television.

Bushwah!

h/t: B. Charlesworth

A religionist gives us theodicy

October 12, 2022 • 12:30 pm

An anonymous reader just responded (after three years) to two readers’ comments on an old post from March, 2019:  “CNN uncritically covers a ‘miracle‘”.  The CNN story was about a church that burned down in West Virginia, but all the Bibles were spared. CNN reported this with others’ comments that the survival of the books constituted nothing less than a miracle.  That of course raises the question of what kind of God would spare a bunch of books while allowing the Nazis to kill 10 million people and who still regularly stands by and watches children die of cancer.

Two readers responded; first Christopher:

and then Keith’s response to what Christopher said:

Good point. Then a few days ago I got a comment on this post from an anonymous reader who wanted to explain why God allows bad things to happen to innocent people. I reproduce it exactly as I got it. (I didn’t post this, of course.) I’ve put my favorite part in bold:

It’s late 3 years late or so I guess but still gotta say it none the same. Your arguments stand on the foundation that only good things should happen to you, which is flawed and even then it also assumes that you are on God’s level, aka smart enough or sentient enough to question his motives and actions.
Even as adults we do not explain the reason of all our actions or request to children and sometimes it takes years for said child to see the reasoning, but we are flawed creatures and sometimes we just do things one way because we want to and there is no real overarching motive. Now I would assume that if a God exist he would be sentient or powerful enough to not need your ok to do something and if he wanted to send another flood to kill out the whole world along with all the babies and children like Noah it would be His prerogative.The only thing in Job that could even have been considered from God was the tornado that killed the children. Most of the evils inflicted on Job was because of humans doing wicked to one another. The thieves the raiders etc….. But let me ask you this; do you know that God is perfect and fully holy and cannot stand the sight of sin. Imagine a God who is gracious enough to give you free will says but if you do things contrary to my nature I will cast you out into eternal darkness. From a perfect being of light any sin/darkness is enough to condemn you to eternal “death” never to appear before His presence again. And as God he doesnt have to explain anything to you. Nor pander to your wishes or discuss why when millions of Jews were killed he sat back and watch, or why he sat on his throne and watch as Jesus his son was on the cross bearing the sins of the same people who was killing him. God is merciful to all and even if we suffer it is nothing compared to the reward that he will give. GOD IS No man’s DEBTOR and he will repay everyone according to our works.

This is perhaps the most common answer to the query, “Why does God allow innocent people to suffer, especially from physical evil (earthquakes, tsunamis, disease, etc.)?” There are two parts to the answer. The first is that He’s God, for crying out loud, and doesn’t have to give reasons for what he does. (This is the “Divine Command” theory of people like William Lane Craig.)

But then the commenter contradicts his professed ignorance (I’m assuming a male) by explaining that the suffering of people on earth will be compensated by a wonderful existence in the afterlife. That, however, raises two other questions. First, will those who suffered gratuitously on Earth get EXTRA rewards in Heaven? That seems unlikely since everyone is supposed to be basking equally in the glory of God.

Second, if there are no heavenly bonuses for earthly suffering, a position that I think most Christians would accept, then the question remains: why is there gratuitous suffering on Earth? After all, if God prevented earthquakes and childhood cancers, the net amount of suffering overall would still be less. Suffering is suffering.

The tortuous explanations of this reader show once again that theodicy—the theological excuses for the existence of evil—is the Achilles heel of religion. I just asked a former believer how she would rationalize evil when she was a Christian. She replied that she learned that stuff as a child, and the answer was always “It’s God’s will.” None of the children were sophisticated enough to ask the followup question. By the time they get sophisticated enough, they’re too brainwashed to deal with such quibbles. But it still amazes me that people can hold these beliefs.

The existence of physical evils occurring to innocent people would seem to drive any rational person away from Christianity, for its God, and many other gods, are seen as all-powerful and loving.

As always, the most parsimonious argument is that there is no God. The alternative is that God is either malicious, impotent, or at least doesn’t care about suffering.

A reader tells us why God allows suffering

May 20, 2022 • 7:30 am

I love the amateurs who engage in theodicy, though, to be sure, they don’t give palpably worse explanations for earthly suffering than do the Sophisticated Theologians®

Reader “Travis”, a true believer, attempted to put this comment on my May 4 post, “Why should nonbelievers pray and go to church?”

The “solution” to the “problem of evil” (at least in the sense of unjust suffering), by my thinking, is this:At the end of the proverbial day all suffering will either be the just punishment  of those who reject God or will be suffering which those who love God will be grateful to have suffered for the accomplishment of God’s good purposes.

Note several things, not least the assurance with which Travis claims to understand God’s plan.  Also, this explanation fails to explain important aspects of suffering, like why infants who die of cancer or other afflictions—before they even know about God and therefore can’t love him—nevertheless suffer.  Further, who would be grateful for earthly suffering, unless that suffering is somehow a prerequisite to being with God?

And what about the suffering of people who accept God, like (honorable) priests, rabbis, and imams? They certainly don’t reject God!

The fact remains, and nobody can explain it, is that there is a huge amount of gratuitous suffering on this planet that God could have prevented had he chosen to, and the explanation above says nothing about suffering as the price of having “free will.” (That explanation, as readers have noted, makes little sense, and at any rate doesn’t explain physical evil: stuff not resulting from human action but from diseases, microbes, or catastrophes like earthquakes and tsunamis.)

Reply to Travis (politely), if you wish, and I’ll inform him/her of the thread.

 

NYT op-ed proposes ditching the idea of God because He’s “hateful”

April 15, 2022 • 10:15 am

Well I’ll be blowed, as a sailor might say: the New York Times has published a full-on article calling for atheism—the rejection of God. The author, brought up as an orthodox Jew, says we should simply give up the idea of God because the Biblical God, at least as portrayed in the Passover/Exodus story, was “hateful”.

It’s an old and classic argument, but not one you expect to see in the New York Times. Click on the screenshots to read:

You surely know the Jews-in-Egypt story and the Passover tale. Here’s the Wikipedia summary:

In the Book of Exodus, the Israelites are enslaved in ancient Egypt. Yahweh, the god of the Israelites, appears to Moses in a burning bush and commands Moses to confront Pharaoh. To show his power, Yahweh inflicts a series of 10 plagues on the Egyptians, culminating in the 10th plague, the death of the first-born.

This is what the LORD says: “About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt – worse than there has ever been or ever will be again.”

—Exodus 11:4-6

Before this final plague Yahweh commands Moses to tell the Israelites to mark a lamb‘s blood above their doors in order that Yahweh will pass over them (i.e., that they will not be touched by the death of the firstborn).

Those were some formidable plagues on the Egyptians, including frogs, boils, hail, locusts, pestilence, and so on. And each time Pharaoh was on the verge of giving in and releasing the Jews, God would “harden Pharoah’s heart”, so he wouldn’t let those Israelites go.  Finally, after the “passover” incident, in which God killed every first-born Egyptian (Jews were “passed over” by marking their doors with lamb’s blood), Pharoah’s heart softened, and he let the Jews go. It is this incident that’s celebrated by Passover.  This year Passover begins this evening and lasts until the evening of April 23.

(We’ll ignore the four decades of wandering in the Sinai, which is inexplicable.)

The thing is—and I believe I mention this in Faith Versus Fact—all those deaths and plagues and boils were God’s fault! It was God Hmself who hardened Pharoah’s heart. He didn’t have to do that–he could have made Pharoah let the Jews go after the first plague. But he didn’t! God kept hardening his heart, over and over again.

And this is what bothers Auslander (as well as another perfidy):

Two aspects of the Passover story have troubled me since I was first taught them long ago in an Orthodox yeshiva in Monsey, N.Y. I was 8 years old, and as the holiday approached, our rabbi commanded us to open our chumashim, or Old Testaments, to the Book of Exodus. To get us in the holiday spirit, he told us gruesome tales of torture and persecution.

“The Egyptians,” he told us, “used the corpses of Jewish slaves in their buildings.”

“You mean they used slaves to build their buildings,” I asked, “and the slaves died from work?”

“No,” said the rabbi. “They put the Jewish bodies into the walls and used them as bricks.”

This is the part that should make a rational person give up God:

. . .God, it seems, paints with a wide brush. He paints with a roller. In Egypt, said our rabbi, he even killed first-born cattle. He killed cows. If he were mortal, the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims would be dragged to The Hague. And yet we praise him. We emulate him. We implore our children to be like him.

Perhaps now, as missiles rain down and the dead are discovered in mass graves, is a good time to stop emulating this hateful God. Perhaps we can stop extolling his brutality. Perhaps now is a good time to teach our children to pass over God — to be as unlike him as possible.

“And so God killed them all,” the rabbis and priests and imams can preach to their classrooms. “That was wrong, children.”

“God threw Adam out of Eden for eating an apple,” they can caution their students. “That’s called being heavy-handed, children.”

Cursing all women for eternity because of Eve’s choices?

“That’s called collective punishment, children,” they can warn the young. “Don’t do that.”

“Boo!” the children will jeer.

This is a simple argument. If God is benevolent and omnipotent, He could have prevented this misery and death.  That means that if he exists, he’s either cruel or relatively powerless, and that’s not the conception of God held by any in the Abrahamic faith.

The existence of moral evil, like one human killing another, has been excused by various theologians as an unavoidable consequence of the free will vouchsafed to us by God, or by other sneaky and ludicrous devices of theodicy. But none of them explain physical evil—deaths by tsunamis, earthquakes, childhood cancer, and so on. And in this case, it’s not moral evil unless you conceive of God Himself as immoral—for it was God himself who caused all this suffering and death.  Again we run into a problem.

So it’s not just physical evil that is a death blow to the Abrahamic conception of God, but also God’s own maliciousness as described in scripture, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic alike. Who wants to believe in a God who lets innocent people suffer and die? “God’s ways are mysterious,” answer the theologians, but yet they seem to know everything else about God. It’s just the hard-to-understand stuff that they fob off as “mystery.”

Auslander’s ultimate lesson is to be kind and try to mend the divisions between humans:

This year, at the end of the Seder, let’s indeed throw our doors open — to strangers. To people who aren’t our own. To the terrifying them, to the evil others, those people who seem so different from us, those we think are our enemies or who think us theirs, but who, if they sat down around the table with us, we’d no doubt find despise the pharaohs of this world as much as we do, and who dream of the same damned thing as us all:

Peace.

Well, though Auslander’s  intentions are good, he’s wrong here. Not everybody dreams of peace. I know of certain Russians, for example, who dream of war.  So I’ll let Auslander have his “Imagine” moment here, but what I’d like NYT readers to take on board is Auslander’s argument against God from evil. It’s a syllogism:

a. God is omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent (assumption)
b. But the world isn’t organized as if it’s run by an omniscient and benevolent God (observation)
c. Therefore we must either conceive of a God who is malicious, weak, or sadistic, or else deny the existence of God.

I vote for the “no god” part of “c”. It’s more parsimonious.

I also vote for more such atheism in the NYT. After all Tish Harrison Warren spews her Anglican palaver in the op-ed section once a week. How often do we see an article like this? Shouldn’t atheism at least get equal time, especially given the absence of evidence for god?

h/t: Enrico

NYT readers, including Dan Dennett, respond to Ross Douthat’s column on the “increasing” evidence for God

August 21, 2021 • 1:15 pm

The other day I dissected Ross Douthat’s long-form NYT essay, “A guide to finding faith.” In short, it was dire, but no worse than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.  His thesis was that, in this age of science, empiricism gives us more reason than ever to believe in God, especially Douthat’s Catholic God. It still baffles me why the NYT would publish such tripe, but the proportion of tripeish material in the paper is approaching that of a bistro in Normandy.

But the readers have responded, and you’ll find five letters at the site below (click on link). Four of them are critical of organized religion, while one misguided soul supports Douthat.  There are two notable letters in the former category, and I’ll reproduce them below.

To the Editor:

On a weekend when fundamentalist Muslims were winning a war against the United States, and as fundamentalist Christians demand the right to cause their fellow Americans to suffer and die from a preventable disease, Ross Douthat had the gall to tell me that I ought to accept the same primitive explanations that led directly to their fundamentalism. Hard pass.

David Bonowitz
San Francisco

and:

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat is so frantic in his campaign to stop the erosion of faith in faith that he can’t resist twice committing the sin I call lying for Christ.

First, he unaccountably misinterprets the meaning of the title of my book “Breaking the Spell,” which called for scrutinizing the phenomena of religion with the same objectivity we adopt when studying viral pandemics.

Second, he misinterprets illusionism, the well-evidenced theory that says that evolution has designed us to be conscious of an efficient oversimplification of the physical world: a user-illusion that helps us track the features of the world that matter to us.

It is ironic that Mr. Douthat himself breaks the spell, taking a hard look at the difficulties confronting would-be religious believers today. His recommendation that they cultivate a return to the mind-set of the Dark Ages is particularly telling. We secularists can glory in the wonders of “creation” without the nagging worries he exposes.

Daniel C. Dennett
Medford, Mass.
The writer is co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

h/t: Barry

Some pushback by religion

August 18, 2021 • 1:15 pm

What I thought would be a pretty uncontroversial post the other day about Ross Douthat’s ridiculous arguments for God as the most parsimonious explanation for nature, turned out to generate a lot of heat. You didn’t see all of it because some came down in the form of emails and of comments so inordinately intemperate or stupid that I didn’t post them.  I don’t want interminable discussions of dumb and long-refuted arguments for God to contaminate this website, though I did allow a few believers to have their say.

Among the accusations were these:

a. You can’t prove atheism. This amuses me because atheism is simply the failure to accept the existence of gods, mainly because there’s no evidence for them. But yes, you can’t prove that there’s no god because you can never prove a negative like this. But you can’t prove that there are no fairies, either, yet I remain an a-fairyist. All I can say is that the less and less evidence we have for God, when (as Victor Stenger often said) there should be evidence for God, the less likely it is that God exists. Just look at it from a Bayesian perspective.

b. The presence of God is not an empirical matter. This was said by someone who characterized himself as a “firm believer”, in which case I wonder why he believes so firmly!

c.  The question of moral evil in a world run by God was solved by Alvin Plantinga, and most philosophers accept his explanation as a valid one. However, my argument was not about moral evil—Plantinga’s explanation is that we have free will, a higher good than the moral evil it creates)—but about physical (or natural) evil, like tsunamis or childhood cancers.  Plantinga’s explanation for that is outlined on pp. 148-149 of Faith Versus Fact, and involves invoking Satan. It’s ridiculous and no sane person would accept it.

d. Even physical evil is compatible with God, for what is a mere lifetime of suffering from disease compared to the glory of eternity with God? My response: what kind of sadistic god would allow even a mere lifetime of suffering if he could prevent it?

e. Atheism is a faith, like religion. This old chestnut is equally risible. Atheism is LACK of faith, for faith is believing in something without sufficient evidence. Atheism rejects belief in god because there is no good evidence for him (or her or it). If atheism is a faith, so is a-fairyism—the refusal to believe in the existence of fairies. Those who say that atheism is a faith must also say that everything they themselves reject because there is no good evidence, is also a faith like religion.

I guess I saw what we already know: much of America is religious, and not religious in a liberal way like the Unitarian Universalists or Quakers. People are willing to make the most ridiculous statements to defend their belief that God exists. One of the most ridiculous is that “atheism is a religion, too”, which I always read as “See? You’re as bad as we are!”. But it ain’t so.

The persistence of belief in God in an age where all evidence once adduced for His existence has vanished (creationism was the most powerful argument) still perplexes me. I can give reasons, like people want something MORE than what exists in the natural world, people want an afterlife, or people want to fob off on God things that they don’t understand (consciousness, or, in the case of Intelligent Design, “irreducible complexity”). There could be evolutionary reasons behind it, like Pascal Boyer’s “agency” theory, and so on. But explaining the ubiquity and strength of religion gives religion no credibility at all; it is a sociological question, not a theological one. Nevertheless, some people still claim that because religion is pervasive, that goes on the “God exists” side of the ledger.

In Faith Versus Fact I lay out a scenario that would convince me—provisionally, of course, because I’m a scientist—of the existence of a divine being. Even my rigorous criteria have been criticized, because they could, some say, merely involve trickery by space aliens. So be it. But nothing has come close to the kind of evidence I’d require.

I’d like to know what evidence would convince believers that there is no God. That evidence, of course, is already there: childhood cancers, tsunamis, the failure of prayer, the failure of God to instill a single religion in humanity, the failure of God to appear to humans for the vast majority of the hominin lineage, the disappearance of miracles that used to occur all the time, the uselessness of invoking supernatural forces to understand nature, the failure of Jesus to return, the paucity of evidence for Jesus, and so on, and so on, and so on. What about Auschwitz and the Nazis? Doesn’t that count against God, at least a benevolent and powerful one? I guess not—not if killing 10 million people was necessary so that Nazis could have free will.

If you’re a believer reading this, let me know what it would take to convince you, in this life, that there is no God.

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ obstinacy

November 11, 2020 • 9:45 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “things”, came with an email note:

It’s probably more of a motto than a policy statement, and it’s definitely more widely adhered to than it should be.

This is pretty much the case, and never truer when believers deal with theodicy: the Achilles heel of religion. If there’s a kind, loving, and all-powerful God, why do so many children and innocents die from natural disasters and diseases (“physical evils”)? There’s no good answer that can be reconciled with the Abrahamic God.  Theologians, of course, do have an unconvincing explanation for “moral evil”—people doing bad stuff to others. That answer: “free will”, which allows some people to do evil, is necessary for God’s schema of salvation. But as for physical evils like cancer, earthquakes, fires, and tsunamis, believers have to default to the position of “God is mysterious.”

And yet believers still believe—all the harder—in the face of this unanswerable argument. Perhaps we’ll have more on that later today.