Tornado Alley (PROG)

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God, Heaven, and Evil

"Disbelieve it or not, ancient history suggests that atheism is as natural to humans as religion"

A Renewed Defense of Atheism

by Ken Levy

After EgyptAir Flight 804 crashed on May 19, 2016, I asked the same question that many others undoubtedly asked as well: How could God let this happen? Of course, this plane crash is just one relatively small tragedy in the whole scheme of things. When we add in all of the other tragedies—all the violence, pain, suffering, and premature death that occur on this planet—the same question becomes correspondingly more difficult to answer.

This is the problem of evil, an argument that is typically used in support of atheism. If God were omnibenevolent, He would want to minimize such evils as violence, pain, suffering, and premature death; if God were omniscient, He would know everything that is happening in the universe; and if God were omnipotent, He would be able to act on His omnibenevolence and omniscience to prevent most or all evil from occurring. Yet all of this evil still occurs. Therefore God—an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being—probably does not exist. If a higher intelligence exists at all, it probably lacks at least one of these three qualities.

Theists, or believers, generally respond to this argument by proposing two reasons to believe that God’s existence is perfectly compatible with all of the evil that we observe and experience:

1. Despite His omnipotence, God simply could not have created a world that lacked evil. If there is to be good, there must also be evil. The existence of evil makes good possible.

2. Evil contributes to a much greater or higher good. For example, suffering builds moral character or brings victims much closer to God or to each other.

Believers always have at least these fallback answers at their disposal to allay any theological doubts. But the very fact that these two hypotheses can be applied no matter the kind or degree of evil in question should make us suspicious. Quite simply, they prove too much. They commit theists to the incredible position that God’s existence should not be doubted even if the degree of evil in the world far outweighs the good. Atheists are right to respond to this theistic “spin”: if God exists no matter how much evil there is, then what good is He in the first place? Better, it would seem, to have much less evil and no God than much more evil and God.

Believers typically supplement (2) above with the “free will defense”: God preferred to create a world in which humans have free will and therefore the capacity to perform evil acts rather than a world in which they lack free will. He preferred this world, a world in which humans are free to do wrong, because it is far more valuable, both in itself and to humans themselves, than a world in which they are forced always to be good. Humans who consciously make the choice to follow God’s commands—notably the moral laws embodied in the believer’s holy text, such as the Ten Commandments—experience and exhibit a much more profound knowledge of, and love for, God than humans who follow them out of either primitive fear or blind compulsion, or don’t follow them at all.

So on the free will defense, the mere existence of God is hardly a guarantee of the non-existence of evil. What is required to wipe out evil is humans freely deciding to turn away from it and toward God. As the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis said in his classic 1952 book Mere Christianity, we live in “enemy-occupied territory”: only by freely choosing to follow God can we eventually escape it. President Kennedy echoed this sentiment in the close of his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961: “[L]et us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

Does the free will defense work? Not really. Consider nonhuman animals. While hunting and factory farming evidence humans’ great capacity for evil in the form of cruelty—not to mention our equally great capacities for denial and rationalization—believers still try to reconcile these activities with the existence of God simply by falling back on the free will defense. On this view, it is preferable that humans gradually phase out violence against animals on their own than that they had never been violent toward animals in the first place. Better a victory earned along with some collateral damage than a game never played. The animals, however, would beg to differ. And one wonders why an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity would not take their feelings and preferences into account. Because they’re just animals? Because animals just don’t matter? This is an all-too-human response. Such speciesist partisanship seems grossly unfair and therefore entirely unbefitting of a supposedly morally perfect being.

The free will defense runs into several other problems as well. First, some philosophers and neuroscientists have offered compelling arguments against the very possibility of free will. According to these skeptics, free will requires something that is at least physically, if not metaphysically, impossible: full self-determination. Full self-determination is impossible because the self (or agent or person or soul or spirit) is or must ultimately be determined by factors outside its control, some combination of its brain, genes, personality, past experience, chance, and the laws of nature.

Second, even if full self-determination is physically or metaphysically possible, many of the people who commit the most evil in the world—violent criminals—suffer from debilitating mental illnesses such as psychopathy, psychoses, and schizophrenia. So the free will defense does not even apply to a large quantity of the very evil that it is designed to explain.

Third, even if the free will defense succeeded in explaining and justifying all human-caused evil, it does not help to explain or justify two other kinds of evil: “natural” and “accidental.” Consider animals again, this time wildlife. The very fact that there are carnivores means that there are inevitable victims. Lions, for example, could not have survived and evolved over the past 11 million years if there had not been billions of herbivores for them to stalk, chase, attack, kill, and devour. It would be one thing if their more gentle victims were, like plants and trees, incapable of suffering. But most lion prey are higher mammals and are therefore not only sentient but also capable of both deep emotions and deep relationships. So if God exists, He basically set these innocent creatures up. He subjected billions of feeling, thinking beings to the constant terror of being chased and killed, the excruciating pain of being shredded by sharp teeth and nails, and the anguish of losing close companions. The free will defense fails to justify any of this violence and suffering—this natural evil—because even higher animals like lions presumably lack free will, at least the level of free will that Christian doctrine attributes solely to humans.

Some philosophers have tried to get around this last argument by simply “biting the bullet” and denying the assumption that animals can suffer in the first place. For example, 17th-century philosopher René Descartes...

Much more - https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/god-heaven-evil-renewed-atheism-defense/