March 10, 2009

  • DChernik & "The Persistence of the Argument from Evil"

    Intro:

    This is a reposted comment of mine in response to DChernik's post over on blogspot titled, "Is God Our Father?"  He'd originally mentioned the couple of posts previous to the one he directly pointed me to as having to do with the discussion, and I've just now found the time to take a look. 

    Basically he argues that the argument from evil against the existence of a good, all powerful, all knowing god is inapplicable because God is not our father in this life and thus has no responsibilities towards us to act as parents would towards their children. 

    Dmitry,

    As Craig pointed out (in the comments), it is unlikely you will be able to square your view here with what on any other day (when not discussing the problem of evil), Christians will speak of God as their father, and the good shepherd of us all. We can’t even be said to be treated as sons who deserve our plight since across the entire spectrum of all the nonsense that happens to people, it wouldn’t be reasonable to say that’s what was always going on. The “life as a test” theory falls flat for basically the same reason. Not everyone knows they are taking this test and the consequences are eternal. I don’t know how much esteem you regard scripture with, but I doubt you’d be able to get through the list of contrary sounding Bible passages with your “God is not our father in this life” interpretation. What comfort is there to Psalm 23? Apparently none of that is really true is it?

    Not only are we “on our own,” but we inherit an imperfect nature, all the crap from our ancestors, a cursed creation, and God’s decided to let Satan and his friends have dominion over this earth to boot. Clearly, individual autonomy is not being respected as though if I were a mad scientist it would be ethical do just about anything to my creations just because I created them. What did we ever do to god to deserve this setup? Why should this god be respected for forcing us into it with such high expectations that he knows will not be met? Especially hypocritical is that he will not even meet them himself as the argument from evil illustrates.

    Why would a good God necessarily have to replace parents? Couldn’t he just start by not letting the bad people have kids? He’s no stranger to closing wombs in the Bible. Why not continue the hobby? Even that would be an improvement and it’s not even clear god does anything at all. We can’t even tell ourselves that somehow it’s all going to turn out right in the end since Jesus already spilled the beans on the proportion of people who will be damned (Matthew 7:14, I think). I think at just about all levels, there’s a very obvious reason the problem of evil isn’t going way. You literally have to have no moral expectations of God whatsoever to be a Christian and that’s just not reasonable and never will be.

    That’s my opinion anyway.

    Ben

    This is my response to part 2 of Dmitry's previous entry:

    “roasted chickens that fly into our mouths”

    haha, that’s funny. We might expect that if the claim was that Willy Wonka created the universe. *giggles*

    Basically the argument from evil can be turned into an argument to the better explanation in favor of naturalism. A world filled with the arbitrary struggle for happiness is more consistent with metaphysical naturalism than it is with the existence of an all powerful all knowing good deity.

    Ben

    Outro:

    I'd actually like to see a "bible study" explaining away all the passages that would indicate the contrary expectation.  Granted, the Bible is all over the place, but that only reinforces the point the Christian moral paradigm is inconsistent. 

    Ben