Sensei Meela

~The Riddle of Epicurus~
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?


I had brought this to the attention of some mates on a different message board...sort of an addendum to another posters' quetsion "If god is all loving, why does he allow children to be born deformed/ill?".

I'm curious to test the responses (And frankly could use a little help deflating the hubris of a certain out-spoken Christian poster).

Nectaris

There are a couple of typical theistic responses. Keep in mind that I'm an atheist, so I am arguing from the devil’s advocate position.

Free Will argument
God created people as good and everything peachy keen. But god loved humans so, so much that he wanted us to have free will, or the ability to decide our actions on our own. It is with that free will that we have created evil. And since we have created it, we have to live it.
(never mind earthquakes, and The Bible claims that Yahweh created evil).

Absence of Good argument
Evil is not an entity in and of itself, but merely the absence of good (think darkness as the absence of light, here). One is defined into to existence by the other. Without evil you can have no good. This also relates to the question, “what is there that an all-powerful god cannot do?” Most theists hold that an all powerful god cannot do things that are inherently or logically impossible, and thus having good inherently requires creating evil.


These are the two arguments I see most often, so come up with some ideas to defeat them.

For free will: The theistic claim of omniscience is your friend. If god knows future events, than they cannot be change. A person's free will is only imaginary. You can also mention natural disasters and diseases with no known human causes. There are other arguments such as if god can create with free will and not give us the ability to fly, why couldn't he create us with free will and not the ability to do evil acts.

The absence of good argument is a little more fun, IMHO. You could argue against god's omnipotence, why can't something that is all powerful create good without evil. If the theist defends this with the fact that this is inherently impossible and god cannot do this. At this point you could keep hammering home on the point that the theist is changing the definition of omnipotence to suit his needs.


I might also suggest moral relativity, in that some acts are seen as evil by some people, but not all people would call the same acts as evil. Does George Bush think he is evil for bombing Iraq? Is the Pope evil for thinking that bombing Iraq a bad thing?

You could also argue something like since good and evil are intrinsically related, that creation of the one is also creation of the other, therefore if god created good, he would have had to have created evil.

You could use a linguistic type of argument, asking for the definition of the word good. The absence of evil would be a completely meaningless definition since it is circular. The usual theistic response is too report that god is good. That would mean that everything else, including all human beings and bunny rabbits are evil.

I don’t know if that’s what you are looking for or not, but I hope it helps. If it's not what you are looking for, I babbled on for a while and I hope it's useful to someone. . .

Peter Kirby

More appropriate to "Existence of God."

best,
Peter Kirby

Sensei Meela

Thanks guys.

Jobar

Welcome, Sensei Meela!

Many, perhaps most, of the arguments in the EoG forum involve this classic trilemma. It's commonly called the PoE- problem of evil. (The LPOE is the 'logical problem of evil'- which attempts to demonstrate in strict logical terms the impossibility of an omnimax god. It's still being argued.)

Barcode

The problem is you won't ever (well rarely) show the religious person that their argument is flawed -- all you need to know as a Christian is that free will excuses everything that is objectionable.

Of course, they don't like the term " excuse." All one needs to be aware of if that if something evil happens in the world then it's not God. If something nice happens, then it's obviously a sign God loves us all.

You could ask them how they excuse *natural* evil. Why would God send say, the Kobe earthquake? Killer tsunami's? Hurricanes? Tornado's? Etc.

Such things do tend to throw a spanner in the concept of God being all loving and all powerful at the *same* time.

Sensei Meela

I have (mentioned natural 'evils') and their response is ludicrous:
"All of creation groans and suffers" from Adam's sin (Romans 8:18-22). That should not surprise me, of course, but it frustrates me to do no end. As I bring up the empirical fallacies (ie death occurred before humans were present on the Earth, as told by the fossil record) and logical fallacies (ie why would a 'loving' and 'reasonable' god punish the innocent?), they retreat into further Biblical non-sense and I feel myself being drawn onto their ground.

[In the case of the former objection, the reply is either some rubbish about "necessary causes" or an attempt to dispute the fossil record...I suppose that alone should be my cue to abandon the argument since opponents are the willingly ignorant, but I do not want to caracturise them any further or let them feel they've 'defeated science'. In the latter objection, they fall back to the old 'only man has a soul' defense that should offend every rational-minded thinker with even a modicome of reverence for life].

Thanks for all of your suggestions; I've stayed rather clear of these kinds of arguments for a long while and my rhetorical skills have rusted!

Ovazor

Do you have to be either of these things to be called a god? AFAIK, most deities that have been worshipped were not credited with both of these traits, and very many lacked both.

SLD

I've never really bought this argument against God. I mean aren't we just imposing our value system on God? We think such and such is bad/evil, what-not, and then we say God, in letting such bad evil thing to exist, must also be bad, or not exist. Well so what? It's his universe, he can do what the fuck he likes with it and if we don't like it we are free to kill ourselves.

God's sense of justice could just be the laws of physics. Violations of them are unacceptable!! Try it and you go to hell for eternity.

Also, what if there is some glorious after-life? Then what difference does it make that your first 70 or so years of life suck (or even your first few minutes of semi-brain dead life). After all, you're going to spend a trillion trillion years living in bliss with 70 virgins to feed your sexual appetite every day - or whatever else floats your boat.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I believe in God, mind you - just that I don't buy this PoE objection to God.

SLD

Kalkin

It's true, a god could exist with no morals comprehensible to humans, but the problem for theists is that that's not what they want. The Christian god, the most common target of the POE, is usually claimed to be omnibenevolent - and if that doesn't mean he's good in any human sense, wtf is the point of the word?

Generally, any god who is relevant to us must be interested in us, otherwise there's no way for us to tell or reason for us to care if it exists. And, if it's interested in us, we should be able to detect some signs of it's interference with us, correct? That's where the POE comes in - whatever god might be out there, it doesn't seemt to have any agenda remotely comprehensible to us, let alone one matching typical theistic claims about its agenda. That's what makes god improbable - while it is certainly concievable that there could be a plan behind the apparent chaos of life, the POE and similar arguments make that very unlikely by falsifying any attempts to state that plan.

But then it doesn't matter whether God exists, so he might as well not.

That doesn't mean God shouldn't care about life on Earth too, assuming he has sufficient power to change it. To scale this down with an analogy, would you be willing to be tortured for a week if you could be assured a long comfortable life afterward? Wouldn't you at least strongly prefer to avoid the torture? It seems as if God should be able to let you... if he existed.

The POE's one of my favorites.