The central tenet of atheism is allegedly an absence of belief that God exists. But if you listen to atheists long enough, you come to realize they never argue against God’s existence.
When you examine atheist arguments, you soon find they only come in two types. The first is the observation that the universe seems to work just fine without divine meddling. The laws of physics, they say, suffice to explain the universe’s operation.
Not only is this a straw man, since Christian metaphysics acknowledges secondary causes, it reinforces the cosmological arguments for God. Laws imply a law-giver. Once the atheist grants the existence of universal principles, he can’t deny that they have an origin without violating the law of cause and effect he’s arguing from in the first place.
The other argument in the atheist’s bag of tricks, and by far the weaker of the two, relies on appeals to the problem of evil.
Philosophers and theologians have been engaging with the question of why a good God allows evil–theodicy, to use the fancy term–since before biblical times. But as they do with the question of God’s existence, atheists pretend Christians didn’t come up with numerous solutions to the problem centuries ago and forge ahead as if they’ve discovered a silver bullet “gotcha” question everybody missed for years.
I’ve heard a lot of smart people say that the problem of evil posed a serious challenge to their faith. That’s because arguments for atheism based on theodicy are rhetorical devices masquerading as dialectic. They derive all of their punch from evoking an emotional response in the target.
The question, “How could a good, all-powerful God allow children to starve?” doesn’t even address the issue of God’s existence. It assumes God exists and instead casts doubt on His goodness and/or omnipotence. Again, it’s not really an argument for atheism. The point is to give believers a case of cognitive dissonance.
Now, one might argue that a creator who lacks perfect goodness and power leaves us with an imperfect demiurge. The obvious objection to that line of reasoning is that it just kicks the can one step further down the road, because a contingent demiurge still requires an Absolute First Cause.
Even more damning to the atheist wielding theodicy as a bludgeon, arguing from the problem of evil also assumes Christian morality. Blind evolutionary forces don’t care if children starve. Such cases are neither good nor bad. They just mean those kids didn’t have what it took to survive.
But our atheist takes it for granted that children starving is wrong, even as he accuses God of hypocrisy in order to undermine the believer’s rationale for judging child starvation to be evil.
If we grant the premise that evil’s existence refutes God’s goodness and/or omnipotence, then God is not God. Therefore, His precepts do not bind in conscience. Therefore Christian morality is wrong. Therefore the believer was wrong to be scandalized by starving kids in the first place.
It’s self-negating.
How do Christians resolve the problem of evil? As I mentioned above, scholars have had a long time to work on theodicy, and myriad solutions exist.
The simplest is this: God exists, and evil exists.
That answer might sound facile, but remember, it’s up to atheists to prove those statements contradictory. They never actually do. They just glibly assume it.
They also pretend like there’s some Scripture passage where God says evil isn’t real, and His people will never suffer. In fact He says the exact opposite time and again. The Bible is the story of God’s tireless efforts to deliver His people from evil, culminating in the Passion of Jesus Christ, which solves the problem once and for all by giving men a way to make suffering redemptive.
“But God created everything, right?” I can hear some of you say. “Doesn’t that mean He created evil?”
The first part of that objection is correct. God alone has the power to create something from nothing. But whereas I’ve affirmed throughout this post that evil exists, that statement is only true in a metaphorical way.
It’s the inverse of how God is said to exist as a matter of convenience. More properly speaking, God is Being. Since God is good, and God is being, good is being.
The flip side of that syllogism is that evil has no independent existence. Instead, evil is an absence of the good; a lacking of something that should be.
Where does evil come from? Remember that only God can create things. Men can’t create anything. Or, phrased another, equally correct way, men can create nothing.
Human beings–and unfallen and fallen angels–are agents of causality. While we can’t create ex nihilo, we can mar and destroy already existing goods.
It’s men and fallen angels who bring evil into the world, not God. It’s all on us.
Happily, bringing something out of nothing; good out of evil, is God’s specialty. He’s already taken the worst evil ever committed–His own sorrowful Passion and death–and turned it into the salvation of mankind.
God says, “I Am,” and the redditors reply, “No! We are, you bigot!” And they will continue be, as long as they obtain the appropriate pharmaceutical assistance.
I think we’re about five to ten years out from “We are gods” becoming a mainstream position in the Apostate West, but history can change directions, and I’ve been prone to underestimate the rate of decay. 🙂
The westerners’ error isn’t theosis. It’s their quest for divinity minus belief in the divine.
Already here. Thete’s a book even entitled Homo deus by some popular science guy who also wrote a book about us called Homo sapiens.
Haven’t read either but they seem popular and been translated into a bazillion languages.
There’s even French language comic of Homo sapiens.
xavier
Homo Sapiens is the worst popular work of anthropology to ever exist; it’s well worth reading CR Hallpikes casual dismemberment of the entire book in one short essay.
Very broadly speaking, the book contains two kinds of ideas: those that are neither original nor interesting in their own right, and those that are wildly, flagrantly, knowingly, false.
Atheists don’t really have an argument for evil, in fact, moral relativism itself denies such a category has any meaning, since what is evil for one person can be good for another. Despite the fact that no society actually thinks murder is good, the atheist will cling to this fantasy in order to satisfy their intellectual predisposition. Ironically, this means clinging to a fantasy morality that nobody actually practices in the real world. The question, “How could a good, all-powerful God allow children to starve?” seems like a virtuous question until you start thinking about the approached to “fixing” this. Should those children have never been born at all? This is the current “compassionate” atheist stance towards “fixing” world hunger. Is it better to be born and suffer or to never be born at all? If life has no positive value in itself that can be outweighed by the potential suffering then of course it would be better to not be born at all. This is what many modern atheists think. But once you start down this path, you arrive at the conclusion that God should not have created anything at all, to stop all suffering. The inevitable insanity of valuing safety/pleasure over life itself. Indeed, the anti life stance is not just ungrateful on a cosmic level, it is a self annihilating one. That it often clothes itself in concern for justice reveals that it is one of the Devil’s oldest tricks.
“He’s an all-powerful God, you fundie. He can create as many humans as [He] wants and give them more than enough food. Checkmate!”
This objection could be easily refuted by Genesis, but SCIENCE! (TM) has assured us that Genesis never happened.
So, “Checkmate again!”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HMnWnyLcq-8
Which just goes to illustrate that atheists have no arguments against God’s existence. Arguments from the problem of evil only target God’s goodness or His omnipotence, but all rely for their effect on the assumption that God exists.
But classical theistic proofs for God necessarily conclude to Absolute Being who cannot be limited in power or goodness, which makes arguments from theodicy attempts to refute internally consistent logic with self-negating rhetoric.
The atheists who debated with me in the past would always default to arguments of why God would allow starvation, or earthquakes, or crimes, or plagues, or Hitler-themed countries to exist.
Their undergirding assumption being that since these things are a net Evil (or really, ‘just plain BAD, man. Because reasons, dude!’), God should have a stop-gap against them, because ultimately he’s allowing people to die, and in painful and ignominious ways. (The aforementioned ways being worse than a quick, clean bullet to the head, I guess.)
Therefore, he doesn’t exist. Or, at least, He’s a bad-icky-Sky-Daddy.
Being willing to take up the Utilitarian argument for my opponent when they eventually lose the thread, I would typically mention that those ways of dying are at least as quick, clean, and efficient as all forms of abortion in a godless world. They all go about the process of “eliminating the surplus population” with the same end in mind, so why are Man’s methods better than God’s?
Once the screaming started, I knew my job was done.
They really are just engaged in Underpants Gnome thinking.