God: The Failed Hypothesis (28 page)

¹⁵
Alexander Campbell, “Our Position to American Slavery—No. V,”
Millennial Harbinger,
ser. 3, vol. 2 (1845): 193.

¹⁶
Jefferson Davis, “Inaugural Address as Provisional President of the Confederacy,” Montgomery, AL, February 18, 1861,
Confederate States of America Congressional Journal
1 (1861): 64-66; quoted in Dunbar Rowland,
Jefferson Davis’s Place in History as Revealed in His Letters, Papers, and Speeches,
vol. 1 (Jackson, MS: Torgerson Press, 1923), p. 286.

¹⁷
Melvin Patrick Ely,
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

¹⁸
John T. Noonan Jr.,
A Church That Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

¹⁹
Ibid.

²⁰
Jean Markale,
Montsegur and the Mystery of the Cathars,
trans. Jon Graham (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003).

²¹
For this and other tales of atrocities in the name of religion, see James A. Haught,
Holy Horrors: An Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990).

²²
Joan Acocella, “Holy Smoke; What Were the Crusades Really About?”
New Yorker,
December 13, 2004.

²³
CNN
Report, March 27, 1996,
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9603/amir_verdict/
(accessed December 9, 2004).

²⁴
Associated Press, September 2, 2003,
http://www.fadp.org/news/TampaBayOnline-20030903.htm
(accessed December 9, 2004).

²⁵
Trial statement, Associated Press, July 12, 2005,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5136448,00.html
(accessed July 20, 2005).

²⁶
Dean E. Murphy and Neela Banjeree, “Catholics in U.S. Keep Faith, but Live with Contradictions,”
New York Times,
April 11, 2005.

²⁷
Smith,
Atheism: The Case Against God,
p. 313.

²⁸
Walter Kaufmann,
The Faith of a Heretic,
paperback ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1963), p. 216.

²⁹
From a
Saturday Review
article, April 16, 1895.

³⁰
Marc Hauser and Peter Singer, “Morality without Religion,”
Free Inquiry
26, no. 1 (December 2005/January 2006): 18-19.

³¹
Paul Kurtz,
Forbidden Fruit: The Ethics of Humanism
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988).

³²
Robert Axelrod,
The Evolution of Cooperation
(New York: Basic Books, 1984); Richard D. Alexander,
The Biology of Moral Systems
(Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1987); Robert Wright,
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
(New York: Vintage Books, 1994); Frans B. M. de Wall,
Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
(Cambridge, MS: Harvard University Press, 1996); Larry Arnhart,
Darwinian Natural Right; The Biological Ethics of Human Nature
(Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998); Leonard D. Katz, ed.,
Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives
(Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic, 2000); Jessica C. Flack and Frans B. M. de Wall, “‘Any Animal Whatever’ Darwinian Building Blocks of Morality in Monkeys and Apes,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies
7, nos. 1-2 (2000): 1-29; Donald M. Broom,
The Evolution of Morality and Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Shermer,
The Science of Good & Evil.

³³
Shermer,
The Science of Good & Evil,
pp. 26-31.

³⁴
Thomas Aquinas, Fourth Way in
Summa Theologica.

³⁵
William Lane Craig, “The Absurdity of Life without God,”
http://www.hisdefense.org/audio/wc_audio.html
(accessed March 9, 2004).

With or without religion, good people can behave well and had people can do evil; hut for good people to do evil
—
that takes religion.

—Steven Weinberg
¹

The Problem of Evil

A
lthough the ancient problem of evil is usually discussed in philosophical and theological rather than scientific terms, it is so important to the debate over the existence of God that I have included a discussion in this chapter for the sake of completeness. Besides, we might argue that a scientific element does enter in the empirical fact that very bad things, such as gratuitous suffering, happen in the world.

The problem of evil can be formally stated as follows:

1. If God exists, then the attributes of God are consistent with the existence of evil.

2. The attributes of God are not consistent with the existence of evil.

3. Therefore, God does not and cannot exist
²
.

The primary attributes that apply here I have designated as “3O”—omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Recall that these attributes were not included explicitly in what I called the “scientific God model” (see chap. 1) since the arguments presented in this book are not limited to a god with these qualities.

Nevertheless, the traditional God of the great monotheisms is assumed to have the 3O attributes, which leads to an enormous logical difficulty that theologians have wrestled with over centuries without success. How can the 3O God be reconciled with the existence of evil?

The attempt to defend the notion of a God of infinite goodness, power, and wisdom in light of the undeniable existence of pain and suffering in the world is called
theodicy.
So far, this attempt has proven unsatisfactory in the judgment of the majority of philosophers and other scholars who have not already committed themselves to God as an act of faith.

The problem of evil remains the most powerful argument against God. But the argument collapses once any of the three omniattributes are relaxed.

What Is Evil?

The argument from evil starts with the empirical fact that evil (bad stuff) exists in the world (a scientific statement) and shows that a god who is at the same time omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient—the 3O God—cannot exist.

We need to define evil before we can go much further. First we must confront what is called the
Euthyphro dilemma
³
.
Does God forbid us to do certain acts because they are evil, or is an act evil because God defines it as such?

Many of the same empirical facts about human behavior discussed in the previous chapter, which lead us to conclude that good exists independent of God, also apply to the case of evil.

Evil does not seem to require the existence of God. As philosopher Kai Nielsen writes, “God or no God, torturing the innocents is vile. More generally, even if we can make nothing of the concept of God, we can readily come to appreciate… that, if anything is evil, inflicting or tolerating unnecessary and pointless suffering is evil, especially when something can be done about it
⁴
.” An omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God can do something about it.

Now, an easy escape from the argument from evil can be achieved by relaxing one or more of the three Os. For example, we can imagine a God who is not omniscient. Such a God would not always know when evil happened and so could not act to avoid it.

Similarly, a God who is not omnipotent may be unable to always stop evil. The latter possibility was the answer Rabbi Harold Kushner gave to the problem of evil in his best-selling book
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
⁵
.
Such a God can have a pleasant, human face, such as George Burns in the film
Oh, God
⁶
!
Burns, playing God, admits he isn’t perfect. He says he would do things differently the next time he creates a universe.

For one thing, he would not give the avocado such a large pit.

In a 1995 paper “Evil and Omnipotence
⁷
,” J. J. Mackie avers that adequate solutions to the problem of evil exist if you relax, but he demonstrates the fallaciousness of several claimed solutions that retain the God:

1. “Good cannot exist without evil” or “Evil is necessary as a counterpart to good.”

2. “Evil is necessary as a means to good.”

3. “The universe is better with some evil in it than it could be if there were no evil.”

4. “Evil is due to human free will.” (Quotation marks in original.) Mackie shows that each of these solutions still implies a restriction on God’s omnipotence. If God cannot create good without evil, that is a limit on his power. If God gives humans free will, then that is a restriction on his control of events.

Mackie gives a long rebuttal to argument 3 above. However, note that it is an example of the definitional problem mentioned in chapter 1. How do we define “better” so that a universe with more evil is better than another universe? We could just as well define the better universe as one with no evil.

One way that evil can coexist with omnipotence is if the evil is what philosophers call a “necessary truth.” This is a statement that is true by virtue of its essential character. An example of such a statement is 2 + 2 is not equal to 5. This is true by virtue of the essential nature of numbers. Likewise, the statement that suffering is evil could be a necessary truth over which God has no power despite his omnipotence
⁸
.

Even so, this just means that God cannot simply define suffering as good. It does not prevent him from utilizing his power to eliminate or at least alleviate suffering.

Theologians have attempted to solve the problem of evil by pointing out that pain is a necessary part of life. Let’s exempt such pain from our definition of evil and limit it to unnecessary pain.

While pain warns us of disease and injury and prompts us to seek treatment, why must that pain persist, often unbearably, after treatment fails and we await death?

Another reason given for suffering is that it helps us to be com-passionate. As theologian Richard Swinburne has put it, “If the world was without any natural evil and suffering we wouldn’t have the opportunity… to show courage, patience and sympathy
⁹
.”

But do we really need “natural evil” to encourage courage and sympathy? We can imagine a world in which the only pain was the necessary pain described above. A courageous act, such as giving up your life to save another’s could be done in the absence of pain. Furthermore, many of the discomforts of life are not “natural evils” but necessities of growth—good in the benefits that accrue. For example, we can show sympathy to a child strug-gling through a difficult mathematics problem.

Does God really need so much pain and suffering to achieve his ends? Is there any conceivable good purpose behind so many children dying every day of starvation and disease? How are they helped by the rest of us becoming more sympathetic?

Yet another common theistic defense for the problem of evil is that God has given us the freedom to choose to commit evil.

This may apply to the suffering that results from human acts; but, great as that may be, much unnecessary suffering is of natural rather than human origin. Examples include most diseases and natural disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami in Asia that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Indeed these are called “acts of God.” And what is the purpose of the suffering of animals? Perhaps we can be sympathetic to that, but why is so much suffering necessary? And, what about the hundreds of millions of living things that died terrible deaths long before humans appeared on the scene?

In a department seminar in 2005 my University of Colorado colleague, philosopher Michael Huemer, provided a concise summary of current responses to the problem of evil and gave his personal analysis of why they all fail
¹⁰
. In the following, he is quoted exactly on these responses, but I give (in italics) my own short summary of reasons for their failure. Please excuse some repeti-tiveness here.

Summary of Attempts to Reconcile a God with the Existence of Evil:

1. “Evil is a product of human free will. God gave us free will because free will is a very valuable thing. But he cannot both give us free will and prevent us from doing evil.”

Not all evil is the product of human free will, for example, natural disasters. If you redefine evil to include only human-caused ills, you still have to deal with the unnecessary suffering of natural disasters that are under God’s control.

2. “Some amount of suffering is necessary for humans to develop important moral virtues. Some moral virtues can only exist in response to suffering or other bad things.

Examples: courage, charity, strength of will.”

This could be accomplished with a whole lot less suffering than exists in the world.

3. “Good and evil exist only as contrasts to each other. Therefore, if evil were eliminated, good would automatically be eliminated as well.”

Good can exist independent of evil. Winning a race is good, but losing it is not evil. Buying a toy for your granddaughter is good, but not doing so is not evil when she already has a playroom full of toys.

4. “Slightly different from #3: If evil were eliminated, then we wouldn’t
know
that everything was good, because we can only perceive things when there is contrast.”

Even if we did not identify something as good, it still can be good. And it still can be good even if we have no experience of bad. My grandchildren know that having toys is good, although they have never had no toys and so have not had the opposing experience.