In this post fundamentalist atheist PZ Myers (*1) criticizes a New York Times article written by Ross Douthat. In his article Douthat grapples with the timeless challenge presented to theism by the problem of suffering and evil. Douthat's article on the subject can be found here: The Best Argument against Having Faith in God. Douthat is a theist and writes this...
One interesting point about this
argument is that while it’s often folded into the briefs for atheism that claim
to rely primarily on hard evidence and science, it isn’t properly speaking an
argument that some creating power does not exist. Rather it’s an argument about
the nature of that power, a claim that the particular kind of God envisioned by
many believers and philosophers — all powerful and all good — would not have
made the world in which we find ourselves, and therefore that this kind of God
does not exist.
PZ Myers response is...
That is correct. No one uses the
problem of evil to disprove a god, but only the idea of a benevolent god, or
more specifically, the perfectly good being most Christians promote. When I see
it deployed in an argument, it’s usually to make the narrower point that I
don’t believe in your god.....
.....But OK, sure, (if) the problem of evil
says you should be anything but a traditional Christian, I’ll take it.
What I think PZ is saying here is this: "OK if there is a God, it's anything but a Christian God, given the level of evil and suffering we observe"; that's PZ's theology. It follows from this theology that if there really is such a thing as a Christian God there would be no suffering and evil in his creation; or at least not to the extent we observe. However, for me this kind of theology prompts a huge personal dilemma.....
***
An implication of PZ's concept of a Christian God is that, by definition, morally and epistemically flawed persons such as myself would not exist in the world free of suffering & evil which PZ envisages. Let me expand on that theme a little.....
A morally flawed person such as myself (flawed enough to be the person who readily passes by on the other side like the priest and Levite in Luke 10:25ff), is part and parcel of the tainted world I'm in. My character is so intimately bound up with my context that this context is also inevitably going to contain your Hitlers, Putins, Stalins, Maos, Polpots, Assyrians, Trumps, Kim Jong Uns, Musks, Mugabes, Assads and an endless list of other sinners whose aim in life is to get a hormonal high by securing for themselves the glories and status symbols of self-assertion (e.g. power, legacy, reputation, wealth, conquest, top-dog rule, high status, plutocracy, influence etc.) and whose ambitions have priority over the well-being and lives of others; they may jail or even kill those in their way. J R R Tolkien's great literary metaphor has warned us of the potential evil that lurks behind our social standing and status motivations; namely, the all but irresistible temptations of the One Ring to Rule them all and in the darkness bind them should the opportunity of absolute power fall into our hands. If any of us corruptible sinners should take and wield the One Ring of absolute power there is the potential for corruption on a wide scale. I have trouble enough with those lesser, mean and squalid sins like walking by on the other-side, let alone the irresistible temptations of social ambition.
So, given that I'm sinner enough to be potential One-Ring-to-Rule-them-All material (just like the characters in that rogues gallery which so often cites Hitler as a prime exemplar) I wonder, as does PZ, that our kind of world would have been reified at all by a Christian God; if it is a Christian God who is responsible for its reification, it must cause untold agony in the Godhead. But given that I now enjoy a highly conscious existence in a cosmos with many beauties, glories, pleasures and consolations should I now wish that my world in spite of all the suffering was never created (along with myself) in the first place? That's the big dilemma.
***
PZ's theology tells him that given the evidences of evil and suffering he's fairly sure there can be no Christian God (sometimes I feel the same way when reality bites). But let me try turning that on its head... does the evidence which for PZ excludes the existence of a Christian God actually point in the very opposite direction? That is, to the existence of the God of John 3:16....
"Before" the big bang(*3) the history of our highly organized and seemingly arbitrarily contingent cosmos existed in the un-reified platonic realm as a logical possibility; just as does, in fact, any other story that some human author pulls out of the platonic realm, reifies it in book form and who presides over that book as an absolute sovereign. So, in spite of all it's pain and evil, did God so love this world that he decided to reify it and save it? We've heard it said that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles; does he also have an inordinate fondness for human beings in spite of our very human self-orientation which has such a potential as a source of suffering and evil? This is the unmerited unconditional love of God, "Grace" I think it's called.
***
Douthat leaves the question dangling of just what kind of God has reified our cosmos out of the platonic world of logically possibility. Hence PZ sums up Douthat's argument for God thus...
The straw he (Douthat) grasps at is that
any god exists, and you can’t explain that, therefore God.
Yes, arguments for God which have form Evidence X therefore God are subject to all the weaknesses of inductive reasoning. But when it comes to the question of meaning and purpose (if the cosmos has any) I prefer the ultimate abductive explanation: That is, the Christian God is the concept I begin with and then I see if that concept can be used to make the best anthropic sense of the cosmos; In this capacity "God" is the primary epistemic driver which both provides the confidence motivating rational investigation into a knowable ordered cosmos and best of all obviates cosmic absurdity in favour of meaning and purpose. (Gen 1:1, Hebrews 11:1-3, 6).
However, at this noetic juncture there looks to be no logical obligation, at least one we able to grasp, which obliges either God or no God. If there is no God then this may mean that we have to simply swallow as is a cosmos absent of meaning and purpose. In this connection consider the reaction of people like physicist Prof Brian Cox who proposes a story of a cosmos that will ultimately end in the black void of thermodynamic death, an absurd story clearly absent of all anthropic meaning & purpose, apart from that which we invent ourselves. That's not to say that I don't respect Cox's position; it's the position Westerners are left with once they discard the abductive explanation of Hebrews 11:1-3,6.
***
Finally PZ says this regarding the creation:
Except that we don't need and all powerful supernatural being to explain how the world works.
That sounds like the "Science explains everything, therefore no God", a line of argument with which I'm very familiar. See for example atheist theologian Don Cupitt who also easily caved in to this line of thought. But this thinking only works if one believes that science's descriptive completeness is capable of satiating our appetite for full explanation. The fly in the ointment of descriptive completeness is that it is only possible in a cosmos which has an a priori unexplained brute-fact high organisation. (The antithesis of randomness). Any attempt to upgrade science's descriptive answers (which in the final analysis only provide answers to the question "How?") to answers addressing the question "Why?" inevitably leads to an absurd algorithms-all-the-way down regress. Any deeper sense than providing a descriptive grasp on the cosmos leaves untouched those intuitively compelling questions which revolve around the question of meaning, purpose and the question "Why?"(*2). We have instinct that the cosmos has an a priori organization which means it yields to rational scientific inquiry. Some of us also have an instinct that the cosmos has ultimate meaning and purpose and just as we can search out cosmic organisation we can also seek meaning and purpose (Acts 17:26ff).
Footnotes
* I would actually rate PZ Myers, by strictly human standards, as a worthy human being. He's a faithful family man and shows no sign of conceit or dishonesty. He gives every appearance of being genuine in his atheism and his case for it is strengthened by the clowning we get from Christian Trumpites and fundamentalists; but he's an insufferable grouch when it comes to criticising Christians of all brands. However, if I get to the Pearly gates before he pops his clogs I'll put a good word in for him.
*2 One atheist who floats his attempt to address the ultimate "why" is Richard Carrier. He tries to arrive at a generalised logical full-stop beyond which no further endeavor about origins need proceed (apart from filling in details). But this attempt runs aground as a consequence of his misunderstandings surrounding the nature of probability and randomness. For him randomness is the ultimate "god-dynamic".
*3 There are attempts (unsurprisingly) to imbue the cosmos with an eternal quality using theories such as infinitely recurring inflation. The impersonal, dispassionate, eternal cosmos then stands in the place of God as a kind of Gaia incubator of life, a disinterested creator without love or compassion. It is an attempt to put creation on the testable level of spring-extending and test tube precipitating science, but this line of thought still leaves us with the algorithms-all-the-way-down regress.
Fred Hoyle is well known for his much earlier attempt the propose an eternal universe with his continuous creation model. The irony is that in his later years his ideas started to get a mystical religious flavour in what to me looked like a pantheistic philosophy of intelligent design. That God shaped hole was trying to fill itself!
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