In about 300 B.C., Epicurus eloquently summed up the problem of the existence of evil. It has come to be known as the Riddle of Epicurus or the Epicurean paradox. It was translated by David Hume in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion:
If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to
Then He is not omnipotent.If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?
1. Hypothesize a model God who is the highly intelligent and powerful supernatural creator and preserver of the physical universe, including the solar system and all other planets and stars, in all the galaxies that we can see with our instruments and everything that might lie beyond.
2. We can reasonably expect that empirical evidence should exist for a purposeful and supernatural creation of this cosmos, such as the observed violation of one or more laws of physics.
3. We can also reasonably expect that empirical evidence should exist for supernatural actions in the operation of this cosmos, such as the observation of events somewhere in the cosmos that cannot be explained by any known natural process.
4. No empirical evidence for a purposeful creation of the cosmos can be found. No universal laws of physics were violated at the origin of the universe in which we reside.
5. No empirical evidence for supernatural actions in the operation of the cosmos can be found. No events have been observed anywhere in the cosmos that cannot be explained by known natural process.
6. Modern cosmology indicates that the initial state of our universe was one of maximum chaos so that it contains no memory of a creator.
7. Scientists can provide plausible, purely natural scenarios based in well-established cosmological theories that shown how our universe may have arisen out of an initial state of nothingness.
8. Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
9. We conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that a God such as the model God, who is the highly intelligent and powerful supernatural creator and preserver of the physical universe, including the solar system and all other planets and stars, in all the galaxies that we can see with our instruments and everything that might lie beyond does not exist.
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godle…
Good going, Erich. You criticize God near midnight, and shortly before dawn he wakes us up with an earthquake!
I had to respond when I felt the aftershock a couple of minutes ago.
I know the earthquake was aimed at you, because it centered just on the far side of Illinois. By biblical standards, that's a close shot.
<img src="http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/mother-nature-watch/files/2008/04/shakemap418.jpg" alt="2008-04-18 Earthquake map">
Or a USGS map is here.
Dan: It wasn't a big quake, only a little shake, a cosmic "hug," God's way of saying "Hey, glad you're thinking of Me down there!"
It seems to me that the real problem with evil is that some people imagine-into-existence a god of evil — a spirit-being who becomes the scapegoat for everything "bad" (whatever that means) that happens to humans. This "bad" spirit-being provides not only an easy way to avoid blaming the "good" god for "bad" things that happen, but also creates the premise that all human actions are caused by either the "good" god or the "bad" god, without any grey in between. This leads to believers in the "good" god demonizing anyone who behaves contrary to their doctrine, because such actions are obviously not caused by their "good" god, so they must be caused by the "bad" god. Likewise, other believers in the same "good" god who, nevertheless, happen to follow different religious dogma, also become accused of following the "bad" god, the result being two (or more) groups each claiming to follow the same "good" god while accusing their counterparts of following the "bad" god. This results in widespread confusion among people outside the various warring groups, who see the groups claiming to follow the same omnipotent "good" god, yet obviously contradicting each other — making the claim of each of the groups highly questionable. Amazingly, despite this problem, each group stubbornly clings to its imaginary "evil" god, because the "evil" deity serves such a valuable role; i.e., a vehicle for explaining away the "bad" things that happen to "good" people without tarnishing the reputation of the imaginary "good" god.
People have been debating calamity for thousands of years. All religions must deal with this question. Each religion’s solution to these age-old problems gives character to its own version {idol} of god {rule maker}. Paul questioned God’s righteousness in dealing with Pharaoh. Every time we talk about those who seem to have been treated unjustly, we raise the level of tension that must be resolved. Many have given up completely because none of it seems “rational” to them. The real underlying question is the liability for sin {law – less – ness 1John3:4}. How liable is man for his sin? How liable is God for His actions in subjecting the creation to the bondage of corruption? God always assumes full responsibility for all of His actions, and, of course, creation must follow His example. Man always resists God’s will {thelema}, but Paul says that no man can resist God’s plan {boulema}. The Creator is responsible for all he has created.
Larry – sounds like you would vote for the third option of epicurus, but you haven't answered "Whence cometh evil?"
God is still interested in this debate, based on the recent earthquake aftershocks in the Midwest. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/21/strong-m…
"Whence cometh evil?" "I {YHWH} make peace , and create evil" Isa. 45:7 Next you must define "evil".
Larry asks, "How liable is man for his sin?"
Larry, maybe you can take a look at this post and give us your thoughts: http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166/.
Hi Erich-
Great points. Here's a video that your article reminds me of that brings up some very related points: http://thesongofgod.com/resources/eroel3.1_solvin…
Chris Just leads us to a series of videos by a typical delusional personality. In this one, he disproves Atheism because he has personally had numerous hallucinations. Well, he calls them true observations. He has seen God and all the angels and the rest of his supernatural entourage. Therefore not a hallucination. If anyone had ever been with him at any of the times when he saw these things, then they also would have seen these things. If only.
Therefore he knows that God is real.
It's amazing how people answer the problem of the insupportability of religion by offering up another insupportable religion. It's as if they simply can't encompass the parameters of the problem in any meaningful way.
You people are all ridiculous. "God" does not have anything to do with the earthquake that recently happened! Haha, wow. Earthquakes happen due to the friction between plates, and we were probably building up to that quake for a good 10 years now. God did not just suddenly decide to shake the earth because someone doubted him. God does not even exist, most likely.
And also, there is no adequate solution to the problem of evil; any solution any theologian has tried to put forth has been overturned.
If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil?
God is both able and willing, but he gave us all free will. When will we turn from evil and choose good of our own free will?
I have some huge issues with "free will." http://dangerousintersection.org/2007/10/01/free-… And if we have "free will," why are all so much alike? http://dangerousintersection.org/2007/05/08/the-s…
I also have some major issues with belief in God. http://dangerousintersection.org/2010/07/11/mendi…
My brother and sister got in a fight today.
I was able to stop them.
I was willing to stop them.
I didn't stop them because I didn't think it was necessary.
God gave us free will, and doesn't WANT to interfere with that.
I suppose I'll start believing that "God" gave us "free will" because Ed said it. End of story.
Hello all,
I'm wondering why must we accept Epicurus' 2nd premise: "If He is able, but not willing, then He is malevolent." And then later, "If He is not willing, then why call Him God?"
Doesn't this mean that unless the universe is all rainbows and butterflies (the way we would like it to be) then we refuse to admit there is a God over us to whom we owe our allegiance?
Is this not a bit haughty? Or childish?
Like a 6-year-old trying to blackmail his parents into buying him a toy at the store?
Rambling, but with a point
We tend to keep giving God human attributes such as size and shape. God is all good is not the same as all of God is all good. Did anyone ever think about what a perfect world of all good would consist of, because I am sure we would have diffirent versions of it making it imperfect to almost everyone. I for one like a little change now and then, Perfect is absolute.
Imaginge something to be more "evil" then death and then try to imagine something more evil than that. Then flip scripts to the "good" side and imagine something more "good" than the best thing ever and you will see that its just a large scale of good and evil that we tend to give values to. The fact that we can know of it is the same way we can know of a future other that the present by our recollection of the past.
The physical life we have tends to be the ultimate value so we base pleasure and pain accordingly.
So if I was able to move our perspective of pleasure and pain a little further down the scale and put death at the top of the scale giving us some horrific evils, death would be a desired way out of pain. Then on the other hand, imagine a world with perfect tempatures, every pleasure and then some with no wants, a hot summer day at the beach would seem like hell on that scale.
life comes with balance, Try this instead of God is all good… God is all possibilities. Maybe he found the perfect scale for us to live in. Evil cannot exist without good and vice-versa. One man's garbage is anothers mans fortune.
Stop assigning religions to this. It's an insult to say that after an eternity of an all powerful God, someone figured him out after a few thousand years of our existence. Just the fact that we are arguing about who is right and wrong shows us as children trying to win Dad's attention. Just understand he IS and that we our too, and that it must be for a reason. LIVE YOUR LIVES. If he is like me, as a Dad, he just wants to see you strive to be good people that overcome obstacles. If you can imagine a good than evil can be too, b/c without that evil, good would have no real value because there would be no other level of good or evil. If so , then something less than one good would make the other an evil… all possabilities.
@Ben (first poster):
Flawed logic. You keep repeating the word "supernatural" conveniently forgeting that what we call "natural" is a construction in process, derived from the atempts to explain the phenomenology of nature, "nature" being everything around us and withing us, intrinsic and inexorable. Without an !aprioristic! model of what nature !should be! we can never postulate the "supernaturality" of any phenomenon. Simply put, everything in nature will and should be conceived as "natural" and only our lack of explanation for it might lend it the appearance of "supernatural".
If there is a God, then He can as easily be found in the laws of this universe as in its exceptions. In other words, the fact that nature has logic and is not instead completely arbitrary suggests an underlying intelligence in the fabric of our existence. And if a Demiurge did fabricate them and everything we've come to agknowledge as natural, then it follows that all exceptions He might have decided to make, shall be equally "natural" in essence.
I'm not advocating His existence, of course, just pointing out that any attempt to prove or disprove Him will be subject to cultural, linguistic and conceptual fabrications, impossible to equate into an absolute silogism.
As much as i adore Epicurus paradox for its simple beauty, it's equally flawed. Equating God with Good and Evil is an antropocentric romantic construction, it proves only there can be no God !in such fashion!. Thanks to his logic at least we can be sure that if there is One, He doesn't care the least bit about us.
Evil comes from men with finite understanding thinking they can judge good from evil when a plan is only partly completed.
We look at a bitten apple and see/sense from a finite perspective that either God has lied, can not be believed, or just doesn't even exist.
God, from a position outside of time, (a.k.a. eternity) looks at the scope of the plan from before the apple was bitten to the completion of the ages knowing that the end result would bring many sons and daughters out of a sin ravaged world into his kingdom of love and light.
So in this regard, evil is how people view the partial steps necessary to accomplish a masterpiece inspite of so many of the players in the game having no desire to believe that a being of both free and good will could ever exist in the first place.
Lifemare: You're (sic) reasoning seems to be backwards, again. Which God are you talking about? The Real one or the Imaginary one?
Pharyngula: "Even if science had nothing to say on God, it doesn't mean that God isn't logically or conceptually impossible. And that's not even pointing out that God isn't even a coherent construct. But those are philosophical issues, rather than scientific. So until you get a God that is philosophically a strong conceptual entity, it's meaningless to even apply science to God. Otherwise you're just going to have bad arguments that demonstrate, in effect, nothing."
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/the_sc…
Lifemare has either never learned, or deliberately misrepresents, how science itself works.
Regardless of whether we are talking a god hypothesis, or leprechauns, the null hypothesis is the same:
H0: There are no leprechauns
the first step is to DISPROVE THAT
NOT to disprove that there ARE leprechauns.
seriously, it's this one, simple error that has confused so many about the issue of science and religion for, well, ever!
obviously, if one ever found conclusive evidence of leprechauns, H0 could be rejected.
since none has, H0 has not been rejected, and the relative strength of H0 would be entirely dependent on how long and hard an attempt has been made to refute H0.
similar with any particular concept of any deity, like the abrahamic god.
if one takes the descriptions of said deity from the writings contained in whatever version of the bible one chooses, forms that into a null hypothesis, it's pretty clear THAT null hypothesis has never been refuted.
it's quite simple really.
It always baffles me why this gets so backwards in the minds of so many, not just the religious.
Still, it must be just tons and tons of exposure to fallacies in what amounts to a superstitious culture.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/01/the_sc…
Karl writes:—"So in this regard, evil is how people view the partial steps necessary to accomplish a masterpiece inspite of so many of the players in the game having no desire to believe that a being of both free and good will could ever exist in the first place."
(This is going to sound cruel, but…)
And Eichmann was just doing his job. People didn't understand what the greater plan was, or they would not have judged him so.
This notion that there is some great master plan that we can't see is often used to justify the damnedest things. It's a crock. There are people perfectly capable of describing or at least imagining what a good life looks like. Ergo, it's not that much of a leap to know there are people who know what evil looks like.
The idea that there are people who think it's okay to be cruel, to diddle children, to eradicate ethnic groups they don't like because the rest of us don't get with some cosmic plan and therefore, because we make the world what it is (sinful, whatever that means), it's our fault there is evil, is a profoundly twisted way to look at anything.
Here's the skinny, Karl—if he exists, it doesn't matter, because this god you keep going on about is an absentee landlord and a no-show. It would be very simple for such a being to explain himself, clearly, in language everyone can understand. After that, those who choose not to follow, you know who they are.
After all, if we believe the Old Testament, Yahweh screwed all the languages up so we can't understand each other (even when, apparently, we're using the same vocabulary)—he can unscrew them, then, and tell us.
As usual, you're guessing according to they way you would like it to be. Meanwhile, there are some real problems that need addressing.
p.s. Beautifully phrased B.S. is still B.S.
I repeat – those who refuse to believe in a being that has both free will and good will believe anything they want to believe about good and evil as well as a lack of agreement concerning personal responsibility for their own or anyone else's behavior as well.
Sure there are people capable of agreeing as to what they believe a "good" life should look like, but then "evil" is also a relative term and then don't try to make it the opposite of good. As relative terms they cannot be opposite only apposite for a particular person’s way of thinking.
Your language metaphor reveals more than you can imagine. Babel was allowed by God, because it was the will of the people to try and create a human culture that would attempt to rival God's will. People lost their cool with one another and what people heard was so offensive to each other that they chose to separate rather than to try and understand each other.
Trash talk is always impressive to those who know what a good life is supposed to look like.
Karl writes:—"Your language metaphor reveals more than you can imagine. Babel was allowed by God, because it was the will of the people to try and create a human culture that would attempt to rival God’s will. People lost their cool with one another and what people heard was so offensive to each other that they chose to separate rather than to try and understand each other."
WTF?
Allowed? ALLOWED?
What's the matter with you, Karl, did you forget how to read? Let's see, that's…Genesis 11. I quote:
"Now Yahweh came down to see the town and the tower that the sons of man had built. "So they are all a single people with a single language!" said Yahweh. "This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do. Come, let us go down and confuse their language on the spot so that they can no longer understand one another." Yahweh scattered them thence over the whole face of the Earth, and they stopped building the town. It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole Earth."
Allowed? You talk as if it just sort of happened and Yahweh did nothing to stop it, but that's not how the story reads. Yahweh proactively did it. Then he scattered them.
Interestingly enough, because—once more—he seemed distressed by the competition. "This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do." Back in the Garden of Eden he stopped Adam and Eve from eating from the Tree of Life, lest they become as gods.
Now, to my mind even more interestingly, there is some etymological confusion here. We take Babel as the word for confusion. The word seems to stem from the Hebrew balal, which means "mixed" and "confused" but that is not the only source and likely not even the correct one. In Babylonian, the city was called "Babi-lu" which means "Gate of God" and from this is derived the Hebrew word "Babel" and the Greek "Babylon."
Turns out, there actually was a "Tower of Babel"—there were towers in most Sumerian cities and this one was begun by a Sumerian king and left unfinished. However, in the 6th Century Nebuchadnezzar actually finished his "tower of Babylon", which stood 325 feet. Not huge by today's standards, but for a long time it was the tallest structure in southwestern Asia.
But, look—you try to turn all these tales around to make it seem as if people brought this shit on themselves, and metaphorically there's some value in seeing it that way—but that ain't what the frickin'
Bible says. Time and again, Yahweh shows himself to be fickle, cruel, arbitrary, and despotic. It's there, in writing.
Now as I happen to believe there is no such being, it becomes easy for me to read all this as metaphorical exegeses of perfectly human conduct—the writers attributing to their god exaggerated characteristics of what people are like, hence the "created in his image" line takes on profoundly more significance psychologically. For me, there is no cosmic plan, just people trying to figure out how to live.
We do the best we can and then someone—such as yourself—stands there on the sidelines and throws out these little bon mots of presumed divine wisdom, all Ecclesiastical, that no matter what we do on our own, we have it wrong and it's all for nothing because we don't put our faith in some great sky daddy with the morals and manners of a spoiled child. And that's fine if that pumps yer nads, but if you're gonna do that and toss out gems from the scriptures to back it up, at least get the story straight.
Yahweh DID THIS, intentionally, maliciously, on purpose. He didn't ALLOW IT to JUST HAPPEN. He CAUSED it. It says so, right there in the scrolls.
Now, this is linguistically absurd, since language variation happens anyway and once enough communities grew up separate from each other there likely was no single language, ever, because we know that even within cities, if they're stratified by class we see linquistic drift that can happen in as little as three generations. SO this is another fairy tale to explain something that happens naturally and tie it to a bad nasty story of human hubris.
But it still intriques me that it was set down that Yahweh was worried that humans could "do anything."
Karl: Perhaps you might better understand this modern version of the story of Babel: http://dangerousintersection.org/2009/05/13/bush-…
Mark,
I'm glad you got the intent of my use of the word allowed.
You are right it is not in the text directly, but neither are your assertions that God is fickle, cruel, arbitrary, and despotic. Those are your words describing what you interpret concerning the actions and motives of the god you claim to know all about.
God's choice of this action of language confusion is seen by some as a blessing, but as a curse by others. This is where our mind sets are so much different. I see the action as a blessing allowing man to avoid a more harsh action/judgment in the future. Like when a parent tries to train their children to do the right things so they don't really run amuk when they are on their own.
What you see it as a frustration to your human hubris, "just what could these humans have accomplished," I see as a way of God showing man that he really doesn't like to have to discipline in this manner, but that he still won't shrink away from it.
God created man, sustains man and could easily claim to manipulate every action of his human "puppets," as you seem to think he does regularly.
You seem to not be aware of the preceding contextual blessing of Genesis 9:1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.
The problem was the complete lack of interest in moving out and filling the earth. The "fill the earth" was now going to take place whether they wanted it or not. I see it as a blessing that allowed the people to not turn themselves into a society of arrogant, immoral, hedonists. You see it as a slap in the face to your human hubris.
Just the very thought of the existence of a God of free will and good will is seen by many people as a curse and not a blessing as well.
God could have chosen a much harsher method of discipline because of the direct aversion of the people to accept God's blessing given through Noah and onto his posterity.
Since the people would not receive the blessing freely on their own, this manipulating God had plan B already worked through before it was needed to be put into effect.
The people could have chosen to work through their differences and stayed together, but God, who knows the power of the tongue to unify or separate people, let the people act in response as he knew they would. They separated company from their associates.