God, Evil, and the Rationality of Theism: An Atheist Perspective, Professor Stephen Law

On Wednesday, November 12, Professor Stephen Law, editor of Think, gave a talk entitled "God, Evil, and the Rationality of Theism: An Atheist Perspective." He overviewed and critiqued the Evil God argument, and answered audience questions.

About the Speaker:
A former postman who entered University as a mature student age 24, Dr Law is known for his popular introductory books on philosophy, including titles for children. He is Director of Philosophy and Cert HE at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education, and researches in philosophy of mind, language, metaphysics, and in philosophy or religion. He has edited Think since 2002.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:04

So uh if everyone can hear me, uh my name is Stephen Law, and um I've been asked to uh give a talk. I'm delighted to do that for the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I edit the journal uh Think uh for the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Think Philosophy for Everyone, um, which is aimed at the general public. And we had a recent relaunch, it's now in color, and uh we aim to uh publish accessible and engaging pieces of up to 4,000 words in think. So that's what I'm responsible for for the Women Institute of Philosophy. Um I'm going to speak for uh a while. I'm gonna allow an hour and 10 minutes in total, and I'm I'm hoping to leave at 20 minutes at least at the end for QA. So when it comes to QA, if you were to uh if you want to ask a question, if you use the raising the hand facility, which is available on Zoom, um I'll be able to see that you've got your hand raised, hopefully, and then I can ask you to um ask your question. If you would rather not be seen, uh, because this is being recorded, um, or indeed heard, um Julia um will instead um read out your question if you type it into the chat facility. Um and you could be doing that, you know, as we go along, um, in fact. So uh so you've got two options there in terms of um asking questions, and hopefully, there will be plenty of time to to do that. Um so I think I I think I can just kick off now. No reason why not. Is there good? Okay, so um, yeah, so I'm gonna talk to you about a paper I wrote a little while ago now, it was published in 2010. Um, this is a kind of a it's philosophy of religion. Um what I'm gonna do is I'm going to really I'm just going to present the very familiar problem of evil, but in a hopefully interesting, slightly novel way, so that you look at it from a from a different angle. Um this paper was published in 2010. Um let me now share my screen so you can see what I'm going to talk about. So I'm hoping now that you can see the screen. Julia, let me know if there are any problems, but I think that's working. Good. Okay, so the paper is called The Evil God Challenge. Uh, it was published in Religious Studies. It became quite well known. In fact, uh it was the most viewed paper of the decade uh in uh that particular journal Religious Studies. So it attracted quite a lot of attention. Um, all I'm going to do today is kind of give you a sort of a fairly breezy uh introduction to the paper. It's not a technical paper, it's not difficult paper. Um the ideas are pretty intuitive. So hopefully this will be fairly accessible and um and entertaining. So here we go. Um so I'm gonna be looking at a very famous argument against the existence of God, uh, an argument with which you're will already be familiar, the evidential problem of evil. But before we look at the argument, let's just get clear about which God we're talking about. So my focus here, at least to begin with, is on this particular deity. Uh, he may have various attributes, but he has at least these three. Okay, he's omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, which means, roughly speaking, all powerful, all knowing, and all good. Or if you prefer, maximally powerful, maximally knowing, um, maximally good. Um, that's the particular God that we're going to be looking at. Um, how reasonable is it to believe in a in a god like that? Well, of course, there's uh highly controversial. Uh, some people think this is an absurd belief, other people think that it's an eminently reasonable belief, and then other people place the belief at various other positions on the scale of reasonableness. So it's um highly contentious just how reasonable this belief is. Um, I'm going to be thinking about whether it is a reasonable belief. Um, I think a lot of people would say, well, it's a lot more reasonable than believing in fairies or Santa Claus or something like that. I mean, those really are absurd beliefs. Um, no sensible person grown up believes anything like that nowadays. Um, belief in God is is much more credible than that, is the suggestion. And I think even many atheists would probably agree with that, actually, but it's it's it's it's not an absurd belief, it's not a highly unreasonable belief. I'm gonna challenge that view. Um I'm going to suggest provocatively that actually it really might be a very unreasonable belief. Um the first thing I'll do is just point out that most of the popular arguments, or the most popular arguments for the existence of that particular deity, um, on closer examination, turn out really just to be arguments for some sort of first cause or prime mover or necessary being or cosmic designer or something like that. And it is, as it stands, a huge and so far unwarranted leap to then draw the conclusion that this particular being is all powerful, all-knowing, and all good. Why, in particular, should we suppose that the cosmic designer is all good? Um why should the first cause be all good? Um, there's a gap there that needs perhaps it can be filled in, perhaps there's a good argument for why there isn't just some kind of cosmic creator designer, um, but that this being must be supremely powerful, supremely you know, maximally knowing, and supremely benevolent. Um, but very often when you look at the most popular arguments for God, people are not really offering that. They're just offering an argument for some sort of intelligence, some sort of designer or creator, or so on. So that's the first thing I'm going to point out. Worse still, there's a powerful looking argument against the existence of this particular God with which you're all going to be very familiar. Um, it's it's known as the problem of evil. In fact, there are two problems, uh, well, at least two problems. Um they are often referred to as the logical and the evidential problem of evil. I've got both problems up there for you to take a look at. So at the top you have an argument, two premises and a conclusion. If evil exists, God does not exist. Evil does exist, therefore God does not exist. It's a simple argument. Um you might think that uh if the premises are true, you might think they're very plausible. The logic is impeccable, so it seems you're going to have to accept uh the conclusion of the argument, but at least be that that would be the suggestion. What do we mean by evil here? Well, that needs a little bit of unpacking. Um theologians generally talk about moral and natural evil. So moral evil is the bad stuff that we and other free agents do for which we can be held morally responsible. So we start wars and we steal and we murder and so on. So those are the moral evils, and then there are natural evils such as you know the great pain and suffering caused by natural diseases, natural disasters, and so on. Um, this is stuff for which we are not, at least not obviously uh responsible. And the suggestion is that uh evil exists of one or both of those sorts. Um, and if evil exists, then God does not. Why would why might someone think that's a good argument? Well, um, it's undeniable really that evil does exist. Um, the first premise, on the other hand, you might you might think, well, why should I believe that's true? And presumably the argument would be something like this that if there is a God, he's gonna be all powerful, so he can prevent evil. He's gonna be all-knowing, so if there is any evil, he's gonna know about it, and he's all good, so he's not gonna want there to be any evil. So there just shouldn't be any evil. Um, but there is, therefore, God does not exist. Seemingly a knockdown argument um against the existence of God. But actually, on closer examination, it's not such a good argument, and in fact, this is widely considered to be a failure, this top argument, which I shall refer to as the logical problem, the claim being that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of any evil whatsoever. Um, there's an obvious rejoinder. You can challenge that first premise. You can say, well, actually, God may have very good reasons to allow certain evils if that's the price he must inevitably pay for still greater goods. It might sound paradoxical, but it's going to be an even better universe with a bit of evil in it than it would otherwise have been, because that little bit of evil allows for still greater goods. Um, so for example, sometimes people will point to free will, God made us free agents, that is in itself good, arguably, and it also allows for the very great good of our choosing to do good of our own, you know, of our own free will, of our own volitions, so we can be held morally responsible for these very good things that we're doing. Unfortunately, because we now have free will in order to allow for that very great good, some of us choose to do bad stuff, evil results. That's unfortunate, but it's the price paid for still greater goods. So you can reject that first premise in that way. That first argument widely considered to be a failure. So let's move on to the second argument. Now, the I the second argument is the evidential problem of evil, which you can present in various different ways. And I have chosen to present it as a deductive argument, but not everyone does that. But this certainly is the evidential problem of evil. Um it's the reason I've done it this way, so you so you can see that it's basically it's the same argument with the word added, and the word is gratuitous. So a gratuitous evil is an evil for which there is no adequate God-justifying reason. God may allow evils for the sake of greater goods, but not otherwise. He's not going to allow sort of pointless evils, suffering for which there is no adequate justification. So let's call those gratuitous evils. And so the first premise of our evidential argument is if gratuitous evil exists, God does not. Now that looks far more robust than the first premise of the logical problem. Um I'm inclined to think that's true. If gratuitous evils exist, God does not exist. God may allow evils, but not pointless, not pointless evils, not pointless, gratuitous suffering. Um however, premise two, gratuitous evil exists, evil for which there is no adequate God-justifying reason. There seems to be quite a lot of that. Um, therefore, God does not exist. So it's this second argument that I'm going to be focused on, the evidential problem of evil as it's known. So just to be clear, an evil is a natural or moral evil. A gratuitous evil is an evil for which there is no adequate God-justifying reason. There do appear to be gratuitous evils, so it seems that we're then compelled to accept there is no God. Let's have a look at some of the evils. So, you know, there are the obvious examples cancer, the Holocaust, Black Death hemorrhoids are added in order to sort of lighten the mood, um, just because it's also depressing as we trawl through all these terrible things that we have to endure. Um, mass extinction events which have um caused immense suffering, not to us, uh, because we're comparatively recent inhabitants of this planet, but to other sentient creatures. I mean, there have been there's been sentient on life on this planet, life capable of suffering for many, many millions of years, and that life has very often been horrifically unpleasant for the creatures concerned. Um, an example being around about uh 250 million years ago, I believe, something very large um hit the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out the dinosaurs, or most of them, and caused unbelievable uh catastrophic uh pain and suffering across the face of the earth. Um that looks like at least some of it looks like at least some of that's going to be gratuitous evil. I mean, what is the point of that from a divine perspective? Um what could possibly justify that uh appalling suffering on a global scale? And this kind of suffering has been going on for you know hundreds of millions of years, it's it's you know literally unimaginable quantities of pain and suffering before we even show up. If God exists, none of it is gratuitous. There's a good reason for every single last ounce. On the other hand, if even a type even a teaspoonful is gratuitous, there is no God. And it strikes many atheists as just sort of highly implausible that there's likely to be some adequate God-justifying reason for all of that pain and suffering. And so this looks, on the face of it, like extremely good um observational evidence against the existence of God. We humans have been here for around about 350,000 years. That's the latest estimate for how long Homo sapiens as a species has been on the planet. For almost that entire period of time, your probability of your making it to adulthood is not much better than 50-50, um, according to the experts. Um, those children would have died probably quite horribly, painfully. But there's not just the child's suffering, there's the parents' psychological torment as they have to watch their child slowly die painfully. Um extraordinary quantities of pain and suffering. Not one ounce of it must be gratuitous, if there's a God. There has to be a good reason for every last ounce. Again, many atheists will say that's just not plausible. I mean, clearly some of that pain and suffering is gratuitous. And so here's the problem then. Uh, if there is any gratuitous evil at all, even an ounce there's no God, it's looking highly unlikely that there is such a reason for every last ounce of evil, but then it's looking highly unlikely that there's a God. The evidence against God is stacking up to the point where it's beginning to look pretty absurd, actually, to believe in God, um, according to many critics. So that's the evidential problem of evil. How do people respond to the evidential problem of evil? If they believe that belief in God is not absurd, it's not unreasonable, how might they respond? One of the most obvious ways is to actually try and identify the reasons that God might have for allowing uh these evils, and so free will again can be invoked in order to try and explain at least some of the some of the evil. So we've already seen that you can apply that this move when it comes to the logical problem. You can uh you can try with the evidential problem too. You can say that, and this is a very simple version. God gave us free will so that we could freely choose to do good. Uh, that's a very great good. Uh, he could have made us just automata or puppet beings that always did the benevolent thing, but if you're just a benevolent, if you're just a uh a puppet, you're not responsible for your behaviour. Uh in order to, in order to be morally good, that behavior needs to be free, freely chosen. So God cuts the strings, uh, sets us free. As a result, some of us choose to do bad stuff, evil exists. But that evil um allows for the very great goods that more than more than outweigh the evil. So again, you can use something like a free will explanation, but there are very obvious limitations. This doesn't really explain hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering, it doesn't really explain 350,000 years of very high child mortality rates. None of that appears to be a result of our free action, or at least not most of it. Um, so perhaps we need to add some more theodices then, some more explanations. Um, so another one that we could add to the mix would be that this is a veil of soul-making. Uh so the theologian John Hick famously introduced this expression, veil of soul-making. Um here's a very simple version of a soul-making theodicy. Um, bad experiences can make us stronger, we can learn, we can be enriched through suffering. Um, there's a child on a bike there with stabilizers on. As a parent of a child who had to learn to ride a bike, I remember taking the stabilizers off, knowing full well my daughter was going to fall over and scuff her knees, and there would be blood and there would be crying and so on. But I did it anyway. Uh, as a loving parent, I took the stabilizers off, knowing exactly what was going to happen. Uh, why did I do that? Well, because unless I take the stabilizers off, she's never gonna learn to ride the bike. And that's gonna be something that I wanted to be able to do. I wanted to grow and develop in that kind of way. I can't allow for that unless I take the stabilizers off. Um, she can't have the sense of achievement and satisfaction of having learned how to do it unless I take the stabilizers off. So on balance, it's better that I take the stabilizers off, despite the fact that I know that pain and suffering are gonna are going to result. And then the suggestion is then that similarly, God's taken our stabilizers off. Um, he could have protected us, he could have created a pain-free existence for us, but that would strip us of all sorts of opportunities to grow and develop, to help others, and so on. Um, people who have been through great suffering often say that as a result of that suffering, they feel that they have learned a valuable lesson, a lesson that you could not possibly learn unless you'd actually been through that deeply unpleasant experience. So perhaps that will explain at least some of the evil that God permits. And you know, maybe so. But again, there are limitations to this theodicy doesn't really explain hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering. I mean, what's God doing? Trying to make the souls of the creatures that he's obliterating? Uh, presumably not. Um, although I've heard theologians uh offer something like that recently, but um I don't I have to say I don't take that terribly seriously. Um there's also the Problem that if you actually look at the way pain and suffering is distributed, it's very hard to make sense of that distribution if this is supposed to be a veil of soul making. Because the people whose souls are um well, those souls who are on the receiving end of the pain and the suffering um very often are psychologically and physically crippled and destroyed by the experiences through which God, if he exists, has put them. Uh, they're not, their souls are not made, they're destroyed, they kill themselves. Um, you know, as a result of their child dying, for example, famous example. Um, the idea that this has somehow made them better, has given them an opportunity to grow and develop, looks absurd given the very weird way in which God has distributed the pain and the suffering. It's just not a plausible account of the pain and the suffering when you look at the manner in which it's distributed. So there are limitations to this particular theodicy too. I sometimes call it the no pain, no gain theodicy. Um, another theodicy, another explanation you could offer, which is offered by the Reverend John Ponkingham, for example, is that some of the pain and suffering that we experience in this life, and that other creatures, other sentient beings experience, is a result of the operation of laws of nature. Um those laws allow for the movement of tectonic plates and so on, which produce earthquakes, tsunamis, which produce pain and suffering and so on, but the laws are necessary for very great goods. Um John Polkinghorn has his own sort of story to tell about that. I'll give you my version. If I want to help you, um I need to know certain things in order to be able to do that effectively. So, for example, if I see that you're cold and hungry, I need to know that if I light strike a match, it will produce a flame, that the flame, when I ignite the wood, will burn the wood, that the burning wood will produce heat, that the heat will warm you up, that the heat will cook the food, and so on. I need to live in a stable, law-governed universe in order to be able to act benevolently towards you with any degree of success. Otherwise, I simply have no idea what the result of my actions is going to be. So, laws of nature are important, they allow for very great goods. As a result of those laws operating, however, um, there are tectonic plate movements, produced tsunamis, people are drowned, there's pain, there's suffering, but that's the price paid for the very great good of our living in a stable, law-governed universe that then allows for goods such as my being able to help other people, and so for moral goodness to exist in the world. So call that the laws of nature theodicy, another theodicy. Pull all these theodices together, and you might begin to think that well, now we're getting somewhere. I mean, maybe individually each one is not that successful, has its limitations. But you know, as we combine them, they begin to gain some momentum because perhaps we've now been making some progress really in dealing with the problem of evil. Um, but even if you don't think that, there is another manoeuvre available to you as a theist that might allow you to deal with the evidential problem of evil rather than cook up the reasons that God might have for allowing evils. Maybe, you know, maybe have a go if you like, but if you can't cook up the explanations, it doesn't really matter. And the reason that it doesn't really matter is that the mere fact that we can't think of such reasons is not good grounds for thinking that the reasons are not there. So this is the position of someone known as a sceptical theist. Skeptical theism is currently it's quite fashionable. Quite a few philosophers of religion are drawn to skeptical theism. Not all of them, though. I mean, Richard Swinburne, for example, the leading philosopher of religion, doesn't like sceptical theism at all. So it's not slightly universally accepted. But it's still, yeah, uh it's intriguing, it's interesting. Um, and the basic idea is this it's that we we're in no position to know what reasons God might have for allowing all of the evil that we see around us. The mere fact that we can't think of reasons is not good grounds for thinking that the reasons don't exist. But that's the only reason we have for thinking that there are no such reasons. And so we're just not in any position to suppose that there are any gratuitous evils at all. For all we know, there are no gratuitous evils. There's a good reason for every last one. And if that's true, then you can't run the evidential problem of evil because you're in no position to know that the second premise of the evidential argument is true. You're in no position to know that there are any gratuitous evils. In order to explain this position, uh the skeptical theorist often will use um analogies. Uh, so here's one of the most popular. Um, it involves a garage. So I've got a picture of a garage there. We're looking into the garage, and um, we can see right to the back of the garage, perhaps all the walls. Uh, if we move our position a little bit, uh, we can't see any elephants. Now, given that we can't see any elephants, it's reasonable to conclude that there are no elephants in the garage. Uh, that's a no-se no-seum inference. I can't see it, so it's probably not there, right? Um, and that works for elephants. Uh, it doesn't work for insects. Um, just because I can't see any insects looking into the garage doesn't mean you know I know I'm in a position to conclude that there are probably no insects present. No, there could easily be insects present. The mere fact that I can't see them is not good evidence that they're not there, because even if they were there, I probably still wouldn't see them. So no CM inferences work for elephants in the garage, they don't work for insects in the garage. And now the analogy is this: that similarly, then, the mere fact that I can't think of reasons why God would allow these evils is not a reason to think that these reasons are not there. I'm just not sufficiently smart and uh intelligent enough to know that there are no or there are unlikely to be reasons back there that would justify God in allowing the evils. So, you know, I need to show a little humility and accept that there could easily be reasons back there, just as there could easily be insects in the carriage that I can't see. There could easily be reasons back there that justify God in allowing the evils, reasons that I hadn't thought of. So I'm engaging in a faulty no thinkum inference, if you like, when I move from I can't think of a reason why God will allow these evils to, well, there probably isn't a reason uh then. So that's the view of the sceptical theist. I have uh quite independently published several papers on sceptical theism. I don't think sceptical theism is going to work, but um let's let's put it on the table. On the face of it, it looks like it offers the theist to sort of get out of jail free card, so far as the evidential problem of evil is concerned. Even if they can't think of reasons for the evils, that doesn't mean that um they're in a position to conclude, atheists are in a position to conclude that there's probably no reason back there. So, uh, having looked at three theodices and skeptical theism, you might begin to you might perhaps start to think that, well, okay, you've got this argument, the evidential problem from evil, and on the face of it, it looks like a very powerful argument, but we can identify reasons why God might allow many of these evils, and even if we can't identify reasons for every last one of them, you're in no position to conclude from the fact that we can't think of such reasons that there probably are no such reasons because of sceptical theism. So that's the evidential problem of evil, then, really brought down to size. Um there's there's no real substantive problem here for theists by means of either Theodices or andor skeptical theism, they can deal with the evidential problem of evil. Uh so what I've given you so far is a kind of a quick overview of a very familiar problem. What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna present you with the sort of the evil god dimension to my paper. So, what I'm gonna give you is basically an analogy. Um and the analogy involves the hypothesis that there is one god, and this being, it's not the devil because he's not a god, obviously. Uh, there's just the one god, and um he's omnipotent, he is omniscient, and he's omni malevolent, not omnibenevolent. So it's just the third omniattribute that we've changed, we've crossed out benevolent and written in malevolent. So this universe was the creation of a supremely powerful and malevolent deity whose viciousness knows no limits, whose cruelty is beyond our imagination. Just the one God, and that's him. Um how reasonable is it to believe in a god like that? Almost everyone, I think, when I whenever I've mentioned it, has suggested that that's that's a pretty ludicrous belief. Um you know that that that that no sensible person would believe that, surely. Um, but why not? Um, after all, we did see earlier that um classic arguments for the existence of God, actually, on closer examination, many of them give us no clue as to the character of the cosmic designer or intelligence or prime mover or first course. Um so why couldn't it be all evil? Uh why why if if if the if the fine-tuning design argument is a good argument for a good God, it turns out to be just as good an argument for an evil God because it's actually completely neutral on God's moral attributes. Um, if one of these arguments is a good argument, then the other one is a good argument. So, you know, surely if I believe in an evil God, I can help myself to these very popular arguments for the existence of God, which seem on the face of it to be just as effective. Um, but still, I think most people will say, no, no, still it is a ridiculous belief, it's an absurd belief. Um, but why? Uh, and I think the argument my suggestion is this um too much good. There's too this world contains too much good for this to be plausibly considered the creation of a supremely powerful and malevolent deity. You know, it's filled with love and laughter and ice cream and rainbows and puppies and uh just too much good for this to be the creation uh of a supremely powerful and malevolent deity. Um, yeah, there's evil in it, uh, but there's a lot of good, uh, too much for uh it to be the creation of such a deity. And in fact, we can sharpen up this objection a little bit. Um, and now you'll see that what it is, actually, is just the evidential problem of evil flipped. We've crossed out evil and we've written good, but it's the same argument. So, premise one, if gratuitous good exists, evil good does not exist. Evil God does not exist. That looks very plausible indeed. I mean, an evil God may allow some goods if that's the price paid for greater evils, but he's not gonna allow the goods otherwise. They aren't gonna be gratuitous goods, right? And yet when we look at the world, we see love and laughter and ice cream and rainbows in abundance. Uh, surely there's not going to be some evil justifying evil good justifying reason for every last one of these goods. So some of them are going to be gratuitous goods, and if there's any gratuitous good, there isn't good, there is no evil god, so there is no evil god. Same argument. Um, is this a good argument? Um I think most people are gonna think um, well, I think very often when people first look at this argument, they go, Yeah, that's just obvious. This is obviously a good argument against the existence of an evil god. But then the question is the challenge is to explain why, if this is an argument, a good argument against an evil god, why the evidential problem of evil is not a good argument against a good god. There seems to be kind of a symmetry here, and it's that symmetry really that I now want to explore um a little bit. So there we go, the evidential problem of good. If you believe in a good God, you have to face the evidential problem of evil. If you believe in an evil god, you face the evidential problem of good. Um let's have a look at some uh seemingly gratuitous goods. Uh, beautiful sunsets and mountains. Why would an evil god give us a lovely view? Surely he would torture us for all eternity with a red-hot poker, not give us a beautiful sunset. Um, why would he give us healthy young bodies? Surely he would make us arthritic and decrepit and permanently in pain. He wouldn't allow us to play sports in the sunshine with our healthy bodies, it's just not the sort of thing an evil god would do. Uh why would he give us children to love who love us unconditionally in return? Evil God hates love, obviously. So this is this is just not something an evil God is going to do. Um why does he allow us to help? We're allowed to help each other, we're allowed to reduce each other's suffering. We become doctors and nurses, we give to charity to try and alleviate and reduce the suffering of other people. Evil God hates that. Why on earth does he allow us to do that if he exists? Again, this looks like you might think evidence against an evil God. Uh, why does he bestow upon some people, David Beckham, for example, fantastic good fortune and wealth, health, happiness, beautiful children, lovely wife, yet another new Bentley, multi-million dollar contracts? Surely an evil god would torture uh torture David Beckham for all eternity with a red hole poker, not give him yet more wonderful stuff. So, on the face of it, there appears to be an awful lot of good, much of it gratuitous from an evil god's perspective, and that's why you might think it's ludicrous to believe in an evil god. But we can actually start to make moves analogous to the moves that are made in defense of belief in a good god. We can now mirror those moves in defense of belief in an evil god. So I'll show you how you can do that. Um, here's a free will theodicy. Um evil God allows us to do good, to reduce suffering. Why? Because he gave us free will. Why would an evil God give us free will? Well, because unless you're free, you can't freely choose to do evil. And if you can't freely choose to do evil, if you're just compelled to do it, well, you're a puppet being and you're not morally responsible for what you do. And so moral evil will not exist in the universe. So because an evil God will want to maximize evil, and in particular, we'll want to see moral evil in his creation, he's going to give us free will. As a result of evil God giving us free will, uh, moral evil exists. But the downside is that um some goods result. Some of us choose to do good, it's not what he wants, but we do it. It's good, but it's gratuitous good because there's a good reason for evil God allowing it. Um, it's because he wants moral evil to exist, and he can't allow for moral evil to exist unless he cuts the strings and sets us free. So this is just the same theodicy as the standard theodicy that I outlined earlier, but I've just flipped it round and I'm now deploying it in defense of belief in an evil god. Similarly, we can take this veil of soul-making move and we can flip that. Um, we can say evil god wants us to suffer, obviously. Why does he create natural beauty? Well, as a contrast to make our appreciation of the ugliness and dreary dreariness of day-to-day life all the more acute. Um, he's gonna pepper, he's gonna pepper his creation with some beauty just to really remind us about how bad the bad stuff is. Why is he going to give us children to love? Because it's only if you really love your children that you really suffer when he kills them on an industrial scale over 350,000 years, which he did. Uh if you don't care about your kids, you're just gonna shrug them off and have another one. If it's only if you love your children that the worst forms of psychological torment that you can inflict on a parent become available to you. So an evil God is gonna allow for love, and he's gonna allow for children because it allows him to maximize evil. Uh why does he give us uh healthy fit bodies? Uh, I've got a bit flowery here. I said after 10 or 15 years, you slowly die, slide into decay, disease, decrepitude, you end up hopelessly ugly, incontinent, and smelling of we, I've so flowery flowerily put it. The idea is that you give people something good and then you take it away. And that's so much more cruel than if you never gave them the good thing to begin with. So, yes, God, evil God gives young people for a brief, brief, fleeting moment, you know, beauty and health and so on, and then he claws it back in the most cruel way imaginable. Um, and it's a bit like you know, you give a child a beautiful fire engine, the child is delighted, and then you smash it up in front of their face. Uh, that's so much more cruel than if you'd never given them the fire engine. It allows you to maximize evil by giving people good stuff and then taking it away. Uh, you will remember John Pulkingham's Mirror Laws of Nature Theodicy. Um says that uh we need laws of nature for very great uh goods, for beautiful, you know, beautiful sunsets for allowing us to interact with each other as moral agents, for example. Um we can flip that round. We can say um evil God wants me to do evil, he wants me to burn your house down with you in it. He wants me to commit horrendous crimes like that. Now I can only do that if I live in a stable, law-governed universe and know about the regularities that obtain. I need to know that when I light a match, it'll produce a flame, and that the flame will ignite the petrol that I pour through your letterbox, and that the petrol will then ignite and produce a fireball that will consume your house and all the people in it, and so on. Unless there are laws of nature, I can't engage in that kind of morally depraved behaviour. I cannot be morally evil. And so, evil God is going to allow for laws of nature to maximize evil. The downside to those laws is that they produce beautiful sunsets. Um He doesn't like that, but that's the price he has to pay for maximizing evil. If you don't like these theodices, perhaps you think they have their limitations. I can deploy a sceptical theism just as effectively in defense of belief in an evil god as belief in a good God. Um how do you know that there are any gratuitous goods? Well, you can't think of any. Uh, sorry, any reasons for the um for the goods for the goods that we see. How do you how do you know that there that there are any gratuitous goods? You can't think of reasons for them that would justify an evil god in allowing them, but just because you can't think of them doesn't mean that they're not there. It's the exact same logic that applies here as was deployed by the skeptical theist in defense of belief in a good God. It works just as well if for uh as a defense of belief in an evil god. So, you know, if we're going to allow one of these moves, uh, we have to allow the other. And that means then that the evidential problem of good simply collapses. You can't know that the second premise that the the gratuitous goods exist, you can't know that premise is true. So uh you might be getting to you, you know, somebody might think, well, maybe there is an evil god. Um, but I'm guessing that none of you actually are coming around to that view. I'm I'm guessing that most of you, I might be wrong, but this is my my my guess. Most of you are thinking, well, this is all Very clever. You're cooking up all of these explanations. But really, we know that there's no evil God, and we do know that on the basis of observation of the world around us. Sure, we can, you know, we can gerrymander and cook up explanations for the goods that we see. But you know, frankly, they're fairly laughable at the end of the day, these attempts to explain away the goods. And in sceptical theism, we know we know just by looking around us that this is not the sort of world that a supremely powerful and malevolent deity would create. And if that's true, and I suspect it is, then the same logic applies to belief in a good God. If belief in an evil God is a downright absurd on the basis of observed goods, and I strongly suspect it is, then belief in a good God is seem is similar is also absurd on the basis of um the observed evils. Um so there seems to be then a kind of symmetry between these two good hypotheses which I'm to which I'm drawing attention. Um the evil good challenge really is the challenge to explain why one of these good hypotheses is so very much more reasonable than the other one, given that one of them is downright absurd, namely the evil good one. Um suddenly the person who defends theism and who believes there's a single all-powerful, all knowing, and all good God behind the universe, suddenly they have some explaining to do. Um why is belief in a good God so much more reasonable than belief in an evil God, given that belief in an evil god is, on the basis of observation, frankly, ridiculous. Um so that's the challenge. Maybe it can be met, maybe not. Various uh philosophers have had a go at meeting the challenge. Um here's a further provocative suggestion. Isn't it actually about as obvious that there is no good God as it is obvious that there's no evil God? Uh, which is surely very obvious indeed. And in if if that's true, then the real mystery is why so many of us fail to see it. I mean, many of us can see it. You know, maybe there's a being back there that's responsible for the universe, but it's not a supremely powerful and malevolent one, and then for much the same reasons, it's not a supremely powerful and benevolent one either. We can cross those two candidates off our list of um like you know likely explanations. True, the atheist may not be able to explain why the universe exists. Does that mean then that they have to allow that God might exist, that God's existence is uh uh not unlikely? No, no. Uh they can they can reason they can still reasonably rule out an evil god on the basis of observation, and for much the same reasons they can rule out a good god as well. Um, maybe there's some sort of deity back there. Argue that if you like, but it's not, you know, these two candidates we can cross off our list. So here's a final analogy. Sherlock Holmes is having a bad day because he can't figure out who done it. But even though he doesn't know who did it, he knows the butler didn't. Why? Because the butler has a Carlstein alibi, he was in the room with Holmes at the time the murder was committed. Just because Holmes doesn't know who did it doesn't mean that Holmes can't very reasonably rule out certain candidates. In much of the same way, then, the atheists may not know why the universe exists. Uh, they could even acknowledge that maybe there's some being back there that's responsible. But they can still quite reasonably rule out God on the basis of observation, is my suggestion. So that's the evil good challenge to explain why belief in a good God is significantly more reasonable than belief in an evil god, which seems on the basis of observation absurd. Maybe this challenge can be met, umbe not, but it's a way of it's intended as a way of kind of sharpening up the evidential problem of evil, getting people to think about it from a slightly different angle. Maybe maybe this is what I'm doing. I'm offering a kind of a spellbreaker. I think people sometimes convince themselves that they've dealt with the problem uh when in fact they haven't really dealt with it at all. And um sometimes you can use an analogy to reveal that. And I th maybe that's what I'm doing here. It seems to me that the evidential problem has not been satisfactorily dealt with, and in fact, it's uh on the face of it an incredibly powerful objection uh to belief in God. And really, I'm just trying to get people to see why that could that might at least be true, and that there's still quite a lot of work that needs to be done um before we can put it to bed. So I'll stop there and now I'm ready for uh any questions you may have. We've got about 20 minutes, I think. Loads of time. So uh Paul has literally got his hand up. We haven't been in the same room.

SPEAKER_04 49:14

In fact, you were talking to a friend of mine, uh Sam, I think. Sam McKee would you had a debate he sold me, which I know, yeah, Sam. Yeah, yeah. Like I was the same church. So oh, that's a giveaway, isn't it? Oh my goodness. Um, yeah, great talk in some ways, it taking the evil god. I I I always struggle with this idea of this very sort of platonic, I suppose, and I'm a great fan of Plato's um idea of uh omnipotent, omniscient, and uh omni omnibele benevolent as you call it, God. I think that is a hypothetical thing. And if you're talking about it's sort of vaguely in a Christian country, I think, um it's nothing like the Judaic God for a start. Um there's a god of wrath, and boy, you read some of the Old Testament. I don't know if you have much. Is it something you read some of those, and my goodness, there are issues there. Um, so that that's my first point. I think um to not labor that too much, which I think good argument if you start with those premises. I would question those premises for a start. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:25

Well, let me just what I was gonna say is let me just respond, let me just respond to the you just let me Paul, just let me respond to that first. So I completely agree with you that we've only targeted um one god hypothesis. Um, it's worth emphasizing that if you cross any one of the three divine omniattributes out, there is no problem. It doesn't matter which one you cross out, yeah. Anyone will do so so we're we're dealing with a very specific god. Sometimes it's it's what's known as the god of the philosophers, who perhaps owes more to Plato and Aristotle. Yeah, yeah, than to the god of the old the old testament. Um, nevertheless, um you would be deemed, I think, pretty heretical were you to suggest that God does not have the omni-attributes or that God is not the greatest conceivable being, and that these attributes then somehow find it. Um so do go that way if you like, you know.

SPEAKER_04 51:29

Um I I think we're no to get onto what you you've used the word good and evil, then my argument would be, and I'm being purely philosophical, not trying to necessarily defend God. I mean, pretty stupid thing if he is all powerful. Um, just where from whence does this concept of good and evil come from? Is it not really? I'll take a logical positive view view, but it's just something you'd rather not happen. And I wrote a sort of jokey um a while ago, it never got published. And I think I should repub re-try and get it revamp it. Um, thing about if you're a football supporter and uh uh uh and your team never wins, is that an evil? It's just something you rather if you're keen on that team, uh you'd rather they win win. And most people say that's trivial, but it's not trivial and good year for me, we've actually won the FA Cup. Uh, you know, I but it I wasn't joking in the sense that you know, take that extreme of something you would rather not happen. So clearly, you would rather not happen um that your daughter gets hurt, but you allow a certain amount to you wouldn't allow her onto uh a main road with her.

SPEAKER_01 52:41

No, I'm good, I've got it.

SPEAKER_04 52:42

So I I think that's that would be my argument. I think that's a reasonable argument for you to come back. You are using the word good and evil without any concept of a theistic or even deistic thing. Where does that come from? And we probably would all agree that there is a sense of good and evil, yeah. So can you explain that in atheistic or any terms you like?

SPEAKER_02 53:04

I'd be interested in okay, so um there were two directions in which you might come come at the evident at the um at the evil challenge. You might say, Well, Stephen, you're helping yourself to this idea of evil, and um some theists would argue that you can't really have the sense uh you can't really have the concept of good and evil, morally good, morally evil uh actions and so on. You can't have that unless God exists. So really, evil proves God. And in fact, you know, the the argument that you're running really undermines itself for that reason. Um, this is a sort of um uh simple attempted refutation of the evidential problem of evil that you find being offered on sort of YouTube, sort of apologetics YouTube channels. There are a lot a lot of examples of people trying to deal with the evidential problem of evil um in this way, but not just them. I mean, actually, I had a debate with uh a very you know good philosopher, William Lane Craig, um, about about the evil good challenge. I talked about the evil good challenge, and he tried that on as well, disappointingly, I have to say. And I'm and I said to him what I'm about to say to you, and he's and he then dropped it. Okay, so so here's what I said to him. Um, the the the problem of evil is a problem that you can run without believing in evil. I don't need to believe in objective moral truths or objective moral value in order to run the objection. The problem of evil is really an internal problem for the theist. And I can point that out even if I don't myself sign up to the idea of there actually being any, you know, anything that's morally good or morally evil. Um, so the the Christian, for example, believes that you know torturing babies for fun is objectively morally wrong. Uh, and yet here's God apparently doing it. So they've got a problem. Now I can point that problem out to them without well while while being a moral nihilist. I mean, I I could say personally, I don't think there is any such thing as good and evil, you know, but you do, and you think that's evil. So now you've got some explaining to do. So so the the evidential problem of evil can be run by an atheist who happens to be a moral nihilist. It doesn't really matter, is the first thing. But that wasn't really your point, because you're coming at this, I suspect, from the moral of an atheist perspective. You're saying, Oh, but as a but you know, I don't believe in objective moral truth anyway. I just think that it's you know an expression of subjective preference or something like that. That's what we're doing when we say things are good and evil or morally good or morally bad. Which I say, well, good good luck to you then. Good luck to you then, because you've all yeah, you you're you're you're trying to refute my refutation of belief in God by simply denying that there is a God. Because because which is great. You just cut straight to the conclusion, that's fine, thank you. Um, because if there are no objective moral facts and there is no objective moral truth, then there is no god because God is, according to those who believe in him, objectively morally good.

SPEAKER_04 56:32

But I don't actually believe what you're saying because you you did use good and Ibu, didn't say where it came from. I don't you it doesn't matter, it's irrelevant. Um that's the way you live your life without any sense of moral. I mean, you know, it's the Freddie Ayer thing, you know, um, but yahboo, and he's got good argument. I think he was probably quite a moral person, actually. So from whence does that come when you actually live your life? You can hypothesize to the counter.

SPEAKER_02 57:01

So you're criticizing okay, you're criticizing emotivism. Is that what you're doing? I'm not quite sure what you're doing.

SPEAKER_04 57:06

Well, I'm just saying people do have motives, and I don't like democracy in that sense, but people have a sense of good and evil, it may vary a bit from um people don't, unless they're psychopaths, maybe you know, do live some sort of moral life. But whence it comes, I know not. And I don't think you've given an argument for it, Stephen. That's all you know.

SPEAKER_02 57:29

Because I don't need to. I'm gonna move. Uh, because uh uh it's the it's the Christian or the Jew or the Muslim, the person who believes in God that believes in good and evil, it's their conception of evil that I'm working with. Let them explain it however they want. It's irrelevant. I don't even have to believe in it. Let's just go with their conception, whatever their preferred version is. Maybe they're a divine command theorist, maybe they're a virtuous. I don't really care. It's irrelevant to me. Uh, whatever their conception of evil is, um, if they think that torturing kids for fun is evil, they're in trouble. And that's all I'm pointing out. And I can point that out whether I, whatever my preferred view of evil might happen to be, it doesn't really matter. I'm gonna go to Julia, um who's got a got her hand up.

SPEAKER_00 58:15

Yes, thank you. I'm reading one from the chat that says, I'm an atheist, but I think in a universe where a God who intervenes to prevent moral evil and natural evil would be one where we cannot become moral beings or even look after ourselves. We could jump off a cliff and God would rescue us. We would never need to restrain ourselves or help others. We would remain helpless babies.

SPEAKER_02 58:42

Yeah, so we need you need some evil, maybe for certain goods. Um we could acknowledge that. Um sometimes it gets sharpened up in this way. People say, well, there are certain um second order goods that require first order evils. Um, for example, in order to be charitable, you need some needy people. You know, good charity is a very great good, but it's a second order good that requires the first order evil of people being needy and so on. So we can acknowledge all of that. That seemed I I don't have any problem with that. Um, the problem uh that the evidential problem of evil highlights, though, is that that's just not gonna that's just not sufficient to deal with the depth of evil that we see around us. Much of the evil seems to be completely pointless and gratuitous, hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering. 350,000 years of very high childhood mortality rates. Um there's got to be a good reason for every last ounce of that. And it seems to me high, highly unlikely that there's likely that there is a good reason for every last ounce of it. So we can acknowledge, you know, it's true that sometimes um you need to allow for some evils for certain correctly goods, fine. The problem is that there's just so much evil there that it's just deeply highly highly unlikely, according to the atheist, uh, that there's going to be some good reason for it. I think I think I've answered that question. Is there another question from the chat? I can't see any hands up, but maybe I'm just not looking properly.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:21

Stephen, it's Doug Kingsley. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, yeah, Chris King, Doug. Stephen, uh I'm just curious. Uh I appreciate very much your philosophical approach, and I must admit I do enjoy the philosophy of religion very much. Um, but just out of interest, have you ever could I say, do you find the philosophical approach to good and evil, and whether there's a God or not, um totally separate? They feel like the fundamentalist who would simply say they believe in God, no doubt that they believe in God, and it's through mankind that evil came into the world. And in fact, it's not God who rules the world, it's Satan. This is the way their belief runs. I mean, would you say they're two separate things? Because although you might give a very good philosophical approach, they probably say, Well, yes, there might be, but their belief in God is there, absolute, but they believe in a new world to come by God's intervention. In other words, it's not that God doesn't exist, they simply believe He doesn't rule the world. Satan does. I'm quoting them. This isn't me. Yes, no, and discussions I've had with them because to be just to quote something from the Bible, um they say in the temptation of Christ by Satan, Satan said basically, if you bow down and worship me, I will give you all the kings of the world. And the argument is, well, Satan couldn't do that unless he ruled the world, and they look on an intervention from God. So I'm just trying to compare a philosophical approach, which is very good, compare with these fundamentalists who say yes, God exists, but he's not in control of it. I mean, this is just my thoughts quoting them almost. Yeah, no, that's what if you've ever had discussions with a fundamentalist now you overcome it. Um separate issues, really.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:06

No, they're not no, no, they are addressing the interesting thing, aren't they? You know, they try they are trying to address the problem.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:12

Um they're saying they go back to Adam and Eve, if you like, and it's man to Eve.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:19

Is that too? The fall, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:21

So it's basically God didn't put Evil into the world, mankind brought it in.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:25

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:28

So back to a paradise world.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:30

Well, let's separate some bits and different thoughts here. So there's so there's the Satan one, um, so Satan rules the earth, yes, because maybe because we allowed him in. Um that that that could be their explanation for the evil. Um, it's just it's a very poor explanation because um God is all powerful, Satan, by contrast, is duny nothing. That's right. Yes. And so uh the question then is well, why would God allow this being to go around causing such immense pain and suffering and catastrophe and so on? Why does he just sit there and and allow that to happen? Um, you know, an analogy would be, you know, it's it's a bit like um it's a bit like um actually I don't have a good analogy. I was gonna use a school analogy, but forget the analogy. Yeah, you can see the you can see the problem. It's it's it's like uh Mike Tyson versus uh me on a weedy day. You get a million bucks for what multiplied, taken to infinity, literally. I mean, it's it's no contest. God can stop it at any time. Um, and that means he is responsible. Um and so he you you can't really, you know, that that that's not really going to work. Um you could try a full type. I tell you why what's interesting about the full is it's a terrible explanation of the evil, um, in part because if they go for a literal version, it requires, you know, a less less than 10,000-year-old universe, um, which is just scientifically ridiculous. Um, sometimes they kind of tweak it a bit to try and get around that. Um, but um, so you know, it's highly implausible that there was an Adam and Eve that uh that existed in the garden and we're all descendants of of them. Um but uh then there are various other problems like well, why do we deserve punishment for what they did? So you didn't need the notion of original sin and the inheritability of sin, which again doesn't really make any sense. Um so you know, really poor explanation doesn't explain hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering before Adam and Eve, because there was hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering before Adam and Eve. So they they've got no answer to that. They're gonna have to be young Earth creationists, which maybe they are. Um but the interesting thing, sorry, just to get to the point that I was trying to get to, um, is that actually the fall is kind of might it might be one of those theodicies that doesn't that doesn't really flip. So we looked at three free will, uh soul creation, soul building um and uh laws of nature. And they all flipped. Um, but I I don't claim that every theodicy flips, actually. Some of them don't really flip, and it's really hard actually to flip the full theodicy. Um, however, there may be then other theodices that work better for an evil god that don't really flip back for a good god. So, you know, it's probably even Stevens at the end of the day. I don't claim that the two hypotheses are all absolutely precisely symmetrically equal in terms of reasonableness. I'm just the challenge is just to explain why one. Is significantly more reasonable than the other one. So because the fall type Theodicea is, so far as I'm concerned, such a non-starter anyway. Um, the mere fact that it doesn't flip doesn't really change for anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:12

Could I just come in there soon to what the gentleman's saying earlier about the Old Testament? I mean, to be fair, one reads the Old Testament, one could almost say one is dealing with a genocide God. I mean, there are things that theoretically said, you know, slaughter X hundreds of thousands. I mean, one begins to wonder, you know, and this the evil God part, I'm accepting what the gentleman said about the Old Testament, reading that maybe easy because God is almost totally destructive in in slaughtering people, if I put it to you. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:42

Yeah. Well, in which case we're not dealing with the you know the god of the philosophers, which is the god that you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:47

No, no, that's absolutely not. No, it's just a god of an old testament.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:50

Yeah, I mean, there are there are a million gods still on the table. We only knocked out two, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:55

Um uh so yeah, but that's just trying to get a comparison between the fundamentalist, if you like, northeast and philosophical. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:02

If they want to draw if they want to cross out the divine any one of the three divine attributes, fine, there is no problem. I mean, that's then we'll need some other argument against existence of deity. This is just an argument targeting oh, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:15

And and and and but still, it's it it is the deity, so far as an all floor of the monotheists are are concerned. Um, and so if we can show that ultimately it's a pretty ludicrous belief, that's extraordinarily significant. Um I'll take that as a win, you know. Yes. Um despite the fact that you know that there are a lot of gods still on the table. In fact, I mean, this god is the this a pair of gods that is still on the table. So you could have a good god and an evil god, neither is all powerful because you can't have two all-powerful beings that are at odds with each other. Um, so maybe this is the creation of beings like that. Now, there were people that believed that the Manichaeans, or something like that. Um, and Saint Augustine was a Manichaean before he became a Christian.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:08

So I read some sorry, I read something recently talking about because there was a suggestion that in the beginning of Genesis it does talk about let us in our own image in the plural side, as though there might be two gods up there. I'm not pushing that too hard.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:27

That's not the authority.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:33

An over-turn word trinity isn't mentioned, but it's there. Um, the spirit, the word, the logos is not talking about that, Paul.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:44

It's it's it's it's yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:49

I I hear what you said, I agree with your arguments purely logically, can't argue with them. I just think this creating this God that that that you've created, I know that's the argument. I just don't think it holds water in in the world we inhabit. And one thing I just want to bring in, I think um, free will, I would actually say that counters going back to the omnipotence of God. If he gives free will, he deigns to give it, he could take it back. He does no longer have omnipotence if we have free will. That would be a reasonable argument, I think. And maybe you could say me playing with the devil. I think that was that is an argument. I don't know which uh theologian or um what but there's there's a stock response.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:37

Let me just do it. So, yeah, you say, and similarly with omniscience, you might say, Well, once God's given us free will, he doesn't know what we're going to choose. So that's a limitation on his knowledge, so he's not omniscient. Yeah, the way in which so the way in which there's a stat there's the way in which so early right at the beginning, I said so God is all powerful, all knowing, and then I said, or maximally, maximally knowing, maximally, and the reason the reason I I I stuck that in there is because that's how they deal with uh kind of objection.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:04

I think you're thinking of God in very human terms, which I'm dead against, in fact, too many questions too. I I think you can have knowledge about something. You knew your daughter is very likely, okay. That's probability, so we're talking motor logic there. But if she rides without the outriders or whatever they're called, she could fall over. She didn't know that, and the chances are she did, hopefully, and didn't injure herself too much. And that was a learning curve. So you would know that would happen. The person doing, you know, your daughter didn't. I think I think there is a difference between knowing all things, uh uh uh and something allowing something to happen. I do they are very different, they are different categories, surely, Stephen. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:47

No, I'm gonna go to Julia because she's got her hand up again. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:50

Stephen, I've opened up another Stephen, I've opened up another debate, and I do apologize.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:57

Dialectic is about, I think.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:59

Yeah. Sorry. Let's have one more question, Julia.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:03

Okay, thank you. This is from the chat. It says, but what would you say to the response that the existence of evil and suffering is God testing our faith to him?

SPEAKER_02 1:11:13

What would I say to that? Um well you can say that, but it doesn't really deal with the evidential problem. Um, because first of all, there's hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering. How does suffering being a t a test of our faith explain that? It doesn't. Um then um there's the problem that while uh we there might be a test, the test is um sorry, I'm tired now, so I'm running out of words. Uh the test is um um it's it's a bit like it it it's it's it's such a cruel uh and seemingly pointlessly cruel test to run. I mean if the idea is that you're going to uh see just how much someone believes in you by torturing them in the most you know appalling and unimaginable ways, um that's uh how do you square that with this being a loving God? A supremely good and supremely benevolent deity. No supremely powerful and benevolent deity is going to torture you horrifically in order to ascertain whether you really believe in him or not. I mean, it's it's it doesn't make again, it doesn't really work as an explanation. So although there are these explanations that are offered, um the fall, Satan, it's a test of our faith. These are particular, I think these are particularly um implausible ones, which was why they don't really you don't see the professional philosophy commute philosophical community uh sort of engaging with them um very much. I mean, they're worth considering. Um, you know, thank you for bringing it up. But I think you can see if you think it's just stop and think about it for five minutes, that that doesn't really deal with the evidential problem of evil because of hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering and the sheer level of cruelty that would be involved. How do you square that then with this being a supremely powerful and benevolent person that is doing the testing? I I can't square that. It's the problem is still there, it hasn't gone away. So I'll stop there, Julia, if that's okay, because I've got to go and eat my dinner.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:41

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:43

It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining me. I hope that was um informative. You can go away and read the paper, The Evil Good Challenge. Uh, it's on my blog. It's easy to find, a free copy of it if you're interested. But thank you very much. Take out a take out a subscription to think is the other thing I recommend. Thank you.