God vs suffering

Over at the other blog, we’re wrapping up William Lane Craig’s attempt to look like he’s solving the problem of evil without actually confronting the real issues. Interestingly, one of his arguments suggests that the problem may be unsolvable by evangelical Christians.

Craig’s argument is that God might have a good reason for allowing human suffering, if it allows us to attain a better knowledge of Himself. According to Christian teaching, the Ultimate Good for mankind is to know God, and therefore it’s possible that a good God might co-exist with human suffering (which Craig has substituted for the more difficult problem of evil). But even if we assume that knowing God is a good thing, there’s nothing about this assumption that makes God any more likely to co-exist with suffering, and in fact makes it a whole lot less likely. See below the fold for the reason why.

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Verifiable worldviews

If you ask young-earth creationists what they think about postmodernism, you’ll find they generally consider it the height of liberal apostasy. Truth, they’ll tell you, is absolute, and not just some postmodernist “social construct.” If you then point out some of the scientific evidence against a literal Genesis creation, you’ll catch them in a bit of hypocrisy. Everybody has a worldview, they’ll tell you. Theirs is a Christian worldview, and yours is a materialistic worldview, and the same evidence can be used to support either one. In other words, your evidence can’t disprove their creationism.

Whether you call it “postmodernism” or whether you prefer the more verbose “everybody has a worldview,” the result is the same: you’re claiming that it’s impossible to tell what the real truth is by comparing your conclusions to the evidence. Worldview (allegedly) overpowers the evidence, and colors one’s conclusions to the point that all conclusions end up being subjective and irrelevant. That’s postmodernism in a nutshell—the very doctrine the creationists condemn as liberal apostasy. But creationism can’t survive without it.

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Equal rights

“Gays have the same right as anyone else—the right to marry someone of the opposite sex.”

“You know, I hadn’t really thought about that before, but that might actually be a great idea.”

“What?”

“In other words, all the gay men will go out and find a straight wife, and all the lesbians will go out and find a straight husband. Then they’ll all raise families, and all those kids will have one gay parent. The social impact could be enormous!”

“Um, well—”

“Just think about it: gays won’t be faceless strangers any more. They’ll be getting together with families for the holidays, and getting to know the in-laws, and getting into the PTA and Sunday schools and coaching and all the things that parents do. Of course, they probably all have to find Christian spouses.”

“What? Why Christian?”

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Tolerance = “overstepping your bounds”

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) is reporting that the Raleigh city council has passed a resolution opposing a ban on gay marriage.

In a 6-2 vote Tuesday, the city council opposed a statewide amendment that would ban same-sex marriage and civil unions.

The vote follows earlier comments from Raleigh’s outgoing mayor who described the ban as “discriminatory.”

Got to love those scare quotes. Just imagine, suggesting that it’s discriminatory to tell millions of people that they’re not allowed to marry the one they love just because they happen to fall in love differently than a lot of other people. How biased can you get?

Never fear, though. The holy men and women of the CBN are right there to remind us all about the proper limitations of government.

Traditional marriage supporters say the city is overstepping its bounds.

Right. You can always tell an overly-intrusive government by the way it advocates keeping the state out of people’s private business. A properly bounded government will pick your spouse for you.

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Gospel Disproof #17: The iFriend Contingency

In Matt. 4:7, Jesus quotes a verse from Deuteronomy that has become beloved by apologists everywhere. “You shall not put the LORD your God to the test,” says the text, which in practice means that God reserves the right not to answer your prayers if He thinks you’re testing Him. It’s a good way to excuse God whenever He might otherwise seem to have failed to answer, but there’s a catch: how do you know which prayers are going to constitute “testing”? After all, there’s no point in wasting your time and His on prayers that are the wrong kind. But how to know which ones are wrong?

It turns out there’s a very easy way to find out. I call it “The iFriend Contingency.” As you might guess, the “i” stands for “imaginary,” and here’s how it works. Imagine you have a magical friend who is really a great person, and who has unlimited power and knowledge and goodness—but is not actually divine. Adopt this magical friend as your iFriend, and then start asking this iFriend for things. In your imagination, this iFriend has unlimited power and knowledge, so you can ask whatever you want.

God’s ability to grant what you ask for will never exceed your iFriend’s apparent ability to grant what you ask for. That is to say, there are some things you can ask for that have a non-zero chance of happening whether your iFriend exists or not. If you ask for such things, you’ll receive them a certain percentage of the time, thus appearing to be a case where your iFriend granted your request. Other requests however—like “Will you please show up at my house tonight at 7:00 and play the guitar at a party I’m having”—will never happen, because your iFriend isn’t real. These are the “testing” requests, and God will never answer them either.

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Freudian slip?

Call me an optimist, but I can’t help suspecting that William Lane Craig secretly knows that his arguments for God are deficient, and is just not admitting it to himself. As evidence, let me cite this little slip up from Chapter 7 of On Guard.

First, we’re not in a position to say that it’s improbable that God lacks good reasons for permitting the suffering in the world.

He’s trying to make the argument from ignorance, that humans have limited knowledge of time and space, and we don’t know all the circumstances, and yadda yadda, and therefore God might have a good reason for allowing suffering. But read it again: he’s not saying our human limitations prevent us from saying God is unlikely to have a good reason. He said we can’t call it improbable that God lacks a good reason. Or to cancel out the double negative, he actually wrote that we’re not in a position to say that God probably has a good reason for allowing suffering.

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Jamming with Dr. Craig

Over at the other blog, we’re in Chapter 7 of William Lane Craig’s On Guard. Here’s an excerpt.

Craig loves to turn the tables and use the atheist’s own arguments against him, and I think this time it really backfires on him.

Although at a superficial level suffering calls into question God’s existence, at a deeper level suffering actually proves God’s existence. For apart from God, suffering is not really bad. If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he’s making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists. [Emph. added—DD]

I had to push back from my desk and stare at that one for a while. So in other words, God’s existence makes the world a worse place than it would be without Him. Without God’s existence, nothing would be bad. “Whoa, Jim, that pit bull just chewed your foot off!” “Yeah, I know, I’m in extreme pain, but that’s ok because God doesn’t exist.” “Sally, is it true that your dad went insane and killed all your kids?” “Yeah, I’m suffering terribly, but it’s ok, because there’s no God.” WTF?

I can see where this is something Craig has no choice but to affirm. It’s the logical extension of his arguments about morality. But seriously, it shows both the flaw in his definition of “good” vs “bad,” and the downright silliness of the whole argument. Yes, it’s literally true that by Craig’s own arguments, the world is a worse place if God exists than it would be without God. God’s existence is what makes suffering bad. If it weren’t for God, suffering would be perfectly ok, at least according to a Christian worldview. And folks, that is one seriously screwed up worldview.

I’m just saying.

The ID Zombie

It’s the 20-year anniversary of Darwin on Trial, the book that started the Intelligent Design movement, and here, via PZ Myers, is a link to Jason Rosenhouse’s blog post, “ID is Dead.” It’s a good review of what ID has failed to accomplish in the past 20 years, but at first I thought, “Gosh, I hope he’s wrong. It would really be terrible if ID were dead.” Then I remembered: Hey, these are fundamentalist Christians we’re talking about. Keeping dead things alive in their hearts and dreams is like second nature to them. And sure enough, here’s a post by David Klinghoffer doing what ID’ers do best: pouting, patronizing, and bragging about what might be called peer-reviewed ID papers if you aren’t too picky about details. I’m confidently optimistic that the ID zombie is alive-ish and shambling, and we’ll continue to see him lurching about for many years to come.

Why is that a good thing? Because Intelligent Design—or perhaps we should call it Not Intelligent Enough Design—is a great way to show that Yahweh is a man-made God.

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Secondary terrorism

This has been bugging me for a while, so let me just put it down in a post. We all know who the terrorists are: Al Qaeda, right? But are they the only terrorists? No, I’m not talking about other underground movements, or right-wing militias, though there are terrorists there as well. I’m talking about primary terrorism vs. secondary terrorism.

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