I completely agree that that PoE is at the heart of most skepticism. I think all of us, Christian and atheist alike, believe what we do in large part because we want to. I say that to people all the time and get furious objections to it. No, no, I'm told, we believe because of the evidence! What we want to believe doesn't have any value in determining truth!ryanbouma wrote:Thank you so much for that reply Jac. I'm going to let that soak in and give it thought, but I believe I can get on board with that explanation. Because its a simpler explanation than mine, its preferred. And thank you for not trying to trivialize suffering. I agree that this tactic really turns off the skeptic. And in my experience, it is the Problem of Evil that keeps people skeptical more than anything I'm aware of.
If we lived in an emotionless world, that type of thing might be true. But Dr. Spock, none of us are, and when we treat others as if they ought to be Dr. Spock in order to see and accept truth, we do more harm than good. Where I live, there was a very young boy who was critically injured during Hurricane Sandy -- a tree fell on his head -- and he is still in the hospital recovering. When you tell his parents, "I'm really sorry about what happened to you. That was so unfortunate. It wasn't evil, mind you, and nor is his or your present suffering. No, it isn't evil -- it's just unfortunate," then not only do you show yourself to be a heartless jerk, but you run the risk of (as you put it) trivializing that suffering, and in doing so, you neither take them nor God seriously. And if they doubt God due to that suffering, then your answer will push them away long before it draws them in.
That would be true, by the way, even if you could successfully argue that suffering isn't evil. Again, I don't think that you can do that. Suffering is evil. But say it isn't. Say you can account for our intuitions to the contrary and build a case that it's just unfortunate. You still wouldn't want to go down that road as an apologist, because the whole reason the PoE turns people from God is that it makes them angry. I don't care how easily you can show such anger to be unjustified. The fact is, people say, "That's just disgusting. Why would you even want to believe that?" And when you try to tell them that, then you just harden them in their position. "Oh," they say, "So your god not only doesn't care or can't stop suffering, but he doesn't even think it's evil?!? No WONDER your god doesn't care--HE is evil."
You can't argue with that. I can show (theoretically) why they are being illogical, but the more I do, the more I harden them in their error. It might make me, the apologist, feel great. I've just won another debate with a wicked atheist. But look at what it has cost me. My lack of compassion has just contributed to the death of a soul, and there's nothing acceptable about that.
But, of course, all of that is moot when the fact is that, theologically and philosophically speaking, natural evil DOES exist and suffering IS evil. So now, we're not only being cold-hearted jerks when we tell the suffering that they aren't going through evil, but to top it off, we're speaking falsely about God and driving people away from Him by giving trite answers. Yeah, good job we're doing there.
The tornado isn't evil. The suffering caused by the tornado is evil. You make a mistake in defining evil as only something that is immoral. That's not true. Look at these two sentence:PaulSacramento wrote:Define evil.
Now have a atheist or skeptic define evil.
e·vil
/ˈēvəl/
Adjective
Profoundly immoral and malevolent.
Noun
Profound immorality, wickedness, and depravity, esp. when regarded as a supernatural force.
or:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evil
Personally always find the definition that some skeptics TRY to use very interesting when dealing with "natural evil":
Obviously they can;'t use the standard "moral/immoral" view since nature has no morals.
SO they try the:
2. causing harm or injury; harmful: an evil plan
3. marked or accompanied by misfortune; unlucky: an evil fate
Yet, under the correct context of how evil is use in those definitions, are harm, injury, misfortune truly evil?
I mean, do we call a tornado evil? do we call an earthquake evil?
- Immorality is evil;
Evil is immoral
Strictly, evil is the absence of good, and "good" is not a moral term (contrary to popular opinion). Let me give a VERY brief and simplified explanation of this. Something is "good" to the extent it exists as it is supposed to. Draw a circle freehand with a broken crayon on crumpled paper, and then use a computer program to draw one. Which one will be better ("gooder" -- "more good")? Obvious the latter, because it contains fewer flaws. It exemplifies better what a circle is by nature. Each flaw deprives the instance of part of what it means to be a circle, and those deprivations are evil. So it is good for the eye to see; blindness is a privation of what they eye is supposed to do by nature. The human mind is rational by nature, so reasoning is good; mental breakdowns and physical deformities that prevent one from developing their mental capacities are deprivations of the human mind. All such deprivations are called evil.
Moral evil is no different. It is good to be kind, because the human nature is so constituted that behavior we describe as kind is that which what we are supposed to do, and were it not for the Fall, we would be kind. To do something unkind is to commit an act deprived of kindness, and therefore, the act is evil to the degree that it lacks kindness (in this example -- there are other examples of moral evil, obviously). So what the Boston bombers did was evil because they weren't supposed to do that.
When you get deeper into this, you find that shy of a divine command theory, this the only way to consistently understand the whole notion of moral good and moral evil. And I would STRONGLY advise you to stay away from divine command theory, as you'll get impaled by Euthyphro if you hold to it. Apologists like to respond to that particular argument by just saying that God's nature is just goodness--that is, what we call good is just that which is in accordance with His nature. And that is true, but again, when you flesh that out, you find that you are really just saying what I've just said about good and evil above in different words.
Again, this gets very deep, and to have a proper understanding of this, we need a proper theory of goodness, which means we need to have a proper theory of transcendentals (Good, True, Being, etc. -- these are all words that describe the same thing in different ways). The tl;dr here is that your mistake is to identify evil with immoral. That isn't the case. All immoral things are evil, because all immoral things are immoral because they are deprived of goodness. But not all evil things are immoral, because "moral" only refers to the acts of a rational being, and not all privations are privations in rational beings. Suffering is just such an example. Suffering, then, is evil in the proper sense of the word. It is a privation of goodness, which is the very definition of evil, which is why, in the New Creation, there will be no suffering, for in that Creation, there will be no privation of goodness, since God--which is Goodness Itself--will fill everything and everything and everything will be in Him finally and perfectly.
