What dread hand?

Reviewers have opened several lanes of traffic through the holes in Michael Behe's argument in his latest book advocating Intelligent Design, The Edge of Evolution.

Nick Matzke tackles one such hole at The Panda's Thumb, with Ed Brayton offering a helpful summary for laypeople and nonmajors at Talk to Action. Follow either of those links for the science, what I'm interested in here is the theology.

Both Matzke and Brayton call attention to this comment from Behe:

Here’s something to ponder long and hard: Malaria was intentionally designed. The molecular machinery with which the parasite invades red blood cells is an exquisitely purposeful arrangement of parts.

Malaria kills about a million people every year. Behe's assertion that this pestilence was "intentionally designed" echoes William Blake:

What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? ...

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?

For Behe, the answer to those last two questions is always yes. This would seem to mean that, for Behe, God is the author of evil. His theodicy is as shoddy as his biology.

I'll leave it to my Calvinist friends to decide whether or not Behe is advocating a kind of supra-supralapsarianism. I'm not very good at sorting through the various lapsarian views, since I disagree with their notion that God is trapped down here in Flatland.

(As a wise man recently will have said, "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly ... timey-wimey ... stuff.")

Comments

[Bugmaster]

...that sentence got away from me. Yeah.

:-)

[Jesurgislac]

The angels have the blue box.

[Bugmaster]

Anyway, as much as I love Doctor Who, I gotta disagree with Fred here.

If God can be at least approximately understood by us mortals, then, assuming he is indeed omni-everything, he is the author of all evil on Earth and elsewhere, malaria included; additionally, he is also the deliberate creator of Satan.

On the other hand, if God cannot be understood by us mortals in our Flatlander terms, then it's pointless to even discuss him, to listen to his commandments, and to worship him in any way. None of these actions serve a purpose, because you don't know, and cannot know, what God is and what he wants. He might as well be this bowl of wibbly-wobbly... godly-schmodly... stuff.

Of course, it's possible that God is comprehensible, but not omniscient; or not omnipotent; or not omnibenevolent -- but most Christians I've met would deny that this is so.

[cjmr]

On the other hand, why are we assuming malaria is evil? Just because it kills people?

[Bugmaster]

Good point. If your morality stems solely from God, and your God is ineffable, then you don't have any morality at all. Hoorray for malaria !

[85% Duane]

On the other hand, why are we assuming malaria is evil? Just because it kills people?

You know the rule: malaria is what OTHER people get. Evil malaria is what YOU get.

[Hagsrus]

Seems as good a place as any to post:

Fun at the Creation Museum
http://tinyurl.com/ynll2e

and of course Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth #7 on the subject of hookworms.
http://tinyurl.com/6p9e

[NonyNony]

I must be dense because I don't see the problem with the theology here. If you come at religion with the idea that God created everything in the universe, and malaria is in the universe, then God must have created malaria. If everything is part of the Divine Plan, malaria is part of the Divine Plan and the people who die from malaria were ordained to die from malaria by God.

What's more, if God created everything in the universe, and evil is in the universe, then God must have created evil. Evil also must be part of the Divine Plan along with pain, suffering, death, Satan and little dogs used by debutantes as fashion accessories.

I seriously don't see the problem here. I mean, it isn't a description of a God that I would find worthy of worship, but it DOES describe a God that a lot of people I know DO worship. Fred (or anyone else) if you can expand on what's wrong with this I'd appreciate it.

[Jon]

The general creationist viewpoint is that everything God created was good -- when He created it. That is, He created Satan as an angel, and supposedly he was pretty good at it, until he got proud at how good he was at it and decided to rebel. He created us humans without sin, and Adam and Eve lived in the garden with vegetarian velocirapters and malaria that didn't harm you and maybe had some useful purpose, but the Fall ruined all this.

Generally creationists don't go into great detail speculating on this, because it does sound kinda silly. But that's their explanation. God made it Good, and free will fouled it all up. (And the theological debate over free will is an ancient and complex one, so please don't try to just handwave it away.)

[Bugmaster]

In that case, God is not omniscient, or even remotely competent. Even I can anticipate bugs in my code ahead of time, and I have unit tests to prove it.

[Josh]

I seem to remember Ivan Karamazov dealing rather eloquently with the "Flatland" defense of the problem of evil. Funny, I don't recall any adequate response.

Also, this kind of stuff bugs me: ...the theological debate over free will is an ancient and complex one, so please don't try to just handwave it away. Ancient and complex are not synonymous with relevant and sophisticated. "Free will" is handwaving of the first order.

[Marissa]

The problem I have with the "did God create evil?" question, is that it suggests evil is a thing. It's not. We can't touch it, we can't destroy it, we can't control it. It's nothing so physical.

Given that, I don't understand how it can be created. It just is...much as happiness, sorrow, anger are natural rather than created aspects of the universe.

[Drak Pope]

Maybe God isn't omnipotent. Maybe he drew up a chart that said everything would be fine in the long run but didn't notice the minuscule pockmarks of evil growing all over his Creation. And now that it's already been set into motion, God can't just unmake it all with somekind of water-based calamity. He has to reach out and apply the Preperation F (for Faith!) to smite great evils where they are. But I guess humans have to help too.

Yeah, that seems like a cogent theological hypothesis. Have at it.

[Bugmaster]

If evil isn't a thing, this also casts doubts on goodness, love, justice, etc. Did God create these things, or are they purely a human invention ?

[nieciedo]

Um, God said that he creates evil.

It's the only way, really. There can't be two gods, since God is one. If God is the creator, then all things come from Him, life and death both. If you believe in a single omnipotent personal creator God, then you can't just thank Him for the good things and let Him off the hook for the bad things.

I don't believe in such a omnipotent personal creator. I do believe that Being itself, and particularly Life is divine. Malaria is form of Life that has had great success in adapting to and exploting its niche, to actualize it's potential. So too, have, humans. Only we have a long way left to go. Disease is neither evil nor good. It just is. It has no morality. Morality exists solely within the human soul, which is the image of God. Calamities like disease have no intrinsic morality: it is only in our response to calamity that good or evil is made manifest.

[Jon H]

"He might as well be this bowl of wibbly-wobbly... godly-schmodly... stuff."

I think I had that at a Dim Sum place in Chicago. Or maybe that was the chicken feet.

[Brian J.]

This outsider concurs with nieciedo and the others. You cannot cop out and say God had no hand in producing malaria but everything to do with creating, say, bunny rabbits. Either God enjoys producing good and evil (and amoral) things, or there's at least one other (G)od out there.

Even LaJenkins have figured this one out- their God is an amoral bastard, but they don't whine that "God can't be mean!"

[NonyNony]

In that case, God is not omniscient, or even remotely competent. Even I can anticipate bugs in my code ahead of time, and I have unit tests to prove it.

Eh. You can catch some of the bugs with unit tests, but unforseen bugs can always crop into code, and its mathematically provable that you won't be able to guarantee that your code has no bugs. Of course, if you assume omniscience on the part of the programmer, you can probably pretty easily prove whether your code has bugs or not.

That said, creating a universe only to have it Fall like that would be a big flaw. You'd pretty much have to believe that it was designed to Fall and that was part of the "programming" in the first place if you're also believing in an omnipotent, omniscient God.

Of course, it could also be that our current vision of the Christian God is a mashing together of the concepts of a limited tribal god from the Palestine area of the Middle East combined with a more all-powerful God envisioned by Greek scholars circa the first century CE as well as with the folklore of various pagan European tribes up through the first millennium as they are assimilated into the Church. So you end up with an omnipotent, omniscient God who simultaneously doesn't realize that his creation is seriously fundamentally flawed and has a nemesis that is the ultimate evil that he also created and, for some reason, can't eliminate.

[Bugmaster]

I could be wrong, but I think that Egyptian gods had nemeses like that. My Egyptian theology is rusty, but I think Apep (chaos, darkness) and Ra/Ma'at (truth, light) are locked in an eternal struggle for supremacy. So, it's conceivable that the Christian concept God was influenced by this particular myth, as well.

[coltakashi]

What is evil about malaria is that the US and Europe have been denying to third world nations the free use of DDT that would kill the insects that are the main vector of transmission, based on an exaggerated fear of the environmental side effects of the chemical. Every death from Malaria in Africa and south Asia is a human sacrifice to a self-righteous ignorance that places avoidance of risks at the one-in-a-million level above the very real deaths every year of millions of poor people.

A malaria organism is unable to form any intent, so it cannot be "evil" in the way a human being is evil.

The discussion ridiculing the idea that the malaria organism shows evidence that it was deliberately created in some fashion, rather than coming about through random events, is like all discussions of theodicy. the "Problem of Evil" is really stated as "the Problem of God". For atheists, the argument conveniently disposes of God. However, we are still left with all of the evil. How exactly are we better off at that point?

The observation about the malaria organism simply demonstrates that Intelligent Design cannot and does not offer to draw conclusions about the identity of the entity or entities who created the design, or their characteristics or ultimate intent. ID does not offer to be a foundation for a faith in God, since it does not say that the designer of any particular part of the physical or biological world is a God. After all, mankind now knows enough to aspire to someday within the coming century being able to specify a genome that will produce a living creature with desired characteristics. If it is clearly within the realm of science for human beings to design a new species, how can human beings assume the egocentric position that we are the only species who has ever lived capable of such a feat? It is far more likely, for example, that rather than finding any viable life on Mars, mankind will eventually create life that can survive on that world, perhaps with a function that will help to transform Mars into something where earth organisms like ourselves can live without space suits. If the life we created on Mars became (by design or accident) sentient and intelligent, would it be ridiculous for them to deduct that their genetic makeup was designed by an earlier race of beings? How can we rule out the possibility that life on earth, some 10 billion years after the Big Bang, was not brought into being in exactly the fashion we envision doing ourselves?

[lightning]

coltakashi -- no.

While DDT has been de- emphasized for malaria control, it's never been banned. The problem with DDT was with its use as an agricultural pesticide. Bugs develop immunity to DDT relatively quickly, and DDT was rapidly becoming useless due to overspraying.

[lightning]

Hmm. Could be that we're looking at Intelligent Design, but not for humans. Perhaps the whole purpose of Humanity is to develop a cure for malaria -- for mosquitoes. There are some suggestion of this in the technical literature.

This lets God off the hook for the human lower back, which was certainly *not* intelligently designed.

[mcc]

He flexed his muscles, to keep his flock of sheep in line
He made a virus that would kill off all the swine

I must be dense because I don't see the problem with the theology here. If you come at religion with the idea that God created everything in the universe, and malaria is in the universe, then God must have created malaria. If everything is part of the Divine Plan, malaria is part of the Divine Plan and the people who die from malaria were ordained to die from malaria by God.

The problem here is that this isn't the approach Behe is taking. Behe, if you look at the overall trajectory of his arguments, doesn't actually claim God made everything. Rather the Designer Behe sees at work in the world just made some things. Which things exactly I haven't been able to work out the heuristic for, but the idea is that God (apparently) set up a universe and a system for Life which can function quite well, adapt, etc on its own left untouched, and which much or most of the variation and progression of the evolutionary tree-- as far as I understand Behe's past arguments-- represents just the normal, no-interference functioning of. However, scattered throughout the evolutionary tree there are a bunch of critical jumps from one species to the next where the Designer had to step in and intervene to specifically engineer some particular feature of some particular living thing, because Evolution was unable to implement a particular lifeform or feature of life by itself but the Designer deemed it absolutely necessary that that lifeform exist.

Behe's God is the blind watchmaker of the Deists, except he's a sort of micromanaging, Windows System Update sort of watchmaker, who after he's sold the watch keeps sneaking back in to the house of the people who bought it to inspect the watch and fiddle with some of the gears that aren't working the way He expected.

And Behe has spent a very large amount of his space in his book arguing that Malaria is one of these special cases where the Designer had to step in to intervene. Behe's God was indifferent to what is apparently the vast majority of life's aspects and forms, but He really, really wanted there to be such a thing as Malaria.

[the opoponax]

ok, there's something i straight up don't understand here. along the lines of NonyNony.

so malaria exists and it kills humans which pisses us off, because we are humans and we don't want to die of malaria.

so what? why does that make malaria "evil" in any absolutist sense?

i mean, for dinner earlier i ate lentil stew with onions, ginger, and coriander. that's four different kinds of living things that had to die so that i might live another few hours without being hungry. does that make me evil? so then why is malaria "evil" for killing humans?

circle of life, guys. circle of life. this isn't an argument for ID -- ID is ridiculous. not because it doesn't allow for the existence of "bad" stuff like malaria and carnivorous animals, but because it's bad science.

[the opoponax]

oh, and another thing -- i do not see what the "evilness" or lack thereof of malaria has to do with whether god can possibly exist and what kind of god such a being must be. anymore than the fact that i just totally took a hit out on an onion does.

[mcc]

Hmm. Could be that we're looking at Intelligent Design, but not for humans. Perhaps the whole purpose of Humanity is to develop a cure for malaria -- for mosquitoes.

Julio Cortázar, Cronopios and Famas, "Geographies":

Established that ants are the true rulers of creation (the reader may take this as a hypothesis or as a fantasy; in any case he will do well with a little anthroescapism), and I have here a page of their geography:

(p. 84 of the book; possible equivalents of certain expressions are given in parenthesis, following the classical interpretation of Gaston Loeb)

"... parallel seas (rivers?). The infinite water (a sea?) grows at certain times like an ivy-ivy-ivy (idea of a very high wall, which would express the tides?). If one goes-goes-goes-goes (an analogous idea applied to distance) one comes to the Great Green Shade (a field under cultivation? a thicket? woods?) where the Great God raises up his perpetual granary for his Best Workers. Horrible Immense Beings (men?) abound in this region who destroy our trails under the earth. On the other side of the Great Green Shade, the Hard Sky begins (a mountain?). And all is ours, though under great threat."

This geography has been the object of another interpretation (Dick Fry and Niels Peterson, Jr.). The landscape might correspond topographically to a small garden at 628 calle Laprida, Buenos Aires. The parallel seas are two gutters for waste water; the infinite water, a duck pond; the Great Green Shade, a bed of lettuce. The Horrible Immense Beings, they suggest, might be ducks or hens, though the possibility that, really, men are meant cannot be discarded. As for the Hard Sky, a polemic is already being waged which will not soon be resolved. In the opinion of Fry and Peterson, they hold it obvious that it means the brickyard next door, as opposed to the notion of Guillermo Sofovich, who surmises it to be a bidet abandoned among the lettuce.

[Bugmaster]

oh, and another thing -- i do not see what the "evilness" or lack thereof of malaria has to do with whether god can possibly exist

Oh, it doesn't, but it prohibits one specific god from existing: the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator of the Universe. Shivah, Ma'at, YHVH, Zeus and all the rest of them are still fine.

[the opoponax]

how so?

i mean, i guess it prohibits a benevolent creator, if you mean a creator of only benevolent things. anyone who is not stupid knows this. such a creator could only have created bunny wabbits, rainbows, ice cream, etc. except for the occasional member of PETA, we are all mature enough to grasp the idea that the world is just not a wonderfully groovy place -- shit happens, and not only as a result of human frailty and free will. so if the creator has to be benevolent in that sense, we can probably all agree that this simply cannot be. Hurricanes, smallpox, and ancephaly exist. Hawks eat bunny wabbits for dinner, rainbows generally follow storms, and you can't get ice cream without seperating a calf from its mother (it's also a bitch to make from scratch, "the custard will thicken to cover the back of a spoon" my ass).

anybody who says "benevolent creator" and means "creator of things that are of necessity ONLY ever benevolent" is either really stupid or is white and male and has never left his suburban American living room.

[the opoponax]

ack, what is with me hitting 'Post' before i'm finished saying what i want to say?

the problem isn't with the idea that malaria = not benevolent, the problem is that who the fuck are we humans, just one tiny link on the food chain, to say that any aspect of creation that is inconvenient for us is "evil", and therefore god can't be benevolent? maybe god is benevolent because gravity exists, and is standard, and thus we don't run the risk of randomly falling off into deep space if we walk funny or sail to the wrong part of the ocean. maybe god is benevolent because we can count on spring coming after winter and day coming after night (if we don't fuck everything up too badly, that is). maybe god is benevolent because bacteria come along and eat our waste so the earth doesn't become one gigantic shitpile (again, if we don't fuck it up too badly).

to come up with a really facile concept of benevolence, and then use that metric to decide that god therefore either can't be benevolent or can't exist is just stupid.

[Josh]

Opoponax,
Ummmm... benevolence: defined as traditionally understood, goodness; related to kindness, generosity, good will, mercy, love, etc.; as opposed to malevolence and distinct from indifference. Generally applied to one human with respect to other humans, may be extended to animals with a certain complexity of nervous system, extended by analogy to other hypothetical sentient beings including purported gods. Benevolence is generally understood to entail a desire not to cause and in fact to relieve the suffering of some set of beings of sufficient self-awareness/capacity for suffering/whatever which includes humans at a minimum.

A benevolent creator god then should display said benevolence towards humanity at least but may additionally include other beings within the creation. Being a creator god he/she/it is responsible both for the capacity to suffer and the circumstances which lead to suffering. There are no either/or choices between, e.g., the existence of gravity or a world filled with pain and fear because, again, we're talking about a creator god here. Hence it is hard to reconcile a benevolent creator god with the evident state of the world.

Obviously this does not preclude some impersonal,malicious,inept or impotent god existing but there is equally precious little reason to believe in such a thing and one will have a hard time winning converts to such a religion.

[David Newgreen]

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva is a rather nasty genetic disease that causes muscles to slowly turn to bone. It tends to start around the age of ten, and gradually ossifies the victim’s entire body. There is no treatment, and even perfect preventative care cannot stop the process entirely.

Now sure, it’s nice to be in a world that has reliable gravity, but wouldn’t it be even nicer to be in a world that has reliable gravity AND no ten year old children learning they’re condemned to an untimely death as their body ossifies around them? Gravity and no FOP don’t seem like contradictory options, so why is the Christian God - who’s quite happy to intervene in the mortal realm to deliver speeches to prophets, rain frogs upon recalcitrant Pharaohs, and incarnate himself as a Jewish carpenter for a few decades – unwilling to eliminate the genetic mutation that causes FOP? I mean, if I had a cure for this or other genetic diseases, I wouldn’t hesitate to distribute it myself.

Now, if I was asking an ancient Greek person why Zeus isn’t curing FOP, they’d be perfectly correct if they said that the reason for that is that Zeus doesn’t really like people all that much, and it’s not like he created humanity or the universe, so why are you blaming him for everything that goes wrong? Maybe your god is like that. Maybe your god is like the Ahura Mazda of the Zurvanist sect of Zoroastrism, opposed in all things by his equally powerful twin brother, the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu. Maybe he’s an Odin sort, destined to die in the Ragnarok, powerful but not omnipotent. Maybe he’s the god of the Deists, aloof, unwilling to intervene. But he’s not the Christian god, all-powerful, creator of everything, patron and ally of mankind.

[Bugmaster]

I think the others have offered much better replies than I could, so I only have this much to add:

the problem isn't with the idea that malaria = not benevolent, the problem is that who the fuck are we humans, just one tiny link on the food chain, to say that any aspect of creation that is inconvenient for us is "evil", and therefore god can't be benevolent

If God is omnipotent (meaning, he can do literally anything), omniscient (meaning, he knows literally everything, past present and future), and if he cares about us humans, he wouldn't create malaria or SARS or Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva or hurricanes that hit densely populated cities. You are essentially saying, "well, maybe there's a reason for all these things that we're unaware of", implying some sort of a tradeoff. But, a truly all-powerful God wouldn't need to make tradeoffs. He can achieve everything, at once.

Again, as David Newgreen has pointed out, this does not preclude the existence of other gods: gods who don't care that much for humans, or gods who are powerful but not omnipotent, or gods who are pretty smart but not omniscient. It only precludes the existence of the classical omni-everything Christian deity.

He can achieve everything, at once.

What would that look like, exactly? And why would anything resembling us be there?

Maybe the world is like this because any world made of benevolence would be so substantially different from this world that there would be no reason for something looking like humanity to form; thus, since benevolence keeps being defined as "stuff humans like", and humans like existing, there's no logical reason for the world to be a benevolent place. It also couldn't really be an illogical happy-nice place so long as humans insist on doing that "reasoning" thing we picked up a few millenia or so ago.

Or maybe "benevolence" on a cosmic level means challenging people, and there's no such thing as a good challenge where there isn't the possibility that you'll lose and lose horribly.

Or maybe not. I prefer semi-ineffable polytheism myself.

[Fraser]

Coltakashi, I know ID proponents frequently say they're not drawing any conclusions about who designed everything, but they're lying: The Discovery Institute's own internal documents (leaked and acknowledge) state their goal is to replace secular science with "Christ centered science." In practice, ID invariably turns out to be a euphemism for creationism: In the Dover, Pa. case, for example, the "Intelligent Design" textbook was a creationist book with the word creationism replaced, and a couple of school board members who said they wanted to "teach the controversy" were caught expressing their religious motivations (which they then lied about under oath).

I don't buy your argument that ID doesn't make presuppositions about "characteristics or ultimate intent" of the designer, either. ID proponents insist that we can, in fact, tell life was designed because of how well it functions and how complex it is, both of which presume a good designer. If anyone criticizes the design--the lower back, or why the designer would give hens genes for teeth--then we're told that we can't possibly draw any conclusions about the designer from the design (or as a religious friend of mine says, since she knows they were designed, therefore these features must be good and logical).

[Nick]

Fred, I've been lurking on your blog for, oh, about 2 1/2 years now, despite having moved from liberal Christian to atheist myself during that time. In that time you've made a lot of swipes at other Christians' theology, but I can't remember you ever explaining what your alternative, enlightened, reasonable theology is. If you have done so, could you point us to the post, and maybe re-post it occasionally (or put it in the sidebar) so visitors to you site can find it more easily? If you haven't, could you please write a post explaining it?

[twig]

Whoever up there mentioned the whole 'Paradise Lost' view of ... could it be... SATAN better go back and read his bible. I don't think that washes with the Biblical version.

Not that it isn't funny to think that God actually has a chair somewhere and you can doink him off of it and be God. Silly human power tripping.

[David Newgreen]

Fred, I'd like to second Nick's request. I like your take-down of Left Behind, because it mainly focuses on the terrible writing quality and bizarre plotting of the books, but in posts like this one, where you critise other's theology directly, I tend to be left wondering what exactly you're proposing as an alternative. I've got a vague idea where you're coming from, but there often seems to be an assumption of prior theological knowledge regarding what youn find so intrinsicly absurd about, say, claiming that "Malaria was intentionally designed."

[Jesurgislac]

the opoponax: i mean, for dinner earlier i ate lentil stew with onions, ginger, and coriander. that's four different kinds of living things that had to die so that i might live another few hours without being hungry. does that make me evil?

Yes. No cumin?

[Angelika]

Bugmaster: It only precludes the existence of the classical omni-everything Christian deity.

Actually, the Classical Christian deity, who as nieciedo cited above also originated evil, is not at all contradicted by that argument. Only the popular version of a mollicodling heavenly grandfather stuck with an obligation to make human life on earth completely pain free, easy and permanently blissful, doesn't quite fit with it.

[Tonio]

"Fred (or anyone else) if you can expand on what's wrong with this I'd appreciate it."

NonyNony, my problem with the theology is that it treats instances of pain and suffering as punishments from God. With malaria, the theology says that people who die from the disease are bad and deserved to die. I find that horrid.

[Geds]

The whole theodicy concept has been completely f-ed up by the strange, pseudo-Calvinist bent of modern Christianity. Everything is, "God's plan," "God's will," and "God made me go here or there or wherever."

I tend to see it as a little story. Your basic fundigelical Christian might show up at church and tell everyone about when he got stuck in traffic on Tuesday, was late for work, but it all worked out because on the way in to the office he met somebody he'd never met before, set up a lunch meeting and had a chance to witness. It was, therefore, God's will that there be a traffic jam, since God had divinely appointed that chance meeting (yes, I've heard similar stories).

But say that exact same traffic jam caused somebody else to show up late for work and lose his job. He now has no job and a mountain of bills and sees no relief so he kills himself. It stands to reason that if God divinely appointed the chance meeting, God also divinely appointed this second man's suicide.

The argument for evil in the world arising out of Free Will makes sense if you actually allow for 100% Free Will. By the time the anemic Calvinism of God running around making everything operate according to His day-timer gets thrown in to the pot, however, you negate everything the Free Will argument was trying to make and can end up with only one conclusion: God causes evil.

In my experience, it's the Christians (and especially the fundigelical ones) who persist in causing this problem. There seems to be a deep-seated fear within modern Christianity (at least in America) of taking responsibility for mistakes or being willing to admit that some things might not happen "for a reason." By retreating in to a God who operates on those conditions, they rob their God of any real power and rob themselves of being able to make any real arguments for a God who is actually "good," no matter what definition of the word you're using.

[Angelika]

Geds: There seems to be a deep-seated fear within modern Christianity (at least in America) of taking responsibility for mistakes or being willing to admit that some things might not happen "for a reason."

It also works the other way around: I remember a congregation issuing an appeal for prayer against the works of Satan, who caused their pastor to fall from a ladder.

What surprises me most of that mindset is, that it seems to leave out one of the most fundamental teachings in Christianity, the forgiveness of sins. After all that message should make it easier to take responsibility for one's mistakes. (At least, that's the way it works for me.)

[the opoponax]

shit, Jesu, you got me. there was also cumin. since spices are so often in dried/powdered form, i tend to forget that they, too, were once alive.

so why is the Christian God - who’s quite happy to intervene in the mortal realm to deliver speeches to prophets, rain frogs upon recalcitrant Pharaohs, and incarnate himself as a Jewish carpenter for a few decades – unwilling to eliminate the genetic mutation that causes FOP?

ok, guys, let's try this again. i have to say it in every thread which deals with the existence of and/or aspects of deity, so why did i think this one would be any different?

I'm not Christian. It's possible that somebody out there can, in fact, talk about the possibilities of what the concept of deity entails without attempting to rationalize YHWH or doing it from an Abrahamic standpoint.

the fact that the Christian god is said to send plagues to the bad guys, advise people about how to build boats, etc. is neither here nore there -- we're all correct that this sort of a god cannot possibly be 'benevolent' if he also allows x really bad disease to exist, because clearly Christianity believes in a god that has a direct interfering relationship with humans, specifically, and could totally get rid of dengue fever if he really wanted to. Clearly, YHWH is not benevolent.

but i'm not talking about YHWH. i'm saying that it's ridiculous for anyone to assume that because something exists that is unfortunate for humans, therefore no god can be benevolent. what i meant with the example of gravity was not "hey, at least we have gravity", but the idea that we can't really know what "benevolence" really means, in any sense that would apply to a deity that was relevant to all of creation and not just humans. which means we have two possibilities. either deity is not benevolent at all, or deity is not benevolent in any way that ensures special treatment for humans (and thus, to some, might be meaningless).

the funny thing is that personally, i'm leaning in the direction of "not especially benevolent", because i think active 'good' is a human moral construct that doesn't really apply to the rest of creation. but i think it's illogical to say "things exist in the world that are inconvenient for humans, therefore god cannot be good and must be an active malevolent force", unless you take benevolent to mean a very specific human-centric and proactive role. i think it's possible to posit a god that is "benevolent" in some sense that has nothing to do with humans and whether we die of random diseases or not, as unfortunate as said diseases are.

I make no argument that YHWH is really pretty obviously not "benevolent" if you take scripture at face value.

[Bugmaster]

Regarding benevolence, and challenging vs. coddling:
This is a valid objection, if applied to someone with limited power, limited knowledge, and yet a somewhat loving nature -- i.e., to a human being. The problem here is that the omni-God is not a human being. Not only is he unlimited in power and knowledge, but he also created the world and everything in it. As such, he is held to a higher standard of benevolence than weak, fallible mortals. Under such as standard, "challenging" people with a massive tsunami that kills men, women and children indiscriminately, is seen as, shall we say, morally questionable.

Anyway, all of the objections to this paradox I've seen so far seem to fall into the following categories:

1). Bad things are really good for you, you just don't know it (implying a sort of design tradeoff);
2). It's the humans' fault for having free will and sinning (implying lack of foresight on the part of the Designer).
3). Who cares, I don't believe in that God anyway (hail Ishtar !).

Objection #1 doesn't work because of God's omnipotence; an omnipotent deity does not need tradeoffs (by definition). He could create literally anything.
Objection #2 doesn't work because of omniscience. In the weaker sense, God would've been able to foresee what damage free-willed creations would do to his world (even humans are able to foresee such things !); in the stronger sense, God, being omniscient, knows everything you do before you even do it.
And, of course, Objection #3 is perfectly fine; I'm not arguing against all possible gods, just one God in particular.

[the opoponax]

"I make no argument that YHWH is really pretty obviously not "benevolent" if you take scripture at face value."

take "I make no argument that" out of that sentence, because it makes no sense and i don't even know why i typed it.

[Tonio]

Geds, excellent point about the deep-seated fear within modern Christianity. But I'm curious about an real argument for a God who is actually "good." Seem to me that such a God would not be all-powerful, but would operate within limits. Part of my objection to the "for a reason" theology is that it implies that events are rewards and punishments from God.

[Tonio]

Oops, that second sentence should be "about a real argument."

[Jeff Weskamp]

The Zoroastrian answer to this vexed problem was quite simple: The Evil God, Ahriman, was absolutely equal in power to the Good God, Ahura-Mazda. When bad stuff happens, Ahriman just had the upper hand at the moment in the Great Cosmic Struggle. They would no doubt say that Ahriman created disease, pain, depression, carnivorous animals, etc.; and Ahura Mazda made herbivores (including bunnies), love, joy, peace, etc.

Some scholars claim that Judaism borrowed this Dualistic system from the Persians when they were in the Captivity. Before then, they certainly believed that Yahweh was the source of ALL things, both good and evil, creative and destructive. This dualism was then later transmitted into Christianity.

However, this produced a great paradox. The Jews and Christians wanted the Good Principle (Yahweh) to be far more powerful than the Evil Principle (Satan); to be all-powerful, in fact. But here is the core of the paradox: How can an omnipotent entity have an enemy??? Surely an all-powerful entity could destroy, counter, imprison, or otherwise neutralize an opposing entity.

[cjmr]

Seem to me that such a God would not be all-powerful, but would operate within limits.

'All powerful' does not necessarily imply that one does not operate within limits. We all impose limits on ourselves in some area of our lives. An all powerful being could operate within limits that He set for Himself.

[Geds]

opo:

The thing I've tended to notice as a pretend historian is that the Jewish Bible doesn't actually make a hell of a lot of sense if you look at it from the Christian perspective or the literalist perspective. It does make an awful lot of sense if you look at it from a nation-building perspective, however.

Noah's Ark as a story doesn't make any sense. Anyone can make the, "There's not enough water on the planet," arguments and the, "There wasn't enough room for all the animals" argument. It does make a lot of sense, though, if you look at it as a mythological construct to explain the need for the Law. Everyone was wicked. G-d killed everyone. Now G-d's given us this Law so we won't be wicked any more. Yeehah!

Then you get to the suffering of people part. In those areas, G-d causes suffering to punish the sins of Israel or to wipe out the enemies of Israel. It absolutely does not jive with the message of the peaceful, benevolent God that Christianity says has been around since the beginning of time. It does jive with a jingoistic view of, "Our G-d's better than your god, so suck it," that seems to have pervaded humanity.

Christianity, meanwhile, has aspirations to rise above human divisions, but there are enough places where the Christian Bible says, "Our way or the highway," and Christian tradition itself has ruined any chance of compromise to live up to those aspirations of a God who truly loves "all the world."

In general, though, this is just a long way around saying, "I agree with you."