Does God Exist: The Argument From Evil?

[Kyuuketsuki]

OK, I don't actually accept the idea of evil in a spiritual sense, if I do it means we aren't under control of what we do and I genuinely believe in personal responsibility (even if were as much driven as drivers) and if there genuinely were evil forces in the world that infect and affect people then one can excuse Hitler and his appalling cronies the crimes they carried out because they cannot be responsible for them. So I don't personally believe in evil in that sense, I look at the world and I pretty much say sh** happens lots of it we can't do much about, much of it we do to ourselves but on the plus side we can also do good things and good things happen without our intervention (granted that good things are often evaluated against bad things and vice versa and that much of what is good or bad is because we have evolved to fit certain environments).

It does however, seem that the problem of evil is a serious one for Christians given that (they claim) their god is all powerful (omnipotent), all knowing (omniscient) and all-loving ... how can one explain away the fact that there is evil in the world weighing that against a god of that nature?

Here's an example from the Daylight Atheism blog:

A World in Shadow VI
In 2006 and 2007, I wrote several entries in a series called A World in Shadow, bolstering the atheist's argument from evil by describing particularly shocking or egregious instances of natural and moral evils. However, I haven't written any new entries for this series in some time.

To be honest, I stopped writing these posts because I found them too upsetting. There are more than enough - far too many - examples of tragedy and catastrophe in this world to make the case against a benevolent overseer; we need not dwell on them. But today, I have to make just one further exception. I don't like writing about these things, but this is one case where the tragedy is so shattering, the suffering so horrendous, and the action needed to stop it so trivial, that it perfectly sums up and encapsulates the argument from evil.

I'll begin where Gene Weingarten begins, from his March 8 article in the Washington Post:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept.

This ordinary man, Miles Harrison, was a loving father who made an irrevocable mistake: on his way in to work one day last summer, distracted and beset by daily trivialities, he forgot to drop off his infant son at daycare. He entered his office, leaving the child still strapped into his car seat in the parking lot. And over nine hours, on a sweltering July day, the temperatures inside the car rose until the boy slowly boiled to death.

[Read The Rest Of The Blog Entry Here]

How can one explain this? For an atheist it's easy ... I'm not writing the child's life off as valueless but as I say above sh** happens, the parents weren't blameless but they weren't bad, they just made a mistake but "God" (if he exists) could have done something about it, a nudge just before Miles Harrison got out of the car, a mental whisper in his head a little later, hell he could even have reached back through time and sorted the whole problem but no ... nothing, not a thing!

How can a loving god do that? It can't be that it couldn't do it otherwise it wouldn't be omnipotent. It can't be that it didn't know otherwise it wouldn't be omniscient. So all we are left with is that it didn't care or it doesn't exist.

It's a tough, uncaring universe out there and I know which explanation I favour.

Kyu