Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Esquilax]

It certainly looks like I'm begging the question doesn't it :-)

But let me say just a little more about that. Let’s leave God out of this for a moment. I believe the conscience exists and that it tells me good from bad. To me that is a ‘properly basic belief’. It is not grounded in anything, but is the ground for other beliefs I have. I take it as axiomatic. Or to put it another way I presuppose that my conscience does know right from wrong. Though that belief is basic (i.e. ungrounded) I find that it helps to make sense of my life. Though I can’t prove it, I trust it. So I wouldn't for example take the opposite presupposition, that everything my conscience tells me is good is actually bad, and then act on that reversed assumption.

The question begging comes when you assert that the conscience represents god's will, because now you're being circular: god is the source of morality, and I know what's right and wrong due to my conscience, which is a barometer of god's will, who is the source of morality... and around we go.

It's also just a factually untrue statement, because our consciences can provide mutually exclusive moral definitions for the same action, meaning that it simply cannot be the result of god's will. This is why we still debate large social issues like abortion, euthanasia and so on; because our consciences are providing different moral feedback about the same scenario.

Other people seem also to report a sense of conscience. So though I can only validate my own conscience through my life experiences, it seems reasonable to assume that other people can do likewise. To put it another way, I don’t think I'm the only one who has a conscience.

But the content of that conscience varies from society to society, immediately marking the idea that it's all the work of a singular entity as doubtful.

Where God fits in for me is that ‘the God hypothesis’ is one that joins a lot of dots for me; it makes sense of my life, from the sense of the numinous (a deeply intuitive sense of what many people have called ‘god’), to the sense that some things really are right or wrong, and to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” So ‘God’, in some respects, is the framework, the paradigm that connects lots of individual bits and pieces of knowledge and experience for me. I could be wrong, but I take the risk of trusting in this God that I think there is. So I believe that God is the fount of my conscience because that simply makes most sense to me. It’s inductive, if you like, answering the question “what is the best model that fits all the data I have?” It’s subjective, it’s intuitive at least in part, it’s not without risk, but I'm still convinced that's is a good reason for me to believe in my God. I trust God with my life.

So despite being, from what I can see, a sensible and rational person in most aspects, you abandon that entirely when it comes to your god claim. That's a pity. As I said earlier, the level of explanatory power a thing has, especially a thing that is defined as just being able to do anything, has no bearing on the reality of that thing. I get it, magic solves everything, but that doesn't make it so, and frankly, without a "how?" answer, a "what?" answer just reeks of making things up.

On the other hand, we have plenty of evidence that evolution occurs, research on the evolution of morality that indicates it also exists in other species, and studies that indicate the extent to which it can be manipulated and changed. Plenty more evidence than we have for a god, even if it doesn't explain as much yet.