Willaim Craig: Evil is proof that God exists.

[EGross]

Just do a search for "Sam Harris William Craig debate" on you tube. And, I kid you not, he says the following:

Evil actually proves the existance of God. Since with the absence of God, good and evil would not exist. You cannot press both the problem of evil and my contention that if God does not exist, then objective morals and values do not exist because evil will acutally be an argument for the existance of God.

His understanding that good and evil are God, in that all the He is sustains and permeates His creations, and therefore without Him there would be no Evil, because without Evil there can be no Good from which to discern.

Sam Harris' position is that, no, people would still do bad things and people would still do Good things, whether or not a God exists. And it is not through the written word of questionable books that establish our morality, but just as we no longer desire slavery as part of our evolution as people, despite its support in the Bible, so too does a society establish an object set of morality that we can say "feeding the hungry is good, letting a child die because your God wrote in a book that He will heal her for you, is bad." (My examples. His were much longer and better).

So does Evil prove the existance of God? After all, in Isaiah the prophet wrote God saying "Manifestor of light and and maker of darkness, maker of peace and manifestor of evil. I am the God who does all these things." (from memory).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL9250...jXCHgPaZO4

[Ryantology]

Evil actually proves the existance of God. Since with the absence of God, good and evil would not exist.

Good and evil do not objectively exist, so we can follow his trail of logical dog droppings backwards to conclude that God doesn't exist, either.

[EGross]

Agreed. We can also use the supposition that just as he say that there is a God who is Good, we could also claim that there is a God who is Evil, using that same logic, or even an entire dysfunctional family of them, some good, some bad.

[Minimalist]

Good and evil do not objectively exist,

Had Germany won WWII Auschwitz would be a place of pilgrimage, there would be statues of Hitler all over Europe, text books would call him a hero for solving the "jewish problem," and the fucking church would have made him a saint.

[Mystic]

He would be correct only if the moral argument is correct.

Also "evil" in the context mostly has to do with the idea of suffering.

We can make the following syllogism that brings the issue of the problem of evil and with acknowledging the moral argument:

1. Human morality seems to be that it's good to get rid of all suffering.
2. God's morality (if he exist) seems to be that it's not good to get rid of all suffering.
3. Therefore human morality and God's morality cannot both be true if morality is absolute and morality is derived from God.
4. Therefore morality either is not absolute or not derived from God.
5. If morality is absolute, it is not derived from God.
6. Without God, no morality is absolute (moral argument)
7. Without absolute morality, there is no God.
8. Therefore neither absolute morality or God exists.

As you can see, the problem of evil/suffering is not really solved by appealing to the moral argument.

[ThomM]

So does Evil prove the existance of God? After all, in Isaiah the prophet wrote God saying "Manifestor of light and and maker of darkness, maker of peace and manifestor of evil. I am the God who does all these things." (from memory).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL9250...jXCHgPaZO4
[/quote]


1 - There is NO proof that Isaiah was a real person either
http://freethought.mbdojo.com/archeology.html
Archeology has shown that most of the claims of the Old Testament do not agree with the reality of the ancient times they claimed to have been in.

2 - THAT it is claimed in a book of fairy tales that something said was from a god - is suspect - since the book itself is suspect.

3 -THE really FUNNY thing you did - is the most circular reasoning you have used to date. YOU used a quote in the bible -= supposedly from god - to prove that god exists - I exist because I say so - HA HA

[Jackalope]

William L. Craig is proof that evil exists. Amirite?

I can scarcely believe that people fall for such arguments.

[EGross]

So does Evil prove the existance of God? After all, in Isaiah the prophet wrote God saying "Manifestor of light and and maker of darkness, maker of peace and manifestor of evil. I am the God who does all these things." (from memory).

1 - There is NO proof that Isaiah was a real person either
http://freethought.mbdojo.com/archeology.html
Archeology has shown that most of the claims of the Old Testament do not agree with the reality of the ancient times they claimed to have been in.

2 - THAT it is claimed in a book of fairy tales that something said was from a god - is suspect - since the book itself is suspect.

3 -THE really FUNNY thing you did - is the most circular reasoning you have used to date. YOU used a quote in the bible -= supposedly from god - to prove that god exists - I exist because I say so - HA HA

Actually, I used a source from the believer point of view, not my own, to show the cricular logic of such a belief, that it is perfectly valid to claim, on the one hand, as believers do, that God is the source of Evil, and use "Evil proves that there is a God."

However, from the non-believing position that I share, it is a foreign way of presenting proof that there is a God.

As to the authenticity of those books, I agree fully with you. The authorship has always been suspect, including from the founders of Rabbinical Judaism.

I will quote from their own works.

According to the Talmud (Mesechet Bava Batra 15a) even the sages admitted that some writings assigned to one were really written by another. Some are attributed to the mysterious "Men of the Great Assembly", for which there is no common understanding of the term, and some to other writers. Here is a snippet after writing that David wrote all of the Psalms, including those with the names of others (the superscriptions were a later addition):

Hezekiah and his colleagues wrote Isaiah, Proverbs, the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes. The Men of the Great Assembly wrote: Ezekiel, Trei Aser (the Twelve Minor Prophets), Daniel and Megilla Esther.

There are then arguments as to how can you possible assign Joshua, or Samuel for example, as being the authors of those books when Samuel dies less than halfway through his book, and Joshua dies in his (not to mention that Moses dies in his, so who finished it?)

There were also those on that same page who said that Job never existed, and they argue that point to death, but they do agree that they don't know when it was written, or by whom.

What they are getting at in this 3+ page argument is that there really is no certainty who wrote a good portion of the Tanach, and if you cannot be certain of authorship, as a religious person who holds these books sacred, you have to have the faith that whoever did, had the authority to do so.

Whoever they were. And that is not a comfortable position in which to be.

[Minimalist]

What they are getting at in this 3+ page argument is that there really is no certainty who wrote a good portion of the Tanach

I quite agree with you, E, but the question really comes down to, is that even important? There is a legal maxim of "cui bono;" who benefits. Once one gets by the biblical horseshit of a great "Davidic Empire" the reality of first millenium Judah is of a poverty-stricken region of goat and sheep herders which attained some measure of prosperity and growth as part of the Assyrian economic system in the 8th century BC. They tried to rebel against Assyria, were crushed, regenerated under subsequent kings again as part of the Assyrian system only to get sucked into the political dealings between Egypt-Assyria on one side and Babylon on the other. The Babylonians won and Jerusalem was sacked and burned. Later in the 6th century the area fell to the Persians who ruled it from c 530 to 333 BC when they lost it to the Greeks. Greek rule lasted nearly as long until a successful rebellion ousted the Seleucids in 141 BC. It is only at that time that there is actually an independent, "Jewish," state and thus the only time that someone could benefit from a story or collection of stories such as those told in the OT.

The Persians, Greeks, Babylonians and Assyrians would not have tolerated such pretensions by a subject people. Religion then, as now, serves the needs of the ruling class.

[EGross]

I just added it to the mix in order to say that even those who loved the faith, knew that they could not assign authors to it, know that some of the people never existed (Job), and still sealed it as the Tanach, and proclaimed it as the Word of God, rather than "Some guys wrote this stuff. We aren't quite sure who, but they probably had some navuah to get it right, but if not, don't worry."

That was one of the key sentences that I learned while doing Daf Yomi where I went "Holy $h!t"