Open Letter on Evil

[everythingafter]

Any thoughts on this: Open Letter on Evil

The letter invited responses. Here was my own:

Chris,

Intriguing letter on the problem of evil. I'm a former believer, and while the problem of evil was a convincing reason not to believe, it wasn't my only reason for making the decision.

From that standpoint, I can, perhaps, offer a clue into what I suspect many of my former churchgoers might say in response, and it runs parallel to Platinga's case: God would not create a being without free will because he wants us to choose to be good to each other and, most importantly, choose to believe in Him. Believers, I think, would say that God was not interested in creating slaves or robots or mindless followers. Man absolutely needed to be able to make up his own mind on whether to believe in his creator, or else, we are zombies. I, to the contrary, think that creating a perfect, or at least, better, environment for humans, and stamping out evil at every turn (immediately stopping the rapist before the act occurred, for instance), would not be outside the grasp of a truly all-powerful god. It would surely present a better case for his existence rather than utter silence in the face of untold anguish and misery down through the ages.

Of course, I can take it a step further: If God created us, and knew that evil would be introduced into the world and knew that he was introducing us, without our input, into some spiritual chess match between good and evil (God and Satan, or whatever other unknown dichotomy might be at play), and then demanding we make choice between him and eternal fire, then we are and were never really free. Free will, if you believe in a divine creator and in his allowance of evil into the world, is an illusion in my view.

Or, as Christopher Hitchens likes to say, from the believers standpoint, we are made sick and commanded to be made well. This is not free will. And I think believers are wrong in making such claims unless the claim is only from deism. In that case, it may be possible to have true free will without the threat of an intervening god throwing us down to pits of perdition for not choosing correctly.

[Captain Scarlet]

Indeed. The formal FWD of Platinga has been refuted esp the consistency of transworld depravity with gods attributes. But again this is a problem of theisms own making. The simpleexplanation for evil is that we are evolved animals who still have savage instincts living on a hazardous planet in a hostile universe. The reallycomplicated and hard to understand explanation is that we are the object of the design of an all loving god in a fine tuned universe etc. Mackie and others have argued that it is also consistent that god could have created a world without suffering and with free will. But for me the argument from theists centres around that we don't understand gods masterplan so we can't criticize. But god has clearly done it before by instantiating Eden and heaven as possible worlds where people freely believe in a world of no suffering. Finally the theistic defence works at least as well if not better if god was all evil creating a world where he urged people to evil but let them choose good. It's clearly a problem for theism and makes atheism more likely.