Hacker News Reader

Comment by humanrebar | Hacker News Reader

The problem of evil is difficult to answer in an emotionally satisfying way to someone who is hurting. Why did God let this evil happen?

Dispassionately, though, the broader problem begs the question. If humanity is jut a product of time and chance, then evil is as much an illusion as any gods are.

But, that being said, some theists see evil as the absence of good. Murder, natural disasters, etc. all result when God leaves the world to its own devices.

To some degree a "good" answer to this question is very reliant on emotional and aesthetic components, so it's extremely fair to call it a hard question to answer.

View on HN

I wouldn't say it's begging the question. Of course evil is an illusion in an atheistic viewpoint. The "problem of evil" is strictly an attempt to show a contradiction in the theist position.

As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork. This requires accepting a broader definition of "good" for you to accept that God is both good and accepts this tradeoff, but it's not a contradiction. It's just an emotionally significant consequence of believing God exists.

> As a Christian, my own answer (in short) is that true "good" requires that people can choose to either do good or evil. The only alternative is a pretty clockwork.

This doesn't really address the problem. If god is omnipotent and created the universe, he could have made things so that evil is simply physically impossible, with no contradiction of free will, in the same way that I am physically unable to flap my arms and fly to the moon, and yet I still have free will. The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god). The onus would have to be on the theist to show how "no-evil" somehow logically contradicts free will; and it must be a truly logical contradiction if it is to be any constraint on omnipotence.

Or one could answer the problem of evil as saying that much like a dog can't understand physics, we can't understand the complexities of God. In this we could still choose to believe, God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent. If God created the universe surly he/she/it is beyond western logic.

"I don't know," in other words.

I mean, you must be able to imagine how your reasoning sounds to people who don't already believe in god, right?

No, it's "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". An open question doesn't mean there isn't an answer.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

If you have a belief about how reality works, normally you would expect that belief to pay some dividend in terms of what you can expect to happen in this situation, or that. Otherwise you're just believing a thing for no reason at all. So you can call this anticipation of a certain result "evidence", and to have it not materialize is, in fact, a solid reason to suspect the truth of what you believe.

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - St. Tomas Aquinas

I completely understand that my reasoning sounds rediculous from a scientific point of view. However, God is not finite, therefore you will never find or prove God using the scientific method, a method for gaining meaning from finite things.

As the Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard expressed, it comes down to a leap of faith. Are you willing to believe something that you yet cannot see?

Why would I do that?

Could be different for many people. For me, it allows me to live in a universe that is a beautiful creation and to feel a great deal of gratitude towards God for creating it. It fills my heart with peace and love that I can spread to others.

Tdlr it makes me happy

I meant in the sense of, why would I believe something for no reason at all? I'm not terribly interested in the advantages and rewards I gain by thinking a thing, other than the basic stuff that naturally comes with seeking and discovering truth.

But, since you bring it up, I'm pretty sure I'm getting basically most of what you mention already, in one form or another, and probably some other stuff that believing in God would diminish. No thanks.

> "To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - St. Tomas Aquinas

And yet, when a new explanation is available that conflicts with faith, faith does not give way to it. That's simply wrong.

It is a greater good to have the freedom to do evil than to be constrained to where it is impossible. Would you prefer an all-powerful, super-totalitarian government that made it impossible for anyone to commit a crime, or would you prefer the freedom that also allows the possibility of crime?

I don't think you get to say "just design a universe such that X" without actually producing one. In this context, that's a circular argument, since the possibility of such a universe is precisely what we're debating. And lots of things that look reasonable turn out to have inconsistencies buried deep inside. If you're not familiar with computability, "write a program that figures out if another program will run forever" sounds possible at first. You can make specific counterexamples to my argument, but just saying "it must be possible" illuminates nothing.

Anyway, I'll try to do better. Basically, in a universe in which "evil" is physically impossible, you may have "free will" in some sense to choose which good, but you cannot choose whether to do good, because all possible choices are "good". It's specifically freedom to choose good or evil that's the key ingredient in "good" being a meaningful concept, or at least it's consistent to so assume. You're back to the pretty clockwork.

I don't know if it's possible to construct a bulletproof argument here. Shaky foundations are an occupational hazard of metaphysics, for both sides. Saying "well, he's God so he should be able to figure it out" works just as well as "he's God and couldn't do it, ergo it's inconsistent". The best we can do is show our positions are consistent under some set of assumptions.

The halting problem! Great point. I'll have to remember to bring that up next time theology comes up in a geeky context.

> The fact that he didn't means he's either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent (a contradiction for those who ascribe both properties to god).

This doesn't really follow. We are creative so we could come up with infinite amounts of nonsense questions that are really logical paradoxes and not real objections. Why can't God create something so heavy that he can't move it? The question of why a loving God allows evil is in that same category if you believe: - love requires free will - free will requires choices - meaningful choices require evil to be an available choice

There are probably other formulations of how love requires the option of rejection and how evil follows from there. But the point is that they turn the contradiction between omnipotence and omnibenevolence into a paradox in the same category as "could God grow a mustache so great that he himself could not shave it?"

It stands to reason, then that the job of the objectors is to show that it's possible to love meaningfully without free will, really. And if you don't believe in objective morality, it's hard to argue what love is and isn't.

Or do I misunderstand and you care to elaborate?

> I wouldn't say it's begging the question. Of course evil is an illusion in an atheistic viewpoint.

Well, fair enough. If someone who doesn't believe in evils asks and a theist provides the Augustinian answer (evil is the absence of good), then we should all be enlightened, appreciate each other, and move on. But much more often, the people asking do believe in some sort of evil (rape warfare, slavery, child abuse, genocide, etc.) and don't realize the premise of the question is flawed. Again, it may be for reasons of aesthetics and emotion, but it's hard to make the case that there is nothing objectively evil. It's at least as dissatisfying as claiming that God exists and allows the same evils to happen.

The thought processes around this question typically boil down to what matters more: morality or observation. There are some who assume objective good and evil are irrefutable and can fairly cleanly proceed to thinking that something is behind all that. And there are people who assume that physical matter is the only way to prove the existence of things, and so all immaterial things (good, evil, God) are illusions unless we can use matter to somehow measure them.

I guess I'm looking at the pristine, logical atheistic position, whereas you're looking at what most people actually believe. I try to ignore emotional satisfaction in these debates, but I have noticed that most people do believe in evil, regardless of their views on the existence of God. :)

I disagree with your second paragraph. I don't see how humanity being a product of time and chance implies that evil is an illusion. For instance, I think the claim "suffering is bad" is true regardless of whether a God or chance created humans.

This is a frequent misconception though. See the Euthyphro dilemma for a rebuttal. TLDR: are things right/wrong because god says so, or does God say so because they are right/wrong. The former implies a completely arbitrary morality. The later implies that morality is independent from God.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/#EutPro

And, other religions might insist that the problem of evil has nothing to do with "God" and everything to do with humanity, and that "God" is beyond good and evil.

Or, in the case of some older religions, they just accept that the gods are spiteful and cruel.

Who decides what is ultimately evil, spiteful, or cruel? The most powerful God? Isn't that just supernatural might-makes-right?

For God to be beyond good and evil, someone (probably God) has to have the authority to decide that. This is analogous to the concept of standing in the legal code. So even to say that God is beyond evil, you'd have to admit that there's some ultimate judge out there somewhere. And therefore something that defines what doesn't count as evil.

>Who decides what is ultimately evil, spiteful, or cruel? The most powerful God? Isn't that just supernatural might-makes-right?

Basically, yes. In the Book of Job, God's justification for visiting such cruelty onto an admittedly righteous man who didn't deserve it (to win a bet with Satan, no less) was, in essence, "Because I'm God, and you're not." God doesn't have to play by human rules, humans have to play by God's rules.

In many old religions, divine beings had no problem killing any mortal they pleased - and the strongest gods tended to be the most petty and violent of the lot. They were manifestations of the wanton and arbitrary power of the natural world. The Old Testament God seems to be cast from the same mold - murder is a sin, but if He commands you to kill your firstborn, you'd better not hesitate.

It's not a satisfactory philosophical answer for modern times but it is an answer. The modern version of this seems to be "God works in mysterious ways," but it's a reformulation of the same argument - God is essentially alien, and not a moral being as humans understand morality.

It's different in monotheistic theology. In pantheism, not all gods create everything equally. And the gods don't (typically) agree on what is fair and unfair. So the conundrum there is that the most powerful gods ends up winning 'moral' arguments, at least while they can.

As for the God of the Bible, I don't understand your point. It seems fair to say that people might not understand the whole picture and that it's not fair to judge God with limited wisdom and perspective. This attitude was Job's sin, not merely being weaker than God.

Are you claiming specific charges against the God of the Bible? Based on whose measure of morality?

I'm not making any claims, just presenting alternative approaches to the problem. The apparent paradox of the "problem of evil" in Christianity depends upon a specific interpretation of the nature of God which the Bible itself doesn't always support. A being that is beyond understanding cannot be merely good or evil, because those are human concepts, which humans understand.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com