God is a Deadbeat Dad
One of the questions I’ve often pondered, as has everyone else in existence, is that old chestnut about why there is evil/suffering in existence if God is so good. I was reading an article the other day, and I thought the author addressed a couple of notable points fairly well. (I can’t remember where the article was. When I find it, I’ll link to it here.) I thought they were worth sharing.
The two arguments:
1. What humans perceive as evil and suffering is but a small part of God’s bigger plan. We are too “small” to be able to understand the big picture.
2. Evil and suffering are necessary, because without it, humans wouldn’t have free will.
A very dear friend of mine is currently battling cancer for the third time in her 26-year existence. Her older sister recently fought through it, and one of her cousins just died from a different type of cancer. In speaking with her yesterday, she was frustrated but optimistic. She noted that her cousin’s death and her own current illness were part of god’s larger plan for her own life, and for humanity’s existence in a bigger sense.
Basically, she’s making argument 1 for how a loving god can still exist even if there is so much suffering and seemingly needless death in the world. Yeah, her cancer sucks, and it sucks that her cousin died from a brain tumor, but it’s “no biggie”. God is good, so there must be a good result in the end.
In actuality, Christians don’t really believe that there is a greater good in anything that happens from bad things. Let me illustrate:
Suppose that you’re reading the newspaper and you see that a van full of teenagers coming back from Bible Camp was hit head-on by another car, setting both vehicles on fire. Several of the teenagers are unable to free themselves, and they burn to death. Witnesses describe their anguished screams and pleas for help. A baby riding in the other car also dies in this way.
The response from the religious community will almost certainly be something along the lines of “we are unable to comprehend God’s will in this tragic event, but we must trust that only good will ultimately come from it.” In other words, we don’t understand why god chose such bad deaths for these people, but god is good, and therefore good will come out of the situation.
The problem with this theory is that if a Christian were standing nearby with a fire extinguisher, they would not hesitate to put the fire out. They would never think that if they let the teenagers and the baby die that something greater might arise from it. Every time that a Christian thinks or acts with compassion, they convict their own god for failing to carry through on his own requirements of them. The only time there is ever a “greater good” is when no one is around that can actually do something about whatever bad thing is happening. This is very much a “god of the gaps” type argument. If we don’t understand something (or in this case, can’t prevent it), we throw up our arms and say, “well, that sucks; good thing there’s a god somewhere out there who knows why 6 teenagers just needlessly died in a needlessly torturous way”.
It frustrates me that people think like this, but I’m glad that as gaps close, there will be less of them that the g-man can fill. If we can take a pill for something that god previously cured in some miraculous way, our subjugation to superstition lessens.
Anyways, onto the second point: I’ve heard it said that if there were no evil, we wouldn’t be able to truly love god, because we would have no alternative. In other words, our decision to choose god is only meaningful because we have the option not to choose him. If god forcibly removed evil and suffering from the world, he would be stripping humans of their capacity for free will, and thus, their capacity to choose to love god.
Never mind that free will is a myth, clearly rejected by modern neurobiology. For the moment though, let’s suppose that we actually do have free will. In that case, this argument angers me more than almost anything else, as it’s so stupid. Isn’t the very definition of heaven a place where there will be no pain, no suffering, no sorrow, and no evil? Obviously, you don’t need all those things for us to love god. Or, do vans full of drunken teen angels careen around heaven, randomly plowing through people, turning them into angel paraplegics? According to Christianity, you don’t need evil and suffering to be present to love god, otherwise Heaven would suck just as bad as earth does. This idea is just a cop out to defend the idea of a loving god.
As a corollary, let me mention one other related argument: if we had absolute proof of god’s existence, we really wouldn’t have a choice to love him. Thus, god hides himself from us, providing just enough clues for us to want to seek him and love him. Lucifer had absolute proof of god’s existence, and he still chose to rebel. What makes people think that I wouldn’t want to punch god in the balls and go do my own thing too? Maybe god doesn’t want me to get a sweet arm tattoo. Nuts to him! Me and Kat Von D are gonna go crazy. I am going to get that Webster tattoo!
The fact of the matter is–according to Christianity–that even with absolute proof, you are still able not to choose to follow god. Ergo, it’s pointless that god should hide himself from us. And this pretty much makes god a crappy, absentee father.
Strike 3, Einstein! Lucifer was an angel, not a man, which means he’s endowed with, like…some kind of super consciousness, which means that he can decide, but we humans can’t. Haw, haw…
Comment by Dave — 6 November, 2007 @ 13:14
Oh, one more thing. Be careful with Stephen Pinker. If Noam Chomsky is the George W. Bush of linguistics, Stephen Pinker is the Bill O’Reilly. All of this stems from their view of language, which makes the following assumptions:
(1) A human child cannot learn a language based on what they hear in their environment. (This is called “Poverty of the Stimulus.”)
(2) Because of that, the inherent structure of language (common to all languages) must be innate.
In other words, it’s a kind linguistic creationism masquerading as science.
Regarding the first assumption, the question arises: Is this the case? One would expect Chomskyan researchers to back up this claim with…you know, research. Wrong! There’ve been countless studies disproving the Poverty of the Stimulus, and none in favor of it. Instead, Chomsky and his cronies insult people who question (1), and marginalize them. “Every serious linguist believes in some form of Poverty of the Stimulus, whether they admit to it or not,” is something I’ve heard from Chomskyan linguists. “Well, do they have any studies that demonstrate that it should be assumed?” I ask. “Oh, yeah, like thousands,” says the Chomskyan. “Name one,” says I. “I can’t believe we’re seriously having this discussion. It thought you were interested in linguistics.” And so it goes.
So, what do you do? If you assume that 90% of language is innate, you produce theories of linguistics that are just laughable, and you start to believe that there’s a big magic “something” behind it all–something like…GOD! But, no! These are liberal “scientists”! They can’t believe in a creator! So, what do they do? They say, “Oh, it’s evolution!”
It’s insulting to see him call himself a cognitive scientist–and even more maddening to see people claim that Noam Chomsky is a cognitive scientist. I hate the field of linguistics…
Comment by Dave — 6 November, 2007 @ 13:28
Your point about Pinker is well taken. I’ll find another source. Did you click on the “free will is a myth” part of that sentence? It’s a different link that takes the reader to the wikipedia article on the Ghost in the Machine idea. Essentially, what I was trying to boil down into one absolutist statement was that modern neurobiology generally does not allow for a duality between lower brain functions and some kind of otherworldly “consciousness”. That is, the same neural logic gates that cause your body to move your arm a certain length when going to shake a hand also cause us to think the way we do. Essentially, man is a biological machine that–through conciousness–has the illusion that he has free will. In reality, every choice, every thought, every word he has ever muttered is determined by the most basic electrical circuity firing a relative eternity before these “top-level” actions occur. Since this is true, there is no such thing as free will, and thus, religions which espouse it are bunk. Or, if they don’t espouse free will (think very aggressive Calvinism), then you cannot possibly take the idea of a loving god seriously, as we are reduced only to mere puppets.
Comment by jake — 6 November, 2007 @ 16:56
Oh, and one other thing: Adam and Eve also had full proof of God’s existence, and yet they chose to sin. So, if you were sticking by your “Lucifer was an angel” argument, I’ve got one up on you now.
Comment by jake — 7 November, 2007 @ 11:44
One thing you might want to look up are mirror neurons. There was an experiment with a half-decapitated monkey (so that the scientists could look at his brain) where these scientists had this monkey pressing this button. That was it: just him sitting there, with the top of his skull chopped off, pressing a button over and over again. Electrodes were hooked up to his brain so they could see which areas of his brain were firing while he was pushing this button. For whatever reason, the button jammed, and the monkey started screaming, or something, so the researchers went to see what the hell the problem was. They unjammed the button, and started pressing it to make sure it wasn’t going to jam again. Here’s the punchline: the same neurons in the monkey brain were firing as when he was pushing the button.
This led to the discovery of mirror neurons. Essentially, there’s no difference in our brains if we see an action or do an action. There’s a theory of language that’s similar. Essentially, in an analogy-based system, humans don’t know anything about language, but they do have the linguistic capacity for analogy. Thus, they see structure AXB, then they see AXC, then they say DXB, and so they generalize DXC. And that’s how it all works.
The interesting thing about this system is it can be used to predict the type of linguistic innovation seen in that language (though not what the innovations will be, of course). In English, we know we can make up new vocabulary, and that if “grunk” is a verb, then Sally grunks, Jake grunked, and we can all start grunking together. We could never innovate, say, something like this: (1) this dog; (2) that dog; (3) dog siff (where “siff” means something like “that dog far away”, and must follow the noun). However, even that would be better than, say, doag (where changing the vowel in a noun indicates that the noun is far away). But even that would be better than changing the tone of the dog, since contrastive tone isn’t even in the realm of possibility for an English speaker.
Further, we can predict what well-formed non-existing words there are, based on the current sound patterns of English. So, “grunk” is fine, but “zdovi” is not.
HOWEVER (and this is the important part), nothing we can do can predict exactly what innovations will occur. To that extent, there is free will with respect to language. By knowing facts about a given language, you can say something about what speakers will do, what they know, and what they will accept, but you can’t predict what’s going to be totally new.
Re: Adam and Eve. God gave them the opportunity to be as angels, according to Milton, but they were free to fall (and, of course, he knew they would). But the whole thing is just a myth, anyway.
Comment by Dave — 12 November, 2007 @ 12:16