An argument I need help analyzing

Faith & Science Conversation
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As someone who has a lot on my plate, it find it relaxing sometimes to watch videos on science as a short break between studying. I find these videos on YouTube, where the longer-form content usually provides for more depth of content (although I’m a Gen X teenager, I absolutely hate mainstream social media. I tried X for a week and haven’t gone on since because of the sheer negativity on the site). Of course, since people are allowed to post comments, it is only natural for debates and arguments to come up. Typically, I avoid the comments of videos simply because of all this arguing. However, in one particular video on “scary” objects in space (I.e. unstoppable asteroids, rogue black holes, coronal mass ejections, gamma ray bursts, space junk, etc.) had me curious. This same creator had mentioned the “terrifying” potential for rogue black holes before, but upon a further search I found that the chances of such an occurrence are extremely low and gravitational for-warning would have been centuries to millennia in notice. I was curious to see if anyone had done their homework on the topic and were discussing it in the comments. Unfortunately, underneath the very first comment (which was a mellow comment on the fragility of life) immediately sparked a religious debate (since astronomy seems to cause these debates more than any other area of science). Since I’m still growing my knowledge on faith, I was wondering if people smarter than me could help analyze what the heck is going on. I stopped recording the argument where I did because it started switching from Christianity versus science to now including Islam, which was a whole other bucket of fish (people began mentioning that the Quran properly conveys Christ message, which was twisted in the Bible). So, here is that argument. What is your guys response to this?

Unrelated Person 1: The fact we are so fragile, makes me appreciate that we can have life on our Planet.

Christian 1: That actually made me believe in God and trust him more

Not Christian 1: ok but is your god that good if he makes a black hole enter our solar system, killing us all?

Christian 2: God has never allowed that

Not Christian 1: remember that time when there was a global pandemic and (understatement) millions of people died from it worldwide, some being good people? Your god said that he would never cause something like that again (the flood and Noah’s ark), but there he goes, killing everyone again. He broke his promise, when he’s supposedly this great all powerful being who is never wrong. Doesn’t that contradict the Bible?

Christian 2: he didn’t yet (referring to Rogue Black Holes)

Not Christian 1: but he did cause a global pandemic

Not Christian 2: he also just killed the majority of the dinosaurs sending a big-a** asteroid at the Earth. Now that’s what I call genocide

Christian 3: God didn’t “cause” that he just lets the world course through and others tend to focus on the bad things. God doesn’t intervene in anything we just get lucky but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist

Not Christian 3: ok so he doesn’t intervene but that time where he flooded the earth and also made the Byzantine empire win with the cross on their shields, that’s not intervening

Not Christian 1: I’ve read the Bible, we’re on an even playing field here. The Bible and events happening now contradict each other, leading many (including me) to believe it’s not true.

Not Christian 1: no, sorry for starting this argument

Unrelated person 1: Pls guys we all can believe in what we want to, and we can still talk normally to each other. Let people have their own believes, we have been given the opporturnity to think what we can chose.:dizzy:

Christian 4: god loves us, but not everything has to be good. Everything is unexpected

Not Christian 1: so if we get hit by a coronal mass ejection and many die out because no electricity, he still loves us? Once humans go extinct in the future, will he still love us?

Not Christian 1 again: Hyper Jonic ok but if this rapture was gonna come then why did one event happen now and we’re not dead yet? His rapture failed meaning he’s not perfect. Also I’m not blaming god for this, I’m saying how a believer might think of it, that god caused it all.

Christian 5: God is supreme over all creation. If you really understand God then you would not be questioning His actions. He owns us so He can do whatever He wants with us.

Christian 6: To be honest with you it is this chaos that we are facing these days, that made me believe in God when I was staggering in faith. The reason is these all chaos are written in the scriptures. I don’t know why God chose this way and I don’t want to know either. Look if you try to look at the Bible it literally talks about things that must happen before Christ come again and unless you don’t want to believe in them there is no way to disprove them because they are happening now.

(Also, if anyone has any good tips for blocking comments, I would appreciate those as well. Many videos I find online are very nourishing for my mind and soul, but the temptation to see what everyone else is thinking tends to be what gets me anxious, especially when religion gets brought into it).

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Another ask: if you guys also have advice on dealing with situations like these without loosing your cool, could you also provide that? Although tiny arguments like these don’t inherently bring up any “knock-out” points, I often find them emotionally painful and anxiety inducing.

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This seems to be a re-phrasing of what is commonly called “the problem of evil.”

From an expert-reviewed glossary definition I wrote once:

“The problem of evil refers to the theological or philosophical problem that people run into when they try to reconcile their observations of evil in the world with the belief that God is loving, good, and all-powerful. Many people make the reasonable assumption that a loving and good God would not allow evil to exist if he had the power to prevent it. They argue that if evil exists, we must conclude that God is either not loving and good, or he is not all-powerful. In response, many philosophers and theologians try to develop what is called a theodicy to solve the apparent contradiction. Traditional interpretations of the Bible say that moral evil and natural evil came about as the result of human sin at the fall of humanity when all of nature became cursed because Adam and Eve sinned, although there are also many other views about why evil emerged. Christians over the centuries have also wrestled with how supernatural evil, spiritual forces or entities that oppose God, fit into the picture.”

“One major criticism of evolutionary creation involves the problem of evil. Evolutionary creationists accept a model of natural history in which evidence of death, disease, and predation exist before humans arrive on the planet. How could a good and loving God create a world where natural evil exists before human sin? While there are many possible responses, one important observation is that in the Bible God seems to accomplish his good purposes through death (such as through animal sacrifices and ultimately the death of Jesus). In this way, some Christians see death as an essential part of God’s creation, one that is compatible with God’s love and goodness.”

If you want to dive into the topic, try reading up on “Christian theodicies.” I think it’s good to concede to agnostics and atheists that the problem of evil wouldn’t have become a thing if it weren’t really a problem. There are more and less satisfactory theodicies trying to deal with it, but none of them are a silver bullet that slays all the counter-arguments. I think it’s important to keep in mind that if you decide a good and powerful God can’t exist because evil exists, you may have “solved” the problem of evil, but you have opened up other philosophical and existential questions that you might not find very satisfying answers for. It’s a trade-off.

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You are not responsible for defending God, resolving the problem of evil, or stabilizing reality in a YouTube comment section.

Nothing happening in those threads places you on trial.
Nothing written there has the power to topple truth.
And no random stranger online has the authority to force your nervous system into crisis.

What’s happening emotionally isn’t “a threat to faith.”
It’s your brain reacting to conflict framed around ultimate things — death, extinction, God, morality. Those topics are wired to feel high-stakes. But the setting is not high-stakes. It’s a comment box under a video.

Zoom out:

  • The problem of evil is 2,500+ years old.
  • Faith traditions have wrestled with it for centuries.
  • Intelligent believers and intelligent skeptics still exist.
  • No decisive “knockout” has ever occurred — not in universities, not in debates, not in journals.

So it certainly isn’t happening in a 14-reply YouTube thread.

You are feeling anxiety because your brain treats existential disagreement like danger. But disagreement is not danger. It’s just disagreement.

Here is the liberating truth:

You do not need immediate answers to remain intellectually honest.
You do not need emotional invulnerability to remain faithful.
You do not need to win arguments to remain grounded.

Peace does not come from solving every objection.
It comes from realizing you are allowed not to engage.

And here is the deeper stabilizer:

If God exists, He is not fragile.
If truth is true, it is not threatened by comment sections.
If your faith is real, it does not depend on winning internet debates.

The anxiety dissolves the moment you stop treating online objections as existential verdicts.

They are just noise passing through a system that existed long before you logged in — and will continue long after the thread dies.

You can close the tab.
Nothing collapses.

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I’m not sure how it works on YouTube, but on Threads I block any account that is hostile or posts nonsense, and I block preemptively without interacting with them. Sometimes I intentionally go onto threads where people are being stupid just to block accounts. This trains the algorithm to mostly show me the content I find interesting and to not show my comments to trolls. I’m pretty sure on any algorithm driven social media site, you will be served up more of what you spend time looking at and interacting with. So don’t interact with Herbs, or you’ll just get more of them.

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One argument that I typically like is that since God took a human form, he is not indifferent to the problem of suffering. John Lennox had said that (evidently I saw that on a different video that I certainly didn’t view the comments with, for obvious potential for argument). The problem here was that these folks were arguing about really complicated issues. Sometimes, it seems easier to ignore God when it comes to deciding what to do. It may seem foolish to believe that God simply wouldn’t ever allow something like a mass ejection or nuclear war to occur because if you argue that preparation is unnecessary then you end up sounding like the people in Jesus parable that didn’t have enough oil for the wedding. But, then if you argue that we should prepare then you risk sounding like you don’t believe God will protect you. In this odd back-and -forth on extreme dangers, I find it easier to leave God out than to complicate matters. However, I think there is also the question of what to make of rogue black holes, plagues, and the potential for other end-of-the-world scenarios as it pertains to God. However, the regular question of evil I think is covered by Christ. What do you think in these other matters.

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whoazers. Thank you so much for that. You don’t know how much of a weight you lifted off of me. I never actually participated in any of these discussions but occasionally I would accidentally come across one. But, thank you so much for your assistance!

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As you note, these are highly complex issues, and social media is designed for simplistic answers and trying to advertise stuff.

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This bears repeating.
A lot.

Amen and amen and amen.

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Print this out and put it on your wall. You don’t need to answer every objection in the world or prove God exists to anyone, even yourself. You simply need to preach the Gospel, do good works and be prepared to give a a reason for the hope that you have.

Social media, reddit, YouTube and so on are toxically anti-God. These places are not usually filled with active seekers. It is not your job to fix them all. God is not fragile. You don’t need to protect Him. He can handle the criticisms.

Vinnie

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I think there is a distinction between natural evil (destructive forces in nature or biology like tsunamis or cancer) and human created evil (war, ICE, the Epstein files). I live in reality where clearly God doesn’t stop evil of either kind from hurting people (and animlas and the rest of creation) all the time, so I don’t spend a lot of time trying to parse the difference between the two. We’re all going to die, some of us painfully. We’re all going to lose people we love, sometimes more traumatically than other times.

So yes, as a Christian I believe God suffers with us and that counts for something. I believe creation will be made new and wrongs will be made right someday, but I empathize with people who don’t find that comforting or think that whole idea is just a fantasy that keeps people oppressed. Faith, hope, and love are gifts people experience, you can’t argue people into having them and you definitely shouldn’t use them as a tool to manipulate people.

I believe God sometimes intervenes in the natural order of things where bad things happen and bad people do bad things. Sometimes people get healed or rescued or protected. Sometimes bad people get punished and good people get vindicated. Certainly not always, so we can’t draw any laws of the moral universe from it or treat God like an equation we could balance if we could only nail down the constants.

I think the older I’ve gotten the less I’m interested in having an explanation for “Why are things the way they are?” and “What should I believe?” and more interested in “Since things are the way they are, and I believe what I believe, what should I do?” What I should do when faced with evil (natural or human-generated) is oppose it and try to help and comfort people dealing with the damage.

If an asteroid destroys earth or a black hole swallows us up, it’s not really going to matter what philosophical or theological arguments we mastered or who found them compelling and who thought they were dumb. I think it will matter that we treated our fellow human beings and God’s creation with love and respect while we lived, so that’s what I’m going to do. Can I prove it will matter to Joe Knowsalot on the internet? No. But I don’t really care, because not being able to make Joe believe something doesn’t really affect my choices, or my responsibilities, or my faith, hope, and love.

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I like that explanation that God suffers with us. It makes sense that no matter why evil exists, God certifiably doesn’t obtain enjoyment from it (as he himself had to suffer one of the most painful deaths on the cross).

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So if a parent lets a child ride a bicycle or use a skateboard and they get hurt or even die then the parent didn’t love their child?

Yes, because eternal life spoken of in the Bible means we still exist for God to love.

Or they might think God did not cause it all. I believe in a God who does not have to control everything – who could lay it all down and become a helpless human infant to live among us, and even die at our hands. I believe in a God who wants a real relationship with those who make their own choices and learn for themselves.

Wow. This guy is in the dark ages or from ancient times where people considered women and children to be property. I don’t think that way and I don’t believe God thinks that way either.

Chaos (chaotic dynamics) is part of the laws of nature. It is part of how God made the universe to work. Why? It is fundamental to the process of life itself. God created for a relationship. So of course He created the universe to support the process of life. God can handle more than pet rocks. In fact he went for the most difficult and dangerous relationship of them all – children: children of God the infinite creator of the universe.

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The best philosophical argument for the problem of evil in my opinion has to do with the concept of best possible worlds. So the idea is that the best possible world is a free world in which nature is free to develop and in which humans have free will. God responds in a loving and non-coercive way to human choices and the development of the natural world. The possibility of harm exists in a free world where God is relating to people and creation in a non-coercive way. A world in which God always exercised absolute power to prevent harm would be coercive (not loving), and therefore not the best possible world. Or something like that, the philosophers say it better.

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Thank you for the in-depth analysis. I’ve seen a lot of your work on this forum so I’m thankful that you could stop by my post and give word here!

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No I think you summarized it pretty well. I think that is a very good way of putting it.

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Of course, now that I’ve felt my issues have been resolved dealing with people’s comments, I of course am now twice as terrified of them now than before :rofl:. I’m trying to be very careful around these areas now (and by careful I mean trying to resist even looking down at their preview real estate in the screen).

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The other night I was listening to an interview on the Daily Show with Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price about their new graphic book for kids about screen time and technology. One of the things they emphasized was the importance of real fun and real relationships. In our tech and internet centered world, people are putting all of this emotional investment into interactions that are not relationships with real people and are not even fun. It’s leading to record levels of anxiety and depression. It was a good reminder for me that we need to “use tech as a tool not be used by tech.” Social media platforms are intentionally designed to be addictive and disregulating. They don’t want you to be healthy and at peace, that does not help them sell things and gain reach. So when I am online, I frequently ask myself if what I am spending my time on is making me a better person for the people I have real relationships with, my family, my co-workers, my neighbors and friends. Sometimes it is, because you can learn a lot, and be informed about important things going on in the world by spending time online with strangers, and that feeds into your real life. And you can use social media in good, relationship-building ways to maintain friendships and encourage people you care about. But I have learned not to invest my emotional energy in arguments with people I don’t know (some of whom are being paid by troll farms to be disruptive). We all have limited resources to give grace to people, we need to invest those resources wisely. I think we all need to be reminded frequently not to get sucked in to the internet rage and conflict vortex. It’s not worth it. People are wrong on the internet and saying crazy stuff on the internet all day everywhere. It’s not our responsibility to fix the situation or even address it. We need to put more energy into interacting with the real people who know us and care about us.

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I fully agree with the necessity of human (and angelic) free will—and with the possibility of choosing both good and evil as a consequence—as a fundamental requirement for a loving relationship between God and angels and humans, who, as far as we know, are the only creatures capable of relating to Him. However, I cannot understand why the natural world must be the way it is in order for freedom to exist.

I mean, as an analogy, a person can be abusive and unloving toward their relatives, or toward their spouse and children, whether they live in a wealthy country in a beautiful, well-kept home or in a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden environment. Does living in a beautiful and well-kept setting prevent someone from exercising their free will or compel them to be good? It certainly does not seem so.

Which is why it has always seemed dubious to me to place both human (and angelic) free will and the development of the natural world in the same category.

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That is true, but given the recent swathe of questions by Max, it seems its important to add there are two major trains of thought here and this is one of them. I know from a classical perspective, a “best possible world” is a no-go zone.

@BuffaloMax17 before storming the beaches of YouTube and Facebook, it might be important to know that Christian theism comes in two major forms today. Theistic personalism and classical theism. Most debates on the internet seem to center around the former and that is certainly the way a lot of intelligent, respectable modern Christians go. I disagree with them and side with classical thought that views God as actus purus (pure act) and evil being a privation of good.

How we approach divine simplicity (pro or con) will have a drastic impact on how we understand God, evil and most objections against theism. So it might be prudent for you to sheath your sword and do a bit more digging before tackling the World Wide Web.

I do not understand God as being “good” in the sense of a moral agent. Classical theology does not understand God’s existence as distinct from His Essence (ipsum esse subsistens). God is perfectly good because He is perfect being (fully actualized) and the source of all existence. God’s goodness is not about Him “behaving well,” but about His nature being the absolute standard of all reality and perfection. God is not one being among many but being itself.

Many classical theists would actually find the theodicy of theistic personal inadequate and think the atheists actually have the better of the argument. I would probably reject your defenses as inadequate to be quite honest. Personalistic theism and classical theism would both agree on pointing to the Cross to show God’s love but in different ways as a response to evil.

Take this famous quote:

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers

This quote is relatable, poetic and beautiful but metaphysically, it is disastrous. If you want to see how classical theology deals with evil, this is a good book:

https://www.amazon.com/Reality-God-Problem-Evil/dp/082649241X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1CYAVZ6QRPXS4&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dZoNVuXqr_gWHe1peettDq4yjLmSO2llfrWpv9YPdNfE53tYqeAzk7T7SjUQAG2Ol-JNsSF7VOIaqDTzXCHIGQ.IEEPP8n2y1csIi4JyXBS7K4qUSfhBy9Eq9ExVfDdJ8I&dib_tag=se&keywords=brian+davies+God+and+problem+of+evil&qid=1772209516&s=books&sprefix=brian+davies+god+and+problem+of+evil%2Cstripbooks%2C228&sr=1-1

Vinnie

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