Problem of Evil ~ a lot different than you think. Please Help. Seeking Truth. Very important!

Faith & Science Conversation
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Something i9nteresting has happened in science. For instance we now have the anthropic principle which has been incorporated into science, One aspect of it indicates that our universe is tuned so human life can exist here and secondly the universe is based on time and space that can only be understood by intelligent observers.

Thus science indicates that the universe is not indifferent to the existence of humanity. Also it5 has been confirmed that the universe has a Beginning and thus a history. We look at history to see where humanity and the universe are headed. Thus far it seems that the universe has been designed to produce humanity and be a home for us. This is the end of a long process so this cannot be by change. Whether we will evolve farther and/or be replaced is still possible, but does not seem to be in the foreseeable future.

Whereas Dawkins is free to believe in God or not, I dispute his claim that his choice is a rational choice based on good science. I find that it is not based on good science.

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Let’s let the political discussion rest and focus on the other points in the discussion, please. Thank you! :slight_smile:

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Al, I appreciate your contribution to the conversation. When you cite de Chardin you bring a historical dimension to the discussion which is missing in mist science. The concept of the Noosphere, but you need to clarify the spiritual aspect of it.

To be sure the Noosphere makes it possible to humans to make ethical decisions, while under evolution organism are guided by Natural Selection powered by the ecology. Humans today are endangered because we pollute the ecology or God’s Creation and endanger ourselves.

Humans destroy themselves by their selfishness, greed, and laziness. We should be ashamed, but our president knows no shame.

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The Problem of Evil and suffering strikes a very deep coord with me and I am far from dismissive of it. It is why I tell people that I could not be a Christian without evolution. It is true that there are many answers to the philosophical puzzle but this doesn’t mean that they are all good answers. Most answers involve diminishing one of the three elements of the trilemma:

  1. God is an all powerful God.
  2. God is good.
  3. Evil and suffering exists.

Your friend discards the first unwilling to consider the existence of a God contrary to number 2 which would make a universe which favors the wicked.

It doesn’t. This is really a matter of short term versus long term gain. Cooperation rather than dog eat dog will be the ultimate victor. The wicked are parasites. They can only exist because others make what they take. But consider the fundamental irrationality. The world is not made a better place by those who take and destroy. Thus it is impossible for the wicked to be victorious for they can only end up with a world that has nothing of value. It is only true that destruction is easier than creation. But the only thing that the lazy takers and destroyers can accomplish in the end, is to teach others to fight and remove the blight of evildoers in order to make a world that is worth living in.

The competition of individuals is only one part of the evolutionary process. Natural selection isn’t even the driving force of evolution. It is only a filter operating on the more fundamental force of variation. Thus the real source of its power is creativity (evident in the existence of more than 350,000 species of beetles alone). So if you really want to tap into the power of nature then you will find it by releasing the untapped potential of human creativity. How? This is why communities protect the weak. It is the foundation of specialization and technology which trumps any self-sufficient Daniel Boones.

So going back to the problem of evil and suffering, I would add a fourth presumption:
4. God is the designer of all living things and completely responsible for everything that happens.

Evolution refutes this. It shows us that the very essence of life is a self-organization in growth and learning and therefore utterly incompatible with design. This means that living things are responsible for themselves. This is frankly makes the most irrefutable elements of the problem of evil and suffering go right up in smoke because then you have the following choice of deities.

  1. A God who would never relinquish one iota of power and control and let anyone else do anything contrary to what He wills.
  2. A God who understands that love requires taking risks, making sacrifices, giving privacy, and sharing responsibility for what happens – and thus choosing love and freedom over power and control.

There is of course a strong connection between the added 4th presumption and the first. But the irony is that choosing the first of these deities ends up making a long list of things which your God cannot do because he is enslaved (with no power over Himself) to a human theology which makes power more important than anything else. Thus for greater logical coherence it should be recognized that really being all-powerful includes a power over oneself. And omnipotence also does not mean being able to accomplish anything by whatever logically inconsistent means one cares to dictate. An all powerful God CAN create a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it because self-limitation is included in all the things which He can do. But being all powerful doesn’t mean an ability to make 1+1 = 3 or to make living creatures instantly since this is inconsistent with what it means to be alive.

Thus you should understand that the possibility of success in getting your friend to accept Christ likely depends considerably on the TYPE of Christianity you trying to get this friend involved with. Too much of Christianity solves the problem of evil and suffering by discarding number 2 and arguing that our moral sensibilities do not apply to God and thus uses threats of hell and promises of paradise to get us to discard our integrity and submit to a God who is indistinguishable from a mafia godfather or a devil.

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We probably have to agree to disagree.

To me, the anthropic principle is a philosophical overlay. I tend to be something akin to a realist. I would expect the universe to go on whether we are here or not to observe it. I can accept that the “observer” is God, so if God is not here, neither is the universe. By extension, I trust that the universe is somehow under God’s control – though I have no scientific way to show that is so.

For me, I see science as merely a set of tools, very useful tools, but still only a set of tools. The mechanic is the philosopher who uses those tools wisely or foolishly. For some people, it seems because a hammer is useful for pounding a nail, they use a hammer on everything. This is where I see a lot of the problem of science trying to do the job of philosophy.

Anyway, I understand your argument.

I think this is a good point.

Maybe Dawkins views the word “rational” is a very narrow definition of only admitting scientifically testable propositions. Yet there are so many things we don’t know that we would be hamstrung to proceed this way in life. At some point, we have to have faith to even get up in the morning and go on for another day. In fact, even to do science, we have to rely on hunches – very unprovable and tenuous propositions that may not even be demonstrable in our own pursuit but are still true.

His insistence on only science also leads us to nihilistic notions to get out of these quandaries by invoking such propositions like the universe simply popped into existence. Hawking has also insisted on this one, sticking stubbornly to his Engish rectitude to facts rather than just accept that some things just cannot be answered until we cross over to the other side of that Jordon river into Canaan’s land.

“Rational” need not be so narrowly defined as Dawkins insists. In fact, “rational” is much closer to finding a way to live in the best way possible according to sound principles. For that, science is a useful tool, but it is not the only thing to being rational. Having hope is a necessary condition for continued survival. This nihilism that people sink into is what @TheStruggler is dealing with. That is far from rational, the way I see it.

You’ll never find peace of mind in your pool of self
You’ll never find peace of mind in a sea of wealth
You’ll never find peace of mind in your rock and roll
You’ll never find peace of mind if you sell your soul

To get up in the morning a face the day, we need more than science and facts. We need a reason to live. We do not live by bread alone. If you have a good comfortable life where you live in a good English town in a nice home and can walk your dog every day with some predictable regularity and there’s no one successfully molesting you in your endeavors to go about your life, maybe it is not so hard to face tomorrow. Yet, not all of us have that. What we have as Christians is hope; hope that there is something more to look forward to, hope that this life is not in vain, hope that the world might come out better if we stick faithfully to the good word, hope that the wicked will not prevail – even when it seems like they are most surely winning – and far more.

Compared to the narrow definition of rationality as a mere application of scientific reasoning (my view of using a tool without wisdom or finesse), including the richer perspective of a walk of faith is a rationality that is more suitable for all seasons of life.

by Grace we proceed.

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Science is more than a tool, it is also a guide. We need to reconcile science, philosophy, and theology, because they are all three important. To make science secondary to philosophy and/or theology is wrong and not productive.

We need a new form of philosophy to determine what is rational or not.

Agreed, but what Jesus said was, 'Seek first the Kingdom of God and all the rest of these things [the necessities of life] will be given to you." God expects more from us than just faith, but faith in action bringing forth God’s Peace and Love.

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When I have been blessed with those moments where I made a discovery – those strange realizations where I see a number of diverse and disconnected fragments of information suddenly connect in a coherent way and lead me in a better direction – I certainly appreciate the power of scientific reasoning at finding the truth. Science is very powerful. When I have reasoned correctly, that amazing confluence of information can be just astoundingly impeccable. I’m left speechless. When the pieces of that puzzle fit together, there is little that can evoke the kind of praise I feel when I see how stunningly simple yet marvelously ingenious the world God made really is.

I don’t see science as secondary. But science is what I understand to be a branch of philosophy, epistemology. It is a very important branch, most certainly. It is a powerful means of getting at the truth. Moreover, when it is used to address matters of truth in many of the issues that matter in our materialistic culture, it is certainly the means that gets sound results. The place I see people getting confused is when they feel that because science is so powerful with all the questions we have about the material world, therefore it should work on the things of heaven too.

With matters of faith, whereas science is not completely useless, is not really a suitable means of finding truth about that “something more” that the human heart needs to live in peace. It is maybe a bit akin to trying to understand an iphone by smashing it with a sledge hammer. Somehow, whatever heaven is, and whatever God is, and whatever all this means, it is quite orthogonal to the axes of our world and they cross only at the limit of an infinitesimally fine manifold. We discern too little, yet just enough.

To me, philosophy is extremely broad, it is not just about Socrates or Aristotle and a few other
people of antiquity, or some prescience attempt at finding truth and only marginally more respectable than religion, etc. [Note, I’m not saying this is what you say, I am just speaking in general about what I have heard some people say, particularly the D types.] I would also see theology as a very specialized part of philosophy that takes certain things like the existence of God and various metaphysical matters as given. To me, science and religion are things that all fall under the general tent called philosophy – though I can concede that maybe an small asterisk is maybe required.

by Grace we proceed

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I see things differently from the way you do. Also from what I hear from scientists, they see science as a revolt against philosophy, a revolt against Aristotelian teleology. One of the mistakes that I think the church has made is the baptizing of Aristotle by St. Thomas. Whereas there was good reason for this, it makes it very hard to separate theology from traditional Greek philosophy, which is not from God.

I perceive that you are probably a Catholic, which is fine, but I really think that we need to address those issues that are causing confusion in our times. We must address the conflict between science and philosophy, which traditional thinking does not.

Science is based on experience or experiments with nature. Theology is also based on experience with God, both personal and through others. Philosophy needs to develop an understanding of Reality which is based on both thought and experience.

Science is about understanding God’s Creation, including ourselves. Theology is about understanding God and how we relate to God and others. Philosophy is how we think, how we understand God’s Creation, how we understand God, and how we understand ourselves.

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Well, actually I’m probably more like reformed theology. However, being an intellectual who tries to think for himself about what it all means, and not being comfortable with excessive doctrine, I don’t really know where I exactly fit. I’m like an ox kicking at the poke on Calvinism because I think there needs to be the “choice”, but I trust in God’s absolute sovereignty, so I wouldn’t make a good Arminian either. Somewhere in the mix of that, I must have spent a lot of time with philosophy, most of which has been under the influence of the Catholic Church during most of our Western Civilization. Now philosophy has largely shifted to the no-god domain, so I kind of float on the ocean without a rudder or a sail.

It has largely become dominated by departments that want to pound a very strong ideology against the notion that there is anything more than just stuff – at least outside of the silos of the Church. In that respect, scientists are right that philosophy is largely irrelevant in the modern age.

I think I can basically agree with you here.

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Please read my short paper on God and Freedom on Academia.edu and tell me what you think.

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Isn´t that view too negative? If you compare the number of bible-believing Christians in academic positions today with like 100 years ago the number has increased dramatically and I´d argue it´s probably similar in the philosophy regarding God

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It is better to keep an optimistic face. In the US, philosophy is a rather tough place to make a living in. I haven’t done a survey, and have not searched the heavens and the earth with my lantern searching for an honest man. There are some journals like Sophia (Springer) that kind of try to look a bit beyond.

Maybe the reason I don’t really encounter much of anything positive on religion outside of a few Jesuit authors is because the demand for philosophy in the secular university is rapidly diminishing (for very practical reasons) and this means that it can only provide room to write for philosophers who have been around since before the Second Punic War.

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Or, as my biology prof said, “A chicken is just an egg’s way of making more eggs”

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Unfortunately this makes it look as if what I quoted from the Struggler were actually my words. I like your biology professor’s ironic sense of humor however.

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The KJV version of Isaiah 45:7 gets it just about right,

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things

Now, for some background. The second creation story is an allegory that compares Adonai Elohim’s conception of good and evil with that of the surrounding pagan religions. In Genesis 2&3 God demotes moral accountability from the divine realm of the pagan gods to the moral realm of humankind in the form of free will. In the pagan world, good and evil were brought about by the actions of capricious gods. In the Garden story, good and evil are brought about the the acts of humans.

So, if the Bible is to be believed (and I do), evil is what men do, not what God causes them to do. Evil results from choice and is the necessary consequence of God’s gift of free will. God is ultimately responsible and He admits it to Cyrus because Cyrus is a man who does not know God.

So, I am now intrigued. How is my conception of evil “a lot different that what [I] think”?

Cheers,

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