Two of the oldest arguments against the existence of God, in the sense of perfect being theology specifically, are the problem of evil and the paradox of omnipotence. The former argues that if there were a God, there would be no evil in the world, but there is evil, therefore there is no God. The latter goes after the concept of God, arguing the idea of being all-powerful makes no sense. A standard version of this second question is "could God make a rock so big even he couldn't lift it?" but a clearer version comes from J. L. Mackie's article "Evil and Omnipotence" (which deals with both problems): can God place limits on himself?
A number of atheists, myself included, have found the problem of evil significantly more compelling, at least on an intuitive level. Why? One temptation is to say that the problem of evil invokes evidence from the observable world, but this is a flimsy rationale: standard versions of the problem of evil involve at least some deduction from abstract principles, and if an idea is incoherent, one shouldn't be stopped from saying so by fears of being accused of armchair reasoning. Another was suggested by Richard Carrier in his book Sense and Goodness Without God: criticisms of the coherence of theism just end up being arguments for the reform of theology. This doesn't seem to hold much weight either, though: the problem of evil can also be evaded by changing your theology.
Another answer to this quandry was suggested to me the other day when I was reading Peter van Inwagen's Giffod Lectures, which deal with the problem of evil. The book on the whole isn't worth buying, as the main material is available elsewhere. However, it does have an interesting section on the divine attributes. Van Inwagen scales them back a bit. For one, he rejects the idea that God knows what free agents will do in the future, a move considered wildly heretical in some circles but which is nonetheless gaining in popularity. More surprising, he rejects the idea that God can do anything logically possible (a common purported response to the paradox of omnipotence), on the grounds that the concept of logical possibility is problematic. Then he tries to draw a distinction between accaptable and unacceptable redefinitions of God. He claims that an understanding of God's attributes must be "loyal to the idea of God as the greatest possible being." This, I think, pretty well captures what theists want, so even if you can prove one concept of God incoherent, they can just fall back to the greatest concept they can get away with.
Maybe, though, you can go after van Inwagen's minimal concept. Maybe you think there are two different but incompatible ways of being extraordinarily powerful (Mackie suggests something like this), or maybe you think for any being there is, there can always be a more powerful one. What are theists to do here? I think many, though they would not say it openly, would be willing to settle for one of the greatest beings they can imagine. That's close enough, right?
Now we see the power of the problem of evil: not only does it show there is no greatest possible being, it shows us how to imagine a being greater than any one that actually exists, by imagining a being that prevents at least some of the horrendous evils that have, in unfortunate fact, been visited upon the world.
4 comments:
'For one, he rejects the idea that God knows what free agents will do in the future, a move considered wildly heretical in some circles but which is nonetheless gaining in popularity.'
What is the point of such a being then?
You pray to this god for advice, he tells you to do something, you get killed by a maniac with a gun while doing it, and said being shrugs its shoulders and says that he never saw that coming.
So why pray to such a god for advice?
Personally, I take the positivist view - there is no scientific evidence to posit the existence of any sort of deity. I didn't even get to the evil/omnipotence problems - I do think that the whole 'could God make a burrito so big he couldn't eat it?' thing is incredibly amusing and fun to confuse theists with.
On the subject of evil, I am reminded of Marx's 'religion is the opiate of the masses' quote, found in full here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_People
In some ways, religion, I think, was devised to try to deal with the basic fact that there is a lot of what is termed 'evil' in the world - specifically, a lot of things that make people hurt - and a lot of people may on some level realize that there are no immediate answers to these problems, or there is no solution yet that they can logically see. There are biological determinants for religiosity and non-religiosity (e.g. the god helmet experiment) and those who are both less educated and more sensitive in the temporal lobe are more likely to be religious (there is a greater population of atheists among the college-educated, particularly in the sciences, and Dawkins famously had no reactions to temporal lobe stimulation). I think of religion as I think of tobacco - an unfortunately societally acceptable drug that makes some people feel good but really screws things up.
Have we ever thought of approaching the problem of societal religion the way we approach drug addiction?
So happy new year.
-Katharine
>"Have we ever thought of approaching the problem of societal religion the way we approach drug addiction?"
The first thing that comes to mind here is that it's not clear that our approach to drug addiction is such a good idea.
>The first thing that comes to mind here is that it's not clear that our approach to drug addiction is such a good idea.
The first thing that comes to mind here is 'what are you implying by this?'
The second thing that comes to mind is that no, our approach to treatment of drug addiction isn't that great, and certainly it really doesn't get anybody un-addicted unless they want to be, but there are some facets of WHY people get addicted that seem to be present in the psychology behind why a bunch of people are religious. Compare the literature on neurotheology and drug addiction, and you will find a few key commonalities:
Temporal lobe epilepsy, besides predisposing people to experiencing experiences which they think are spiritual, has a significant impact in drug addiction - many people with temporal lobe epilepsy are far more susceptible than those who do not have temporal lobe epilepsy to developing a secondary addiction (by which I mean caused by the temporal lobe epilepsy) to drugs. Do a search for 'temporal lobe drug addiction' - it's incredibly revealing.
Combine that with entheogens, drugs which do similar things to the brain that temporal lobe epilepsy does - they make the person think they're experiencing an experience which is perceived by the person, possibly, to be spiritual.
Do some reading on a particular person named Michael Persinger - he's a neurotheologist at Laurentian University in Canada.
-Katharine
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