Sometimes when atheists are quick to point out suffering in the world, it doesn't always play, to me at least, as they intended. So many will - sometimes angrily - list off various atrocities in the world followed with the concluding, "Where was God?"
The problem is that, fervent declarations of atheism notwithstanding, it sometimes comes across not so much that they don't believe in Him, as it is that they are confused, disappointed and/or angry with Him.
Dave, the debate video will be available online in about two weeks I'm told. A transcript of it will be available shortly afterward. I want you to respond to what I said in the debate. Until then I'll suffice it to say that you simply do not understand the problem. When you do, then we can talk.
LOL Does that mean you won't respond to anything in the interim? Perhaps others will.
I've often wondered at "the problem of evil" Christianity clearly has its answer. What though of " the problem of good"? How can atheists say that anything is good if there is no God. This is what held me back from the brink of atheism. If there is no God then there only..is. And chemicals in a beaker or complex chemicals pretending to be living creatures are still just chemical reactions...no good, no evil...just..."is".
Dave, you are a very patient man. Thank you for your work.
Can we start a blog Debunking the Man in the Moon? How about Debunking Pepsi-and-Pop-Rocks-Combined-Will-Kill-You? 
Scott
I just read your long paper on the problem of evil. I'm once again so sorry to tell you this, but you simply do not know the full extent of the problem. So many things to say here, that I don't know where to begin. But the first thing I'd say is that you need to think seriously about intense suffering and horrendus evils. That's where the debate is focused on now. We're not talking about scrapes and scratches and bumps and brusies here.
Great. Keep thinking I am ignorant and in this utterly over my head. I never claimed to be on par with all these professional philosophical minds. Of course I 'm not, and they would blow me away in a formal debate (do you think I don't know that?). So no argument from me there. That is not being disputed in the slightest. It's a truism.
But your claim is not simply that I am not a philosopher (wow; what a revelation), but a much more ambitious one: that I don't understand or comprehend the problem at all (or now you say "the full extent"; your criticisms keep getting milder as you better figure out what I know about it). That makes for a delightful (and humorous) set-up to a paper I will be putting up later today. Clue: think "Alvin Plantinga".
I should add that you fall into another fallacy in assuming that this one paper exhibits the full extent of my reflection on the topic. It does not necessarily do that (as is obvious, logically). I made that clear in how I introduced the paper on your blog. It doesn't follow that one paper of mine either intended or successfully accomplished a treatment so comprehensive on the problem of evil that all bases were covered; every jot and tittle. This was a chapter in a book of popular apologetics, not a philosophical treatise. It did not, and because that was te case does not justify you concluding that this is all I know about the topic.
The other stupid thing you say is that I have failed to "think seriously about intense suffering and horrendus evils." This is virtually an insult, since you already know that I consider the problem of evil a very serious objection to Christianity; in fact, the most serious one by far. So for you to imply that I haven't struggled with this, is asinine. The Christian is the one who struggles with the problem in the first place, not the atheist, since it is a proposed problem in the internal consistency or plausibility of our worldview.
Your struggle is with (or should be with) the "problem of good" (which I have dealt with at extreme length in a debate with an atheist that is one of my all-time favorite dialogues I have ever participated in).
So of course I have done so, as has (I would venture to guess) any serious Christian who thinks at any level of depth about his faith, God, and the world we live in.
Just because it doesn't cause all of us to lose our faith as you have, is not grounds to claim that we haven't thought seriously about it, or that it doesn't trouble us, or that we don't understand it (as if only the atheist does, or that mostly atheists do). It doesn't trouble us to the extent that it overthrows our faith.
Do you think the biblical Job (or a person in his similar situation, who is a Christian) didn't mightily struggle with the problem? Your faith was weak. If you had truly maintained a supernatural faith given to you and fully enabled and caused by the grace of God (note that I don't deny that you ever had it; on
(cont.)
. . . only Calvinists have to do that), you wouldn't have fallen away and been taken in by the fallacies that you labor under now. But in any event your intellectual struggle (and we would say, deficiencies) is not one that we all share.
Keep thinking I am way out of my league. That only helps my goals and purposes as an apologist when opponents vastly underestimate what I know about something (and atheists have a very annoying habit of repeatedly doing that with virtually every Christian they come across).
Precisely because you keep saying this, now you have motivated me to do a bunch more reading, and to devote myself to the problem in an extremely serious way in the coming weeks (perhaps months). That's fine with me. If I am able to do it, time-permitting, I will (though I am always very busy and have multiple commitments). I think it is a great and supremely important topic for apologetics (as well as Christian life), anyway, so I would be only too happy to delve more deeply into it than I already have, and write quite a bit about it, regardless of how "up to speed" you may think I am.
You have enough intellectual problems of your own, as I will be highlighting when I deal with your deconversion and other papers of yours. So I wouldn't get too cocky about the whole thing if I were you.
Sticky glue,
I didn't say Craig did it [defeated the Problem of Evil], but Plantinga. He disposed of the classical, Humean objection. It is quite an accomplishment for any philosopher to solve such a major, vaunted objection.
This is impressive in that it makes it impossible for the atheist to say (as, e.g., Daniel Morgan naively does) that PoE absolutely proves that God doesn't exist.
Arguments from plausibility are notoriously subjective. All the Christian has to do with those is endlessly poke holes in the proposed premises. That's as easy as pie, and one of my favorite things to do as an amateur philosopher / apologist / Socratic. It's vastly different from having an airtight logical argument, where the ground rules are agreed-upon by all.
>I would say that believing that God found it more valuable to introduce a free will and the attendant suffering and pain (some which would be ETERNAL by your worldview),
God doesn't cause the eternal punishment; rebellious creatures who have every chance to avoid such a fate, do. So hell can't be blamed on God either. This only works against the Calvinist positions, because it posits absolute double predestination. We Catholics only believe in predestination to salvation (and even that not without significant cooperation on the saved person's part in a non-Pelagian sense).
>rather than create nothing at all, and just exist in its own perfect state, is quite implausible.
So you claim that non-existence is better than free existence because of evil. It's good that you exist to write that sentence, though, isn't it?
You would personally prefer to non-exist rather than exist?
>i) An all-good, all-powerful Being would not set in motion a course of events which would bring about evil, pain, and eternal suffering and sorrow
He would if the benefits and goodness of the possibility of free-willed creatures doing good outweighed it.
>versus
ii) An all-good, all-powerful Being created human free moral agency
iii) free will (even if granted that it exists, somehow, along with God's sovereignty) is somehow commensurate with the cost of (i)
Simply put, the premises you hold are not as strong as those I hold.
You don't know all the things that God knows. You don't believe in eternal life. But clearly, with that as a reality, suffering takes on an entirely different perspective: almost making it insignicant from the perspective of the long view, just as earth is in light of the immensity of the universe.
After 1000 trillion trillion trillion years in heaven (actually eternity is out of time, but whatever) who will care about their suffering on earth, way back, no matter how horrible?
It's all a matter of perspective: divine vs. human / eternal vs. the dinky, tiny time we live on earth.
So our view is not implausible at all, if one accepts all of it. It only becomes implausible when you start tossing things out such as eternity and don't properly deal with
(cont.)
. . . the fact that finite minds are in no position to cavalierly judge omniscient minds.
I've issued a debate challenge and would seriously entertain debating you. But your cocksuredness must go. It's unbecoming of thinking adults who recognize that others just see things differently.
I'm "cocksure" (?) -- yet you are the one who wrote:
"I'm saying the case I make in my new book is overwhelmingly better.
"Again, are you going to read it and critique it for yourself? Hey, I dare you! I bet you think you're that smart, don't ya, or that your faith is that strong - that you can read something like my book and not have it affect your faith.
"If Christianity is true, then you have nothing to fear. But if Christianity is false, then you owe it to yourself to get the book. Either way you win.
"And even if you blast my book after reading it here on this Blog, I'll know that you read it, and just like poison takes time to work, all I have to do from then on is to wait for a personal crisis to kill your faith.
"Want to give it a go? The way I see you reason here makes me think it'll make your head spin with so many unanswerable questions that you won't know what to do.
"But that's just me. I couldn't answer these questions, so if you can, you're a smarter man than I am, and that could well be. Are you? I think not, but that's just me."
This is not unbecoming? How could it not be, talking about your great wisdom being "poison" that will inevitably "kill" the faith of any Christian person who dares read your book and honestly think about it? I think you owe not only Steve Hays, but all Christians an apology.
You are "cocksure" enough to actually believe that your reasoning is so profound and compelling that any Christian's faith would be cut down?
For my part, I can't even imagine such deluded self-confidence. I wouldn't in a million years dream that an atheist would almost inevitably become a Christian (or even a plain theist) by reading my papers and books. Indeed they might. God could use this weak vessel for that purpose. But I can't imagine actually writing what you did above.
Of course I am confident in my beliefs (as one would expect a Christian apologist to be, since our job, after all, is to defend Christianity), but the pejorative label "cocksure" fits (if it fits anyone here) the one who made the silly statement above, which shows scarce evidence of "recogniz[ing] that others just see things differently".
I've already made my statement about the debate. I don't have the time or desire to do some formal thing. I'm already debating or dialoguing informally. I just finished today (many hours of work) the following paper:
Alvin Plantinga's Decisive Refutation of the Atheist Use of the Problem of Evil as a Disproof of God's Existence, Goodness, or Omnipotence
It will shortly be posted at:
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ52.HTM
I'm not all that interested in emotions-based, hysterical-type arguments from evil. I agree with Plantinga's sentiments in the paper that evil is deeply troubling and perplexing and that Christians often have no answer to any given specific instance of it.
(cont.)
. . . My main concern seems to have already been accomplished by Plantinga: he showed that the problem of evil is no disproof of God's existence or omnipotence or goodness.
If you want to carp on and on about it being a problem for Christians, certainly it is, but it is no proof of atheism or disproof of Christian theism.
I'll also eagerly look forward to hearing you reiterate again that I have no inkling about the problem of evil, after having abridged Plantinga's classic argument.
You show an lack of understanding of the gravity of the problem even while recognizing what a serious problem it is. That's a bit strange, yes. Your arguments are at best weak. The strange thing is that you think they are strong. That's sophmoric and funny to me.
I'm glad you're being entertained. It's very much likewise. All this nonsense when all you have to do is simply make your argument. You have freedom here to do so, to "deconvert" everybody. What stops you?
But I'm really enjoying my dialogue with DagoodS. Now there is a good discussion. I hope he hasn't gone goofy and silly too, so we can continue the enjoyable discourse.
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