A semio the thinking atheist. It's not a person, it's a symbol,
an idea. The population of atheists in this country is going through the rule,
rejecting faith, pursuing knowledge, challenging the sacred. If I tell the
truth, it's because I tell the truth, not because I put my hand
on a book and made a wish and working together for a more rational world.
Take the risk of thinking. Feel so much more happiness. Truth Usian
wisdom will come to you that way. Assume nothing, question everything, and
start thinking. This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews. A
friend and fellow activist John W. Loftis Jess reached out to me a few
days ago. He had published kind of a distilled down version of a book
that he released in November of twenty twenty one. The books called God and
Horrendous Suffering, kind of a deep dive into what we call the problem of
evil. I like to call the problem of needless suffering. John would call
it horrendous suffering. And it's a good problem to bring up, because when
you and I engage with these sort of blank eyed, happy clappy Christians who
say God is good all the time. He is perfectly just and omni benevolent.
Right, Everything happens for a reason. And then you and I ask
reasonable questions. We're like, well, hang on just a second. Twenty
five thousand people are going to starve to death today. I think they might
take issue with the bumper sticker on your car that says God is good all
the time. Jesus never fails. We've got war and famine and disease,
natural disasters and corruption and just horrible stuff happening all the time. This does
not seem like a master blueprint by a perfect creator. And then often we
will see the casual believer kind of drift into these conversation stoppers. You know,
well, free will, it's a fallen world. Free will, it's
a fallen world. Or worse. When you talk to apologists, they get
into how God uses evil for his own glory. Well, you know,
in order for God to be good, you have to have something to contrast
the good with, so God kind of needs evil. As it says in
the Book of Isaiah, right, God created evil. Why would a good
God create evil? I remember this was way back when my channel first started.
I guess it's been fourteen years. One of the first videos I ever
produced was called The Story of Susie, and the character of Susie spent her
Christian lying with their hands to the sky, thanking and praising God for his
goodness. Says, planes were falling out of the sky and her grandma gets
hit by a car. Just just shit's going down all around her, and
she's like, praise Jesus, Praise Jesus. Right, Christianity Today, I
think it was. Christianity Today did a feature on me and the Story of
Susy video when it released. Now, strangely, they weren't able to get
a hold of me to participate in the piece, even though I'm a public
figure online, my website, my emails, they were all right there,
no, no. The author of the piece couldn't get a hold of me,
but she was able to get comment from a Christian apologist, a guy
named Norman Geisler. So he shows up and he says this. He says,
well, in order for us to know what a straight line looks like,
we have to know what a crooked line looks like. So God allows
the crooked line so that the straight line will make moral sense. This is
like the kind of crap that you and I hear all the time. Geisler
wrote a whole article this decades ago on the problem of evil. He titled
the article God, Evil and Dispensations. It's a very lofty piece, lot
of big words, and he says kind of the same stuff. God doesn't
really get glory from evil, but when evil happens, the fact that he
allowed free will to produce evil, that will bring glory to God. He
talks about Paul in the New Testament, saying that we exalt in our tribulations
because tribulations bring about perseverance, which prove character, which bring hope. That's
out of the Book of Romans Tewod Corinthians four seventeen. For momentary light affliction
is producing for us in it weight of glory, far beyond comparison. In
my first book, d Converted, I was I think I did a whole
section on this. I'm like, what is considered light and momentary affliction in
the eyes of the apologist? Child leukemia, people losing their arms and legs
in horrible car crashes tsunamis that wipe out a quarter of a million people in
US single day. I'm sorry, momentary light affliction, somebody qualify that,
well, you have to have the crooked line. Seth. That crooked line
helps us know that God made the straight line. Essay. Of course,
the Book of Isaiah says that God created evil. Right, God created all
things, This must include evil. I'm going on and on and on.
Anyway, back to my original point. John Loftis has distilled the book down
into some major points, and I think these will be useful to you and
me in our own conversations, and we need to be talking more about this
specific counter apologetic and he asked if I would voice it to do an audio
version so that people had the option to listen instead of reading. And I
asked John for permission to read it for you here on the podcast now,
because I don't want to interrupt the piece once we get started. Let me
take a short break right here, and I will come back and read for
you the article. The text version is linked in the description box God and
Horrendous Suffering. I'll do it next, Okay, as promised, allow me
to read for you uninterrupted this piece. It's about thirty seven minutes long.
I think it raises a lot of good points. It will benefit you in
the conversations you are having out there God and horrendous Suffering. First published in
the Trinity Journal of Natural and Philosophical Theology in the spring of twenty twenty three.
The evidential problem of horrendous suffering is one of the most powerful refutations of
the theistic God as can be found. If there's an omni everything God,
one who is omni benevolent or perfectly good, omniscient or all knowing and omnipotent
or all powerful, the issue of why there is horrendous suffering in the world
requires an explanation. The reason is that a perfectly good God would want to
eliminate it, an all knowing God would know how to eliminate it, and
an all powerful God would be a to eliminate it. So the extent of
horrendis suffering means that either God does not care enough to eliminate it, or
God is not smart enough to eliminate it, or God is not powerful enough
to eliminate it. The stubborn fact of horrendus suffering means something is wrong with
God's goodness, his knowledge, or his ability. Just think of this in
terms of who has the greatest moral obligation to help someone who is suffering.
It's the person who knows of the suffering, who cares the most to alleviate
it, and who has the greatest ability to alleviate it. Therefore, the
person who has the greatest obligation to alleviate horrendous suffering is a theistic omni good.
If he exists, anyone who is wholly good would be morally obligated to
prevent horrendous suffering, especially if all all it would take was a snap of
the fingers. There are two categories of horrendous suffering that must be adequately explained
by apologists. For God. One moral evils that is suffering caused by the
choices of moral agents. Examples include the Holocaust, the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, terrorist beheadings, childhood molestation, torture, slavery, gang rapes,
wars, and so on. Then there's two natural evils that is suffering
caused by natural disasters. Examples include pandemics, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes,
volcanic eruptions, droughts, earthquakes, massive wildfires, and so on, Including
the enormous suffering caused by the kill or be killed law of predation. In
the animal kingdom, there are several levels of suffering, stretching from mere hunger
pangs to the horrors of the Holocaust. But we don't need to determine the
exact demarcation point when the suffering becomes too horrific for an omni everything God,
or the greater the suffering is, then the greater the problem of evil is
for an omni good. My focus is on horrendous suffering, the kind that
turns our stomachs. It's the best kind of suffering to test the probability of
a good God. If believers cannot solve this problem except by focusing on hypothetical
possibilities rather than on probabilities, or by punting to ignorance by saying God's ways
are above ours, then that God has allowed more suffering in the world than
is reasonable for reasonable people to accept. Surely, a God who created reasonable
peace people should provide what reasonable people need if he wants us to believe.
If we think exclusively in terms of probabilities, the more horrendous suffering that exists,
the less probable an omni everything God exists. And there is too much
horrendous suffering for God to exist. In legal terms, the theistic omni good
could easily be convicted of the crime of depraved indifference. This is when a
defendant's conduct is so wanton, so deficient of concerns, so lacking in regard
for the lives of others, and so blameworthy that it warrants the same criminal
liability imposed upon the person who intentionally causes the crime. The strength of the
problem of horrendous suffering depends on one's religious views. It's much greater for evangelicals
who believe in a God who is spired the horrific tales of the Bible,
including sending people into an eternal conscious torment in hell. So apologists like William
Lane Craig have said, the problem of evil is certainly the greatest obstacle to
belief in the existence of God. When I ponder both the extent and depth
of suffering in the world, whether due to man's inhumanity to man or to
natural disasters, then I must confess that I find it hard to believe that
God exists. Apologist James Sennet echoed what Craig said. He said, by
far, the most important objection to the faith is the so called problem of
evil. I tell my philosophy of religion students that if they are Christians and
the problem of evil does not keep them up at night, then they don't
understand it. The strength of this problem is perhaps the greatest for Calvinists who
believe in theological determinism as opposed to non Calvinists who believe in free will,
but every believer faces this problem. Pantheists believe suffering is an illusion or maya,
but they cannot avoid suffering throughout their lives. For polytheists, their multiple
gods aren't powerful enough to decisively overcome suffering and are believed to cause much of
it. Process theologians like John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin believe their
God can't force free willed agents to do good. Their God can only persuade
people to do good. But given the fact of horrendous suffering, such a
God as shown to be useless in the face of natural disasters and powerless when
it comes to the choices of liars, thieves, molesters, rapists, kidnappers,
and killers who refuse to be persuaded. For protest theologians like John Roth,
God's continual inaction must mean God is directly responsible for the suffering in the
world. Their response should be to protest the lack of divine action, in
hopes that publicly shaming him will goad God into doing good. For deists,
suffering has little force, but only because they already admit there God is an
absentee slum landlord of a world that should be condemned as unsafe for habitation.
Then there are the misotheists from the Greek word messaiah to hate, who hate
God. Their view is a moral position, not a stance on the existence
of God. For them, it's immoral to praise and worship any moral monster,
including a divine one, real or conceptually held in the minds of believers,
so scorn, mockery, and rebellion against religious authorities are their appropriate responses.
By contrast, for atheists who don't believe any God exists, the fact
of horrendis suffering is not an intellectual problem at all. Suffering, even horrendous
suffering, is what we expect to find in a world that evolved by natural
selection. Let's turn now to consider four moral concerns that an omni good should
have considered when creating a world. Suppose a perfectly good deity exists who didn't
need or want anything, yet decided for some mysterious reason to create a world
to test free creatures. Okay, then such a deity should have four moral
concerns. The first moral concern for God would be that we don't abuse the
freedom given to us. The giver of a gift is blameworthy if he or
she knowingly gives gifts to people who will terribly abuse them. Any parent who
gives a razor blade to a two year old is culpable if that child hurts
himself or others with it. Good parents give their children more and more freedom
to do what they want, so long as they are responsible with their freedom.
If children abuse their freedom, parents will discipline them by taking away their
freedom to make bad choices. It's that simple. Furthermore, children shouldn't have
to suffer draconian kinds of punishments for their actions when they err When my children
misbehaved, I didn't send a proverbial hurricane their way. In fact, as
a parent, I sought to protect them as much as I could from the
severe consequences of their actions. A little pain was a good thing, so
they could learn from their mistakes. But no caring father would let his children
suffer the full brunt of their mistakes, certainly not broken bones or being beaten
within an inch of their lives. If a father sat by and did nothing
while his children suffered these and similar horrendous consequences for their misdeeds, the father
would be morally culpable for letting it happen. He would certainly want all predators,
killers, and rapists locked in jails and prisons away from his children.
Since God doesn't do this for us in our world, he's not even as
loving as a typical human parent. An omni God should have kept us from
abusing our freedom by creating us with a stronger propensity to dis like wrongdoing.
In much the same way that we have an aversion to drinking motor oil.
We could still drink it if we wanted to, but it's nauseating. Such
a deity could easily keep a person from molesting a child or raping someone if
at the very thought of it, the person began to suffer severe nausea.
We have the ability to do this with alcoholics when it comes to drinking,
so it shouldn't be a problem for a good deity to do this with respect
to the most heinous of crimes. Nothing of value to God would be lost
by him doing so. Since God supposedly can read our minds, he can
still judge our character by our intentions alone. After noting our intentions to do
harm, God could implant good thoughts into our heads to prevent us from actually
carrying out our bad intentions. An omni good has many other means at his
disposal to keep us from harming others. A heart attack could have killed Hitler
and prevented World War II. Timothy McVeigh could have had a flat tire or
engine failure while driving to Oklahoma City to blow up the Murrah Federal Building and
the people in it. The militants who flew planes into the Twin Towers on
nine to eleven could have been robbed and beaten by New York thugs before they
could do so. There's utilitarianism at its best. A poisonous snake bite could
have sent Saddam Hussein to an early grave, averting the Iraq War before it
happened. The Zyklon B pellets dropped down into the Auschwitz gas chambers could have
simply malfunction by being miraculously neutralized, just like Jesus supposedly turned water in to
one. The second moral concern for God would be that the environment he placed
us in will not cause us excessive suffering. At the very minimum, an
omni good should prevent all natural disasters if such a god exists. The two
thousand and four Indonesian tsunami that killed approximately a quarter million people should never have
taken place if God had prevented it with a miracle by stopping the underwater earthquake
before it happened, no one would have been the wiser, precisely because it
didn't happen. By doing so, God could have remained hidden for some hidden
reason. Then with a perpetual miracle, he could keep it from happening in
the future. Such a God could stop all naturally caused horrendous suffering in this
manner, and none of us would be the wiser. We would just conclude
that this is how the natural world works, with much less suffering in it.
An Omnigod should not have created predation in the animal world either. The
amount of animal suffering is atrocious, as creatures prey on one another to feed
themselves. The extent of animal suffering cries out against the existence of a good
God. This horrific suffering is perhaps the most difficult problem of all. To
say these creatures do not feel pain is to reject the overwhelming evidence of evolution
that proves we are all related as creatures. In lieu of this, an
omnig good should have created all living things as vegans, like herbivores such as
rabbits, deer, sheep, cows, and hippos, And in order to
be sure there's enough vegetation for all of us, God could have reduced our
mating cycles and or made edible vegetation like apple trees, corn stalks, blueberry
bushes, wheats, and tomato plants grow as plenteous as wild weeds do today.
An all powerful God didn't even have to create us such that we needed
to eat anything at all. Since theists believe their God can do miracles,
he could sustain us all with miraculously created nutrients inside our biological systems throughout our
lives, and we wouldn't know anything different. Such a deity could simply do
a perpetual miracle here as well. In fact, there's nothing prohibiting God from
feeding us by the process of photosynthesis, just like plant life, thereby not
requiring animals at all. Given that God didn't do this. Many animals are
farmed for human concents asumption, under horrible conditions in intensive factory farms, abused
in experimental labs, or trapped in horrible ways without any condemnations of animal abuse.
In God's alleged revelation in the Bible, the third moral concern for God
would be that our bodies provide a reasonable measure of well being. All that
seems to be necessary for God and his plan of salvation is that we have
rational powers to think and choose, the ability to express our thoughts, and
bodies that will allow us to exercise our choices. So we could have been
created much much differently. An omni good should have created all human beings with
one color of skin. There that was easy. There has been too much
institutional racism, race based slavery, and too many tribalistic wars because we don't
all have the same color of skin. Such a deity could have also made
all creatures capable of sexually self reproducing, like zebra sharks, komodo dragons,
some reptiles, and other species. If God had done this, it would
eliminate gender discrimination and gay hate crimes. Since there wouldn't be any gender or
sexual differences between us. An Omnigod should have created us with much stronger immune
systems, so there would be no pandemics that decimate whole populations, or chronic
diseases like cancer, emphysema, leukemia, or for that matter, babies born
with deformed limbs, blindness, deafness, muteness, and so on. This
is horrific suffering that God should never have created or used as any so of
punishment for our misdeeds, or allowed for any good, overarching mysterious purpose.
Such a God could have created us with self regenerating bodies. When we receive
a cut, it heals itself over time, as does a sprained ankle or
even a broken bone. But why can't an injured spinal cord heel itself?
Why can't an amputated leg grow back in a few weeks. If that's all
we experienced in this world, we wouldn't know any different. Many animals can
regrow new parts of their bodies to replace those parts that have been damaged.
Lizards can grow new tails, Sharks continually replace lost teeth, Spiders can regrow
missing legs. An octopus can regrow severed arms. Starfish can regrow new arms
and even grow an entirely new body out of a severed arm. We find
lots of examples in nature that an omnigod could have created in us but didn't.
Such a god could have created us with a much higher threshold of pain.
He could have given us fish like gills to keep us from drowning.
He could have given us wings on our backs so we could fly to safety
if we fell off a cliff, or he could have made us much smaller
in size, so if we accidentally fell off that cliff, we wouldn't get
hurt, just like ants who have a very low terminal velocity. A fourth
moral concern for God would be to prevent a wide diversity of religions in the
world. If there is an omni good, he should have made it a
priority to prevent religious diversity by clearly revealing himself in this world, such that
only people who consciously refused to believe would do so. There would be no
such thing as reasonable non belief in the one true sect specific religion, regardless
of when and where we were born or how we might be culturally indoctrinated.
Otherwise, such a God would have made his revelation available to every culture and
buttressed it with some astounding evidence based miracles. This deity would provide a naturalistic
moral code for everyone that excluded all religions that were misogynistic, racist, homophobic,
nationalistic, and otherwise barbaric. In this way, he'd prevent religiously motivated
wars, crusades, inquisitions, witch burnings, suicide bombers, and terrorists.
Given the horrendous suffering caused by religious diversity, the probability that an omni good
exists is directly proportional to the amount of religious diversity that exists, and there
is way too much of it to suppose he does to sum up so far,
Given these four moral concerns, it is crystal clear for many of us
that a god who created this world just doesn't care about us. God had
a reckless disregard for our safety by giving us the gift of freedom before we
could use it responsibly. He placed us in an environment that causes us excessive
suffering and gave us bodies that don't provide a reasonable measure of well being.
On top of all that, he failed to let us know which religion is
true. Out of a great diversity of religions. Only if theists expect very
little of their divine being can they defend what their God has done. Either
their God is not smart enough to fi figure out how to create a good
world, or God doesn't have the power to create it, or God just
doesn't care. These appear to be the only options given this world. Four
apologetic strategies. Marilyn McCord atoms admits this. She says the standard of apologetic
strategies for solving the problem of evil are powerless in the face of horrendous evils.
When it comes to animal suffering, C. S. Lewis admitted that
the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far
as we know, beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue. Therefore,
they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it. Still, there are
four apologetic strategies used in solving the problem of horrendous suffering. According to one's
strategy, God won't help us since he's more interested in building our character and
horrendous suffering bill's character. This is one of the least successful strategies for answering
the problem suffering is one thing Horrendous suffering is another we're talking about the supposed
value horrific suffering produces for the very people who suffer, not lessons for future
generations that can be learned with hindsight. It's also improbable that the virtues we
learn in this world, such as compassion for the poor, patience and times
of turmoil, forgiveness for someone who has wronged us, and the like,
will even be needed in a heavenly bliss, where there is no pain or
suffering for which to have compassion, patience, or to grant forgiveness. I
am a white male who is not but ugly, or so a few people
tell me, who grew up in a middle class family, with all the
privileges that entails. To date, I have never spent a night in a
hospital bed, nor have I gone hungry. I've had my wits about me
most of the time. Anyway, Yet life has been hard for me.
This life has tried me to the core, though I haven't experienced any horrendous
suffering in it. So this world doesn't need horrendous suffering. If my life
is any indication, all that a good God must do is eliminate the horrendous
kinds of suffering in our lives. There's plenty of suffering left in this life
to challenge us. A second strategy used by apologists is to maintain that God
can't help us when free will is involved, or he cannot help us very
much. God needs to let our free choices play themselves out. But as
it stands, theists are the first ones to say unrestricted freedom is not a
good thing. In the case of heinous crimes. We put criminals in prison.
We do not let them roam the streets. Once they are discovered,
they lose their freedom in the interests of having a safe society. Safety is
a higher value than freedom. The theistic God has a mixed up sense of
what is more valuable. For that God thinks human freedom is more valuable than
having a safe society. All of us have a very limited range of free
choices anyway, if we have any at all. The limits of our choices
are set by our genetic material and our environment. It does absolutely no good
at all to have free will and not also have the ability to exercise it.
Some people don't have the strength needed to stop an attacker, while others
don't have the rational capacity needed to spot a con artist, I could not
be a world class athlete even if I wanted to. Our free will to
do what we want is limited by our age, race, gender, mental
capacity, financial means, and geographical locality. Since we already have limited choices,
then God should further limit our choices if we seek to cause horrific harm
to others. A third strategy is to say that God cannot do away with
horrendous suffering because suffering is a necessary byproduct of causal natural laws. To have
the one is to have the other. However, the apologist believes God created
the universe from nothing along with the laws of nature, So if God can
do that, he can also create a different universe with different laws of nature
without any horrendous suffering in it. It just doesn't make any sense that God
chose to create this world with so much horrific suffering when he could have created
a better one without it. Even if God failed to create a good universe
initially, he could still do miracles in this world to correct any errors in
it. An omnipotent, miracle working God can do anything in the material universe,
or he's not a miracle working God. Even apologist Richard Swinburne agrees.
He says God is not limited by the laws of nature. He makes them,
and he can change or suspend them if he chooses. He can make
planets move in quite different ways, and chemical substances explode or not explode under
quite different conditions from those which now govern their behavior. In a two thousand
and three debate on the existence of God with Eddie Tabash, chair of the
Center for Inquiry, Swinburne said God could quote raise this stadium into the air.
However, from what I can see, all God does in today's world
is to imprint an image of Jesus on a potato chip. Since this world
is causing so much horrific suffering, the question for the theist is why the
laws of this world are fixed and necessary when God could intervene to alleviate the
most horrific kinds of suffering. If changing the world requires some miraculous adjustment,
what's the problem people should matter enough for God to do that. I wonder
if theists have really thought through the implications of a God who prefers this present
set of natural laws with its sufferings, over constant miraculous maintenance. Does their
God care? Is their God lazy? When apologists defend the miracles in the
Bible and elsewhere, they will talk about an omnipotent God who created the world
out of nothing, who sent fire down from the sky, and part of
a sea that allowed six million Hebrews to pass on dry ground, Hebrews who
lived in the desert for forty years where their sandals never wore out, and
who were fed by manna from heaven. An omnipotent God can do anything,
they'll say. It even says so in Matthew nineteen twenty six. With God,
all things are possible. Their God is a miracle working God, so
it shouldn't be difficult to believe God does miracles, they'll add. Yet,
when it comes to alleviating horrendous suffering, many apologists seem to argue so that
God can't do that. This appears to be nothing less than intellectual dishonesty.
I maintain that the burden of proof is upon apologists to show why any of
my suggested changes to the world are improbable. For an omnipotent, miracle working
God, nothing short of this will do. I'm suggesting there are several things
an omni good could do to eliminate horrendous suffering without producing a chaotic world or
inhibiting our character development that would help draw us to Him, all of which
are easy to conceive and already found in the animal kingdom. Since God,
if he exists, could have done differently but did not, he is to
blame for all horrific suffering in this world. A fourth strategy used by apologists
is to hunt to mystery by claiming we simply cannot understand God's reasons for allowing
horrendous suffering in this world. The truth is that it seems very likely we
should be able to see God's reasons for allowing it, since most theists also
claim God wants us to believe in him and will condemn us in the afterlife
if we don't. More importantly, this answer cuts both ways. We're told
we can't understand God's purposes, and this is true. We can't begin to
grasp why there is so much suffering in our world if a good, omnipotent
God exists. But if God is omniscient, as claimed, he should know
how to create a better world, especially since we do have a good idea
how he could have created it, So which is more likely that we cannot
begin to understand God God's omniscient ways, or that we can have some kind
of idea about them. If we consider the idea that we are all created
in God's image, the answer seems obvious. We should indeed have some kind
of idea about God's omniscient ways. Since this is so, and since we
have good ideas on how God might have done things differently, the most reasonable
conclusion is that an all powerful, omniscient, perfectly good God does not exist.
Conclusion. If you name any specific example of horrendous suffering in this world,
I can show you how an omni good could have eliminated it, which
would still leave plenty of suffering for an omni good to test us in this
world if that's important to a God who can predict what we will do.
Anyway, in order to evade my challenge, I have found Christian apologists to
be experts at cherry picking God's supposed divine attributes of omnipotence, omnicience, and
omni benevolence, depending on the problem to be solved. When it comes to
God's omnipotence, apologists embrace this attribute when it comes to believing he created an
unfathomable and mysterious universe that continually surprises us. But when it comes to horrendous
suffering, apologists conveniently negate it by saying God cannot create a better world than
he did. One apologist, Thomas Ord, has stated this forthrightly, saying
God cannot interfere in the world he created or with free willed choices intent on
doing harm. According to him, God simply doesn't intervene in the world.
How do apologists like Ord know this? They don't. They just affirm it
because of the need to believe. So in order to save their faith from
refutation, they must allow God's omnipotence to only go so far and no farther.
This is where God's power arbitrarily ends where the apologist needs it to end
to solve a problem for faith when it comes to God's omnitionis Apologists embrace this
attribute when it comes to God reading our minds, hearing billions of prayers at
the same time, and knowing everything that can be known, including minute details
into the distant future billions of years from now. But when it comes to
horrendous suffering, apologists negate it by claiming God didn't know how to create a
good world without animals, or without natural disasters, or one in which free
willed creatures do no harm. Many apologists, such as William Hasker and Greg
Boyd have come to embrace open theism, which denies that God can fore no
free willed human actions, so their God isn't to be blamed for what we
do. How do apologists know this? They don't. They just affirm it
because of the need to believe. So in order to save their faith from
refutation, they must allow God's omnitions to only go so far and no farther.
This is where God's knowledge arbitrarily ends where the apologist needs it to end
to solve a problem for faith when it comes to God's omni benevolence. Apologists
embrace this attribute when it comes to God's love and sending his son Jesus to
pay the ultimate price by dying a horrible death for our sins, But when
it comes to suffering, apologists like Michael Peterson and Bruce Little appear to negate
it by claiming God does not care that much about our daily lives. In
their view, God does not care enough to micro manage the world, so
they claim that God is off the hook for much of the suffering we experience
in the world. How do apologists know this? They don't. They just
affirm it because of the need to believe so in order to save their faith
from refutation, they must only allow God's omni benevolence to go so far and
no farther. This is where God's omni benevolence arbitrarily ends where the apologist needs
it to end to solve a problem for faith. If this is not the
point, then what is it. Certainly an omniscient God knows how to intervene.
Certainly an omnipotent God has the ability to do so. Shouldn't an omni
benevolent God have the motivation to do so so? The evidential problem of horrendous
suffering is one of the most powerful refutations of the theistic God as can be
found. Okay that article God in Horrendous Suffering. I have linked the text
version in the description box of this show. I hope it helps you as
you engage the culture out there. Thanks to John for letting me share it
with you, and I will see you back here next time. Follow The
Thinking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter for a complete archive of podcasts and videos.
Products like mugs and t shirts featuring the Thinking Atheist logos, to atheist pages
and resources, and details on upcoming free thought events and conventions. Log onto
our website, The Thinkingatheist dot com