The big argument that I hear from atheists is “If god exists, why does He let bad things happen to good people? What kind of a god would do that? Therefore, god must not exist.”
However, a question: Who said God has to be good? Why could there not be some divine being that revels in the fact that he/she/it causes pain and suffering to millions of people? I mean, it would suck, but why could that not be true?
One quick point: This comes nowhere close to what I believe. I’m only curious.
(…Hmm. The way this is written, I seem fairly ignorant, and I probably am. Either way, I’m interested.)
Well, that’s really not the way that the question is normally posed. It usually goes more like “If God is all powerful and all-loving, why does He let bad things happen to good people?” The argument is that he can’t be both. Perhaps bad things happen to good people because he is not all powerful, or maybe he just doesn’t care. Either way it doesn’t address the existence of God but rather what he might be like.
—Either way it doesn’t address the existence of God but rather what he might be like.—
No. The argument is seeking to deductively rule out the existence of a particular God: the one with the characteristics specified. If the particular God being asserted does not have the characteristics specified, then the deductive disproof is irrelevant. In a way, it’s more of an attempt at a disproof of linking the characteristics in a single being than it is a disproof of God.
The normal response to it is “free will.” Then there is a sucking silence as philosophical explanation of what the characteristic of “free will” is, is demanded, and none is given (though several attempts are made to pass off non-coercion as the sort of “free will” asserted). Then, a lapse into silence, nothing resolved.
I suggest we simplify the standard debate. It should continue:
“well, that’s not right because of reason XYZ.”
“What’s reason XYZ?”
“It’s defined as being whatever reason invalidates that argument.”
“Well, how does it work?”
“It works great.”
“…”
There is also the question of the natural world, which is outside the scope of the free-will discussion. The question here would be: why design a world such that it so arbitrarily hurts so many people for seemingly no reason at all? What can justify, for instance, creating a planet with the natural conditions such that an entire town can be wiped out by horrible searing volcanic ash?
Often, when there’s a natural disaster, one hears stories like this: big tornado sweeps through town, and demolishes the church. None of the parishioners is seriously injured.
Those who believe in a loving god maintain that “the good Lord was watching over us;” they ascribe the tornado itself to “nature,” or to simple bad luck. An equally valid interpretation might be that god is one mean S.O.B., who threw a tornado at the town; the survival of the parishioners is just good luck. (Those who fervently believe in both the Old and New Testaments face a dilemma, since the OT god has quite a viscious streak.)
The atheist says that neither explanation really makes any sense. The tornado was produced by physics, and the physics involved in the destruction of the church made it possible for the people inside to survive the hit. No god required.
—Of course if he were evil, it might not be above him to lie about it.—
Always a problem with an unknowable, much much superior being. It may not be able to be trusted absolutely: on what basis could it establish such a trust to beings that it could fool with hardly a thought? Worse, if there are any interceding beings incomprehensibly more powerful than us, but still not as powerful as it, they can easily masquerade as it for our benefit, and we likely cannot be the wiser.
If you love someone, do you always always ALWAYS do whatever you can to prevent them from feeling pain?
I am quite confident that my dad loves my brother, but he (my brother) is constantly doing stupid things which land him in jail. My dad now says that since he is over 18, he has to let him make his own decisions and live with the consequences.
God is often referred to as God the Father. Coincidence?
But that is an example of bad things happening to bad people (I’m over simplifying of course.) What if your brother was an upstanding citizen but the cops would throw him in jail just for the hell of it? Would your father seem so honorable then if he just stood by and did nothing?
The OP is about about bad things happening to good people.
Obviously my brother wouldn’t keep going to jail if he didn’t keep doing stupid things. My point was more to how my father reacts to it. I think most of the time God allows us to deal with the consequences of our actions so that we can eventually become better people.
Hey, when he saw that the creatures he’d created weren’t working out the way he wanted, did he fix things up? No, he just drowned ‘em all! And, for all you “pro-lifers” out there, how do you feel about a god who’d kill off all the first born children of an entire nation? When he could have just freed Moses’ people on his own initiative? (Is this god of yours omnipotent, or not? Make up your mind.)
**Lord Ashtar ** - The whole point of the OP is that bad things happen to good people. Good people get cancer, die in plane crashes, suffer horrible injuries for reasons totally unrelated to what kind of lives they live. You keep wanting to say that they are somehow to blame for their ill fate, but that’s just not always the case.
A friend of mine from high school died in his thirties from brain cancer. He was as good and decent a person as there ever was. No one could tell him how or why he got the cancer, so even if it was caused by some act of free will at some point in his life there was no lesson to be learned and no moral to be had. His cancer was as far as anyone can tell simply not the “consequences of (his) actions.”
Planes crash all the time killing saints and sinners alike. Infants die before they can even exercise any free will. These are the issuse the OP is addressing, it’s not about bad people getting their just desserts.
What about the old Daoist saying that good cannot exist without evil? How much art, music, and literature is inspired by horrible circumstances and extreme depression? I personally think a world full of stupidly happy people would be kind of nightmarish.
