Thank you , very nice article.

We need to be reminded of the above. The main point that helps is ‘Loving us into creation’ I have lost my way. I am not practising and I get caught up in the ‘negativity’ towards God and I sometimes get the feeling why should I bother deepening my faith and is it so futile a road to take. I do take time to be an apologetic of my faith but i feel very hippocritical seeing that I dont practice my faith although I feel that my being does sometimes reflect that of a believer but unlike the love of God my Love is not infinite and has limits and boundaries(it seems to me).
God Bless

How about the objection that an all-knowing God could choose not to create the people he foresees would choose against him?

Very nicely put, Mark!  Free choice makes me think of how, as kids grow up, they want more and more freedom to make their own decisions (starting with what to wear and what to eat, and as they get older, where to go and whom to date).  We probably wouldn’t be happy with simple good, because we actually do long for the more complex good.

Matt, I’m not sure I understand your question, so please clarify if I misread it.  I think you’re saying, why doesn’t God just not create the people who choose evil, is that correct?  I think most people would say they’ve done some things which they knew were wrong.  In our own ways, we all choose against Him.  The good that can come out of it, the complex goodness which Mark speaks about, is that we have the opportunity to realize we’ve done something wrong, and in the future we can choose to do the right thing.  I for one am very glad that God doesn’t just not create people who choose against Him, and I’m grateful that He has given me free will and a mind capable of choosing between right and wrong.

I think the big clue is in the phrase “unnecessary pain”.  Pain is always necessary.  It is how your body tells your brain that there is something wrong, something to pay attention to.

Suffering, likewise, is how we spur our fellow man to acts of charity, and thus is always necessary, always needed.  All suffering, therefore, can be seen as good, rather than evil.

It is for this reason that I say the problem of evil- is with the definition of evil, not with any actual problem with the definition of God.  Evil, true evil, can include forced suffering, but the keyword is forced, not suffering.  Evil can only be accomplished by the intentional act of a rational being; and thus, natural disasters are not evil, even though they may cause suffering.

Oh, and Matt, if you’re asking why doesn’t God just not create atheists, I can give you the answer in one word:  Love.

In order to accept Mr. Shea’s explanation, one must find it plausible that the omnipotent, immortal, omniscient ground of all being has human qualities like the ability to love and to experience joy. One must also accept that this infinitely “good” being willed into existence a universe with at least one planet that produced generations of non-rational but sentient beings that experienced suffering for millions of years in order to evolve rational beings with free will who could then share their creator’s more complex good.

OK, those beliefs certainly can’t be disproved, but my experience does not provide compelling evidence of their truth.

Joan: An atheist acquaintance of mine recently posed the question as to why a benevolent all-knowing God would create people whom he knew would end up in Hell.  Part of the answer was given in Mark Shea’s answer above: the question pre-supposes that non-existence is a greater good than existence in Hell. But I don’t think that answer is sufficient.  And I can tell you from my discussions with atheists that simply saying that God creates even those who do not believe in him out of love is not, by itself, sufficient either.

An excellent, profound, and comprehensive post here by Mr. Shea, IMO — but with one really major flaw: for he writes of “why God creates when He knows that a consequence of creation will be sin”. No! Given that sin is an utterly free and non-necessary option of which a creature is the absolutely first cause — *absolute prima causa*, says Aquinas — it follows that there could have been a human world entirely without sin. When it comes to utterly free option, all statistical calculations must go out the window. There is no room here for “Well, sooner or later, someone’s bound to utterly freely sin” — an absurd contradiction in terms. Because every fully deliberate sin that’s utterly freely chosen is obviously utterly non-necessary. And utterly non-foreseeable. Mr. Shea should therefore have written rather of “why God creates when He knows that a consequence of creation CAN be sin”; not “will be sin”.

The logic is so clear cut in this article - it should be published in a peer reviewed journal.

The problem, cowalker, is that you have a different definition of the word “rational” than the rest of the universe uses.

Being a parent has helped me to understand “the problem of pain” so much better.  Having a child was so difficult, but every difficulty was dwarfed, and made insignificant by the incredible blessing of his life.  I was afraid that when I became pregnant again, I wouldn’t be able to love another child as much as the first, whom I was pouring my life out for.  I was amazed however, that my love instead *multiplied* for another, instead of dividing itself.  It is true that suffering has always been a painful part of the equation, but it too was dwarfed by the monumental reality of loving.  In some cases the pain was truly like the sculptor’s chisel upon our beings—neccessary blows that we might be loosened from what keeps us from being fully human.
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As Catholics, we believe that heaven is communion with another, and Hell, is an isolation.  No suffering and no joy exists without the entire communion of man being affected. —I look back in time and remember moments when youthful caprices, temptations, or vanities had rendered me blind to Truth, and the true nature of why I exist.  At critical times, a powerful light penetrated the darkness and the isolation of my vanity—revealing to me, my extreme poverty—my indifference to so much Love.  Why did this grace come to me when I was so incapable of discerning Truth?
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Now that I am older, and have lived, loved and suffered so much more, I have realized at times that my own, unexplainable sufferings are *opportunities* to elevate the communion of man.  When united to the supreme gift of God on the cross, my own sufferings are gifts that I can freely give.  As I give them, and offer them in the spiritual realm, I am reminded of those times when I experienced grace pulling me out of my selfishness and isolation.  I feel certain, that without any *merit* of my own, the grace that came forth from another human being—perhaps even on the other side of the world, and was the gift of grace that I so sorely needed.
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As a parent, I can’t deny the reality that pain has been the instrument to help my children become better, more pure human beings.  It is difficult to accompany them during the most purgative moments, but I see how nothing else, could have weaned them away from self destructive vanities and caprices.  I pray and offer my sufferings gladly for them.
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I feel honored to play a part in the great drama of the redemption of mankind.  I understand why saintly men and women have said that if the angels could envy us, it would be because we have the gift to be able to suffer at the service of God, and for the family of man. There comes a point when this reality can be made so clearly to us, that suffering is literally transformed.

cowalker believes that when we speak of the love of God we are speaking of the same thing as the love of people.  Let us assume actual love, not lust.  [The difference is that the luster desires the other for what the other can do for him; e.g., provide an opportunity for his orgasms, provide an ornament to hang on his arm, provide an object he can enjoy, etc.  The lover otoh desires the other for what he can do for the other; e.g., provide, protect, give up his life for, etc.]  Now, if as we deduce the First ‘Mover’ is the sole source of all powers and that one cannot give what he does not have, then First Mover is “all power-full” (i.e., full of all powers).  Then there is something in First Mover that is like the power of love, either formally or eminently.  [A power exists eminently if it exists in a logically prior manner, as for example “fire” exists in the phosphorus of a match head.] 
Because of the equivalence of the transcendentals, we say that God is love.

When he says “the omnipotent, immortal, omniscient ground of all being” one senses that he imagines some sort of supreme being, i.e., an “omnipotent, immortal, omniscient being.”  A being among beings, possibly wearing Spandex™ and a cape, only tougher, older, and smarter.

First of all, I resent that you consider an “honest atheist” such an oddity that you have to emphasize it. It reflects the inherent prejudice of the Catholic religion.
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Second, if God has a plan for the universe that includes evil as a means for the “glorious Goodness,” s/he is a total Irrumator.
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How can the murder of school kids, the wiping out of both good and evil people in a hurricane or tsunami be justified as part of the “greater glory” of God? Hitler pushed the same idea for the glory of the Aryan race.
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If you prefer to believe in a God that is a cacator, then stercorem pro cerebro habes!

Matt, thank you for clarifying!  I agree that more is required to answer the question, and I don’t think we’ll ever find a perfectly complete answer in this lifetime.  It is difficult to discuss these things with atheists, mostly because I think our human understanding of love is varied and severely limited.  C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves did an excellent job clarifying the definition (of course there’s also Pope Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est), so I guess I would suggest any atheist struggling with the idea of God as Love to read a bit to clarify our definitions and then we can discuss.  The other thing I would say is, the Catholic Church has never explicitly declared with certainty that any person is in hell.  While we do believe that hell exists, and that there is the possibility of eternal damnation, there are also a multitude of opportunities for us to receive God’s love and forgiveness (St. Faustina is pretty explicit about this).  I hope that helps in future discussions with atheists on the topics!

Sandy Malia - the “honesty” of this particular atheist is revealed in the very first sentence of his e-mail:  “a question i have in regards to the existence of god or gods.”  The atheist knows he is writing to a Christian and nonetheless invokes the straw-man of polytheism before he even utters his question.  He knows no one is defending “gods” in this particular discussion so why does he insist on the plural? Because most theists in the west disagree with polytheism, that is somehow supposed to legitimize his position?  This is the kind of distracting non-sequitur that atheists surrepitiously invoke in their “quest for truth.” The atheist writer here clearly was not looking for an answer - that is revealed in the first sentence - but rather, the “problem of evil” he identifies was no doubt supposed to be a discussion-stopper in his mind; as if St. Thomas Aquinas wasn’t aware of it 750 years ago and as if no other theologan had addressed it since.

Also, how about this atheists refusal to capitalize God? He is supposedly trying to engage a Christian in an “honest” discussion yet he cannot even show a minimal level of respect for the Christian position? 

Until atheists stop using dishonest language and argument techniques, theists will continue to remark at the possiblity of an “honest atheist.”

Funny, Sandy, how you resent the “honest atheist” title, yet then proceed to confuse the evil act of an evil *man* (the murder of little school kids) to have anything to do with God at all.  Or worse yet, not see the good in hurricanes and tsunami (which we can now detect *both* to the point where human stupidity plays a role in failing to evacuate).

I don’t need to bring God into explaining these evils, why do you?  And that is the difference between an honest atheist, and a dishonest one.

Sandy - your are obviously impressed by your own ability to understand Latin. I suppose if I were as sophisticated as you, I would also consider myself the supreme intellect in the universe and would have no need for God. But vulgarities are not argument, and certainly are not rational, in any langauge.

Sandy: The difference between an honest atheist and, say, yourself is that an honest atheist asks questions to find things out whereas people like you ask questions in order to keep from finding things out because you are bound and determined to arrive at pre-determined answers to questions you are certain you already know the answers to.

Puleeez!

My guess, based on the last, is that Sandy is your typical 13-year-old intellect, convinced it knows everything.  This holds true even if the body and brain is chronologically older; many new atheists never mature past 13.

“Goodness” is not an idea.  Goodness is a person.

Mark Shea,
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Quite a profound work of writing and thought!
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I remember struggling with this same question as stated once (a little differently) by Elie Wiesel.  Somewhere in his ponderings over the Holocaust, he said something about knowing why *we* would need God, but not at all understanding why God would ever need *us*... and so why are we here?
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The older (and less invincible) I become, the more I realize quite simply that God is love.  God is love and perfect love is so abundant that it can not help but to create abundantly.  I can not think of a logical way to describe it (this is a realization that has slowly come to me through prayer and introspection…)... but, while hopelessness, despair, hatred, and the like ultimately destroy, the opposite is true: Love, Goodness, and its Source create.
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And why suffering?  I always knew it had something to do with our free will.  But, only as an older man (and father) can I now appreciate the implications of a person’s free will.  We have been created “in the image and likeness of God.”  We are like God!  That means we choose our paths in life.  Some of these paths lead to dead ends and are terribly painful.  But to take away that pain, God would have to take away the absolute fullness of our existences.  We have the freedom to choose pain.  But, amazingly, we also have a God that will walk with us into the depths of whatever darkness we have chosen, suffer with us, and die with us… all to lead us back to him!
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Great writing, Mark!

dan h:
You just described natural selection! Welcome to the secular philosophy!

Natural Selection , also known as Theistic Evolution, is a teaching of Catholicism.

Theodore M. Seeber posted on Monday, Feb 11, 2013 2:05 PM (EDT):
“I don’t need to bring God into explaining these evils [tornados, tsunami, the murderer of little school kids] why do you [Sandy]?”

That is exactly how I feel too. If you simply take out the God component, the good and bad (from the human perspective)in the world falls into place as the consequence of us having evolved in a process that is not goal-oriented. Some people have good luck, some people don’t. Some people are well-socialized, others are not. Men, microbes, and everything in between struggle to survive in the environments that shaped them,  well enough adapted to reproduce successfully but sacrificing individuals (and sometimes species) along the way. It only gets difficult to explain the randomness when you hypothesize a human-like purpose to the universe, imposed by some anthropomorphized God figure

. It makes no sense to attribute human characteristics such as purpose, will, joyfulness, love, to God. You can try to redefine them, but such an attempt just strips them of all meaning. We have no means to describe, or even think about, a being that is omniscient, immortal, omnipotent.

Ted:

No.  Natural selection is *compatible* with Catholic teaching.  The Church no more has a teaching about natural selection than she has about hydraulics, the atomic weight of carbon, or photosynthesis.  These are matters for the natural sciences to chew over.  The Church’s teaching pertains to the revelation of God in Christ, not to telling the natural sciences how to do their jobs (except on those ocassions the work of the natural sciences interacts with or attempt to usurp the work of philosophy and theology).

Just as Love revels in creation, so too does despair surround itself with destruction.
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Just as Love fills the universe, despair attempts to empty it out.
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Love gives of itself, overflowing; despair consumes, a ravenous creature - standing gauntly in only flesh and bone, it constantly devours but is never sated.
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I can see the truth of this even in the people around me.  Those who are filled with God are a pleasure to be around.  They offer themselves in the service of others.  They give abundantly in an effort to edify the dignity of their brothers and sisters.  Those who live without God seem to draw on the energy of the people around them - they create dischord, disruption, disunity, dysfuntion.
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My oh my… I’m realizing that I’m rambling here.  I think I like to hear myself talk too much.  God bless all of you!  Find the Father’s hand (reaching always for your own) and pray that I do the same.  (I’ve got some trials coming up in my life in the next couple days.)

If you simply take out the God component, the good and bad (from the human perspective)in the world falls into place as the consequence of us having evolved in a process that is not goal-oriented.

Except that’s not true and created things still move toward ends all the time.  Go, read. Particularly section 5  At some level, evolutionists know this, which is why they constantly smuggle in the concept of the telos.  Indeed, the whole notion that a species adapts *so that* it will survive totally depends on saying that evolution has a goal: survival.

Atheistic materialist Evolutionism depends on a massive act of base-stealing.  It says *given* time, space, matter and energy all held in being and obeying intelligible laws infused into them I can account for everything that happens in the field of space time.

Uh, given by whom, exactly?  Why is there anything?  Why does it have these laws intrinsic to its being?  Why is it intelligible to us?  Biology—and any other natural science—ain’t gonna answer that.  That’s not because we don’t know enough yet and science will someday answer that question.  It’s that natural science is the wrong tool for that job. What you need is metaphysics.  And the metaphysician you need is St. Thomas, who logically reasons that this points us to You Know Who.

Your attempt to say that stuff “just happens” with no telos would if true, not be the death of theism (there’s no reason in principle that a God might not create a disorderly world, I suppose).  It would be the death of science. A world in which things did not move toward an end would be a world in which an egg might hatch a rhinoceros, a black hole, or the clutch plate of a 1938 Buick.  But since created thing reliably move toward their end, they keep hatching chicks and we can study the natural world to find out why the things in it keep moving toward those ends.

Dang, Mark Shea, once again quite awesomely stated!  (Yeah, I couldn’t drag myself away from this blog… Alas!  It will be my undoing!)
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This natural progression of things toward some telos must not be ignored!  I have never been able to state it as such, but this has been my difficulty whenever I’ve read Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene (in regard to the physics of the universe).
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So many intelligent people try to explain why we’re here by talking about the physics of black holes, the Big Bang, and the like… But no matter how big the microscope, telescope, or time machine, no one has ever been able to explain to me *why* we are here!  We can explain how the Big Bang may have happened, how it may have ordered our universe, but why was there anything at all to begin with?  Why did there have to be matter or energy or anything at all?  Why couldn’t there have been absolutely nothing?
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Telos.  Telos.  hmmmm…

Mark,
I don’t think the point of your reader’s question is really about suffering or evil, but more basic: why would a God create the universe at all just to make us? I fail to see how you manage to distill this fundamental question into an “attempt to assert that Being is bad” or that “giving the world being was a bad idea”. However, you’re correct to observe that this is a non-starter and that it’s a silly argument. Problem is, it’s not an argument that any atheist would make, just words you put in his mouth. I’m not even sure what this means.
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You spend a bit of time dispelling the notion of the traditional Christian God. I suppose it will be ignored that this is exactly how the writers of the Bible and average Catholics portray Him, or that we are told we made in His image, or that we can have a personal relationship with Him and he hears our prayers. In any event, this vaporous conception of a deity is even less compelling an argument for an atheist. This notion that God is “love” or “being” and is so mysterious as to perpetually elude our powers of observation may be a decent argument, as far as it goes, but it’s certainly not an argument for the existence of the Christian God, much less a good one. So I don’t think your answer “helped” in any way other than allow you to state what you believe.
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Like most atheists, I think he is quite aware of the arguments Christians make for the truth of their God, but simply find them lacking. Is he wrong to disbelieve what is contrary to his senses, or immoral to draw a different conclusion than you? Like me, he probably has noticed that we have invented Gods and imagined miracles and answered prayers since we became a species, and we all agree that these humans were simply attributing natural phenomena to Gods. Are we wrong about this? Possibly, but we are in the good company of billions of humans, including yourself, that have examined the claims of other religions and found them utterly lacking.
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Atheism is much more than the “unthinking skepticism” you like to dismiss it as. To accept that there are some things that can’t be known or accept that some things are impossible to know is a valid and healthy philosophy. We have a choice to evaluate the possibilities. The choice offered by religion is not to accept, and to say, “No, actually, we know. We know there was a creation moment. We know why it was, we know what was intended by it.”
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On the bright side, at least we can look forward to the brief period of between Ratzinger’s abdication and the appearance of white smoke when no one on earth can claim to be infallible.

When you use free will to solve the problem of evil, you are in fact claiming that God chooses not to prevent the rape of a child because he wants to preserve the rapist’s (and everyone else’s) free will more than he wants to end the suffering of the child. In order to do this, you need to prove that god values free will in contexts other than the problem of evil. Without that, free will becomes a stock excuse.

There is little proof that god values free will; see infant mortality and natural miscarriage rates. Before modern medicine, most humans died in infancy. Back then and today, vast majority of conceptions were/are miscarried, with the result that most humans die before getting a chance to exercise their free will. Exercising free will in this world does not seem to be a requirement for being human, or entering heaven. btw, heaven also poses problems for those who believe god values our free will. Will we have it there? If we do, will we be able to sin? Will free will change in some way, so that we will still have it, but won’t want to sin? What changes? It can’t be the visible presence of god, as Adam sinned, yet he was with god…etc. 

So we end up with an omnipotent and omniscient god who knows that we will suffer, who has the power to prevent the suffering, yet chooses to not to. This wouldn’t be a problem, if he were not also all loving. All three in one god, however, creates the problem of evil.

Altho it’s true that metaphysics CAN answer the “why” questions Mr. Shea lists in this thread, it’s not true that metaphysics is NEEDED for this. Common sense suffices, “the natural and primitive judgment of human reason, infallible, but imperfect in its mode” (Jacques Maritain, *An Introduction to Philosophy*, p. 102). That the beings we observe have a personal creator, and that every agent acts for a goal, are evident to an adult human reason, I submit; altho common sense, being “imperfect in its mode”, is admittedly unable to defend this evidence against objections, but must here defer to metaphysics.

There is only one way that God avoids direct observation- when the observer PURPOSEFULLY and PREJUDICUALLY rejects all evidence connected with God, merely because such evidence points to God.

The rest is a matter of will.  If you actually bother to reject prejudice, evidence of God exists in every scientific law.  But if you are prejudiced and biased, no amount of evidence will cut through human arrogance.

“But since created thing reliably move toward their end, they keep hatching chicks and we can study the natural world to find out why the things in it keep moving toward those ends.”

This sounds to me like a confusion of purpose with the consequences of the laws of our physical universe. Yes, those laws are consistent and a chicken egg containing a chicken embryo that is encoded with chicken DNA will hatch a chick that will grow into a hen or rooster. Scientific study relies on the consistency of physical laws. Organisms that were not consistently shaped by these laws would not survive in this universe. It is not necessary to hypothesize a “purpose” as humans understand purpose to explain why a chicken embryo always develops into a chicken.

“Indeed, the whole notion that a species adapts *so that* it will survive totally depends on saying that evolution has a goal: survival.”

I agree that sometimes descriptions of the evolutionary process are incorrectly phrased in this way. It would be more accurate to say that accidental mutations within a species result in individual members that have a survival advantage. Therefore the offspring of these members survive to reproduce disproportionately. Over time this process can result in big changes in the species. But a long course of evolutionary development often comes to a dead end, as we see with the dinosaurs. The “laws” of their universe changed and there were no mutations (or at least none happened rapidly enough) to enable some members of the species to survive in the changed environment. Therefore they died out.

Of course I get it that identifying the laws of our universe well enough to make predictions and to hypothesize about past events does not provide an answer to the question of why the universe exists. Is there some purpose, as we humans understand purpose? I have no idea how one would go about answering this question, or what form the answer would take. The attribution of human purpose, love, compassion, justice, will, etc. to the metaphysical concept of a “ground of all being” seems completely beside the point to me. It is a word game unless you inject emotion, and when you inject emotion you have an anthropomorphic creature that is just a large, powerful human.

“There is only one way that God avoids direct observation- when the observer PURPOSEFULLY and PREJUDICUALLY rejects all evidence connected with God,”

And an observable example from the material universe we exist in would be what exactly?

Subsistence, Ted Seeber, the post deals with the problem of evil as it pertains to the existence of a specific type of god (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent), not with the existence of god or gods. There is plenty of evidence for suffering, and plenty of arguments, both logical and evidential, that such suffering is incompatible with the nature of this deity. The most common argument in favor of this god is the free will argument. Frankly, that argument is weak, especially as the natural world does not prove that god values free will as much as we would like him to. Statistically, the vast majority of humans (something like 75-80%) die without being given a chance to exercise it. Catholic doctrine believes that these humans will enter heaven. Once there, will they be given a chance to exercise free will the same way if they had survived long enough to exercise it on earth? If so, how will heaven remain heavenly? Adam walked with god in paradise, yet sinned. Will they be given a different type of free will? If god allows the vast majority of human beings to die without exercising this precious commodity, and if free will is either gone or changed in our supposedly perfect and eternal home, then you can not use god’s respect for it to explain why he chooses to allow all manner of horror to befall his children in the only earth they have sensory access to.

dch:  The existence of the universe at all is a good one.  Even if you expand it to the many worlds theory, then that just pushes the meta one step back and creates an even more wonderful structure for God to have created.

It is only your own prejudice that prevents you from seeing God in every physical law from gravity to unified field theory.

It always astounds me that new atheists can see that the universe has an objective realty, but never stop to consider that morality itself is objective, as is love.

@Stella- you exercise free will with every breath.  And suffering, to borrow from a different religion for a second that I also respect, is just a matter of perspective.  If you stop *expecting*, you will stop suffering.

Stella - most if not all of these issues are addressed at
www.peterkreeft.com/featured-writing.htm
Obviously no one can answer all of these questions completely but Dr. Kreeft makes a compelling argument that these objections do not deal the death blow to God that you seem to imply.

@cowalker- randomness doesn’t exist- it is a figment of your inability to measure.

A rational God is necessary for a consistent universe, one governed by laws.  A random universe would not have physical laws, and would not be any more consistent than the universal model of the Islamics, where Allah himself is random.

Zeke,
IF you have a son or a daughter, do you ever look at him or her, and marvel about how you were fine before he arrived in your life—but how that he is here—it is earth shattering-ly beautiful to love this person that you share your life with?  That you would enter a snake pit to save him?
THAT Zeke, is the language of God.

“It always astounds me that new atheists can see that the universe has an objective realty, but never stop to consider that morality itself is objective, as is love.”

Actually it is quite easy, just look at the vastness of the universe in time and space dimensions, and then look at various myths and superstitions of human religions across cultures.  They don’t match up at all. The observable universe does not support the biblical explanations of the universe.

I simply accept that we have not figured out all of nature yet and will not in my lifetime, or perhaps ever.  It might be beyond our means to fully understand.  The bible has added zero new information in 2,000 years. 

(correction)—but now that he is here—
@Zeke
I don’t think it should bother us that humans have strained to know what and whom God is, and have needed to do him homage in a million different ways.  I received an email from my third grade son’s teacher about a month ago, because my son burst out laughing at the description they were reading out loud about a Native American religious ceremony.  “That’s just stupid.”  He said when she questioned him.  when he came home, I explained to him that what the Native American Indians were doing, was loving and giving homage to their creator in the best way that they could.  I told him that that this is a beautiful thing, oriented toward our maker.  “Look around you at our beautiful planet, with all of it’s incredible forms of life; you know what is sad and laughable?  That there are modern people who think it came from *nothing* (how scientific is that???), and whom place *themselves* at the center of all creation, refusing to feel gratitude to God for it.”
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He got it.  I emailed his teacher back and told her that his former attitude had been fixed.

“Actually it is quite easy, just look at the vastness of the universe in time and space dimensions, and then look at various myths and superstitions of human religions across cultures.”

The variety is rather superficial, for the most part.  There’s a difference in language, but the majority of myths point to central truths, that are objective and *constant*.  So once again, this isn’t real, it’s just prejudice.

“The observable universe does not support the biblical explanations of the universe.”

Yes it does, but you have to account for language and human frailty first.  But it just occurred to me that you are what I call a Biblical Atheist-  You start with the assumption that everything we know about God is in the Bible.  Which is a false assumption.  Not even everything we know about the historical figures referenced in the Bible, made it into the Bible.  The Bible is a sufficient work for teaching salvation, but it is an incomplete work when it comes to describing either morality or the universe.

@Theodore Seeber, by free will, I mean the ability to make a moral choice. This is the only explanation that makes sense when free will is used to explain God’s decision to allow rapes, genocides, etc., to go forward. A blastocyst does not have this ability, nor does a baby, yet these make up the VAST majority of humans who have ever lived or died. Suffering is a reality for me, as it is for most humans. I would not want to tell a parent whose child has been raped that having the expectation that the child should not have been raped is morally faulty, nor would I want to tell him that the child’s suffering was a “matter of perspective.” This is a melodramatic example, but our world is/has been full of melodramatic suffering.

Sure, I marvel at my kids, and would do anything to keep them safe. How does this suggest the language of God? Chimps would enter a snake pit to save their offspring as well. Does that mean they have a soul? Crediting God for something we don’t understand is to give up on the search for an answer.
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What if your son said the same about Muslims martyring themselves to bring glory to Allah? Or reading the OT tracts where God commands death to homosexuals, heretics, children who talk back their parents, or women found not to be virgins on their wedding night? I think “that’s just stupid” sums it up pretty well.
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It should bother you that mankind has invented gods and religion to explain things like love or creation. Science admits it doesn’t know the answers, but keeps searching. Religion is merely failed science, because it stopped searching long ago. It says essentially, “I don’t know either, but I still believe”.

Melodramatic suffering isn’t something that is objective.  And thus has no place in an objective morality.  Blaming God for a rape instead of the rapist for the rape is irrational.  Blaming the *child* of rape for the rape is equally irrational, yet many pro-choicers seem to think it is a crime worthy of the death penalty.  What “free will moral choice” did the child conceived in rape make that warrants such a punishment?

I could easily end all melodramatic suffering on the planet earth by the correct placement of 4,000 nuclear weapons.  Are you arguing that suffering is so bad that we should?

On this matter of the Deity in face of suffering, Raïssa Maritain wrote in her essay “The True Face of God, or Love and the Law” (quoted by her husband, the essayist Jacques Maritain, in his book *Peasant of the Garonne*): “If [God] could transform [a suffering human] nature into His own by abolishing the law of suffering and death, He would abolish it — because He takes no pleasure in the spectacle of pain and death. But He cannot abolish any law inscribed in being.” (The French: “Mais il ne peut abolir aucune loi inscrite dans l’être.”) For in the view of most monotheists, divine omnipotence means that the Deity can do anything doable, anything not intrinsically impossible in itself. Accordingly, since a Euclidean square circle (for instance) is reckoned impossible in itself (because absurdly self-contradictory), it is reckoned utterly undoable or unmakeable. So Raïssa Maritain says (in the same page), “God Himself cannot abolish [the absolutely necessary link to suffering and death, of the transformation she describes], just as He cannot produce the absurd.” (“Dieu lui-même ne peut l’abolir, comme il ne peut produire l’absurde.”)

@Theodore Seeber, this is either deflection or a very strange strawman. Suicide or abortion have nothing to do with using free will to solve the problem of evil. My point is if you are going to state that god respects human free will so much that he would allow a child to be raped in order to preserve it, then you had better be able to prove that he respects free will independently of that suffering. That god allows the vast majority of human beings to die then enter heaven without exercising free will implies that he does not respect it as much as we would like him to.

btw I’m not talking about aborted fetuses. I’m talking about natural miscarriage. Look up the numbers.

I don’t see the problem with suffering at all, I’m sorry.  Suffering to me is a positive; there is no gain without pain.  No need to convert to good without evil.  It may be hard for YOU to see the good in a raped child, but that doesn’t mean the good does not exist, it just means that YOU personally can’t see it.

Perspective.  Use it or lose it.  Just don’t laugh on the way to your execution, it won’t be understood.

Also, I don’t have a problem with miscarriage- because I trust God.  It is those who fail to trust, who don’t have the perspective of trust, who have a problem with suffering and evil.

The only time I’ve come close in my life is when I thought we had lost the culture war; then I realized that the so-called winning side doesn’t have any survival value.

Zeke, I think you understand what I am saying, and *no* I’m not sure about the fate of the noble animals we observe, and their fate within the vast providence of God.  I don’t think you would argue that your love for your son is far more developed than a chimp’s.
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Clearly some religious acts performed by some are not of God. In fact some are obviously quite the opposite: they reflect a subservience to pure evil.
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To seek to follow the law of goodness that is etched upon our souls is what is necessary.  St. Paul refers to the noble savage who is journeying toward God.  St. Paul also speaks of those who have an exquisite understanding of theology, but are clanging gongs because they don’t love.

@Stella, your outrage over sin and death darken your ability to understand that the cure that is God, is a universe, compared to the grain of sand, which is the sin or the disease.

@anon, Suffering is not as a “grain of sand” in the universe. God acknowledges this by promising a heaven after death to the worthy, but offers zero evidence for the existence of this place, and zero evidence for an afterlife. In the past (maybe now, too?) he used to offer a correctional facility (Purgatory) where the dead would be prepared to enter heaven, not to mention a hell where the very evil dead would be punished for all eternity. It’s fascinating that god, whose lack of noticeable activity here forces his adherents to jump through hoops in order to ensure that, yes, he does exist and loves us very much, would act so directly on behalf of the dead in a realm that can not be witnessed by the living. It’s enough to make a cynic wonder if we’ve made it all up. Hence the problem of evil.

The skeptics and dissenters on this thread do have right one important principle: “Don’t assert a ‘greater’ cause when a ‘lesser’ cause sufficiently accounts for the observable phenomena.” For ALL the observable phenomena. Now a mere moment’s reflection is enough to show that “bigness” and “smallness” are really utterly, radically relative and comparative: something is thought of as “large” or “small” simply because it’s bigger or smaller than something else. (When we speak of “large” or “small” without explicit comparison, we just mean something is bigger or smaller than what we reckon usual.) Clearly, then, there’s absolutely no reason at all why an entire solar system, even an entire galaxy, couldn’t be the size of your keyboard, say. (Supposing, at any rate, that it were somehow insulated from any interference from our galaxy’s gravitational/magnetic “fields”, or the like.) But what we experience, especially since the advances of modern astronomy, is that our whole observable universe seems to be on one SAME scale. Is randomness sufficient to account for this observable phenomenon of uniformity of size-scale?

anon:
wonderfully written thoughts!
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Stella-
I couldn’t help but comment on your notion of heaven and hell.  I don’t know what comes after death, but from what I’ve experienced in my life, Heaven and hell are not so far off.  My own self-will and stubborn determination brought me a little piece of hell and God patiently waited for me to ask him for help.
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God is love.  And as such, he wants what’s best for us - not just what’s *good* for us, but what is *best* for us.
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Children dying young, entire families starving, entire populations facing extermination - these things are terrible.  But I can tell you that there “more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in your philosophy”!  There are things that are worse than death - even worse than the death of a child.  And so God wants us to live, to travel this tough road and to decide - *freely* - to follow him.

Another thought on heaven and hell and the power of our free will:
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There is an ancient Chinese parable about an old man who knew he would die soon. He wanted to know what Heaven and hell were like.
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He visited a wise man in his village to ask “Can you tell me what Heaven and hell are like?”
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The wise man led him down a strange path, deep into the countryside. Finally they came upon a large house with many rooms and went inside.
Inside they found lots of people and many enormous tables with an incredible array of food.
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Then the old man noticed a strange thing, the people, all thin and hungry were holding chopsticks 12 feet long. They tried to feed themselves, but of course could not get the food to their mouths with such long chopsticks.
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The old man then said to the wise man “Now I know what hell looks like,
will you please show me what Heaven looks like?”
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The wise man led him down the same path a little further until they came upon another large house similar to the first. They went inside and saw many people well fed and happy, they too had chopsticks 12 feet long.
This puzzled the old man and he asked, “I see all of these people have 12 feet chopsticks too, yet they are well fed and happy, please explain this to me.
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The wise man replied, “in Heaven we feed each other”

dan h. That brought tears to my eyes.  I read it to my husband and third grade son, Lucas.  My little man was delighted and “got it” completely.  My husband asked me to thank you.

Zeke wrote that “Religion is merely failed science, because it stopped searching long ago.”  This comments reveals an ignorance of 2000 years of Catholic saints and theologans from Augustine and Aquinas to Fr. George Lemaitre, who first proposed the Big Bang Theory in the 1920’s, to Fr. Bernard Lonergan and Fr. Robert Spitzer of today, and many more. Our religion has never stopped searching. 

Stella wrote:  “It’s enough to make a cynic wonder if we’ve made it all up.”
Stella, your overall tone is enough to make me wonder if, before you ever even considered the problem, you had already decided it was all made up.

Steve,
I respectfully disagree that am I ignorant of the last 2000 years of Catholic theologians. Much credit is due to those Catholics like Lemaitre who advanced scientific knowledge and cosmology. However, evidence that the universe began as a singularity more than 13 billion years ago in no way supports the notion of a God, much less the Christian God. The number of Gods found in the trash can of history, and the preponderance of Gods to this very day should be taken as confirmation that they are man-made. Gods and religion were man’s primitive answer to the questions of how this all came to be. The Bible and other magic books were once read as textbooks on biology and cosmology, but authority in these areas long ago have been trusted to the care of science.
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In fact, it is much worse than that. Scientific inquiry cherishes skepticism, proof, and welcomes efforts to overturn existing theories. There is no “searching” in religion, except for evidence to support God, which is taken as a given. This is the polar opposite of science. The brilliance of those like Lemaitre has no bearing on the truth of his religion, any more than the wonderful contributions of Muslim scientists lends any credence to the claim that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged steed.
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You seem to suggest that Augustine and Aquinas contributed to our scientific knowledge by poring over the Bible. The reasons that Augustine endorsed torture and Aquinas felt heretics should be killed outright is that the Bible is so befuddled and contradictory that educated Catholics were able to happily burn heathens alive for 5 long centuries. When you begin with the premise that your holy book is the written word of God, outcomes like this are not surprising. You of course have drawn different conclusions from the Bible, but isn’t it amazing that you are able to discern the truth of the Bible where the greatest Catholic theologians have failed?

@Mike, that my conclusion is different from yours does not mean that I haven’t considered the problem.

@Zeke, I agree that scientific inquiry and theology are different, for the reasons you mention. I also agree that Christianity/Islam’s omni-omni-omni god is ridiculous. However, humans are prone to asking teleological questions, prone to believe in what they can not see, and prone to tie that urge to their art. Science gives us antibiotics; religion gives us a Mass in B minor. They are both impressive. You can explain this through evolutionary psychology, but I’m afraid evolutionary psychology is like free will, trotted out to explain anything that is troubling. So religion exists, because it helps us survive. Does it, though? It has caused the deaths of millions through wars, forced conversions, etc. It is not the only tool an authority could use to assert authority, and the deified authority of the Egyptians and the Romans used practical tools to keep people under control. Greek, Assyrian, Hebrew, and Babylonian gods were unpredictable and flawed, and offered dismal or no afterlives for their followers. Dawkins’ statement that teleological questions are “childish” is an inadequate dismissal.

Zeke,
Your initial comment suggested a level of inadvertent ignorance.  Your more recent post betrays your wilful ignorance.

You wrote:  “evidence that the universe began as a singularity more than 13 billion years ago in no way supports the notion of a God, much less the Christian God.”

This ignores the fact, from the Enlightenment on (for about 300 years), atheists argued that the Biblical description of create was nonsensical specially because the universe was eternal and had a beginning.  Big Bang cosmology was a game changer for theists in that regard, so much so that atheists like Fred Hoyle resisted the concept for decades because of the theistic implications.  The term Big Bang itself was coined by Hoyle and was supposed to be a criticism, until everyone eventually accepted it. See
http://magisgodwiki.org/index.php?title=Why_Believe_in_God?#Unit_D:_Is_there_Evidence_of_God_from_Science.3F

You wrote:  “The number of Gods found in the trash can of history, and the preponderance of Gods to this very day should be taken as confirmation that they are man-made.”

No doubt you will point out that I’m atheistic to Zeus and Thor so we actually have a lot in common.  First of all, there is not really a “preponderance” of Gods today.  Two billion Christians and over 2 billion Muslims, along with Jews, actually pray to the same God.  Perhaps you are here to attack Hinduism but that would be a strange objective on a Catholic website.  No one here is arguing for Hinduism, nor are they offering Zeus apologetics.  The New Atheists’ surrepitious invocation of “gods” when arguing with Christians is a classic red herring/straw man. Moreover, one of the chief reasons for the “number of Gods found in the trash can of history” is that many pagan Gods were abandoned due to the growth of Christianity. 

You wrote: “Scientific inquiry cherishes skepticism, proof, and welcomes efforts to overturn existing theories. There is no ‘searching’ in religion, except for evidence to support God….”

You have simply chosen to ignore the work of the people I have mentioned. Your initial statement was that religion begins and ends with the Bible so there is nothing to think about.  Why then, would Aquinas have bothered to write literally thousands of pages about every sort of philosophy around, including atheism which is direclty addressed in Summa Theologica. Was the just “poring over the Bible.” Was the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin just “poring over the Bible” when he wrote The Phenomenon of Man? Why would the Vatican even have an observatory?

You wrote:  “You seem to suggest that Augustine and Aquinas contributed to our scientific knowledge….”

The science that you so worship grew as a direct and proximate result of Christianity. See:
http://www.pearceyreport.com/archives/2005/09/post_4.php
Also, you seem to suggest that only scientific knowledge is relevant. Which one of Aguinas’ Five Ways to you find insufficent philosophical proof for the existence of God? 

Finally, you allude to the crimes committed in the name of religion, implying that it discredits the writings of Aquinas and others.  Violence committed in the name of God is troubling, as was the murder of 100 million by militantly atheistic governments in the 20th Century (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).  Much has been written about it and its beyond the scope of the comment box.  You can find plenty to help you understand if you chose to.  But science too can be manipulated for terrible things.  The same fission that can power a city can also power atomic bombs.  Our understanding of microbes can be used to make antibiotics or to weaponize anthrax. The same rockets that put men on the moon can deliever either of the above.  Are those valid reasons to deny or abandon science?

Posted by Stella on Thursday, Feb 14, 2013 12:42 PM (EST):
“@Mike, that my conclusion is different from yours does not mean that I haven’t considered the problem.”

No, but you have given us several other clues that reveal your bias. You started from the assumption that the problem of evil is insurmountable because you’re certain God cannot exist, not the other way around.

Well, the view from the commenter “cowalker” of the Deity sure contrasts with Jesus’s depicted view. Admittedly Jesus’s looking up toward the sky when he addressed his heavenly Father, shows he agreed that the Deity was transcendent, was not a part of the world. But Jesus apparently figured the Deity’s numbering every single hair on our heads (Mt. 10:30 and Lk 12:7) did not at all interfere with that transcendence. Nor did that transcendence involve indifference to our suffering. When Jesus—the visible image for us of the transcendent God—saw a poverty-stricken widow grieving her only son’s recent death, he “esplankhnisthê” (Lk 7:13)—that is, he was disturbed in his viscera—at her pain. (And he reportedly did something to alleviate that pain, by raising the dead young son to life and health.)

@mike, ad hominem is a logical fallacy. This has nothing to do with my personal history, but with the problem of suffering, and whether or not free will solves it in favor of an omni-omni-omni god.

@subsistent, Same is true for the Old Testament. Job suffered, only to have god take away his free will by speaking with him, then gifting him on earth with everything he allowed Satan to take from him.

Identification of prejudicial bias is not valid for ad hominem fallacy.

In my experience with posters like Stella, it is rationalization of mortal sin that causes such bias, and since every human being is guilty of having mortal sin, this cannot be taken as an insult.

Never until now have I heard any Catholic say that “every human being is guilty of having mortal sin”, even if Jesus and His mother be excepted. Let every reader understand that Mr. Seeber’s statement here is far from being the teaching of the Church, which holds rather that, as Vatican II’s constitution *Gaudium et Spes* puts it (in Section 28), “[God] forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.”

Ted:

Every human being is not guilty of mortal sin.  Every human being is afflicted with original sin (until baptism) and even after baptism struggles with concupisence and can lapse into mortal sin.  But every human being is not in mortal sin.

Perhaps I miswrote.

But when I read the FULL section 28 of Gaudium et Spes:

“28. Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.

This love and good will, to be sure, must in no way render us indifferent to truth and goodness. Indeed love itself impels the disciples of Christ to speak the saving truth to all men. But it is necessary to distinguish between error, which always merits repudiation, and the person in error, who never loses the dignity of being a person even when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions.(10) God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts, for that reason He forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.(11)

The teaching of Christ even requires that we forgive injuries,(12) and extends the law of love to include every enemy, according to the command of the New Law: “You have heard that it was said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you” (Matt. 5:43-44).”

I don’t see an intent to deny the necessity of the sacraments in that paragraph.  If a person is not first guilty, then how are we to extend the forgiveness and grace of Christ to that person?  If we do NOT, through Original sin, fall into Mortal Sin when not offered the sacraments, then of what use is the Church?  Why did Christ have to die, if you insist that mortal sin does not exist?

I agree I miswrote.  But if we don’t lapse into mortal sin through Original Sin, then there’s no need for the Church and there is no need for Christ’s sacrifice.

I know for a fact I lapse into mortal sin from time to time.  Why is it so hard to understand that others might?  Why are the sacraments necessary, if it is possible to be saved on good intentions alone?

And better yet, *being my original point before this sidetrack*- why is being a sinner an insult if nearly everybody is a sinner?

Forget theology and logic for a moment. If you don’t believe in God and can’t see how others do, why not just say, ” Ok. God, if you are there, show me.” What’s to hurt?
if there is no god, there is no risk.
If God does exist, well….get ready for the ride of your life.

@Ted Seeber, An argument is an argument, whatever the prejudices of the person making it. If prejudice disqualifies one side, then it also serves to disqualify the other side. If an atheist’s statement is disqualified because of prejudice, so is the theist’s, for the same reason.

The problem of evil has plagued the omni-omni-omni god for centuries; Aquinas needed to respond to it nearly 800 years ago, and his solution failed to end the debate. “Mortal sin” itself raises plenty of problems of its own. For instance, can it affect the morula, which consists of less than 20 cells? If you are Catholic, you must believe that these beings are fully human, and you need to deal with the fact that they make up the vast majority of the human dead. If such beings go directly to heaven, baptism or not, conscious experience of free will or not, and if, again, such beings make up the vast majority of the human dead, then what happens to the concept of mortal sin and the argument from free will?

I never said that bias invalidated the argument.  I said that it is ridiculous to call identification of bias a logical fallacy.  Reductionism is absurd, you cannot find truth by eliminating data points.

Miscarriages are not evil.  God has power over life and death, and mankind should not endeavor to ursurp that power.

Catholicism believes in a God that is omniscient and omnipresent, but one that chooses when to be omnipotent.  It is the height of arrogance to assume that we know enough to judge good and evil in natural events. God’s answer to Job is the definitve answer to the problem of evil.

@Ted, You can’t use the fact that x has had six divorces or is dedicated to celibacy in order to invalidate his argument on marriage/divorce. You must deal with his argument, not with his personal life or beliefs. If a theist states that a person’s supposed atheism is a reason to disqualify his argument on the existence of god, then the atheist can do the same to the theist. In any case, doing so is ad hominem, a logical fallacy. You are attacking the person, not his argument, and you must confront the argument, not the person, in a debate. 

I never said that miscarriages were evil. Miscarriage has nothing to do with abortion, and your reason for bringing up abortion twice now is a mystery to me. My argument is that miscarriage is natural and common—it happens to over 70% of conceived human beings. Often, the mother has no clue that she has miscarried; she certainly has not deliberately brought it about. This is simply the way conception works.

I used the natural miscarriage rate as one argument against free will. If god allows the majority of human beings to die without having a chance at exercising their free will, then the free will argument, which posits a god who values human free will so passionately that he would allow a genocide to go forth in order to protect it, is dubious.

btw, this argument is applicable even if you believe that life does not begin at conception. Before modern medicine, a majority of human beings did not live until puberty or even until the “age of reason,” however you interpret that. The majority died shortly after birth.

I suggest you look up natural miscarriage rates and pre-mid-19th century infant mortality rates.

@Ted, btw, I don’t need to prove that a majority of conceived humans die before exercising their free will in order to undo the free will argument (though I can prove that very easily). A single human being who dies before being able to exercise free will is all I need.