[Here is a brief summary of B.C. Johnson’s, “Why Doesn’t God Intervene to Prevent Evil?” It offers a devastating critique of classic theism.]
Are there any good excuses for someone (or a god) not saving a baby from a burning house if they had the power to do so? It will not do to say the baby will go to heaven since one suffers by burning to death. The key is suffering. If the suffering was not necessary, then it’s wrong to allow it; if the suffering is necessary, the baby’s going to heaven doesn’t explain why it’s necessary.
It doesn’t make sense to say that a baby’s painful death will be good in the long run, and that’s why the gods allow it. For that is to say that whatever happens, in the long run, is good; since if something happened it was allowed by the gods, and it must, therefore, be good in the long run. We could test this idea by burning down buildings to kill innocent people. If we are successful, then we know that this was part of some god’s plan. But this is absurd. Moreover, this doesn’t show why the gods allow babies to burn to death, it merely says there is some reason for this suffering, a belief we have since we assume the gods are good. But this argument is circular; it merely assumes what it is trying to prove. (That the gods are good.) “It is not unlike a lawyer defending his client by claiming that the client is innocent and therefore the evidence against him must be misleading—that proof vindicating the defendant will be found in the long run.”
In conclusion, we simply cannot excuse a bystander who could save the child but who doesn’t.
We might say that we ought “to face disasters without assistance,” so as not to become dependent upon help. But this suggests that the work of doctors and firefighters, for example, should be abolished. But if this kind of help is good, then good gods should help like this. But they do not. If this kind of help is bad, then we ought to abolish it.
Similarly, we could say that the gods would reduce the moral urgency to make the world better if they intervened in evil. But should we abolish modern medicine and firefighting since they help people, but thereby reduce our urgency to help people? Of course not. Moreover, this argument suggests that the gods approve “of these disasters as a means to encourage the creation of moral urgency.” 85 And if there were not sufficient baby burnings, the gods would have to bring them about. But this too is absurd. We shouldn’t create moral urgency by burning babies.
Maybe suffering is necessary for virtues like compassion, mercy, sympathy, and courage to be exercised. But even if this is true, the non-believer is simply claiming that we could do without burning babies and still have plenty of suffering to elicit these virtues. Furthermore, we value efforts to improve the world, and we don’t consider the possible reduction in opportunities to practice virtue a good reason not to improve it. If we can’t use this as an excuse not to improve the world, then neither can the gods. Developing virtue “is no excuse for permitting disasters.” The argument that the gods allow suffering to humble us is open to the preceding objections.
One could claim that evil is a by-product of the laws of nature and the god’s interference would alter the casual order to our detriment. But lives could be saved if serial killers had heart attacks before committing their crimes. Such occasional miracles wouldn’t necessitate changing the laws of nature. How often should the gods do this? Johnson says often enough to prevent particularly horrible disasters like child torture.
As for the claim that the gods have a higher morality such that what seems bad to us (child torture) is really good, and what seems good to us (modern medicine) is really bad, it is hard to make any sense of this. You could say we just don’t understand the god’s ways like children don’t understand their parent’s ways, but as adults, we might conclude that some of our parent’s actions were bad.
The main reason all these arguments fail is that they are abstract. None of them really explain why all good, all-powerful beings watch helpless infants burn to death since none of the excuses such being would offer seem convincing. One could claim that the gods just can’t prevent evil, but it is strange to believe in gods less powerful than fire departments and medical researchers.
At this point one may retreat to faith, simply believing the gods are innocent like you might believe in the innocence of your friends even if the evidence is against them. But Johnson argues that we don’t know the gods well enough to trust them like friends. In addition, we have good reason to believe the gods are not good since in the past they have allowed so much evil. You could still claim that you trust in the gods and nothing anyone can say will undermine your belief, “but this is just a description of how stubborn you are; it has no bearing whatsoever on the question of God’s goodness.”
Furthermore, all the reasons offered as to why the world’s evil is consistent with good gods could be used to show why it’s consistent with evil gods. For example, we could say that an evil God gives us free will so we can do evil things. Or we could say that evil exists to make people cynical and bitter (instead of compassionate and courageous), or it exists so that we quit caring about others (instead of becoming morally urgent.)
In short, there are 3 possibilities concerning the gods: 1) they are more likely to be all bad (theists don’t want this to be true; 2) they are more likely to be all-good (but this can’t be true since any evidence for this thesis will also support #1); or 3) they are equally likely to be all-bad or all-good. But if 3 is true, then what excuses do the gods have for allowing evil? They have none. And the reason is that for any excuse for evil’s existence to be justified, it must be highly probable that the excuse is true. But note that option 3 rules this out, since according to 3 there is no more reason to think the excuse is valid than that it is not valid.
Why then don’t the gods intervene according to Johnson? Because they don’t exist.
(Of course, explaining evil without positing gods is easy—humans do bad things.)
Perhaps the gods are neither good nor evil, but simply amoral.
Or they aren’t all powerful, all knowing, or both.
Except your summation fails to note that Johnson’s original argument was about the traditional Western conception of a Christian God (all-knowing/good/powerful). You’ve torqued it completely out of socket and somehow argued against deity in general. The possibility of traditional polytheism (many limited Gods) fits perfectly well within the paradigm of Johnson’s Problem of Evil.
What if, with the gift of ‘free will’, we are given the choice of what we want to experience on this earth, before we are born? Either for the sake of learning, or growing, or experiencing or all of the above?
Let’s face it, negative experiences shape us easily as much as positive ones do. Perhaps on some greater level, living through multiple incarnations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ lives, we grow in a way that is not otherwise possible.
This soul building argument, most notably advanced by John Hick, is almost universally rejected by contemporary philosophers. Primarily because it cannot possibly justify the AMOUNT of evil in the world.
Process theology as developed by Whitehead and Hartshorne, as well as panentheist philosophies and ‘open theism’ do a pretty good job of answering the problem of evil for theists. Although in my atheistic opinion these ideas (and any concept that identifies god with natural processes) ultimately renders the existence of god unnecessary.
One could conclude that if there are gods, then they are feeding off of human misery. It seems to be their primary source of fuel.
David Hume thought that the evidence suggested the world wasn’t designed, or if it was it was made by infant gods, or incompetent gods.
Good and evil are concepts, malleable in nature, so-far-as-we-know developed entirely by human beings. In short, they mean nothing. Evil here might be good there. Evil today might be good tomorrow. Why is allowing suffering evil? What does it matter when experience disappears after organic death? It seems silly.
So while I might find certain acts to be disdainful, that is me; my perception. The amount of people who hold a belief says nothing about the truth of it- so even if most people agree that murder is evil, does that make it so? To me at it’s root it’s simply energy in motion, like everything. Good and evil are human definitions mired within the level of distinction making between this and that thing.
Without an ability to traverse the boundaries of time across generations, it’s simply arrogant to assume any of these reasonings are actually relevant to the grand scale of ascention, thus the realm of gods and their abilities. These miniscule reasonings do point more to polytheism with lesser gods, the same as if someone were shot from the direction in which you stand it stsnds to reason you mustve shot them. Limited knowledge= limited understanding
Or maybe Gods don’t pay any more attention to human life and the daily routines of individuals than we pay attention to our own ribosomes.
Or maybe they lack a “consciousness” or “conscience” as we define it.
Silly puny mortals… expecting they understand the mind of a god.
If we set aside arguments concerning the possibility of ‘god(s)’, this argument on it’s face value is weak.
A simple reversal of it’s tone e.g good for evil, burned babies for saved babies etc, & we pretty much have an argument for ‘god(s)’.
This is not enough to make either position true & simply rests on the inference that suffering or lack thereof is a proof per se.
Weak.
We are subatomic particles to God’s, our planets and moons are electrons , our stars the nucleus (protons&neutrons), our solar systems the atoms, and our galaxies the cells. Our universe is…the God(s), or at least a part of them. Are we aware of our own subatomic particles? Or our own atoms and cells? Sure, we know they are there, but there is nothing we can do to effect them directly, outside of eating right, exercising, and staying positive. That is the burden of God. You can only make universes better, by making yourself better, but can never directly control anything. God may be real, but God can not perceive us in a way that would allow it to manipulate us.
The question you should make then is if there are no gods or a higher power that controls everything why infants are burnt to death? Why do we ask ourselves about it? Why is still without a God pain? Why there is pain? You have no answer without God. There is no why to anything ultimately. But we still ask why because there is an ultimate why, whether one belives in God or not, because there is a God.
there is evil because humans are modified monkeys who do bad things. most of what you write makes absolutely no sense.
The Gnostic Christians from what I’ve read seemed to believe that there is a non evil God but it’s not Yahweh. Yahweh is the Demiurge or false god that created our physical reality and imprisoned spirits in a meat body on a material plane that is our physical prison. Seems he (it was male) was just trying to play a god. I used to like this idea but I had to ask myself why the non evil higher God would let this travesty continue? That kills the idea for me. In the end it’s going to have to stay an unknown and without even good guesses. The amount of evil and suffering we can experience leaves me terrified and amazed. There is something so wrong with this in my psyche that nothing further makes any sense ever for me. I’m lost in space and feeling fairly hopeless. I’m also impotently angry beyond belief. What a lousy way to feel. As far as I know I did nothing to bring this on myself.