_____
Since you brought up the question of scientists and creation, I'll analyze his interview. The National Geographic interview you're referring to was with Francis Collins and John Horgan? I read it, and I read the Time interview between Collins and Dawkins.
Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, and his new book is called, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" (LINK) -- he is an ardent supporter of evolutionary theory. If anything, his words should mean more to you than to me, since you have the belief that proponents of the scientific theory of evolution are all atheists; that educated Christian scientists, who accept the authority of science over the authority of the Hebrew creation story, like Collins aren't possible. You seem to think that evolution is some sort of conspiracy among godless heathen professors, but you would have to include people like Collins in that conspiracy.
Anyway, the most meaningful issue that they touched on in this recent National Geographic conversation, IMHO, is the Problem of Evil. It is an ancient argument, and I find it devastating to the concept of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God. I would be agnostic if it were not for the PoE.
Collins' response to Horgan on the PoE:
Collins also ignores the responsibility of God in giving free will. This is a very important distinction, and one that most Christians ignore -- they assume that God almost has to give people free will in every situation, and that this is better than God restricting human freedom during horrible circumstances.
Consider: most parents would agree it is not more loving to allow their young child to freely hurt themselves and others than to step in and stop them. The parent would even be held liable in a court of law for negligence. But why is it that God is somehow supposed to be exonerated from responsibility for giving people free will to abuse and use however they want?
Consider: many babies are born with fatal diseases, and/or acquire leukemia at a very early age. Would it be more loving, or less loving, for God to have allowed Hitler to be one of those babies? Would it be more loving, or less loving, for God to restrict Hitler's freedom? The answer is obvious. And thus, the PoE destroys the capacity for a believer to say that it is rational to believe in a God who is all-loving and all-powerful.)
Blaming the devil doesn't work: God supposedly created the devil, so this just pushes it back a step further.
Handing it off to "free will for the devil" also doesn't work, because, as I explained above, it is not "all-good" and "all-loving" to give someone/something power or the will to do evil with, when you could instead restrict that power/will.
Consider: humans cannot fly. We never think much about things this way, but if you believe in God, then you agree that God has restricted your free will -- often times you wish you could just fly away like a bird. The very complex topic that this opens up leads some people to believe in Calvinism/determinism, because they recognize that intrinsically, we often will to do something that we cannot accomplish.
Imagine, for instance, that I want to win the 100-meter race. I simply do not have the genetics for it, period. I could put all of my heart and soul into it, but never could I beat out natural athletes whose bodies are marvelously fit for such exercises. In the same way, my Saint Bernards will never attack a child and maul it to death. Both of these two things are related: my physical nature limits me (by genetics), and so does theirs. People are no more "free" than their bodies and natural inclinations make them, and thus not truly free at all.
Philosophers have dealt with this topic extensively, and they point to the source of our will as desire, and the source of our desire as our nature -- and so the question of what constitutes our nature becomes relevant. No one can deny that genetics hugely constitutes our nature, as well as how we are raised. Children who are abused will deal with pain and anger for their entire lives that, for instance, I will not. We all know people who seem to have been born with a gentle nature -- completely nonviolent. It takes much more to anger them than the average person. Let's call that person, "Ms. X". If she is raised in a loving home and well-educated, it is completely unlikely that she will ever feel the urge to cause someone terrible pain for fun. Why is it that Ted Bundy enjoyed causing pain for fun? As a scientist, I want to study his brain, his genes, and his environment as a child -- three things he had no real control over (he wasn't free to determine those things), and compare his to "Ms. X's".
I would bet the ranch that I could find something physically different between Bundy's physiology and hers. She simply never felt the desire to harm people that he was constantly bombarded with. That desire came from an unhealthy brain. She feels a degree of empathy that compels her to help people in need and in pain. He feels no empathy whatsoever. Who is ultimately responsible for how Bundy's brain works? For his lack of empathy? For his innate desire to harm others? I would answer: it is a random part of genetics and chemistry -- variation occurs naturally in these processes, we observe it all the time. You get an entire spectrum of traits from nature: good and bad. You would answer...?
Now, Collins wants to argue that God cannot intervene in human affairs. First, Collins ignores the serious issue I laid out above: who set the laws of chemistry and biology in motion, if God does exist? And if God made the laws in such a way that they would produce a Ted Bundy, could God not also have affected those same laws such that everyone was born with the personality of Ms. X? And if God could, would God not want to? If both...then why do Ted Bundy's exist?
Consider: everyone could've been born with the gentle nature of a Saint Bernard, and it is logically possible that no "Yorkshire Terrier"-type angry personality existed. If that is possible, then God has an obligation to bring about the highest good for the highest number of people. If that is not what we observe (and we obviously don't), then either: i) God isn't able, ii) God isn't willing, or iii) God doesn't exist.
Collins argues that God cannot intervene because of chaos...but, God could intervene in such a way that we wouldn't even know it was happening. Some examples I just outlined above -- i.e. that Hitler was born with a crippling disease, or that people are born with a high degree of empathy and compassion, and no urges to hurt people for fun. Another problem for Collins are simple examples of senseless suffering -- like when lightning starts a forest fire and humans, deer and squirrels get burned alive and die a horrible frightened death. If the lightning never struck that particular tree, would the world be "very strange, chaotic, unpredictable"? Or would we never have known any differently?
The same scenario could apply to most human behaviors -- i.e., a person gets up and is a great mood, and doesn't want to go abduct a child that day, because God has altered their desires such that they do not feel violent. Would they know that? Or would they just go about their business, whistling and happy? If one believes that drugs can alter the state of mind to affect human emotions, moods, and desires, then why is it not possible for God to do the same?
Again, God doesn't "get off" for giving unrestricted free will to people who will abuse it -- it represents negligence on the part of whomever gives someone power that will be abused when they know ahead of time that it will, and could otherwise stop it. And, if while this person was sleeping, I injected them with some Xanax or anti-psychotic, they would wake up feeling different desires, and not even know why. If I knew that this person would wake up with the desire to abduct and rape a child, and I had the power to affect this desire, and make it go away, I would. Not only would I, but I would be morally evil if I did nothing! Now, in the same sense, God not only has the power to affect this person's desires, but according to believers, God is in control of everything!
Therefore, God is ultimately responsible for the configuration of the pedophile's brain that makes them lust after children. There is no part of me that lusts after an innocent child, nor of most mentally healthy people. Pedophiles are mentally ill, and is it more reasonable to believe that a loving God made them that way, that God doesn't intervene to make them mentally health...or that God doesn't exist? I find it more rational to believe in the last option.
Consider: Many Christians use this sort of defense, or a soul-making theodicy, to try to say that God uses evil to bring about good. An analogy is often drawn to the very young child at the dentist's, where the child is undergoing pain and does not understand that the dentist is not evil, nor are the parents for taking the child to the dentist. However, the failure of this analogy is simple: if God is all-powerful, then God could bring about this good in another way. If the parent were powerful enough to choose between: i) giving the child fluoride in the water to prevent their tooth-related issues and, ii) letting the child develop those issues, and then go through pain to fix them, then we would say that any parent who chose (ii) over (i) was evil. Now we might say that our conception of good and evil is flawed to try to rescue this, or our understanding of God is, but then we sabotage the very definitions that we ascribe to God.
On the issue of "there could always be a morally compelling reason for God to allow evil", then, we might stop and think for a moment. There could indeed also be purple unicorns floating through the universe. Let us grant, for a moment, that both are logical possibilities. But we cannot believe on such speculations. We can only judge truth by what we know. We are not being rational if we ignore the evidence in front of our face in order to dream up scenarios on how things might otherwise be.
Furthermore, I do not think it possible for an all-good and all-powerful God to be trapped into this sort of situation, like the kid at the dentist above, and God being compelled somehow to choose (ii) over (i). In the analysis of what those "omni" terms mean, I do not comprehend how God could ever be "cornered" in this way -- forced to choose to allow evil. In the first place, God never has to create anything, or do anything, if God is all-complete and perfect. Therefore, it seems to follow logically that this option is always available to God, and therefore, God could never be compelled to do anything whatsoever.
If we say that the notion of God must make suffering and evil different for God, then we lose the right to call God "good" for the same reason. That is, if we say, "What seems evil to us may not be evil to God," then the same thing applies to, "What seems good to us may not be good to God." And if this is true, then things like compassion, charity, kindness, self-restraint, patience, tolerance...those things are good to us. How can we say God is/has those things? If what is good to us isn't real, or doesn't represent God's view, then why do we call God "good" at all?
If allowing and causing gratuitous pain, suffering, and misery isn't evil, then we lose the basis for calling things (or God) good as well. However, no reasonable person can deny what is good and evil. It is an intrinsic part of our human nature to feel compassion, altruism, empathy...we cannot pretend we do not. And we call those things, "good". Furthermore, the moral properties we ascribe to actions, behaviors, and character based on our intuitions and perceptions are real. If they were not, then there is no such thing as morality. If no real moral properties exist, then no good and evil exist. If no good and evil exist, then God still doesn't exist! (Remember that the definition of God includes goodness.)
We must use our conceptions and perceptions of good and evil as the only basis for those things, elsewise we lose any grounding for using the terms at all. Ergo, if there is a God who does not feel those things as we do, nor act on those things as we would, why would we call this God "good" at all? We can't logically make those characteristics square with the sort of God who would introduce, allow, or even possibly make the sorts of evil that we all observe and experience.
Collins has ignored the depth and breadth of this devastating argument against theism.
Therefore, the PoE leaves us with this (rearranged from Epicurus):
And that is why I am an atheist, not an agnostic, with respect to a "tri-omni" God of goodness, knowledge and power. I do not believe in such a Being for good reason. I cannot logically discount other sorts of gods -- weak ones or morally questionable ones, but I also cannot believe in them, nor would I care to know one way or the other about them.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Philosophy
Since you brought up the question of scientists and creation, I'll analyze his interview. The National Geographic interview you're referring to was with Francis Collins and John Horgan? I read it, and I read the Time interview between Collins and Dawkins.
Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, and his new book is called, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief" (LINK) -- he is an ardent supporter of evolutionary theory. If anything, his words should mean more to you than to me, since you have the belief that proponents of the scientific theory of evolution are all atheists; that educated Christian scientists, who accept the authority of science over the authority of the Hebrew creation story, like Collins aren't possible. You seem to think that evolution is some sort of conspiracy among godless heathen professors, but you would have to include people like Collins in that conspiracy.
Anyway, the most meaningful issue that they touched on in this recent National Geographic conversation, IMHO, is the Problem of Evil. It is an ancient argument, and I find it devastating to the concept of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God. I would be agnostic if it were not for the PoE.
Collins' response to Horgan on the PoE:
Horgan: Many people have a hard time believing in God because of the problem of evil. If God loves us, why is life filled with so much suffering?Collins ignores the fact that some suffering brings about no "learning" whatsoever -- suffering that leads to death, animal suffering, senseless random acts of natural disaster...and that this sort of pain and suffering would lead many to learn that this is evidence of either: i) a callous God, ii) a weak God, or iii) a non-existent one.
Collins: That is the most fundamental question that all seekers have to wrestle with. First of all, if our ultimate goal is to grow, learn, and discover things about ourselves and things about God, then unfortunately a life of ease is probably not the way to get there. I know I have learned very little about myself or God when everything is going well. Also, a lot of the pain and suffering in the world we cannot lay at God's feet. God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
Collins also ignores the responsibility of God in giving free will. This is a very important distinction, and one that most Christians ignore -- they assume that God almost has to give people free will in every situation, and that this is better than God restricting human freedom during horrible circumstances.
Consider: most parents would agree it is not more loving to allow their young child to freely hurt themselves and others than to step in and stop them. The parent would even be held liable in a court of law for negligence. But why is it that God is somehow supposed to be exonerated from responsibility for giving people free will to abuse and use however they want?
Consider: many babies are born with fatal diseases, and/or acquire leukemia at a very early age. Would it be more loving, or less loving, for God to have allowed Hitler to be one of those babies? Would it be more loving, or less loving, for God to restrict Hitler's freedom? The answer is obvious. And thus, the PoE destroys the capacity for a believer to say that it is rational to believe in a God who is all-loving and all-powerful.)
Horgan: Physicist Steven Weinberg, who is an atheist, asks why six million Jews, including his relatives, had to die in the Holocaust so that the Nazis could exercise their free will.Collins ends with the very sticky open question for believers. It isn't just a matter of "having enough trust"; it is a logical question of how one can reconcile the notion of God's goodness with the notion of natural evils.
Collins: If God had to intervene miraculously every time one of us chose to do something evil, it would be a very strange, chaotic, unpredictable world. Free will leads to people doing terrible things to each other. Innocent people die as a result. You can't blame anyone except the evildoers for that. So that's not God's fault. The harder question is when suffering seems to have come about through no human ill action. A child with cancer, a natural disaster, a tornado or tsunami. Why would God not prevent those things from happening?
Blaming the devil doesn't work: God supposedly created the devil, so this just pushes it back a step further.
Handing it off to "free will for the devil" also doesn't work, because, as I explained above, it is not "all-good" and "all-loving" to give someone/something power or the will to do evil with, when you could instead restrict that power/will.
Consider: humans cannot fly. We never think much about things this way, but if you believe in God, then you agree that God has restricted your free will -- often times you wish you could just fly away like a bird. The very complex topic that this opens up leads some people to believe in Calvinism/determinism, because they recognize that intrinsically, we often will to do something that we cannot accomplish.
Imagine, for instance, that I want to win the 100-meter race. I simply do not have the genetics for it, period. I could put all of my heart and soul into it, but never could I beat out natural athletes whose bodies are marvelously fit for such exercises. In the same way, my Saint Bernards will never attack a child and maul it to death. Both of these two things are related: my physical nature limits me (by genetics), and so does theirs. People are no more "free" than their bodies and natural inclinations make them, and thus not truly free at all.
Philosophers have dealt with this topic extensively, and they point to the source of our will as desire, and the source of our desire as our nature -- and so the question of what constitutes our nature becomes relevant. No one can deny that genetics hugely constitutes our nature, as well as how we are raised. Children who are abused will deal with pain and anger for their entire lives that, for instance, I will not. We all know people who seem to have been born with a gentle nature -- completely nonviolent. It takes much more to anger them than the average person. Let's call that person, "Ms. X". If she is raised in a loving home and well-educated, it is completely unlikely that she will ever feel the urge to cause someone terrible pain for fun. Why is it that Ted Bundy enjoyed causing pain for fun? As a scientist, I want to study his brain, his genes, and his environment as a child -- three things he had no real control over (he wasn't free to determine those things), and compare his to "Ms. X's".
I would bet the ranch that I could find something physically different between Bundy's physiology and hers. She simply never felt the desire to harm people that he was constantly bombarded with. That desire came from an unhealthy brain. She feels a degree of empathy that compels her to help people in need and in pain. He feels no empathy whatsoever. Who is ultimately responsible for how Bundy's brain works? For his lack of empathy? For his innate desire to harm others? I would answer: it is a random part of genetics and chemistry -- variation occurs naturally in these processes, we observe it all the time. You get an entire spectrum of traits from nature: good and bad. You would answer...?
Now, Collins wants to argue that God cannot intervene in human affairs. First, Collins ignores the serious issue I laid out above: who set the laws of chemistry and biology in motion, if God does exist? And if God made the laws in such a way that they would produce a Ted Bundy, could God not also have affected those same laws such that everyone was born with the personality of Ms. X? And if God could, would God not want to? If both...then why do Ted Bundy's exist?
Consider: everyone could've been born with the gentle nature of a Saint Bernard, and it is logically possible that no "Yorkshire Terrier"-type angry personality existed. If that is possible, then God has an obligation to bring about the highest good for the highest number of people. If that is not what we observe (and we obviously don't), then either: i) God isn't able, ii) God isn't willing, or iii) God doesn't exist.
Collins argues that God cannot intervene because of chaos...but, God could intervene in such a way that we wouldn't even know it was happening. Some examples I just outlined above -- i.e. that Hitler was born with a crippling disease, or that people are born with a high degree of empathy and compassion, and no urges to hurt people for fun. Another problem for Collins are simple examples of senseless suffering -- like when lightning starts a forest fire and humans, deer and squirrels get burned alive and die a horrible frightened death. If the lightning never struck that particular tree, would the world be "very strange, chaotic, unpredictable"? Or would we never have known any differently?
The same scenario could apply to most human behaviors -- i.e., a person gets up and is a great mood, and doesn't want to go abduct a child that day, because God has altered their desires such that they do not feel violent. Would they know that? Or would they just go about their business, whistling and happy? If one believes that drugs can alter the state of mind to affect human emotions, moods, and desires, then why is it not possible for God to do the same?
Again, God doesn't "get off" for giving unrestricted free will to people who will abuse it -- it represents negligence on the part of whomever gives someone power that will be abused when they know ahead of time that it will, and could otherwise stop it. And, if while this person was sleeping, I injected them with some Xanax or anti-psychotic, they would wake up feeling different desires, and not even know why. If I knew that this person would wake up with the desire to abduct and rape a child, and I had the power to affect this desire, and make it go away, I would. Not only would I, but I would be morally evil if I did nothing! Now, in the same sense, God not only has the power to affect this person's desires, but according to believers, God is in control of everything!
Therefore, God is ultimately responsible for the configuration of the pedophile's brain that makes them lust after children. There is no part of me that lusts after an innocent child, nor of most mentally healthy people. Pedophiles are mentally ill, and is it more reasonable to believe that a loving God made them that way, that God doesn't intervene to make them mentally health...or that God doesn't exist? I find it more rational to believe in the last option.
Horgan: Some philosophers, such as Charles Hartshorne, have suggested that maybe God isn't fully in control of his creation. The poet Annie Dillard expresses this idea in her phrase "God the semi-competent."There could indeed be. But, what would Collins have to do to the term "all-good" and "all-powerful" in order to allow for these sorts of reasons?
Collins: That's delightful—and probably blasphemous! An alternative is the notion of God being outside of nature and time and having a perspective of our blink-of-an-eye existence that goes both far back and far forward. In some admittedly metaphysical way, that allows me to say that the meaning of suffering may not always be apparent to me. There can be reasons for terrible things happening that I cannot know.
Consider: Many Christians use this sort of defense, or a soul-making theodicy, to try to say that God uses evil to bring about good. An analogy is often drawn to the very young child at the dentist's, where the child is undergoing pain and does not understand that the dentist is not evil, nor are the parents for taking the child to the dentist. However, the failure of this analogy is simple: if God is all-powerful, then God could bring about this good in another way. If the parent were powerful enough to choose between: i) giving the child fluoride in the water to prevent their tooth-related issues and, ii) letting the child develop those issues, and then go through pain to fix them, then we would say that any parent who chose (ii) over (i) was evil. Now we might say that our conception of good and evil is flawed to try to rescue this, or our understanding of God is, but then we sabotage the very definitions that we ascribe to God.
On the issue of "there could always be a morally compelling reason for God to allow evil", then, we might stop and think for a moment. There could indeed also be purple unicorns floating through the universe. Let us grant, for a moment, that both are logical possibilities. But we cannot believe on such speculations. We can only judge truth by what we know. We are not being rational if we ignore the evidence in front of our face in order to dream up scenarios on how things might otherwise be.
Furthermore, I do not think it possible for an all-good and all-powerful God to be trapped into this sort of situation, like the kid at the dentist above, and God being compelled somehow to choose (ii) over (i). In the analysis of what those "omni" terms mean, I do not comprehend how God could ever be "cornered" in this way -- forced to choose to allow evil. In the first place, God never has to create anything, or do anything, if God is all-complete and perfect. Therefore, it seems to follow logically that this option is always available to God, and therefore, God could never be compelled to do anything whatsoever.
If we say that the notion of God must make suffering and evil different for God, then we lose the right to call God "good" for the same reason. That is, if we say, "What seems evil to us may not be evil to God," then the same thing applies to, "What seems good to us may not be good to God." And if this is true, then things like compassion, charity, kindness, self-restraint, patience, tolerance...those things are good to us. How can we say God is/has those things? If what is good to us isn't real, or doesn't represent God's view, then why do we call God "good" at all?
If allowing and causing gratuitous pain, suffering, and misery isn't evil, then we lose the basis for calling things (or God) good as well. However, no reasonable person can deny what is good and evil. It is an intrinsic part of our human nature to feel compassion, altruism, empathy...we cannot pretend we do not. And we call those things, "good". Furthermore, the moral properties we ascribe to actions, behaviors, and character based on our intuitions and perceptions are real. If they were not, then there is no such thing as morality. If no real moral properties exist, then no good and evil exist. If no good and evil exist, then God still doesn't exist! (Remember that the definition of God includes goodness.)
We must use our conceptions and perceptions of good and evil as the only basis for those things, elsewise we lose any grounding for using the terms at all. Ergo, if there is a God who does not feel those things as we do, nor act on those things as we would, why would we call this God "good" at all? We can't logically make those characteristics square with the sort of God who would introduce, allow, or even possibly make the sorts of evil that we all observe and experience.
Collins has ignored the depth and breadth of this devastating argument against theism.
Therefore, the PoE leaves us with this (rearranged from Epicurus):
P1) The gods either can take away evil from the world and will notThe only rational answer is -- all-powerful and all-good gods do not exist. And, if some other form or version of God exists: say, a weak one; or a morally ambivalent one...then does it deserve our acknowledgment, respect, or adoration? No. Could we be morally obligated to a God which has less compassion than we do? Less power to prevent evil? After all, we are the ones being forced to cure cancer and eradicate starvation.
P2) or, being willing to do so [take away evil from the world] cannot
P3) or, they [gods] neither can nor will [take away evil from the world]
P4) or, they are both able and willing [to take away evil from the world].
C1) If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. (if P2)
C2) If they can, but will not, then they are not omnibenevolent. (if P1)
C3) If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. (if P3)
C4) Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist? (this is a reductio ad absurdum for P4)
And that is why I am an atheist, not an agnostic, with respect to a "tri-omni" God of goodness, knowledge and power. I do not believe in such a Being for good reason. I cannot logically discount other sorts of gods -- weak ones or morally questionable ones, but I also cannot believe in them, nor would I care to know one way or the other about them.
________________
Technorati tags: God, Religion, Atheism, Philosophy
