Final Conclusions in re Theodicy Proper

Back in 1997, a gentleman whom I'll just call Robert (he has requested that I not use his full name in this age of personal google searches) posted on alt.christnet a post rejecting Christianity in part because of the existence of evil and suffering. This is the sixth in a series of posts that constitute my response to some of his objections. You can use this table-of-contents post to read Robert’s original post and then each of my response posts, in the appropriate order.

Robert,

Recapping the arguments, then:

1. You can't prove atheism from evil, because the proof depends on the assumption that cosmically binding morality (a) is objectively real rather than a matter of mere personal taste (which an atheist is logically compelled to deny) and (b) happens to conform exactly to the personal prejudices of the person making the argument, a person who not only is a finite contingent being of statistically insignificant experience, but who doesn't even live up to his own moral code. (Everybody who thinks there is such a thing as right or wrong has at some time in his life done something he himself thought was wrong at the very time that he did it.) ...continue reading...

2. If you say, "There is a God, and there is a moral code, and it does agree precisely with my personal prejudices, and the Christian God doesn't suit my moral taste, so therefore the Christian God isn't the real God," then how do you show that your moral tastes are divinely inspired? Either you are claiming to be a prophet authorized to speak for God, or else you are appealing to some authoritative revelation (whose authority you must be able to defend on rational grounds such as the historical evidence for the literal Resurrection of Christ). Now you, Robert, apparently are not appealing to any holy text, for you say that Deism is "the only way I can make god work," not, "The Koran/Book of Mormon/Zend Avesta/Vedas tell us that fairness is an absolute requirement of morality." So whether you realize it or not, you are claiming that your personal moral preconceptions are the standards by which the universe is to be judged. Good luck justifying that one logically.

3. If you try to prove that the Christian God is self-contradictory because He stands condemned by His own standards, you fail for the simple reason that He does not. Attempts to prove that He does all start either from a misconception of Christian doctrine about God (such as your confusion about whether God is constrained by the time continuum) or of Christian doctrine about morality (such as the common silly ideas of what it means to be a "God of love").

But those three are the only variants of Crappy World that even pretend to be logical. Does this mean that people who have faced up to the flaws in Crappy World admit, then, that the Christian God could exist? Most of the time, yes. Does that mean they become Christians? Not at all.

For after all the arguments, after all the pros and cons have been bandied back and forth and reason has reached its conclusions, you may still say, "Oh, if that's all you mean by 'good' — well, maybe there is a God like that, but if there is, I refuse to worship Him. Even if there's no ultimate standard of good and evil, I refuse to worship a sadistic God; I will stand on my own standards, and will not compromise them, even if the alternative is Hell. If God is thus, then I say He is vile, and I defy Him for all eternity. Like John Stuart Mill, I say that whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which He shall not do: He shall not compel me to worship Him, and if He can sentence me to Hell for refusing to call Him good, then to Hell I will go." If you do...well, there are those to whom in the end God says, "Thy will be done." He will not force you to love Him; He is Love, not a cosmic rapist. But you must not expect the rest of us to admire you for your "moral courage." For we would be obligated to admire you only if your stand was a genuinely moral stand, whereas on your own hypothesis there would be no genuine morality to take a stand on other than your personal taste and social conditioning (with a possible genetic quirk in favor of gene-pool-saving altruism thrown in). In that case you might say, "I won't worship an evil God." But logically you could only mean, "I won't worship a God who doesn't do things my way." Your use of the language of morality would be simply a psychologically underhanded way to bring in the connotations of nobility that accompany such language — connotations that are there only because in our bones we believe that good and evil are something more than mere personal preference. It would be, in short, an attempt to overcome logic with emotion. Yet you are of course free to choose that path. If you do, you will be relieved to know that God will not force you to worship Him — but you can hardly be shocked to find that neither will He go back and recreate the universe to suit you.

And I must warn you — all the while hoping that the warning will turn out to be superfluous — that you cannot pick and choose where you are going to be reasonable. Once a person deliberately chooses to defy reason in any one area, he begins to lose the capacity for honesty. An Crappy Worlder who is moved primarily by moral indignation, not yet having realized that his very capacity for moral indignation is a meaningless quirk of nature unless God exists, is not doing himself a whole lot of damage. Although his reasoning about evil is invalid, his emotional reaction to evil is basically healthy. But a man who consciously admits that his moral impulses have no meaning outside his own emotions, and yet demands that the universe conform to his moral impulses, is deliberately turning his gaze away from reality and taking his first steps on the path to irreversible self-deception — which is just another name for Hell. Thus stubborn Crappy Worlders tend to be led into the kind of fatuity exemplified (admittedly to an unusual degree) by Bertrand Russell, who first argued that values were purely subjective, created by the individual for his own self-actualization; then wrote a vitriolic satire abusing "Nice People" (meaning Victorian religious hypocrites) because they violated the moral standards Russell admitted to having made up for himself; then (in "Why I Am Not a Christian") informed us that he thought Jesus was not particularly moral because...well, because a truly moral Jesus wouldn't have criticized the Pharisees so harshly just because they didn't accept his teaching. Thus we have the spectacle of a man who admits to having constructed his own values yet still feels free to pour scorn on those who don't follow the particular values he has chosen to construct, condemning a man who, believing good and evil to be really good and really evil, criticized those he thought to be committing evil — and condemning him for being judgmental! Among religious people this is known as "hypocrisy;" I don't know what it's called in modern philosophy departments — "fighting religious intolerance," perhaps.

Anyway, there is your dilemma. If morality is genuine and you are fallible, then Christianity could be true even though evil exists. If morality is not genuine then you have no moral argument against the Christian God — since Christian theology and morality are compatible with the current state of the world, and there is no higher standard by which to condemn God. To insist that the universe must meet your standards anyway is not to amend the dilemma, but to defy it, to turn your back on reason. And "when reason is gone, the monster comes out."