The theological “problem of evil” can be summarized by saying that the following three propositions are incompatible or inconsistent: 1) God is all-loving; 2) God is all-powerful, and 3) evil exists. First it must be said that strictly speaking there is no formal contradiction between the statements (i.e., you can rationally believe all three propositions without explicit contradiction). However, the atheist believes that if you “tease out” the assumptions behind each statement you will eventually expose an inconsistency or contradiction, and therefore a rational person will admit that at least one of three statements must be in error: either God is not all-loving (i.e., perhaps he is “beyond good and evil”), or he is not all-powerful (i.e., perhaps he is limited in his ability to fight evil), or evil does not really exist (i.e., perhaps evil is an illusion). Since the existence of evil is said to be self-evident, however, the problem must be with one (or both) of the first two propositions, with the conclusion that God (understood as both all-loving and all-powerful) does not exist. Or so the atheist or skeptic may argue…
The denial of the existence of the God who is both all-loving and all-powerful (i.e., the Supreme Being) based on the existence of evil is not logically persuasive, however, first because there is no formal contradiction between the three statements (i.e., that God is all-loving, God is all-powerful, and evil exists), and second because the atheist’s conclusion that the Supreme Being does not exist is a “universal negative” statement, that is, a statement that ranges over the set of all existing things, claiming (omnisciently) that of nothing in all of existence is God… When we consider that claim, however, it should be clear that skeptical “atheism” cannot possibly justify its conclusion, since it cannot justify the essential premise that the mind can know everything that exists….
Moreover, since atheism usually adheres to some form of “natural” evolutionary theory, it assumes the claim that the universe has always existed (i.e., that there was no “First Cause” that is its personal Creator), and therefore it assumes that the “mechanism” of evolution has always been at work. Consequently it must assume that everything that now exists, and whatever has evolved, is the inevitable result of impersonal processes of reality. Such a metaphysical viewpoint is of course incapable of making moral distinctions between, say, the actions of Adolf Hitler and Moses, since there is no essential difference between them as “products” of the grand evolutionary machine.
Indeed the “machine” metaphor that nature operates according to certain “laws” that constitute reality reveals an epistemological weakness to the entire “narrative” of atheism. If human beings have evolved over billions (trillions? quadrillions?) of years in a closed system of cause and effect, then how is human consciousness — itself a product constrained by such impersonal forces — able to transcend the system that programs it to evaluate its meaning and truth? To say that categorically everything evolved by an impersonal system of cause and effect is therefore a self-refuting and metaphysically meaningless claim…
Atheists often claim that God “cannot” exist because the world is so unjust and full of pointless suffering, and yet from what source does this ideal of justice derive? How is it possible to define what “evil” or “good” mean by appealing to natural processes alone? How does the atheist derive any “ought” from any “is” based on the faith that whatever happens ultimately comes from entirely impersonal natural processes? On the grounds of philosophical naturalism (i.e., that there is nothing but “natural elements, principles, and relations” of the kind studied by the natural sciences) there is no such “thing” as “right” or “wrong,” there is no realm of “ought,” but only brute facts of reality, and therefore there is no way to criticize whatever happens since it is, after all, an inevitable and necessary outcome. The only recourse – on naturalism’s grounds – is to claim (with Thrasymachus) that “might makes right” (the survival of the fittest), and to abandon any talk of ethical idealism. Ironically enough, since naturalism reduces (or redefines) morality to mere description of natural processes, it cannot say anything meaningful about what is morally right or wrong at all. In short, atheism is a morally bankrupt philosophy based on irrational thinking, darkness, and despair.
Hebrew Lesson:
