Making Excuses For God

Any monotheistic religion that posits a loving and all-powerful God has a problem: Why does evil happen?

The book of Job suggests evil is God testing us to see if our faith is strong; God is actively involved in tempting you to do wrong to test your faith (and this is why the Lord's Prayer has that bit "Lead us not into temptation"). Later, Satan became the source of evil - which does not sit well with monotheism, but so what? Modern Christianity has got more sophisticated, but in the end makes no more sense.

Here is an article by Frank Turek on why God allows evil, specifically discussing why God allowed the terrorist attack in London, and is a great example of the nonsensical reasoning these people use to delude themselves.

Because evil doesn’t exist on its own; it only exists as a lack or a deficiency in a good thing. Evil is like rust in a car: If you take all of the rust out of a car, you have a better car; if you take the car out of the rust, you have nothing. Evil is like a wound in your body: If you take the wound out of your body, you have a better body; if you take the body out of your wound, you have nothing. (That’s why we often describe evil as negations of good things. For example, we say the attack on London was immoral, unjust, inhumane, not right, etc.) In other words, there would be no such thing as evil unless good existed, but there would be no such thing as good unless God existed.

That is quite an admission. True evil can only exist if God does. There are truly evil things happening in the world, therefore God must exist. If there were no evil things happening, if we all lived in peace and harmony, then that would make the existence of God less certain.

Is that really the Christian position? No. What he is really arguing is that only Christianity gets to call things evil, therefore if we are labelling stuff as evil, then Christianity must be true! Meanwhile, terrible things happen in the world, whether they get labelled as evil or not.

And God chooses to allow them all.

Turns out plenty of other religions also have a concept of good and evil, and the Christian concept may well have come from Babylonia (via Judaism).

But even if it was exclusive to Christianity, that would still be a problem for Christianity - because it shows a huge inconsistency in Christian doctrine.

• Christianity says the London attack was evil
• Christianity says it is wrong to allow evil to happen when you could stop it
• Christianity says God allowed the London attack to happen
• Christianity says God is perfectly good

These more statements cannot all be true - and yet Christianity claims they are. And it does not matter whether evil really exists or not, either way Christianity is internally incoherent.

Turek on Christian morality

The sexual abuse of children? It’s only wrong if God exists.

Think this through. He is saying that the only reason child abuse is wrong is because of God. Seriously? This guy cannot see that abusing children is wrong in itself?

And this is the mentality of many Christians. This is why the atrocities of the Bible are swept under the carpet. According to this moral view, genocide is fine as long as it is sanctioned by God.

And it is only a short step from there to the terrorist attack in London. Scary stuff.

Turek on Atheism

Regardless of the reasons, evil is a problem for every worldview including atheism. But Christianity is the only worldview equipped to handle it.

How is evil a problem for atheism? Atheism states there is no god, which is why no god intervened during the London attack. Simple as that, Frank.