Apparently, Sir David Attenborough is going to tell Kirsty Young that there is no inconsistency between evolution and belief in God. He may, perhaps, already have done so, since there is often a time lag between my picking up on the news and the events or anticipated events it records. He’s not confident enough to be an atheist, says Sir David, opening the floodgates of prediction that the shrill, strident new atheism is being replaced by a more genial, accommodating form of unbelief. But, of course, this is sheer nonsense. Those of us who are convinced, on good grounds, that there is no basis for belief in a god of any sort that would be religiously meaningful, have no intention of building atheist temples and listening to atheist sermons, even if, it seems, there are some atheists, like Alain de Botton, who think this is a good idea, and some theists, like George Pitcher, that particularly rebarbative Anglican priest, who begins his piece of Daily Mail pap with words of terrible banality:
There’s something divine in the air. Agnostics and atheists are beginning to nod respectfully in the direction of the Almighty, while still, of course, maintaining that He’s not there.
And he ends with something equally trite:
The shrill voice of Dawkins is gradually being marginalised by those of no more faith than him, but who nevertheless perceive mystery in humanity and, while not accepting the presence of God in the world, are prepared to face in the same direction as the rest of us and stand in awe and wonder.
Has Pitcher really heard Dawkins speak. Shrill?! Come! Come! As for awe and wonder, Dawkins has all along said that there is so much in the natural world to prompt awe and wonder. This he has never denied, and adding belief in a god doesn’t add to the wonder, or precipitate more awe. Just as a swallow does make a summer, a couple of accommodating agnostics do not actually serve to marginalise Dawkins, and Pitcher’s “arguments” are about as lame as ever, though this time he’s gone a bit downmarket and is writing for the Mail. Before his short stint as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s public relations officer (or equivalent), Pitcher was writing for the Telegraph, admittedly a conservative paper, but one of some quality. The Daily Mail, however, is in another class altogether, and given Pitcher’s completely scurrilous attack on Evan Harris, a well deserved demotion for this dislikeable hack. Long may it last!
But what is all the fuss about? Just because David Attenborough says that he doesn’t think that evolution is inconsistent with belief in a god or gods, doesn’t mean that it isn’t. The real question — and one that no one seems to be bothering to ask — is this:
Is evolution consistent with belief in a god that would be religiously meaningful?
That’s the key question, and no one even bothers to ask it. For there could certainly be a god that was consistent with evolution, but that god would be, without a doubt, either evil and cruel, or powerless. And neither type of god would be religiously meaningful.
This was Darwin’s problem. He realised, over the years, more and more, that the theory he had discovered was simply inconsistent with the goodness of god, and duck and dive as they please, no one has suggested how to make evolution consistent with a god’s goodness. It really doesn’t take much imagination to see why. There is only one plausible way in which a god might be consistent with all the pain and suffering that is the direct consequence of that god’s using evolution as the means of creation. First, human beings must be a distinct creation, and, second, the suffering of animals must be irrelevant to the question of the goodness of god. This seems to be the pope’s way out. But it doesn’t work, however plausible it seems. First of all, it is simply impossible for any but a psychopath simply to discount the suffering of animals as irrelevant to any imagined god’s goodness. And second, the claim that human beings are a separate and distinct creation is one which the theory of evolution denies. Human biology is continuous with the biology of all living things. We are one little twig on the tree of life.
The pope and many other Christians, of course, don’t really believe in evolution at all, because they believe that, at some point in the development of life, god directly intervened and created a being with a soul, namely, us. This ontological saltation, of course, is not a part of the theory, but an addition that simply makes a nonsense of the theory. In order to create intelligent, rational beings, who had a ghostly kind of free will, god had to intervene directly in the process, and, as a result, an entirely new order of being was created. This is not supported by the scientific evidence. It is a theological presupposition — made up stuff! The evidence is quite clear. Human beings are animals, like all the other animals on earth, and like them, human beings are related to all of life, including plants and bacteria, amoebae, and even more primitive forms of life. There is no ontological jump from animals to human beings. Given the theory of evolution, there is simply no reason to believe such a thing. We can trace our lineage back to a common ancestor of gorillas and chimps, and further back to the beginning of life, to one-celled creatures just beginning their billions of years’ long journey to the amazing diversity we see in the world around us, including ourselves.
Even on this theological supposition, what are we to do with the billions of years of suffering of so many animals that have come to be and then lost the evolutionary fight, and were replaced by more successful forms of life? Billions of years of meaningless, pointless suffering, with no one around to respond with awe and wonder, as human beings can. It is simply intolerable to believe that there is a god who used this method for creating us, for bringing us into being. It is a completely mechanistic, algorithmic process, set in motion billions of years ago, and just by chance, happened upon beings like us who can think about the universe and our surroundings, and find it full of things at which we can wonder, and consider with awe. The entire reason for the stridency of the new atheism lies right there. There is no reason to believe a god necessary for the production of this evolutionary process, and any god that was responsible for it would have to be a monster.
There is another point. It only took two cases — just two! – of accommodationism (or apparent accommodationism) for people to go all ga ga about the apparent reasonableness of belief in a god. This is a dramatic point. Just two examples: Alain de Botton and Attenborough, and everyone is all agog! The new atheism is to be replaced by a kinder cousin! But we can’t let go now. We have to keep up the pressure, because if that’s all it takes to give religious people a new lease on life, a sense that there’s going to be relaxation in the religion wars, just imagine what would happen if all atheists began to say the same kinds of things! There would be a return to religion in droves! People would be falling over themselves trying to get back to church and make it up to the big guy upstairs, and all the tawdriness and paltry claims of religion would begin to be made again without restraint!
No, this is nonsense! It’s time to draw a line, and hold our ground. Alain de Botton’s atheist temples and sermons be hanged, and the same with Sir David. If he doesn’t want to offend his audience, I understand, but that’s not a good reason to send people back to their Bibles and Qu’rans and Talmuds, their Gitas and Granth Sahibs, and all the rest of the pathetic crew, nor is it a good reason to give comfort to the religious. I notice that the Mail has gone searching for the grumpiest looking pictures of Dawkins imaginable, and they’ve put it side by side with a silly, grinning de Botton. But the new atheism is the way to go. This is no time to make up to the religious. Religions are a menace! This was the point of the new atheism. Religion is a menace, and a danger to society, and a subversion of reason.
Based on what we know about life and the universe, all gods are palpable falsehoods. This is no time to nod respectfully towards any supposed gods, of any shape, size, power or predilection. For life, however joyful and wonderful some parts of it may be, is, taken all together, a suffering thing, nasty, brutish and short. Certainly, let’s make the best of what life has to offer, but let’s not pretend that there is a silver lining to all of this. That would be the cruellest joke of all. To find, after years of suffering and sorrow — and that is, I suspect, the experience of most people a good bit of the time — that the god who designed all this could have done a much better job, right from the start. Hume was right. Speaking to Philo, in Part V, of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he writes:
In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES’s suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.
The point simply is, once you think that there is a god behind the design of things, there are all sorts of ways in which even we, imperfect as we are, can suggest improvements. Christians already believe, as do many other religious believers, that god has something awaiting us that is far more perfect than this, so we’ve already thought of improvements ourselves. Then why not start off with the perfect? Surely, this would make more sense, than to allow billions of years of senseless suffering, and then say that god intended it all. If Sir David thinks that believing in god is not inconsistent with this, then he has an incredibly warped sense of what a god might be, but he doesn’t, and that’s an important point. As Jerry Coyne points out:
Attenborough is known for being nonconfrontational, and his unwillingness to declare overt atheism on Desert Island Discs can hardly be seen as a harbinger that The New Atheism is becoming The New Agnosticism.
And he includes a marvellous video in which Attenborough says quite clearly why he is so cautious about what he has to say in public about religion. He wants people to watch his programmes and learn about nature and evolution, which he finds much more awesome and wondrous than the idea of creation. And he knows, as he makes clear in this video, that there is just too much pain for there to have been a good god. He knows this, but it’s not something he’s going to broadcast on Desert Island Discs, which is not, perhaps, the appropriate occasion for being controversial. Sir David knows the answer, but he’s not going to make an issue of it. But the new atheists will continue to make an issue of it, because any other course is closed. Religion is too grave a danger to the world. Somehow, reason must prevail. ____________________________________________________________
I have added the Attenborough video for those who want to see it now, before visiting Jerry’s website. As you will see, he knows that evolution and the goodness of god are incompatible, whatever he might say on Desert Island Discs. There is no religiously interesting god that is consistent with all the pain and suffering in the world. Even religious people know it, because they believe there is something better to come. But, as C.S. Lewis so eloquently said in his book A Grief Observed, if there is a god, then, given what we know of this world, why should we expect another world, created by the same god, to be any better? Of course, Lewis answers by speaking about Jesus. But can the suffering of another man really do the trick?
If Attenborough can see no path but discretion and accommodationism for himself, I see little wrong with it. Not everyone is willing or able to be a firebrand or an activist. The one thing that IS wrong with it is making positive statements that make it easier for theists to cling to their nonsense. Silence is one thing, going along with the lie that evolution is compatible with any but the weakest philosophical theism/deism is a whole other ball of ear wax.
It seems to me that atheists (or if they don’t like that word ‘non-religious’) are often forced to be apologetic and accommodating to the religious because their very existence of being atheist is offensive, and if atheists dare voice their opinions (usually void of respect for the sacred) then that is a blasphemy that can’t be tolerated. Even John Locke certainly found atheists intolerable, and I suspect that is the underlying sentiment against all atheists, no matter how accommodating and appeasing they are.
This is the great lesson that atheists (and the non-religious) must now face–you can no longer expect to exist freely without defending your right to exist. The religious will seek to silence, censor and diminish your life, and we all have a moral responsibility to oppose religion, authoritarianism, illiberalism, irrationality, immorality because we have all gained from the fruits of liberty, we must also pass on those fruits to other generations.
This is excellent. There is, however a third contributing factor to the Roman Catholic explanation that you touch on briefly, namely the Cartesian idea that since the soul is the seat of consciousness, animals don’t have real suffering because they’re unensouled and so aren’t conscious of their own nociception – on this view animals have no qualia because they have no souls that enable them to be conscious of experience. According to this just-so story, god would have had to prepare the human body to be operable by souls through the evolution of mindless, experienceless zombie beings (a view that, if I remember correctly, was being pushed by Feser and other earlier this summer). Therefore god is not responsible for any suffering before this point, because there was nothing to experience something as noxious, and anything after this point is man’s fault. As a bonus, if you follow it far enough, humans get dominion over animals and nothing a human does to an animal can be thought of as “cruel” for the same reasons. Like all stories that involve souls it’s unfalsifiable, but I think it would take an extreme lack of empathy not to be moved by the beaten horse in Raskolnikov’s dream.
The left are still at it. Here is another tirade against new atheism from the obscure self-important ‘spiked’ website:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/12030/
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Egbert #4
That is a really awful article; typical of the sort of posturing I see from people in the pub who think they’re above the messy business of challenging religious dogma in the public square, and think it’s oh-so-clever to call anyone who is concerned about the damage that religion is doing, ‘zealous’. As if one shouldn’t be enthusiastic about stopping harm. It’s nauseating, but, to be charitable, at least Furedi didn’t call new atheists ‘strident’. Everything but, though.
It took no time at all for the “atheist temple” to be co-opted as a “respectful nod in the direction of the almighty.” It did exactly what we were afraid it might do in no time at all. It gave the religious a chance to creep back into their comfort zone and ignore the stark problems of their worldview as they always have. Is it any wonder why we have to be “shrill”? Why deliberately manufacture evidence for the outrageous claims that atheism is “just another religion” and “atheists really do believe, they just don’t want to admit it”?
This is an excellent piece Eric. The explanation that religiously compatible evolution is not really evolution at all is particularly good. Bravo.
You can also make the same case for the origins of the universe: there is no reason to suspect that other than all-natural forces were at work.
This was actually Stephen Hawking’s point a while back, which was widely misinterpreted as him saying “there is no god”. No. That’s not what he said. He said that we know enough about the origins of our universe for us to dispense with the need of a supernatural agent to conceive it. In this instance, he was merely mirroring Laplace from 200 years previously. He didn’t claim god didn’t exist, only that he wasn’t necessary.
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Thanks, Eric, for this posting.
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I find all this very encouraging. Some of those not quite so shrill and strident atheists have thrown a few handfulls of crumbs in the direction of the theists. Those theists are now down on their knees desperately scrabbling to pick them up. See, see, not every atheist despises our evidence free, made up nonsense, some of them still respect it, in fact I think that the Gnu Atheists are old hat now and the much nicer atheists are already replacing them in the public sphere. There was I thinking that religion was based on wishful thinking.
I disagree.
An evil god would be religiously meaningful. And definitely very interesting. The concept of an evil deity does exist in many old and current worldviews. Though obviously it doesn’t have quite the same mass appeal as jeebus or 72 houris.
Mike.
Very nice post.
I am somewhat amazed that believers are trumpeting Attenborough’s “agnostic, not atheist” position. Frankly, if 70% of the US population suddenly took Sir David’s position, I think the (remaining) gnus would be much happier about it than the (remaining) theists. The thought of David Attenborough convincing others to his position doesn’t upset me – quite the opposite; I hope for more Attenboroughs.
I can only think that they are trumpeting this in a ‘make lemonade’ sort of way – i.e., trying to make the best of what is, in fact, a very anti-religious-establishment comment by a well respected public figure. “Well, he didn’t rule out the possibility of God. So let’s declare victory before anyone notices he’s not a believer!”
I have trouble with the key question: How could there “certainly be a god that was consistent with evolution”?
Where would the consistency arise? To build a grand argument around this is not meaningful, and has been pointed out, throw some crumbs to the theists. God. Evolution. Two completely different and incompatible viewpoints and exploring a hypothetical joint process seriously muddies the waters.
In my view the “No this is Nonsense” paragraph sets out the key stance. We do indeed need to draw lines and reject the preposterous outright. We need to be more dismissive. Theists are de facto not open to logic or broken logic, so stridency must prevail!
He didn’t claim non-existence because non-existence is assumed. You seem to suggest that Hawking leaves the “God door” open ever so slightly when in fact, he pre-supposes that there is no god, and points out that all we can ask about the universe can be explained by our existing science.
“and any god that was responsible for it would have to be a monster”
And that’s exactly where the perversion started. Because they had to force an image of god that was more powerfull than the gods of their conquerors , the jews had to create an allmighty supernatural being. Calling the god of the old testament an all loving father was the mistake of the christians. The big problem is : what when this allmighty being is a sadist. Shall we call all his tortures a way of loving us ? It’s this mad idea that shapes the brains of sick people like theologians who had to defend the crimes of the bible and twist every word to prove their goal : an all loving god. But there is more. Like we can’t protect ourselves from the jaws of death, believers can’t forget the mad ideas fasten in their minds by the priests. Remeber The brothers Karamazov and the chapter ” the inquisitor”
Speaking to Philo, in Part V, of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he writes:
Dang it… I thought HTML was enabled on your blog… Drats… Moseszd… is that what you wanted, or just italics? (You didn’t close the italics.)
It was this kind of attitude that forced me to stop going to church with my wife (to keep her happy, for the social aspects, etc). The pastor declared in his sermon that we were all there to give glory to god, whether we felt that way or not. Uh, nope, not me. No way. I stopped going right then, consequences be damned.
The delusion, exhibited here by Pitcher, makes me want to get all strident and shrill and militant and exclaim [male cow feces]! (I’ve edited myself since I’m unclear on your level of tolerance for crude language, Eric).
Eric, I’ve read several of your pieces via Jerry Coyne, and am very glad to have you as part of the chorus of Gnu Atheists. Cheers.
You write:
“what are we to do with the billions of years of suffering of so many animals that have come to be and then lost the evolutionary fight, and were replaced by more successful forms of life? Billions of years of meaningless, pointless suffering, with no one around to respond with awe and wonder, as human beings can.”
What do you mean? Each animal (except humans) lives and dies alone, without awareness of winning or losing any fight except the one they engage in every day for their own survival. Individual animals or groups of animals are not aware of where they fit in with regard to “billions of years of suffering” or “successful forms of life”.
I also wonder how you define “successful forms of life”. Would you consider a species that thrived and spread for millions of years (say ammonoids) but is now extinct successful or not? Are humans a successful species?
“There is no reason to believe a god necessary for the production of this evolutionary process, and any god that was responsible for it would have to be a monster.”
Do you not believe it is possible that something could have started the evolutionary process much like Edison invented electricity? He did so without considering the possible outcomes that exist today. Technologies such as televisions would evolve from it that both enhance and destroy peoples lives. Does that make him a monster?
But presumably God is aware, and God could stop it, and doesn’t. That’s the crux of it. Whether the animal is aware of the suffering caused by evolution is beside the point. If I let a cat starve completely unnecessarily, the cat may not be aware of the suffering I caused, but I am.
Mike Zaun. I have been speaking throughout of a god that would be religiously meaningful. And a god who produced something, but was completely unaware of what would issue from the decision to do so, is of little religious interest. There is another point. Edison discovered something about the uses of electricity (he didn’t discover electricity). The uses that he had in mind were useful and made human life better. Lighted spaces, for example, helped prevent crime. But, like all technologies, it could be put to bad uses, and has been: torturing people with electric shock, for instance. Edison is not responsible for that, because this is not a logical implication of his invention. That’s down to those who misused his invention. However, a god who creates by means of evolution, that is, who knows what the process of evolution includes, is responsible for the whole of it, for you can’t have evolution without massive waste, and you can’t have the massive waste of animals, without a great deal of suffering. Of course, if this supposed god could not predict the suffering, then it is scarcely of religious interest.
@Bruce:
“He didn’t claim non-existence because non-existence is assumed. You seem to suggest that Hawking leaves the “God door” open ever so slightly when in fact, he pre-supposes that there is no god, and points out that all we can ask about the universe can be explained by our existing science.”
You do realize this is your personal interpretation and hence your opinion, right? It’s certainly not how I took what Hawking was saying.
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A wonderful post. I must say I’m disappointed with Attenborough: when you know the truth, pretending not to know it is dishonest. He might be interested in spreading the message of how amazing Nature is, but that goal is far less important than spreading the message that the material world is all there is. His role as a distinguished science communicator must have earned him quite a bit of money, and I can’t help thinking that he is trying to hold on to the gravy train.
De Botton, on the other hand, is a one-of-a-kind idiot. Other than his deranged proposal for an atheist temple, I wonder what claim to fame he might exhibit. I believe he just saw a gravy train approaching, and made sure he was on the right platform at the right time.
Et. Just a short reply to your note. I don’t think the different issues dealing with success or failure of species is so important in itself for my argument. Nor can I see how pain and suffering are less for animals that cannot self-respect. If you’ve ever watch and animal in pain, there is, indeed a kind of Stoicism involved, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t suffer or feel pain. They obviously do, and human beings are concerned about the suffering that we might cause animals, and most states have cruelty to animal laws which govern our behaviour towards animal. However, in that respect we are far more humane than god, since he/she/it doesn’t seem to care about the widespread suffering caused by the mechanism of evolution. That’s where I find the problem. Billions and billions of years of meaningless, purposeless suffering. If there is a god who creates by evolution, then we have defined a monster. Most religious people who think that religion and evolution are compatible, don’t even consider the problem for the most part, but I think it is insuperable.
Eric – there are religious people who believe that god creates by evolution, and also that suffering is ennobling rather than immiserating. I just can’t take this seriously, but it seems to be a logical consequence of “omnibenevolence” + evolution — you have to redefine suffering as good, as something that brings one closer to god. I think it’s pretty obvious that we should worry about this kind of thinking, but the conversation is usually over before it starts.
Another Matt. It may be true that suffering can be sometimes ennobling, insofar as someone who accepts suffering with patience and dignity can be seen as an act of courage, almost as an act of defiance towards the forces ranged against him (or her). And that provides at least some of the aspects of nobility. It may even, to some extent, give suffering a human meaning. But the idea that suffering can bring one closer to god is, I think, a piece of nonsense dressed up in fancy clothes.
None of this, however, applies to animal suffering, and when the religious say blithely that their god creates by means of evolution, they are ignoring animal suffering altogether. Even suffering borne with patience and dignity is still suffering, and, in my experience, great suffering generally issues in a sense of grievance, that is, a sense that it is undeserved, very much after the manner of Job. The idea that through suffering, because Jesus suffered, we draw nearer to god is, I think, merely a cop-out — an attempt to evade the problem that suffering causes, rather than to face it. Interestingly, an Anglican priest, Paul Badham, in his book Is there a Christian Case for Assisted Dying?, acknowledges that:
That has been my experience.
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If Edison is not responsible would not humans be responsible for their own suffering based on that argument?
Also why would there be no religious interest in a god that could not predict suffering? If his intentions for creating evolution were good I think there would be people that would worship such a god, even though his creation also caused much suffering.
For the record I am not saying I believe in a god or am religious. I am very open to all possibilities. I am just trying to understand your stance on this and add to my knowledge.
I’m entirely unclear on how an atheist is equipped to expound on what sort of god is, or is not, “religiously meaningful.”
Two points:
First: your claim is empirically, historically false. The great number of deities that have been worshiped throughout human history have been neither omnipotent, nor necessarily “good” in the sense you mean. And yet billions of humans have found “religious meaning” in these gods.
Which leads to the second point: when you say “religiously meaningful,” you are clearly eliding, whether you realize it or not, the completion of the statement: i.e., you mean “religiously meaningful to me.” But what makes your own sense of what is “meaningful” the touchstone of what is or is not meaningful to anyone else, let alone meaningful in any absolute sense? You may not find rap-music “musically meaningful.” You may not find Picasso “artistically meaningful.” You may not find hot dogs “nutritionally meaningful.” Anyone else is fully justified in asking: so what?
Well, egyptsteve, you may be right that some religious people have found religious meaning in gods which are neither omnipotent or good, but, in general, in theology at any rate, it is thought that what is religiously meaningfull must have the character of goodness in some respect, and at least be powerful enough to bring about the good of its devotees. And an atheist, especially one who spent most of his life doing theology, surely has some right to speak on such matters. I could have put it in personal terms, but I chose to put it in more general terms. And while my sense of what is religiously meaningful may not apply to all religious believers, in theology it at least does apply to most of the monotheists who have thought about what their concept of god implies. I’m not particularly interested in discussing it further than this. It’s always open to anyone to say “So what?” about anything, but it is not particularly helpful.
You claim only two possibilities for a god, given the sufferings of the world; a cruel one, or a powerless one. I say there is another possibility; an ignorant one who does not know of our existence or of our needs.
But before we speculate about the nature of a god, if any, surely we should first ask what a god would be. One classic definition is: a being of infinite compassion, power and wisdom; but this is inconsistent with the reality of suffering. It is also inconsistent with Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which proves that every political system is somewhere either unfair or indecisive or illogical.
I doubt there is a god, but I cannot prove a negative, so I guess that makes me an agnostic. I regard atheism as the most pious of faiths, and I mean that in a good way: for it gives God the perfect alibi; not present at the scene of the crime. Atheism is also the purest of faiths, for it demands neither tithe nor rite. Atheism is the most unified of faiths, for there are infinitely ways for there to be one god, but only one way for there to be none. And atheism is the most mystical of faiths, for it denies the mind the comfort of a finite image of the ultimate.
Atheism is therefore the best of faiths. But I myself am not the best of believers; so a doubter I remain. But I’ll gladly grant atheism this; if there is a god, then god is certainly not Yahweh, nor Christ, nor Allah, nor any other of mankind’s all-too-human fictions.
I agree with all of the religions, about all of the other religions.
“He realised, over the years, more and more, that the theory he had discovered was simply inconsistent with the goodness of god, and duck and dive as they please, no one has suggested how to make evolution consistent with a god’s goodness.”
Is it possible for an author to be a good person? They can put their characters through quite a bit of torture and pain. (They also have all of the other characteristics of god, as far as the “universe” of their books is concerned – omnipotent, omniscient, outside time, etc).
I’m not sure why evolution is a case of special incompability with a good God, one who is sufficiently powerful to be “religiously interesting”, especially when you translate all of the potential problems with evolution into the currency of “suffering”. There is always suffering, so on your view, all of it is always incompatible with religious belief and belief in God. There’s nothing special about the incompatibility of religion with evolution, then; this is just another problem-of-evil argument. Might as well say religion is as incompatible with evolution as it is incompatible with toothache. Neither claims seems particularly off-putting to religious people who argue for compatibility.
What do you suppose makes one species “wasted” or “unsuccessful” in objective terms? Rather, what happens happens, and then you judge it as wasteful or successful or pointlessly miserable according to your own criteria. The fact that humans are but one twig on the big tree of life is no argument against religious people; I’m sure they’d find the whole thing sacred and significant, right? If some of them think that God let the whole process occur and then suddenly made some of the creatures special by dropping in a soul, their point is that his interference has nothing to do with the physical process, nothing to do with the onward march of evolution. So I also don’t see how that argument would refute what they’re saying at all. If you didn’t believe it before, you still won’t, and if you did, there’s nothing new here to change that.
Sorry, agree with Suzy; don’t see at all how the reality of “suffering,” connected to evolution or not, which certainly exists, means that God (who might not) must be either less than omnipotent or cruel. We might, of course, also quite sensibly conclude, as the Judeo-Christian scriptures do, that we simply don’t have the perspective or the moral intelligence to sort God out. (“So far are my ways above your ways…”) The suffering, for Christians, of Jesus, already puts the same conundrum on the table, no need for Darwin to figure out the implications of evolution!–The fact of Christ on the cross suggests to human ways of thinking God must either be less then all-powerful, or screwed up enough to impose suffering on what is, theologically speaking, himself…or else …we just have to acknowledge he’s God, and we are not, and we are profoundly underequipped to understand the ways in which he squares accounts in the end.
“you may be right that some religious people have found religious meaning in gods which are neither omnipotent or good, but, in general, in theology at any rate, it is thought that what is religiously meaningfull must have the character of goodness in some respect, and at least be powerful enough to bring about the good of its devotees. ”
This is an extraordinary statement. How can someone who has “spent most of his life doing theology” talk about “theology” as if it is a single thing? It is not even a single thing within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheistic tradition, let alone if you will graciously allow that ancient Greeks and Romans, Hindus, Buddhists, Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and no doubt Aztecs and Mayans and every other literate culture with a specialized priestly class, has produced a written discourse on the nature of the divine and man’s relationship to it.
And I note that the statement begins with some intellectual flim-flam: It is not the case that I “may” be correct that “some” religious people have found religious meaning in gods that are neither omnipotent or good (at least insofar as “good” is defined in narrow, Christianoid terms). It is rather absolutely the case that the great majority of religious people who have ever lived have found religious meaning in such gods.
I see that you are fully trapped in your own historical and intellectual moment, and — surprisingly for an atheist — have fully bought into monotheism’s teleological belief in its own intellectual and moral superiority. And you mistakenly believe that you can project your own personal or cultural beliefs onto humanity in general, and draw “general” conclusions from your own particular experience. I’m neither a rhetorician nor a philosopher, but I suspect there is a technical term for such argumentation. If I had to come up with a name for it, I’d call it the “solipsistic fallacy.”
Come off it, egyptsteve. The passage you quote was carefully open to the possibility of non-omnipotent gods and their goodness, so not tied to monotheism or any kind of grand solipsistic isolation.
So not trapped at all in my own historical and intellectual moment. Your whole response is based on this mistake, so irrelevant to the argument. Nor, by the way, did I speak of theology as a single thing. Many religions don’t do theology at all. They just do religion. Theology is a discursively reflective process of trying to systematise and understand what is done on a ritual or personal level (e.g. mysticism and meditation). Where they do, gods are always thought to have doings with humans — why else would they be thought of at all? — and the expectation is that they intervene for good in human lives.
Dr. Arty. I would never suggest that you cannot simply retreat into ignorance and submission, and if it works for you it works for you. But, in general, Christianity, certainly, and, I suspect, Judaism, made suffering manageable by thinking of the suffering that counts as restricted to human beings. Having been given dominion over the animals, animals, in a sense, simply don’t count. And, in general, they have not counted. However, once you see that human life is continuous with other life, and that human suffering, besides being self-conscious, and perhaps thus intensified, is continuous with animal suffering, the bounds of the suffering world are so expanded as to expand the bounds of god’s lack of compassion to the point where it topples any idea of god’s goodness.
Believers keep telling me that there is no difference, but I think Darwin was right. It does make a difference. For, after all, the Christian conception of suffering (as reflected in Paul, for example) is that suffering is really down to us. We are responsible, and we deserve the suffering we receive, for it is through man’s sin that suffering entered the world, and the redemption of humans is also the redemption of creation (see Romans 6). But if there were billions of years of life and suffering before we ever appeared on earth, this whole conception of man and human suffering is shown to be false, and the explanation for suffering is put into question. The point here is that, if you do retreat into ignorance (now I see with my own eyes, and yet I have only touched the hem of your glory, as Job says), as you are perfectly entitled to do, you must see that the conundrum of evil is much much larger than it seemed when creation was a homely little place where humanity, created in god’s image, was to live out its days. It relies on a lot more ignorance than before, because this is not a human sized universe, but one in which powers are at work which lie completely outside the realm of the human, and the limited time-scale of history.
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