Richard Dawkins and the Evil God Problem | Jack Symes

But something I know you're really interested in and shared, I guess, a—I don't want to say a common enemy, a good friend of both of us—but someone we philosophically disagree with, and Richard Dawkins makes a very similar argument.

So do a lot of the new atheists. Their mode of operation is parody. They go, "Let's take the principles of theism, of religious belief, and show how they actually lead to absurdity." One of them is like, "If God created the world, then God wouldn't be simple." But really, Lex, you don't really get anywhere. I don't think that's a good argument. We can leave that aside.

The more popular version of that argument is when people like Dawkins say, "If we look at scripture, what we see is a God not just doing good things but drowning people, giving them plagues, and instructing people to commit genocide." He says, even if that is fiction, this is still an evil character; like Cruella De Vil, it might be the worst character that's ever been written in.

Says Dawkins, you see different versions of this too. The late great Dan Dennett gave the example of "Superman is dead," and "Vevo Jesus" are a lot more entertaining than the Superman films that have been made. But the point is that if you take these parodies seriously, you find asymmetries.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is not a similarly reasonable hypothesis as the good God hypothesis because spaghetti is something that exists inside time and space. These are fun taglines; this is the new atheist game: mock, make fun, try and reduce it to absurdity without doing any proper philosophy.

I think this is what's happened with this argument in professional philosophy of religion known as the evil God challenge. It goes, "Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that you've got good arguments to think that your God is benevolent, powerful, knowledgeable, and exists. Well, what makes you think that hypothesis is any more reasonable than my hypothetical one, which is that God's the same but is evil through and through?"

You ask, you know, what kind of definition can we give of evil there? And I suppose all the definitions of evil they try and give are flipped on their head, so to speak. But let's ignore, like, the emotions and pleasure, pain, and suffering that would, I think, fall under like a creation theology.

Like you look at the world and, as we agreed earlier in our main discussion, you can look at all the happiness and pleasure, pain, and suffering, and you can't quite judge whether on the whole the world is good or bad just on those things. But then we've got other areas of theology: Revelation and perfect being.

So if we ask ourselves, "What would the greatest being be like? Is goodness a great-making property, i.e., something we strive for as individuals, or is evil something we strive for?" Well, if your friend tells you they're going to go and cheat on their wife and beat up a child in the park, you explain to them reasons why they shouldn't do that; you help them see the truth of the matter.

It seems like the reasonable great-making property is goodness and not evil. Similarly, and I'll just give this one as an example because I think it's really obvious, let's take Dawkins' example of scripture. Give him the benefit of the doubt; let's say that in scripture God historically did these bad things and these good things—a real controversial premise, I know—but give him the benefit of the doubt.

His argument still won't work. What you have is good and evil actions, but then you've also got these explicit and teleological statements about God's intentions and God's motivations. "No one is good apart from God alone." God has plans to prosper you, not to harm you.

Like, this being has this hypothesis, this harmonical approach, has the extra benefit of these explicit statements. But then it goes one further because you can contextualize these evil actions in the light of God's intentions and God's character as revealed in scripture.

So you end up having three points to the good God hypothesis and one point for the evil God hypothesis. What I do in the book is, um, and not telling people to go out and buy the book—it's ridiculously priced at £85, I think that's an evil in and of itself—pick up "Flosses on God" for a tenner if you're interested in learning some more on philosophy of religion.

But what I do in the book is I painstakingly go through all of the arguments and show that there is a massive cumulative case that if God exists, God is good. I get a lot of people saying, like, "You believe—like, you keep getting asked as well, Jordan, do you believe in God?" Right? You've just had two bucks come on.

People assume that I'm this theist, I'm trying to convert people. I think we should give the best arguments for atheism if we're going to be atheists, but that's not one of them. This isn't a good argument; just run the problem of evil. It's a classic for a reason.

Well, the other thing too that we should take serious stock of is that a naively good spaghetti monster in the sky, let's say, would be a justly parody character. Now, one of the things that you can't say about the Old Testament authors was that they were naive; they're not naive.

Now the great heroes of the Old Testament corpus, they're not good people when they start. Like, they might have an upward striving instinct or a calling, let's say, or a prod of conscience, but they do what they can to fight it. They suffer along the way and they produce an awful lot of misery.

The human characters in the Old Testament are very realistic; they're very multi-dimensional. Now, the same can be said for the characterization of God, and I can understand why Dr. Dawkins, for example, objects to the cataclysmic roughness of the biblical accounts.

But what we also have to understand is that they had to contend, for example, with the ethics of war. Now, if the atheist types had a better answer to the ethics of war than the Old Testament corpus, then Dawkins' point would be well taken, but they don't.

There's other things I think that Dr. Dawkins doesn't understand about the biblical corpus too. The force against which the chosen people strive in the Old Testament corpus, it's always the descendants of Cain—well, Canaanites; it's always the descendants of Cain. This actually means something from a literary perspective.

It means that those who climb Jacob's Ladder will, and should, be victorious over those who, uh, fail to make the proper sacrifices, who are bitter, resentful, arrogant usurpers because those are the descendants of Cain. This is an eternal struggle; it's laid out in the antithesis between Cain and Abel, which is really the first historical story in the biblical corpus.

Because, of course, the story of Adam and Eve takes place in Paradise itself. The war that God is fighting, let's say, on behalf of the chosen people is a war against evil. Now, then you might say, "Well, what's the morality of a war against evil?" And the answer to that is, well, set the situation up to begin with so that evil doesn't prevail.

That means that you walk in the pathway of the truth, and that you say like Jonah did, "What is on your conscience?" And that you walk upward, Jacob's Ladder. Now let's say you failed to do that, and the forces that produce the flood, or the forces that produce the totalitarian state of the Tower of Babel arise, and you find yourself in the midst of a complete bloody catastrophe.

Well then maybe all you have left open to you are bad choices. And so, I mean, we think that the Second World War was a just war, all things considered. Well, that doesn't make it a paradis desirable situation.

I also don't think it's something that you can lay at the feet of God. You know, if it is the case that human beings have the choice between good and evil, and it is the case that we have something to do that's real, then the consequences of our failure to abide by the divine order are real, and not only real, real but cataclysmically real.

I happen to think that that's true; there's no fighting that off on God. No, there's a balance there. We have something important to do, and we have choice. The world's real, and we have agency. Okay, one of the consequences of that is that we can bring evil into the world.

Now that's a different question than, "Is there evil implicitly in the world?" You know, the battle for life and death that characterizes existence, those are separate questions. Human beings can genuinely bring evil into the world. Is the world evil in its essence? What's the answer to that? If you assume that and act in consequence, you'll make it worse.

Now, I know that's a consequentialist argument. It's not the only argument, but it's not a bad one to begin with.