The plight of mustangs as evidence
What strikes me as the most compelling evidence against the existence of a wholly good, all powerful deity is the status of nonhumans in the world today. One might think that the sheer number of people in this country alone who profess devotion to the ideals of Christianity would have the effect of making people more compassionate towards the suffering of others. Sadly, this is not the case.
200 years ago there were approximately 2 million wild horses in the US. Today there are less than 40,000. This is not due to disease or natural catastrophe, but to cruelty. In Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado and Oregon, horses, even small foals, are shot to death for fun. Others are captured and sold for slaughter -- to provide low cholesterol steaks to France, Italy, Begium and Japan. The 3 horse slaughter houses in the US have carved up 50,000 horses in the past year alone.
Take this one example of the last moments of a wild mustang:
(Excerpt from Lifesavers, Inc. letter. http://www.wildhorserescue.org)
Now what kind of god would create these creatures with the foreknowledge of their agony at the hands of cruel humans? How could any of this suffering be needed in any way? How could the allowance of such cruelty be construed as providing fertile ground for free will? Would it really limit free will to deny the French their mustang steaks?
It seems to me that our religious language is at a loss to conceive any reasonable explanation for a perfectly good and all powerful deity permitting such atrocities. And this is not an isolated case.
More to come...
200 years ago there were approximately 2 million wild horses in the US. Today there are less than 40,000. This is not due to disease or natural catastrophe, but to cruelty. In Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado and Oregon, horses, even small foals, are shot to death for fun. Others are captured and sold for slaughter -- to provide low cholesterol steaks to France, Italy, Begium and Japan. The 3 horse slaughter houses in the US have carved up 50,000 horses in the past year alone.
Take this one example of the last moments of a wild mustang:
Depressed and confused, gentle Daisy stands nervously on the cold, slippery floor. She is edging through a funnel-like chute and into a large wooden stall.
Suddenly, her depression turns to terror. Her acute sense of hearing and smell, both way beyond human development, forebode her fate. Daisy begins to tremble violently. She urinates on herself. She smells death.
A worker appears, wielding a strange, mechanical instrument. He brings it down with a brutal, unyielding force. The retractable four inch bolt fractures Daisy's skull, driving bone fragments deep into her brain. Again and again the bolt violently thrusts. But it does not kill.
Daisy collapses, writhing fully conscious, still alive, still aware, onto a conveyor belt. From somewhere, another contraption snares her leg, lifting her upside down, her head dangling towards the floor. Terror and pain bulge from the innocent mare's brown eyes.
Then, the blade appears. with one vicious swipe Daisy's throat is sliced. Her heart continues to beat as her blood -- her life -- collects in a thick red pool on the floor.
(Excerpt from Lifesavers, Inc. letter. http://www.wildhorserescue.org)
Now what kind of god would create these creatures with the foreknowledge of their agony at the hands of cruel humans? How could any of this suffering be needed in any way? How could the allowance of such cruelty be construed as providing fertile ground for free will? Would it really limit free will to deny the French their mustang steaks?
It seems to me that our religious language is at a loss to conceive any reasonable explanation for a perfectly good and all powerful deity permitting such atrocities. And this is not an isolated case.
More to come...
posted by Andrea Weisberger at 7:54 PM
24 Comments:
You're right, Andrea, this is sad. I am a christian, though I can't explain violence, abuse or selfishness. I believe our world is broken, fallen from greatness, but I find hope here knowing that there are some who do indeed care about righteousness... maybe your voice is one of God's instruments of discipline?
I would think that, if there were an all powerful god, it could do a lot better than using an atheist as "an instrument of discipline."
This would be the same god that created Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Tamerlane, etc., as "instruments of discipline," no?
One of my points is that despite the claim many make to being devout followers of a compassionate creed, these same individuals either institute, participate in, or reap benefit from the obscene suffering of nonhumans.
That they see nothing wrong in that, coupled with the increase in the intensity and amount of suffering, seem to point to either a very corrupt captain at the helm of their belief system, or the complete lack of any reason for belief in a the captain at all.
Actually, if you look at the names you just listed... Stalin, Hitler, etc... they were, in fact, atheists. But that doesn't matter. I just think it's great that you're fighting for compassion and justice in a world that (as you've noted) can be brutally destructive. Maybe it's not evidence of a god... but is evidence of a "good".
The problem of pain is nothing new. You could, conceivably, go on for months enumerating cosmic, systemic problems with both humanity and its surrounding environment.
The simple reduction of such a list would be: the economy of creation is fractured, and if such fracture is by design, then the Designer either is a bad designer or is a figment of human imagination.
One must recognize that this argument works only within a deterministic framework that ascribes total microgovernance to a first cause and states that this cause must either be omnipotent and mean, or helpless and good.
This framework is a categorical assumption. It hasn't even been established.
If God is a free Being who has created free beings in His image, then one must contend with the possibility that free beings may act contrary to the desires of God.
In other words, the problem of pain must consider the doctrine of the Fall, which is this: a free creation, called into being by a Being who is the ground of creation's being and is the source of its life, has exercised freedom in such a way as to separate itself from its source. Thus, creation has willed its own death. Chaos must follow.
I read your article on Dore and Plantinga. Without having read either works, I agree that Dore's alternative way doesn't work. Freedom has to actually be freedom to choose, not simply a perceived freedom analogous to the freedom of water to fall.
If it is admitted that the freedom to choose is sufficient to allow freewill, the issue then turns to:
why could god not have only created those beings which have the ability to choose to do wrong, but do not, in fact, commit wrong?
If choice preserves free will, then the ability to act otherwise is not necessary and the abundance of suffering found in our world cannot then be accounted for simply by the appeal to human "free will."
So, the "evil is the result of humans acting contrary to the desires of god" gambit just won't cut it.
The burden is still on the theist to show how this abundance of suffering in the world is necessary. This is quite a trick, and much sleight of hand will be needed for anyone to convincingly make the case for a good and all powerful god in the face of just the lone example I have cited above.
"Why could god not have only created those beings which have the ability to choose to do wrong, but do not, in fact, commit wrong?"
This question isn't necessary at all. It's speculative at best.
One might just as legitimately ask, "Why must a benevolent (but free) God bother to create some free beings who (always!!!!) choose to do good?"
And then, friend, the burden of proof is on you.
Suffering is inevitable among free agents. One needn't show it 'necessary' at all. All interaction of free beings first and foremost involves suffering. Even the Triune and free God suffers.
I think you missed the point entirely here....
There is no necessity to god creating free beings who always choose to do good, but if that is admitted as a possibility and god does not do so, then there is superfluous evil in the world.
The point of all this is that suffering is NOT necessitated by free will -- in other words, suffering is NOT inevitable among free agents.
The burden is then on the theist to explain why god chose not to create this better possible world, in which suffering is severly diminished, if not outright eradicated.
Perhaps you might want to read some Plantinga to get a handle on the logic involved in discussions of free will?
I've never read Plantinga, but one of my professor in seminary was working on a disertation based on his writings.
I don't think you can maintain "free will" with (in your words, andrea) "created... beings which have the ability to choose to do wrong, but do not, in fact, commit wrong?"
How can created beings be "free to choose wrong" and while (as a result of their creator's design), "never commit wrong". You're taking free will out of the hands of the created being and placing the control into the hands of the creator all over again.
That would be like me telling my kids we can go anywhere you want on vacation this year, boys!" Only then to add, "as long as it's Disney World". Did I let them chose our vacation spot? Yeah. But I didn't give them any choice in the matter, either. You're talking about giving persons the ability to choose without a choice between good and evil.
Regardless, choosing to deny a creator because we don't like his creation is somewhat pointless, anyway. I may not like Picaso's paintings but that doesn't mean he didn't paint them. We may not like the "problem of evil" in the world that doesn't mean the world doesn't exist... or that it doesn't have a source of existence.
If you deny the existence of God based on the presence of evil, how do you explain all that is "good" in the world? Where does your standard of morality come from? Why should anyone care about the slaughter of horses if there is not "good" in the world? In fact, we could just write "Daisy's" tragic end of off as the result of Dawinian evolution... survival of the fittest, might makes right.
1. Where there are free agents in community there are independent (i.e. varying) wills.
2. Anything done by one agent that is allowed/endured by the other is 'suffered', by definition.
I.e., there is more suffering* in the world than you think.
3. Community of free beings, therefore, cannot help but mean suffering.
4. Furthermore, it has not been established that suffering is a bad thing.
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* 'Suffering' understood properly is that which passes us.
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Thinking--
Let's say that you had the choice between 10 flavors of ice cream, but did not have the range of choice of Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors. Would you then say that your choice of chocolate mint chip (assuming that is one of the 10 and that you like that flavor) was not free?
The point I was getting at with the ability to choose (as opposed to the ability to act) was that if all that is needed for free will is the ability to choose, than why not create a world with beings who have the ability to choose otherwise who, in fact, never do wrong?
In traditional theology, angels are free willed creatures who, in fact, do not commit wrongdoing (except of course for one very famous angel who is no longer an angel).
If creatures such as angels have free will, why then should the appeal to free will be used to justify acts of cruelty? Surely angels need not be cruel in order to exercise their free will?
Whether we want to construe free will as the ability to choose or the ability to act, we can still imagine a world in which free will is preserved and the amount of opportunity for wrongdoing is not as great as it is now. Why must the ability to commit genocide, for example, exist for free will to be preserved?
And, conversely, there may be as yet unthought of horrendous evils that we cannot commit because of some physical limitation of the natural laws of the universe. Would we then complain that our free will is limited because of this? Should we maintain we are not truly free because we cannot choose to fly unaided, no matter how hard we flap our arms?
The upshot of all this is that if there is suffering in the world which is extra -- something which is not accounted for by appeals to free will, or some other type of excuse, then there is unnecessary suffering.
If there is unnecessary suffering in the world -- suffering for which there is no good reason, or any reason, then either god is not all powerful (else this suffering would be eradicated) or god is not all good (since a good god would want to eradicate that to which it is in opposition).
This, in a nutshell, is the problem of evil.
Theoloblogger --
Anyone who is in doubt as to whether "suffering is a bad thing" ... well maybe they are a masochist or a sadist -- someone who takes pleasure in the pain of others or themselves perhaps.
In general, for the vast majority of sentient creatures, suffering is most certainly a bad thing.
Is that not self-evident?
I think I see your point, Andrea, you're suggesting that if there were a "God" which created free moral agents with the ability to choose evil, he/she could at least place some sort of "limit" on the scale of that evil. Is that correct?
And if we consider the extreme nature of the evil in the world, we can deduce that A) There is no "god"; or B) God is not good.
Please, correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.
Just for the sake of dialogue (not argument), would you share a response to my other point? I would simply like to hear your perspective. This is the point to which I'm refering:
"If you deny the existence of God based on the presence of evil, how do you explain all that is "good" in the world? Where does your standard of morality come from? Why should anyone care about the slaughter of horses if there is not "good" in the world? In fact, we could just write "Daisy's" tragic end of off as the result of Dawinian evolution... survival of the fittest, might makes right."
I guess my question is this, "How do you account for all the 'good' in the world?" How do you account for a moral ethic that would protect wild horses, or the poor, or the war victims in Iraq, etc.?
You're working with a very narrow definition of suffering that has its moral and emotional baggage built in. Once you start to critically examine what actually makes suffering what it is, however, one begins to doubt that it's ipso facto moral evil. I.e. of course it's not self-evident that suffering is bad. It's certainly even less evident that the existence of suffering shows a moral flaw in the character of God.
All that is evident is that the agent who suffers, by definition, undergoes that which is against the agent's will/disposition.
In other words, all that is self-evident is that suffering is distasteful to those who suffer.
In simpler words, you don't like suffering.
Who cares?
It's hardly compelling to argue that God should be spurned or dismissed as non-existent simply because you don't like what He does. Such an 'argument' is an emotional convenience, but a yawn for those who are engaged in critical conversation.
Re: angels, the Church does differentiate between angels that do good and angels that commit evil. Not all angels exercise their free will for good.
I am curious about the asking of the question regarding the need to account for good in the world. Is the presupposition here that without a divine lawgiver, there cannot be laws or standards for determining right and wrong?
If so, there is a tradition in western philosophy surrounding this question. To loosely paraphrase Socrates, in the Euthyphro, the question is asked:
Is something is holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love something because it is holy?
In other words, is good whatever the gods say it is, or is there a standard of good which the gods must also adhere to?
If we take "good" or "right" or "moral" to simply mean whatever god says it is, then we have to ask the difficult question of ourselves -- if god told us to murder innocent children, would we do so and believe it to be right?
Descartes, the famous 'I think therefore I am' philosopher/mathematician who was also a devout catholic, believed that there are standards of good which god must adhere to. [Whether god created those standards and then was bound by them is another dilemma.] But the idea here is that there exists some standard which functions independently of god.
Fast forward to a moral theory such as John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism which posits good or right to be a result (this is a fast and loose rendering) of actions that produce a balance of pleasure/happiness over pain/suffering for those involved, and wrong/bad to be the inverse. In such a theory, good and evil reference the maximization, or not, of happiness and suffering. There is no need of any reference to supernatural entities to establish standards of right and wrong actions here, we can sufficiently appeal to our observations of the natural world.
In short, we can easily determine what is good behavior without reference to god, just as we can recognize suffering or evil without reference to god. We can also communicate these ideas meaningfully to others with radically different ideas of divinity, or the complete lack of belief in the supernatural.
The wonder really is that we have a solid understanding of right and wrong action despite the belief in the existence of god. Reviewing just the old testament, for example, we can see a multitude of god approved, even divinely commanded, actions which we recognize as just plain wrong! That alone should be a red flag that moral standards ought not rely on a conception of divinity, let alone need a conception of god as foundational.
To make the claim that god loves suffering is to admit that the argument from evil succeeds.
The aim of the argument from evil is not to prove that god does not exist, per se, but that a particular conception of god is untenable. Namely, the traditional western conception of god as both all powerful and wholly good.
If it is allowed that either god is not all powerful, or that god is not perfectly good, then the argument is admitted as efficacious.
Most theists would not accept that god is not wholly good [or that god loves suffering] -- what then is the point in worshipping such a being?
Of course, people do worship the one angel who was not good -- satan. To each his own.
Faith is a personal choice. I have no quarrel with that. My only difficulty is when believers maintain that their faith is rational or reasonable, and that others need to recognize their beliefs as such.
Similarly, I see no reason to recognize the claim that
"it has not been established that suffering is a bad thing"
as anything other than madness.
For more info on utilitarian theory, or just to take a look see at defending "a view of right and wrong, good and evil, in a universe without gods" see Atheist Ethicist
According to christian dogma, God is of course, "holy" and "transcendent" and the ultimate standard of righteousness does not lie outside his being but within it. Ultimately "good" is self-giving love manifest in the triune life.
No matter how you try to build a moral ethic without a God it fails. Your ethical may be built upon John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism but what to stop me or someone else from building our standards off the tenants of racism, sexism or terrorism? It is, if nothing else, not a universal ethic to which all humankind can appeal.
I'm not sure where the secularist looks for transcendent values... but for the christian, most begin with the character of God as manifest in the 10 commandments, the sermon on the mount, the life of Christ, etc.
You raise a challenging point when you make mention of the seemingly inconsistent actions of the Israelites in the OT. And while I was given an explanation of sorts by a seminary prof. it would be too complicated to explain here and undoubtedly an inadequate response.
You write in response to "theoloblogger":
"Faith is a personal choice. I have no quarrel with that. My only difficulty is when believers maintain that their faith is rational or reasonable, and that others need to recognize their beliefs as such."
I believe the christian faith can be rational and reasonable, but I do not need, nor do I insist, that others recognize it as such. Unfortunately, you are right in saying many christians arrogantly demand faith of others. However, it doesn't seem to be irrational or a sign of intellectual idiocy to believe in God. Many of the most brilliant thinkers in history accepted and believed christian dogma. And to write history off is equally arrogant and comparable to the pressure many christians place on others to "believe".
I'm not suggesting you've done this. And I do not have qualms with a reasoned skepticism such as yours. Thanks for answering my questions. I'll be back to read more of your articles.
'How can created beings be "free to choose wrong" and while (as a result of their creator's design), "never commit wrong".''
it is Christian doctrine that God has created angels who are free to choose wrong, but never commit wrong.
So it is perfectly possible for God to create free agents who never choose evil, and Christians maintain that God actually has created such agents.
So why did God create agents that he knew in advance would choose evil?
And why does God prevent certain evils (errors appearing in the Bible, the Pope making false statements about Christian doctrine), while allowing animals to tear each other apart to get something to eat?
'If God is a free Being who has created free beings in His image, then one must contend with the possibility that free beings may act contrary to the desires of God.'
So if there were free beings ho wanted Jesus dead and wanted him out of the way, then God could not thwart their desires to have a dead Jesus, by , for example, raising him again?
If God acts to reverse the evil caused by some free will choices, why does he allow other free will choices to cause huge amounts of suffering?
dear andrea, if you are the andrea i knew when we were kids, then i even remember your love of horses back then...and your love of bowser too...i agree with your arguments...debbie and ira in seattle..
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That would be a very good comments in this post. I fully agree with this topic. The article about Dore and Plantinga is very good to read. Thanks for sharing.
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Horses don't have souls; YOU have an indelible soul. I don't need to explain what the term 'immortal' means to you, dear. Think about saving your indelible soul first; then, lissen to wisdom and re-grow thy brain in this lifelong demise. If God doesn’t exist, why do you hate Him so much? If God does exist, why don’t you follow us Home to Heaven Above if you‘re gonna croak as I am? How long do we have to enjoy this finite existence? 77ish, measly years? Compared to the length and breadth of eternity, 77ish years is faaar LESS than a nanometer in the whole, bloody, universe. Why don’t we have a BIG-ol, rokk-our-holy-soxx, party-hardy celebrating our resurrection for many eons? Heaven TOTALLY kicks-ass for eternity. Yes, God’s odd, yet, aren't we? Thank you proFUSEly, for the wick is running out on U.S. … choose or lose BIG time. _thewarningsecondcoming.com_
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