Francis Collins, the Templeton Prize, and the Problem of Evil

Online and authorial friend John Horgan dusts off an old interview with Francis Collins of the National Institutes of Health on news that he's won this year's Templeton Prize.

Horgan notes that, at the end, where he asked Collins about the future of humanity, he showed lots of faith in god but little in homo sapiens. The questions were really about another issue — the role of suffering in religious belief.

The reality, per Logic 101 is that "suffering," however the word is defined, is not logically necessary for religion or a deity. (Remember: Folks like Theravada Buddhists have a religious belief system without a personal divinity.) Philosophy of Religion 101 will then add that suffering, or a belief in it, is not psychologically necessary, either.

The first is the old Problem of Evil. For believers in a god both omnipotent and omnibenevolent, it's an even bigger stumbling block than the Euthyphro Dilemma. The second often results from attempts by believers in a dual-omni god to avoid the Problem of Evil by citing their god's inscrutability. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this usually involves an appeal to Job, with Christians doubling down by citing Paul referencing Job.

Doesn't work.

This is, as I have called it, the Psychological Problem of Evil.

Either said god is less than all-powerful if he can't make himself scrutable, or he's less than all-good if, other than "stop questioning me," he can't make his followers accept his inscrutability is for their good.

That said, what if there was some new way to get these people to accept his inscrutability? Still doesn't address the omnipotence and psychological evil issue.

There's also a bit of a petard lurking here.

IF ... we did accept that some suffering is necessary for human development as part of religion, how much is necessary and how much is too much? Usually this ends up again being hoist on the inscrutability of god in the Western "dueling-omnis" idea of god.

Otherwise, Collins himself, who famously once said, and included it in a book, that he had the idea of the Trinity be made understandable by a three-part waterfall, doesn't strike me as the deepest of thinkers on matters religious. It's almost as silly as the apple explanation that I heard as a kid — the peel, the pulp and core are all separate, but all connected, and all have "appleness," but there's still just one apple.

Nor does his taking a page from Augustine, on the idea that an omni-god is outside humanity's four-dimensional space-time, makes such a god inscrutable by logical necessity. Per Flatland, such a god could intervene into our four dimensions in a perfectly scrutable way.

I mean, if Collins did a riff on Whitehead's process theology into something even more creative, or invented his own religion, even more, I'd have more respect for him. But this is just plain bleah evangelical Christianity.

As far as what Collins misses in terms of psychology of religion? It was staring himself in his hiking face. The "trinitarian" waterfall is a dictionary exhibit of confirmation bias.

One will be taken and the other left

For people not familiar with the Christian scriptures, whether some atheists, or some Xns both liberal and fundamentalist or conservative evangelical, that's Matthew 24:40 I'm referencing. And, whether riffing directly off Pauline material or not, the "Great Apocalypse" of the synoptic gospels at least arguably supports Rapture-type ideas, contra, oh, an L.D. Burnett at S-USIH, the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, who claims the Rapture is un-Christian.

Baptism for the dead, of Mormon doctrine, is also Christian, L.D. and others. Deal with it.

But let's get back to why that header I have us up there.

In the fairly small town to which I recently moved, a lady announced earlier this week that she had officially been pronounced cancer-free by her doctor after a fairly severe cancer with arduous treatment process.

She took this all as a gift from Jesus, etc. She also went so far as to say, even for comment to the newspaper, that she was using this as a tool to try to convert her atheist doctor.

Erm, not so fast, ma'am.

The very next day, a young firefighter, or rather, a young ex-firefighter on forced medical retirement due to extensive radiation-induced heart damage due to an infancy neuroblastoma cancer, died.

And, where was god then, when in an existential Rapture-like sense, one was taken and one was left.

Was it better for the firefighter to die as gain than live for Christ?

Well, the conservative Christian apologists will offer up the tender mercies of god, the inscrutability of god, silver linings that we can't see, etc.

Then, when the likes of me counter with Ye Olde Problem of Evil?

Some of them will counter with "original sin."

Do not go there, unless you really want your biblical literalism to be that repugnant.

'Blessed rest until the resurrection' — the problem with Xn dualism, theodicy

An old college prof, from my small Christian college, died yesterday.

And, among the comments at a Facebook page for alumni was one asking that "God grant him blessed rest until the resurrection."

And, that exemplifies the problem with ontological dualism.

If, per the parable in Luke, long-ago known as "Lazarus and Dives," the faithful person has an immortal soul that already goes to heaven, he doesn't need wishes for blessed rest. And, to go hyper-Platonic, he doesn't need a physical body in the first place. An omniscient, omnipotent god could have made him a soul-only creature, whose primal ancestor wouldn't be tempted by forbidden fruit because he didn't have a body to be fed anyway.

OK, fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, shot down.

But, what about "liberal Christians"? What do you believe is happening when a person  like this dies?

If he or she has a soul enjoying bliss right now, then the same as above applies to you.

Even if that soul is in limbo, if it's alive in some way outside a physical body, it applies to you. So, both liberal and conservative Catholics don't get off with the purgatory answer.

If said soul exists but goes into "soul sleep," for fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, then why did Jesus tell such a non-literalistic parable? For liberal Christians, if Jesus really was divine in a western monotheistic tradition, why didn't he spread Buddha-type enlightenment about the reality of what happens at the moment of death?

Otherwise, to riff on Susan Jacoby's great op-ed column, it's arguable that atheists can offer MORE comfort at a graveside than liberal Christians, in some ways. Or at least more sympathy, possibly more empathy.  Or, at a minimum, less muddle and pretense.

That said, liberal Christians continue to have available rejecting one fork of the dilemma of theodicy — either god is not all good, or he's not all powerful. But, despite embracing things like a "ground of being" or saying that Jesus' "divinity" may not mean what it was  understood to mean 2,000 years ago, even the intellligentsia of liberal Christianity don't seem lined up to make this choice.

Paul was wrong in 1 Corinthians — a belief n a divinity for this life only can still have power. That's even if it's the power of positive psychology, wishful thinking or self-deception. But, it requires keeping up appearances, or masks, as to what comfort is offered beyond this life, if any. It's just that literalists and non-literalists wear different masks for different situations.

For liberal Christians, for the dailiness of life in this world, does it offer that much comfort for a religious leader to say, I really don't know why those bad things are happening in your life? Does it offer that much comfort when you try to tell yourself that?

At the same time, if you reject traditional ideas of god, whether because you recognize problems with the "problem of evil," i.e., that a god can't be both all-good and all-powerful unless you want to put your own mind inside a permanently black box, does it really offer that much comfort for a life beyond this one? Are you able to offset that relative lack with the degree of comfort a god of less-than-all offers this life?

Or are you able to detach from such questions? And, if so, how do you square that with Christian belief in the resurrection of the dead in general, even if you reject a bodily physical resurrection?

You see, this is all part of what I went through on my journey from conservative Christian divinity student to secularist. In many ways, it was a psychological and emotional decision, after wrestling in those areas; it was by no means just an intellectual one.

But, just as I realized liberal Christianity had to use what Dan Dennett calls "skyhooks" to defend what in the bible it thought worthy of belief and worthy of semi-literal understanding, it had to do the same with questions of the justice of god, of theodicy. (Ditto, if you will, for liberal Judaism.)

And, so, in the face of a Newtown mass shooting, let alone if something even close to that happened in my life (and enough happened in my life at pre-adult level), I couldn't "stop" at say, the United Church of Christ, or even Unitarianism, as I left conservative Lutheranism.

If you'll click the "atheism" tag, you'll see in this blog a series of posts that go into more detail about that journey.

A theological-philosophical mashup can’t save god

A Jewish scholar, Yoram Hazony, tries to make the claim that the Christian Old Testament/Jewish Tanakh doesn’t support the idea of a god who is both omnipotent and omnibevolent.

He tries to do this with an old angle … claiming the “omnis” all come from Greek philosophy, and they’re not supported by the Old Testament.

Simply not true that they all come from Plato et al, and simply not true that they’re not biblical.

The second issue first.

“Second Isaiah” is probably the clearest Old Testament example of the omnipotence of the biblical god. Isaiah 45:7 NIV:

I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things.

Second Isaiah has numerous other passages like this.

As for the provenance of omnipotency, etc., in early Judaism, after the return from exile? That came from the Persians that liberated the exiles, namely from their Zoroastrianism that gave us, as well, cosmic dualism, heaven and hell, etc.

That’s why Second Isaiah has passages like this. Ditto for Zechariah and some other late books.

Beyond that, Hazony is wrong in another way.

Daniel, of course WAS written long after Jews had had extensive contact with Greek philosophical thought. Depending on where you butter your bread on the date of this book, Ecclesiastes may reflect Greek philosophical influence, too.

And, the rabbis by the time of Rome certainly did.

A "more plausible" idea of god might exist, but it's not in the Tanakh.

Second, what is this "more plausible" idea? Is it a "god of the gaps"? Is it a magic-god of Arthur C. Clarke's famous dictum, wielding advanced enough technology to seem divine to at least a few?

Finally, the idea that the Hebrew imperfect is best translated in this case as “I will be what I will be,” rather than “I am what I am,” in god’s burning bush appearance to Moses, is a weak reed. In English, both tenses can be seen, to some degree, as implying continuity, not a one-time event, or as implying an ongoing status. In either case, the Yahwist author of that portion of Exodus wrote about 450 years before Second Isaiah. If Hazony is going to give us an ounce of exegesis, please give us the whole pound.

And, he should also tell us that modern scholarship thinks the name of Yahweh is yet another botched pun, whose roots are actually in the verb HaWaH, to storm or blow. In short, Yahweh was a Midianite Zeus, with Sinai, like Olympus, an old volcano.

A failed attempt at theodicy

Rev. Timothy Keller makes a nice try, when he says that if one uses the existence of suffering or natural evil, and its seeming unfairness, as part of rejecting the existence of god, it doesn't work, because the suffering remains senseless without a deity.

Not true; that's a framing mistake. It's really similar to Gilbert Ryle's idea of category mistakes.

"Sense" and "senseless" are both related, in general, to the issue of agency. And obviously, nature (unless one is a New Ager) isn't a personal being with powers of agency. A good existentialist could do more to straighten out Keller.

That's just the first of four straw men that Keller sets up to knock down.

The second is that this means that any god who exists is less than omnipotent.

But that kind of God doesn’t really fit our definition of “God.” So that thinking hardly helps us with reconciling God and suffering.

Well, maybe your definition is wrong. Isn't it arrogant to assume it isn't? And, that's a problem I have with theologically liberal Christians. It's for similar reasons I unfriended on Facebook, and eventually blocked there, a Harvard Divinity student who claimed Plato's famous Euthyphro dilemma (is "good" what it is because god orders it? then god can be capricious; is "good" what it is by its own nature? then "good" has moral standing independent of god) didn't apply to the god of Christianity.

(Honest grasping of the dilemma, perhaps through distinguishing between contingent and necessary moral truths, while ultimately a failure, would still be an effort, at least, not a craven dismissal. The "false dilemma" claims of some Christian Fathers, as listed on Wikipedia, aren't very good, either; they're halfway on the road to the ontological argument for god's existence, and it's no wonder Anselm is among those making this claim.)

The third one is that some people suffer because they're more evil. Well, about no nontheist claims that. Many of us do claim that, within a monotheistic theodicy, it sure looks that way, though, even if we're not Gnu Atheist knife-twisters.

Fourth is what he says is a half-answer; it's the will of god, we have to but accept.

He spins on this to go to us needing to be like children before god.

Not true. In fact, a god who creates sentient, curious, thinking beings, but then says "hey, wait a minute" and hides behind inscrutability is ultimately guilty of inflicting psychological evil on those creatures, thereby making the "problem of evil" worse, if anything.

Now Keller is just a parish pastor, not a theologian. Nonetheless, he's a pastor in New York City for a mainline, vaguely liberal Protestant denomination. And, he can't do better than this?

What about God and the first tornado. ma'am?

I'm no Gnu Atheist, and I know at bottom line people in general are creatures of emotion, and desire for psychological comfort first, then rationality second.


Nonetheless, I can't help but point out this line from a survivor of the Harrisburg, Ill., tornado, in light of the possibility that a new round of severe weather could bring more twisters to the area:

"You just keep thinking, 'God, please don't let there be another tornado.'"

Sorry, Ms. Wise, but the god you believe in, under your belief system, already let one happen there. Why not another?

IF religious people were willing to drop either omnipotence or omnibenevolence from belief systems, then non-Gnu Atheists like me would dialogue more on more issues. And, this is primarily an  issue of western monotheisms.

But ...  



Or course,. as I've said before, karma is in some ways  worse than hell, so I'm not letting Buddhism or Hinduism off the hook.

Did God only talk to 1 of 2 pastors?

Did the message to 1 get garbled? Was only 1 listening?

I'm normally not like Gnu Atheists, taking cheap potshots at organized religion. But, per this interesting substory within last week's Florida traffic accident tragic pile-up, this is one time to partially set aside those rules.


For the omnipotent god of conservative Christians, of course, the only answer is that "god is inscrutable." Really? Well, as I have said before, then such a god causes psychological pain to his creatures, at least those who would like to believe in some higher order in the universe, but can't blindly accept "inscrutable."


And, contra Gnu Atheists, but contra stereotyped conservative Christian beliefs, there are people who at times wish such psychological comforts existed, but not on terms of blind faith. To use human parenting language, children have blind faith in a parent only to the point in their maturity in learning what non-blind levels of trust are, and are to be offered.


That said, non-literalist Christianity hasn't, for people in the pews, figured out a way beyond this, at least for thinking people in the pews who would still like some sort of "higher order." If this order, power, or divinity is less than omnipotent, while we might yearn for it/him/her to do something, how much can actually be expected?


In short, without endorsing ideas of "progress," in the modern social world, many people who are willing to think these things are at least 16 years old, psychologically. We're old enough to see that, if there is any "higher order," it may not be that much above our heads, and that alleged "answers" for these issues aren't, either.


But, many of us also aren't social Darwinist Gnu Atheists, either. We reject the idea that it's "weak" to feel the need for religious solace (or solace of support/comfort groups in general). And, yes, Gnu Atheists, "name it and claim it" New Agers, and success gospel Christians are all social Darwinists, or the psychological equivalents thereof.

Even Obama over uses "civic religion"

Obama can't even be totally blame-free on this.

Very interesting, noting that civic religion often invokes what really is pure, dumb luck, but noting that nobody wants to actually put it that way.

In talking about theodicy and this issue, James Wood notes:

Either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

Or god, at least as many people see him, doesn't exist.

The emotional power of how theodicy undermines the Western Judeo-Islamo-Christian all-powerful deity was as powerful for me, if not more so, than intellectual arguments.

Unfortunately, somebody as smart as Barack Obama doesn't think that through.

Rightly did Hume say, in light of things like this, that reason is the slave of the passions.