I am amazed that someone living in this century could be so backwards in his logic, but the religious never fail to surprise me. This is in response to Nick Elledge’s article.

“It [evil] is the absence of good. God is the source of all life and joy – to rebel against Him is to be removed from his goodness, which results in the spiritual evils of sin and selfishness, as well as physical pain.”

Let me modify Epicurus’s argument to suit your definition of evil. Is God willing to prevent the absence of good but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able but not willing to prevent the absence of good? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then why is there the absence of good? Is He neither willing nor able? Then why call Him God?

The argument still stands even if you try to change your definition of evil. Also you should be more specific about what it means to “rebel” against God. Presumably you are under the impression that any sort of inquiry or questioning of God is somehow to rebel against Him, but of course, this is the fallacy of circular reasoning since you presupposed the existence of God.

“We are good people. Is this necessarily so? If sin is failure to love and serve and surrender to God, and if sin puts distance between us and God, then it is quite possible that we deserve the evils we experience.”

Once again, you are redefining sin and evil but I’ve just shown that redefining sin and evil doesn’t change the problem of evil. This statement presupposes that those who really believe and “serve” and “surrender” to God somehow do not have bad things happen to them. Don’t trivialize people’s suffering to accommodate your world view.

“Truthfully, pain often produces character, wisdom, and compassion. It is not true that all things are good (E.g. being raped), but it is true that, “all things work together for good to those who love God.” The most joyful people I’ve met are those who have experienced great pain.”

I am amazed at how backwards your view of the world is and I really think you just proved my point. People like you only strengthen my point that for good people to do bad things, it takes religion. So because rape is arbitrarily out of the picture, what about domestic violence or child molestation? “Yeah, don’t worry Billy, you’ll thank me later and you will have greater character, wisdom and compassion. Now take your pants off.”

“Animals don’t understand everything about humans so how can you and I expect to know the motivations and reasons of God? It is not true that we must be able to understand and explain every evil in the world in order for us to rationally accept God’s goodness and power.”

It’s not a very helpful proposition to say that something is unknowable. If you are going to go this route, you have to take it on face value and say nothing else about it. Kant made a serious mistake when talking about the nominal realm because he proposed a realm in which there is no definitive property or interaction with things in the real world. Of course if you are going to say something like this, you have to be able to defend it and this sort of forces one to say something about the unknowable. In the end it is self-defeating. So what is going to be? God is unknowable and has unknowable characteristics? Or that God has knowable properties and a knowable existence? Because if you take the latter, your argument fails and if you take the former, you are forced into total skepticism of God.

“Belief in God is actually what provides a sound foundation for the existence of good and evil. An atheist cannot to an objective and universal standard of right and wrong, only to a subjective personal one which can be imposed on others by persuasion of force, but is not, in the end absolutely true.”

Yes, we can all see how sound your foundation for the existence of good and evil is, especially when you changed your definition of sin and evil to accommodate your subjective personal world view. You must be part of the school of thought that thinks that atheists are immoral. You might want to actually go up and talk to people who have opposing views than yours so you can actually make more robust arguments. I can only assume that you only look for arguments that already support how you think the world is because you so readily quote Pascal and C.S. Lewis, both people who have been heavily criticized by philosophers.

Ken Ueda is a senior math, physics and philosophy triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].