Suffering & Meaning Debate (V)

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevski described an instance of children being thrown in the air and caught on bayonets and another of children being hunted down and torn to pieces by a rich man's hounds. Surely, any of us would have intervened to prevent any of these heinous crimes if we had known about them and could have prevented them without risking harm or injury to ourselves or others. It is even more certain that we would have intervened to prevent at least one of these terrible acts. But they weren't prevented by God or anyone else. If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he surely knew about the crimes and could easily have prevented them without any risk of harm to himself or others. We see no reason why God, if he exists, would not have intervened to prevent at least one of these horrible acts. So it is reasonable for us to think that there is no such reason. So it is reasonable for us to think that God does not exist.

Bruce Russell

The grim and inescapable reality is that all life is predicated on death. Every carnivorous creature must kill and devour other creatures.... How could a loving and omnipotent God create such horrors? Surely it would not be beyond the competence of an omniscient deity to create an animal world that could be sustained without suffering and death.

Charles Templeton

"I always have to think too of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that action."
-David Attenborough

Category:

Education

Tags:

• debate
• religion
• gods
• problem
• bart
• ehrman
• evil
• suffering
• william
• lane
• craig
• ravi
• zacharias

[cwisefool]

To see how bad this question-begging is, let's concoct it's alternative: if God does not exist, objective moral values don't exist, objective moral values don't exist (because God doesn't exist), therefore God doesn't exist -- it's just as "valid" you see -- you can't assume a premise as true to prove that premise! Logic just doesn't work that way! :D

[cwisefool]

"In the absence of God objective moral values just don't exist." (4:44) If we take this as true, then the "argument" at the beginning (0:32) is a mere question-begging (petitio principii) tautology! For it becomes 1) premise: object moral values exist only if God exists, 2) premise: objective moral values exist (which necessarily means by definition that God exists), conclusion: God exists -- or in shorter form: God exists therefore God exists ;)