The existence of evil seems inconsistent with the existence of a God who is wholly good, and can do anything. Most religions say that God is completely good, knows everything, and is all-powerful. But the world is full of wickedness and bad things keep happening. This can only happen if And so there is no being that is completely good, knows everything, and is all powerful.
And so, there is no God. Theologians and philosophers have provided various answers to this argument. They all agree that it gives useful insights into the nature of God, evil, and belief.
For most of human history God was the best explanation for the existence and nature of the physical universe. But during the last few centuries, scientists have developed solutions that are much more logical, more consistent, and better supported by evidence. Atheists say that these explain the world so much better than the existence of God.
They also say that far from God being a good explanation for the world, it's God that now requires explaining. In olden times - and still today in some traditional societies - natural phenomena that people didn't understand, such as the weather, sunrise and sunset, and so on, were seen as the work of gods or spirits. Where we would see the weather as obeying meteorological principles, people in those days saw it as demonstrating God at work.
And it was the same with all the other natural phenomena, they just showed God doing things. The Greek philosopher Thales moved things on by suggesting that the gods were actually an essential part of things, rather than external puppeteers pulling strings to make the world work.
But there was more to these ancient explanations than gods doing things in or to the world. People saw the whole universe in a religiously structured way; they had no other way to see it at that time. For the ancients, God provided the power that made the universe work, and God provided the structure within which the universe worked and human beings lived.
Ideas like that survive in modern astrology. Many people believe that their lives are in some way influenced by the movements of heavenly bodies. And the heavenly bodies concerned have names taken from mythology and religion. And you'll find similar ideas in most popular religious thinking. Many people still believe, or want to believe, in the idea of God as puppeteer.
They believe that God is able to do things in the world: he can divide the waters of the Red Sea to save the Israelites from Pharaoh, he can respond to prayer by healing an illness or getting someone through an exam.
Nowadays it's a branch of astronomy and physics, but in pre-scientific times it was a religious subject, organising the universe in terms of almost military ranks of beings. God was at the top, and human beings came pretty much at the bottom. In some cosmologies there was also an inverted hierarchy of evil beings going down from humanity to the source of wickedness, the devil, at the bottom.
These religious cosmologies were rigid; each being had its place worked out for it in the structure that God had provided, and that was where it stayed. Looking at the universe like this provided great support for the hierarchical power structures of earthly nations and tribes: Everyone in a nation or tribe had their place, and the power came from the top.
And if God had decided to organise the universe in such a hierarchy, this provided a strong argument against anyone who wanted to suggest that society could be organised in a fairer and more equal way - God had shown us the perfect way to organise things, and those who were ruling did so by a right given by God. It was also very good news for whichever religion was followed in a particular nation: since the power all came from God, religion was bound to be given high status.
The idea that God steered everything in the universe as he saw fit was demolished by the discovery that there were natural laws obeyed by objects in the universe. Galileo, for example, discovered that the universe followed laws that could be written down mathematically. This suggested that there was logic and engineering throughout creation. The universe behaved in a consistent manner and was not subject to gods pulling a string here and there, or some unexplained influences from astrological bodies.
This didn't give Galileo any religious problems although it annoyed the church greatly and they eventually made him keep quiet about some of his conclusions because he believed that God had written the scientific rules. And around this time scientists began to come up with new ways of assessing whether certain things were true.
Things were expected to happen in a repeatable, testable way, that could be written down in equations. Although scientific discovery began to explain more and more, it didn't cause large numbers of people to become less religious. Even many - probably most - scientists still had a place for God in the universe. At the very least, he had started the whole thing going, and he had created the rules that his universe was shown to obey. This half-way house between religion and science still had problems for the faithful, since it didn't seem to leave much room for God to intervene in the universe - and certainly it didn't need God to keep things ticking over.
But the half-way house also provided some support for the faithful. They could look at the universe and see how beautifuly made it was, and be reassured that God had demonstrated his existence by creating such a wonderful place. And since science, until the late 18th, and 19th centuries, hadn't produced any good explanation of how things began, religion still had an important place in explaining how the world was the way it was.
God's role as an explanation for the way things are took a serious knock from the sciences of geology and evolution. Geologists discovered that the earth was hundreds of millions of years old, and not just 6, years old as was generally believed at that time.
They showed that the rocks that make up the earth had been laid down in layers at different times; a deeper layer by and large came from an earlier time than a shallow layer. In each layer were fossils that showed that different species of animals had lived in different eras.
Not only were many no longer in existence but some didn't appear until relatively recent times. This was incompatible with the idea that God completely created the world in 6 days and so scientists with a faith came up with another compromise - the 6 days of biblical creation were a poetic way of describing long periods of millions of years during which God worked on the world.
The theory of evolution explains the variety of life forms on earth without any reference to God. It says that from very simple beginnings, processes of genetic variation and selection i.
These processes are not directed by any being, they are just the way the world works; God is unnecessary. No intervening spirit watches lovingly over the affairs of nature though Newton's clock-winding god might have set up the machinery at the beginning of time and then let it run.
No vital forces propel evolutionary change. And whatever we think of God, his existence is not manifest in the products of nature. Some philosophers think that religious language doesn't mean anything at all, and therefore that there's no point in asking whether God exists. They would say that a sentence like "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is neither true or false, it's meaningless; in the same way that "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is meaningless.
Logical Positivists argued that a sentence was meaningless if it wasn't either true or false, and they said that a sentence would only be true or false if it could be tested by an experiment, or if it was true by definition. Since you couldn't verify the existence of God by any sort of "sense experience", and it wasn't true by definition eg in the way "a triangle has 3 sides" is true , the logical positivists argued that it was pointless asking the question since it could not be answered true or false.
These particular philosophers didn't only say that religious talk was meaningless, they thought that much of philosophical discussion, metaphysics for example, was meaningless too. This philosophical theory is no longer popular, and attention has returned to the issues of what "God" means and whether "God" exists. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject is as being false.
Ayer actually preferred a weaker version of the theory, because since no empirical proof could be totally conclusive, almost every statement about the world would have to be regarded as meaningless. A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience.
But it is verifiable, in the weak sense, if it is possible for experience to render it probable. For if the existence of such a god were probable, then the proposition that he existed would be an empirical hypothesis. Emerging research is demonstrating that atheist parents and others pass on their beliefs to their children in a similar way to religious parents — through sharing their culture as much as their arguments.
Some parents take the view that their children should choose their beliefs for themselves , but what they then do is pass on certain ways of thinking about religion, like the idea that religion is a matter of choice rather than divine truth.
But are atheists more likely to embrace science than religious people? Many belief systems can be more or less closely integrated with scientific knowledge. Some belief systems are openly critical of science, and think it has far too much sway over our lives, while other belief systems are hugely concerned to learn about and respond to scientific knowledge.
Some Protestant traditions , for example, see rationality or scientific thinking as central to their religious lives. Meanwhile, a new generation of postmodern atheists highlight the limits of human knowledge, and see scientific knowledge as hugely limited, problematic even, especially when it comes to existential and ethical questions.
These atheists might, for example, follow thinkers like Charles Baudelaire in the view that true knowledge is only found in artistic expression. And while many atheists do like to think of themselves as pro science, science and technology itself can sometimes be the basis of religious thinking or beliefs, or something very much like it. For example, the rise of the transhumanist movement , which centres on the belief that humans can and should transcend their current natural state and limitations through the use of technology, is an example of how technological innovation is driving the emergence of new movements that have much in common with religiosity.
The science of the biological world, for example, is much more than a topic of intellectual curiosity — for some atheists, it provides meaning and comfort in much the same way that belief in God can for theists. Psychologists show that belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety , just as religious beliefs intensify for theists in these situations. Shortly after receiving my degree in Religious Studies, I was walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with my father.
By that point I had already turned atheist; I studied religion because I was fascinated by why people believe, not necessarily what they believe. I asked my father why I was raised with no religion at all. The weekly class was more social activity than required training anyway. The theater might at first entrance, but the drugs do eventually wear off.
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