{"id":6338,"date":"2017-06-28T16:39:41","date_gmt":"2017-06-28T20:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=6338"},"modified":"2017-06-28T21:26:57","modified_gmt":"2017-06-29T01:26:57","slug":"the-problem-of-suffering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=6338","title":{"rendered":"The problem of suffering"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Gerencser<\/a> points toward a discussion at Bart Ehrman’s (paywalled) blog taking-up the problem of suffering. Ehrman writes …<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019m not completely sure when I first started realizing that the enormous amount of suffering in the world, so much of it completely gratuitous, is a problem for anyone who believes that there is a loving and powerful God who is in control of what happens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This points toward what is known as the “problem of evil:” Why does an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good god permit evil (or, suffering)?<\/p>\n

Ehrman rightly concludes that the inadequacy of any proposed solution to the problem, or theodicy, ought to bother believers. For my part, I think that the so-called problem points to the intellectual unseriousness of theology.<\/p>\n

Notice: As posed, the question posits three premises — god is all-knowing (hence, aware of suffering), god is all-powerful (hence, capable of alleviating suffering), all-good (hence, wants<\/i> to relieve suffering). But there is a fourth, antecedent and unspoken, premise: God exists. Here, it seems to me, is exactly where the sleight-of-hand comes in. If you can’t prove god exists — and every theologian and Holy Man on earth freely concedes that when they prescribe faith, or belief without evidence — then how can you make claims about god’s attributes? The setup actually looks like this:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    I can’t prove My Invisible Friend exists, but he does.<\/p>\n

  2. \n

    I can’t prove it, but My Invisible Friend knows about suffering.<\/p>\n

  3. \n

    I can’t prove it, but My Invisible Friend could make suffering go away any time he chose.<\/p>\n

  4. \n

    I can’t prove it, but My Invisible Friend wants<\/i> suffering to go away.<\/ol>\n

    And what is the (so-called) problem of evil? This: Why doesn’t the world look as we’d expect it to look if those four unproven premises are correct?<\/p>\n

    Please. This is not intellectually serious; it’s nothing but tarted-up make-believe. It never rises to the level of a bona fide<\/i> problem.<\/p>\n

    If you look through an engineer’s files, you will find page after page after page of calculations — and every single line of those calculations has a pedigree. You will find right triangles, and the solution of the length of a hypotenuse can be traced all the way back to Pythagoras in ~ 550 BC. You will find geometry that can be traced back to Euclid’s Elements<\/i>. You will find calculus, and Isaac Newton’s proof of his techniques is in the public domain. For every equation in physics, electronics, mechanics … there is a pedigree, a history that names a specific individual who made an observation, explained it, and all those afterward who contested the explanation, refined it, improved it, tested it.<\/p>\n

    But theologians can’t even be sure that Jesus ever existed; remember that next time you hear one of them sneer at ‘materialism’ and aggrandize themselves as learned men.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Bruce Gerencser points toward a discussion at Bart Ehrman’s (paywalled) blog taking-up the problem of suffering. Ehrman writes … I\u2019m not completely sure when I first started realizing that the enormous amount of suffering in the world, so much of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6338"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6346,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6338\/revisions\/6346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}