Evil and atheism

I'm in the process of reading the book God Forsaken by Dinesh D'Souza because someone recommended it to me as the "definitive" book on the problem of evil. As I've already written about before, I'm having a crisis of faith with respect to the evil I am seeing in the world right now. Can God be good and evil on the level we see today be happening? I see genocide in Gaza, as well as other places in the world, including America, where legislation currently making its way through Congress would amount to genocide of transgender people in America.

I just read a chapter that gave me food for thought, in which D'Souza examines the idea that the burden of proof is entirely on theists. He argues that there are flaws in the atheist view that require explanation, but I only find some of his claims convincing.

D'Souza points out that many atheists have argued that the reason religion exists is essentially wish fulfillment. We live in a world full of pain and suffering, so we imagine that God will take us in the next life to a place called heaven where there is no suffering. He admits that heaven seems like wish fulfillment, but how can atheists explain hell? There's nothing comforting in the idea that there is a place where the suffering is both worse and eternal, is there? My thought on this is that I don't know if he's talked to the right atheists; there's a twofold purpose to the invention of hell, and that is (1) to keep believers in line and (2) to have something to scare unbelievers with. Also, I suppose to a lesser extent, it gives believers a feeling of superiority, which you sometimes see in a Christian telling an atheist, "You think your logic is so clever, but you won't feel so clever in the lake of fire!" Ugly, but it certainly happens.

D'Souza talks about how atheists point out that God is curiously absent for something like 100 million years of humanity's existence, and the reveals himself to a single Hebrew, so how does that make sense? D'Souza points out a couple of things. First, although homo sapiens was around for a long time before Christianity, only about 2% of all humans who ever existed lived before Christ, so perhaps the timing is actually rather fortuitous. Secondly, although homo sapiens was around for so long, before around 35 thousand years ago, humans accomplished almost nothing, and then suddenly they invented agriculture, art, language, and complex tools. D'Souza suggests that this shift may have been the result of divine intervention, and atheists have no solution for why this shift happened, and why so late given that homo sapiens didn't seem to have evolved much in 100 thousand years. It seems to me however that the invention of agriculture in itself would have played a pivotal role in the development of all of the rest. With agriculture comes culture, because we change as a species from nomadic hunter gatherers to people who take up a specific space. That creates culture.

D'Souza briefly touches on the problem of objective morality, pointing out how C. S. Lewis argues that if an atheist claims something violates a moral standard, there must be a standard giver. D'Souza admits this argument may not be very good, and as for myself, I think it's rather simple to conceive of a moral standard based on whether one is creating pleasure or suffering, or perhaps, as I myself have argued recently, on consent.

D'Souza claims that the real problem with evil is the extremes thereof. If we're just evolved animals, why is it that other animals will inflict suffering if it leads to their survival (such as a lion killing an antelope to feed its family), but they don’t do things like torture or genocide? These things do nothing to increase our fitness for survival, so why do they happen? D'Souza doesn’t really flesh out the theistic solution here as he challenges the atheist, but I assume it has something to do with sin or even the devil. I don't know about torture per se, but when it comes to genocide, I have actually read some very compelling arguments from an evolutionary perspective. There apparently was a period of time when the world was inhabited by something like six separate species of hominid, and then all of them died out except for homo sapiens. Some have suggested that it wasn't some inherent inferiority of the others, but rather that for some unknown reason an instict was born into us that drove us to kill everything that was similar to us, but not exactly like us, so sapiens became the dominant species. (I've even heard it suggested that this might be why we have the "uncanny valley" effect: something that looks really close to human but not quite is perceived as dangerous.) So as ugly as it seems, genocide could conceivably be bred into humans due to our evolutionary history.

D'Souza's final argument in the chapter is probably his strongest. He argues that humans simply have limited knowledge and reasoning, and because of this, we can't really say that any particular evil or suffering is without purpose. Like a parent can't really explain to their two-year-old child why they have to be poked by a needle at the doctor's office, perhaps it's simply beyond our comprehension why some suffering happens, but God's understanding is limitless. Thus, an atheist can't reasonably claim that there is such a thing as "needless suffering". The only problem I see with this argument is that it cuts both ways; while atheists indeed can't prove that any instance of suffering is without purpose, that in itself doesn't prove that it does have purpose.

I'm continuing to read this book, and I'm continuing to discuss the problem of evil with people of a variety of viewpoints. In the meantime, evil in the world continues, and so much of it inflicted by my government.