Why hello my fellow apes, I hope you’re well. As a naturalist,
I’m convinced that your time as a conscious being is limited, and so I consider every minute you
grant me to be of infinite value. Thank you. As not to waste said time, let’s not beat around
the burning bush. When one speaks of theism within our culture they are almost always referring to
capital G God—that is, the God of Abraham. Theism, then, for our purpose, is the proposition that an
ALL-powerful and ALL-loving God exists, which entails that he has unlimited power and will
always act as to create the greater good. Now let's define rationality. Rationality
is the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic, and I
think it’s best conveyed through an example: Hundreds of years ago, it was rational to believe
that diseases such as cholera, chlamydia, and the Black Death were caused by miasma (bad air).
After all, wherever there was foul odours, such as by sewers and crowded urban slums, there were
diseases. Belief in miasma was based on the best evidence of the day. It was a rational belief.
Today, however, we know that these diseases are not caused by bad air. We in fact have
so much evidence to the contrary that we now consider it irrational
to believe the miasma theory of disease. A belief is rational, then, if and only if
that belief is in accordance with the reason and evidence available to the believer. So,
yes, most of our beliefs are rational, but that doesn't mean they’re true! Whether
something is true and whether something is rational are two different propositions.
And of the beliefs we hold that are not rational we typically maintain them because we haven’t
considered, much less even recognised, the absence of their evidential and logical support.
Instead, we’ve leaned on intuition, authoritative figures, and cognitive bias.
That said, there is a pretty famous other way to maintain irrational beliefs that
some even venerate—namely, faith. Per Hebrews 11, “Faith is the substance
of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. To have faith is to
believe in a proposition despite their NOT being sufficient evidence for doing so.
So there’s our keywords front and centre. Now we can dive into the juicy parts,
and we’ll start with the worm in Adam’s Apple the problem of evil.
By virtue of God being all-powerful, we know he can prevent evil,
and by virtue of him being all-loving, we know that he wants to prevent evil.
And yet, when we stroll through the remains of mass extinctions and witness natural disasters,
predation, parasitic diseases, and other forms of suffering in the world,
it appears obvious (and I mean really, really obvious) that we’re beset by gratuitous evil—that
is, evil that does not serve any greater purpose or lead to any greater good.
This poses a significant “problem” for all followers of this classical God. By maintaining
that an all-powerful and all-loving God exists theists are committed to a worldview that cannot
admit of any gratuitous evil whatsoever. None! Every single instance of gratuitous evil
must necessarily be an illusion. So when, for instance, we discuss a mass
extinction (in which millions of sentient beings suffer horrendous and often prolonged deaths),
rather than recognising that, yes gratuitous evil exists theists have to spin a story (a theodicy)
so that they can confidently declare, “This must be for the best somehow!
And they must do this with every instance of apparent gratuitous evil! This can’t
be stressed enough. Be it natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes;
or human atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, theists must continue to
insist that “well, I know it doesn’t look like it but this must be for the best somehow”.
To really get this on this table, let’s list a few more instances of what appears to be evil.
Leukaemia in children. Forest fires that incinerate wildlife. Infectious diseases,
such as malaria, smallpox and HIV. Birth defects that often deform and
cripple an animal’s capacity to survive. Then we have predators such as lions,
crocodiles, and snakes that must (I repeat, must) inflict untold
horrors on other sentient beings to survive. These predators are designed, through evolution
or creation, to do this! This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! God gave them their weapons, and ensured
that they must use them on the innocent! And what about parasites, such as ticks,
fleas, and tapeworms? With the life cycle of some consisting of eating their host
from the inside out. These teleological evils, we’re told, must be for the best somehow!
To believe this, I argue, is to be profoundly irrational. Having a faith this strong only
serves to protect YOU from reason. Now, in my experience, theists tend to
fail in grasping the irrationality at play here, and so let me flip the script through the work
of Stephen Law: Suppose that I believed in an all-powerful and all-EVIL God which
entails that he has unlimited power and will always act as to create the greater evil.
And when I'm presented with something that’s seemingly obviously good, such as children playing
as they cultivate life-long friendships and love, I argue that this is an illusion of good.
Can’t you see that God has intentionally allowed for moments of good as a way to intensify the
suffering that follows? After all, if you didn’t love that person before God gave them cancer,
then you wouldn’t have experienced the pain that you still do even to this day. God is
wise in his cruelty, don’t you know? Then suppose you gave me countless other
examples of seemingly obvious good, and yet I didn’t budge at all. No, I confidently declare,
“this all might appear rather lovely, but I assure you, this must be for the worst somehow!”
Technically, I would, indeed, be telling a consistent story here. My “theodicy” provides
a possible account, but mere possibility doesn’t imply high probability, does it? The fact that
it’s possible that an evil God exists doesn’t mean it’s rational to believe as much.
You may find the evil God concept facetious, but make no mistake about it,
this IS a parity of precisely the irrationality of Abrahamic theism.
The last thing I’ll bring up is soteriological confusion: According to the vast majority of
theists, God, in his goodness, offers salvation, and the lack of accepting
this great gift is of eternal consequence. In the case of many of you listening today,
a condition of salvation is conviction in a set of propositions—for example,
that God as defined exists, that Jesus resurrected or that Gabriel spoke to Muhammed. Hence, if I
die as I am now (a non-believer) I face at best annihilation, and at worst eternal torment! Yes,
some theists believe that eventually all will go to heaven, but this belief (universalism) is
today as it has always been—a fringe view that requires such vague interpretation of scripture
as to give the idea that God doesn’t ordain slavery a run for its money.
This threat of eternal torment is terrifying enough, but it gets worse!
Most Christians (let alone Muslims and Jews) can’t even agree on what’s necessary for
salvation! And their disagreements are only growing every year!
Hence, most theists agree that salvation is necessary to avoid
eternal catastrophe, and yet they do not agree on what's necessary to avoid it.
Tying these threads alone, yields a story of ludicrous contradiction!
Despite being told the mind of God is inconceivable to us mere mortals,
we do apparently know that he acts for the greater good, and that this all-powerful and all-loving
unembodied mind has created a hoop for us to jump through; a hoop that, in his mysterious ways,
he’s made appear very unlikely to exist at all! And of those that are nevertheless convinced of
the hoop’s existence they don’t agree on what it looks like, what it’s made of,
or where it’s located. And of course, for those of us so made as not to see the hoop,
instead being perplexed by the millions arguing for their favoured contradiction
we'll be eternally forsaken… which, all together now, “must be for the best somehow”.
I propose that this is the most absurd, ridiculous, irrational tale ever sold,
and it’s bought with emotional currency… not rationality! Thanks.