Sunday school atheism

“Christian philosopher James F. Sennett has said: ‘By far the most important objection to the faith is the so-called problem of evil. I tell my philosophy of religion students that, if they are Christians and the problem of evil does not keep them up at night, then they don’t understand it’.”

I haven’t authorized Dr. Sennett to be my spokesman. He doesn’t speak for me.

The problem of evil doesn’t keep me up at night, for if there is no God, there is no evil.

Notice that Loftus has never made a case for secular ethics. He has never said if he believes in moral absolutes. He’s never said what school of secular ethics, if any, he subscribes to.

Even assuming that secular ethics can get off the ground, Loftus has never explained how it’s possible to wrong a meat machine.

He’s never explained his position in relation to eliminative materialism.

“I’m arguing against the theistic conception of God, who is believed to be all powerful, or omnipotent, perfectly good, or omnibenelovent and all-knowing, or omniscient.”

As I pointed out in my review of his book, which he never responded to, the omni- prefix has snuck into the definition of divine goodness. From what I can tell, this is a fairly recent development.

It’s one thing to define God as benevolent, another to define him as omnibenevolent. That is not self-explanatory, but it tends to bias the debate by suggesting that if God is good, then he must treat all his creatures equally.

If so, then that prejudges the debate by defining goodness in Arminian terms. To be good is to be equitable.

As a Calvinist, I reject that definition. The correct formulation would be equal treatment all other things being equal. But things are often unequal.

The egalitarian definition of goodness is radically individualistic, as if creatures are discrete, self-contained units.

Paul Helm has pointed out some of the conceptual difficulties with this assumption. Cf. “Can God Love the World? K. Vanhoozer, ed. Nothing Greater, Nothing Better (Eerdmans 2001), 168-85.

Let’s remember that a Bible-believing Christian is only concerned with defending the God of Biblical self-revelation, and not a semantic abstraction, in which we infer the nature of God from an unrestricted definition of words like “omniscience,” “omnipotence,” or “omnibenevolence.”

To the contrary, we don’t begin with categories from philosophical theology, but from Biblical descriptions of God. That’s where the definitions come from, not vice versa.

“But what reason is there for creating anything at all? Theists typically respond by saying creation was an expression of God’s love. But wasn’t God already complete in love? If love must be expressed, then God needed to create, and that means he lacked something. Besides, a perfectly good God should not have created anything at all, if by creating something, anything, it also brought about so much intense suffering. By doing so he actually reduced the amount of total goodness there is, since God alone purportedly has absolute goodness.”

One of the problems with this discussion is a systematic equivocation of the nature of the “good.” “Good” is a relative term. Good *for what*? Good *for whom*?

The world isn’t good for God or bad for God. It has no effect on God.

The question is whether the world is good for others. And does the existence of evil subserve the ultimate good?

“Well over 100 million animals are slaughtered every year for American consumption alone, while animals viciously prey on each other.”

Is Loftus a vegan? Does he subscribe to the “meat is murder” philosophy?

I am not a vegan. I don’t regard a meat diet as unethical, and Loftus has given me no reason to think otherwise.

I daresay that many unbelievers enjoy their steak and lobster, so Loftus objection isn’t limited to Christian theism.

“If, however, God did not give us free will, then Calvinistic theology must justify why our world brings God more glory than a different world where he decrees from eternity that his creatures all perfectly obey him.”

Reformed theology has, in fact, mounted such an argument. Loftus simply chooses to ignore the argument—because he can’t answer it.

“No tornado’s, no floods, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no devastating fires, no volcanic eruptions, no lethal parasites, or major diseases like cancer, polio, malaria, pneumonia or AIDS. There should be no poisonous creatures like the brown recluse spider, and no poisonous plants like Yew (eat it and you die within minutes).”

This is a very odd string of objections from someone who says he believes in natural science. These natural forces and natural events have a natural function in the balance of nature, in a physical, functional universe, with a self-contained ecosystem.

“If God exists he should stop all natural disasters too, like the Indonesian tsunami.”

Other issues aside, if you live on the coast, you are subject to coastal flooding. That’s a calculated risk.

“If God allows these disasters for a greater good, what’s the greater good here? Any paltry benefits to the victims could’ve been gained by other means. To say the victims are going to be rewarded in heaven for their suffering can never morally justify why they suffered in the first place, otherwise the final eternal state, even if it’s pleasant for them, only compensates them for their sufferings.”

i) This falsely assumes a one-to-one correspondence between victim and compensation.

ii) It also disregards the fact that, as sinners, we are morally liable to natural disasters even if there is no one-to-one correspondence between a particular sin and a particular catastrophe.

“If God exists he should not have created predation in the natural world, either.”

An assertion, not an argument.

“The amount of creaturely suffering here is atrocious as creatures prey on one another to feed themselves.”

i) How does he know what animals suffer? Does he know what it’s like to be a bat?

ii) Does he believe in animal rights? What is his secular justification for animal rights?

What does eliminative materialism have to say about animal suffering?

iii) Shouldn’t he at least draw a distinction between higher and lower animals? What’s a lobster’s capacity for pain and suffering?

“All creatures should be vegetarians.”

An assertion, not an argument.

Why should all animals be herbivores? Is it a miscarriage of cosmic justice when a sparrow eats an earthworm? Has the sparrow deprived the earthworm of its annelidan rights? Is this based on annelidan social contract theory?

Which version of annelidan social contract theory is Loftus appealing to? Hobbes? Locke? Rousseau? Rawls?

“And in order to be sure there is enough vegetation for us all, God could’ve reduced our mating cycles and/or made edible vegetation to grow as plenteous as wild weeds do today.”

I don’t see many human beings complain about the fact that they can have sex year round.

“In fact, there is no good reason for God to have created animals at all, especially since theists do not consider them part of any eternal scheme.”

If Lotus were God, there would be no rose gardens or camellias.

Loftus has a Scrooge-like view of the good. If Loftus were God, he would pave over Yosemite Park to put in a shopping mall.

But something doesn’t have to be an ultimate good to be a finite good.

Loftus is a good example of the atrophied worldview of unbelief. He knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. It’s all about the bottom-line. The profit margin. Unadorned utility.

“As a result, William Rowe’s argument about a fawn that is burned in a forest fire and left to die a slow death without any human witness is gratuitous evil, plain and simple. It serves no greater good.”

Once again, this is an absurdly romantic notion of nature for someone who believes in natural science.

Animals die in wildfires because of animals, trees, and fire. It’s a natural side-effect of animals, trees, and lightening.

Electricity has a natural function in a physical universe. Trees have a natural function in the ecosystem. There’s nothing gratuitous about a forest fire.

“If God created the laws of nature in the first place, then he could’ve created a different set of laws.”

Now he’s shifting gears. He’s tacitly admitting that these are not gratuitous events, but purposeful events in a physical universe.

Yes, God could have created a world without “useless” creatures like camellias and butterflies.

Notice a fundamental tension in Loftus’s objections. On the one hand, he complains that nature is too ruthless, too efficient. On the other hand, he complains that nature is too gratuitous, too inefficient. Which is it?

Loftus is a standard-issue apostate, and, as a result, he exhibits the intellectual and emotional schizophrenia of the typical apostate.

Loftus looks at nature from the viewpoint of a disillusioned idealist. If Loftus were coming at this issue from scratch, as a purebred atheist with no Christian conditioning, he wouldn’t hold the natural world to this Edenic standard of perfectionism.

Ironically, his argument for naturalism comes from of an idyllic frame of reference which doesn’t come out of a naturalistic worldview.

He’s comparing the natural world with a sentimental preconception of how the world ought to be.

But that hardly represents a secular point of departure. Rather, it represents a theological starting point.

Moreover, it represents a very provincial starting point, which is just what you’d expect given his Church of Christ background.

He’s rebelling against the theological naïveté of his parochial Christian experience. His disappointment with that standard of comparison is what continues to supply the standard of comparison.

Instead of growing into a more sophisticated and exegetically astute Christian outlook, he simply revolts against his Sunday school version of the Christian faith.