Reply to Logician_Bones on the problem of evil

One of James Patrick Holding's followers, some Christian using the name "Logician_Bones", tried to "explain" in a comment why evil is "necessary" and yet humans are still accountable to avoid what's logically necessary....and yet maintain a straight face all at the same time.  See here.  I reply in point by point fashion:

Logician_Bones18 hours ago (edited)
​@PristineKat It's the Problem of Evil argument which I've debunked, so here goes. The bad premise is implied 'underneath' "God made us who we are yes?" that he did so arbitrarily -- in reality, God had to work within logical necessity.

Well first, your attempt to explain evil is making use of an incoherent concept called "god".  This being cannot be empirically detected, but you pretend that inferring his existence indirectly makes his existence as obvious as cars or trees. Try again.

It's been shown (by analyses besides my own, but mine is definitive and fairly simple as a disproof) that allowing evil for a time was logically necessary.

Which means your god, who bitches at people for sinning, thus bitches at them for doing what was logically necessary, i.e., something they could not logically avoid doing....a divine attitude completely contradictory to the common sense notion that it is crazy to "expect" people to avoid that which is logically necessary.

If America's court judges and juries believed like your god, they'd have no moral basis for holding guilty criminals accountable.  If not even God can get around the logical necessity of evil, what fool would argue that less powerful human beings are "required" to do any different? 

Short answer is if we did not experience a fallen world like this for a time, we would not truly appreciate how bad evil, left to itself, is

We wouldn't need to know how bad evil itself is, if god kept us from doing it.   Our need to "appreciate" the evil of sin is simply a non-starter under the theory that God was capable of creating a sinless world.  And under your logic, your god is a deceptive asshole, because he sure does give the appearance in Genesis 3 that he never willed for Adam and Eve to disobey.  At least that's the appearance the illiterate farm hands living under Moses (the originally intended audience) would have gotten.  They did not have biblical inerrancy of systematic theology on the brain anymore than they had alegebra on the brain.  They would have understood Genesis 3 in the same simpleminded way that small children today get from "The Little Red Hen".

-- and we would always think it must not be that bad and would want to try it,

Then God could have created a sinless universe, and the risk we might find evil tempting, would never arise in the first place.  One conservative hermeneutic is to ask how the originally intended audience would have understood the story.  It's obviously stupid to assume Moses' mostly illiterate farm-hands would have had theological consistency, systematic theology or bible inerrancy on the brain as they sat listening to the story teller reciting from Genesis 3.  Those dolts would most certainly not have seen any ulterior divine motive, but would have believed God honestly wanted Adam and Eve to obey him, and that their doing so was just as unexpected to their god as a teen's involvement in murder was unexpected by their parents.

You cannot understand Genesis 3 correctly today because you read it through the rose colored bible-inerrancy glasses you've chosen to superglue to your nose with the help of a bulldozer.  But the understanding that makes Genesis 3 contradict the rest of the bible's fairy tales about its constantly evolving 'god' is more objective.

and, if God gave us freewill mentally at all, would always be angry at him for refusing to let us act as we wish.

Same answer:  if God created a sinless universe, there's be no "don't do this" command that would alert us to evil and possibly morph into our being mad at god in forbidding us to try knew things.

If yoru god was perfect before creation, he'd have been perfectly "content" without creatures to worship him...leaving him about as much rational motive to create anything,  as a person who just drank half a gallon of water has motive to take another swig.

So appeals to empathy with rape victims, murder victims, etc. are actually proving our point, and unwittingly evidencing that God had to allow this (temporarily).

Only in an evil world.  If God did what any good parent does, and prevented us stupid kids from succeeding with our stupid dangerous ideas (i.e., keeping bleach locked up), there would be no occasion for us to feel sorry for victims of evil in the first place, as such victims would never exist.

The skeptics fail to consider that their empathy (when not fake, and often it's somewhat faked just to give an excuse to be obnoxious with this argument, though many well-meaning people do honestly wonder about the argument) is not automatic. They're taking it for granted and forgetting that they got it in the first place precisely because God set things up this way.

No, empathy is part of the nature of a mammal, even if to varying degrees.  Frank Turek does a rather shitty job of trying to prove "god" is the "best explanation" for human morality.  On the contrary, an empirically undetectable something or other than people have been disagreeing on for 2,000 years, is a horrifically complex solution clearly sliced away by Occam's Razor long before any empirically based naturalistic theory would be.

If we rightly condemn a parent who constantly bitches about their kids being bad, but never does anything to physically prevent them from doing evil (i.e., negligent parenting), then we rightly condemn god, who, like the neglectful parent, constantly bitches about his kids being bad, when he is apparently even more capable of interfering with their evil plans than human parents are (coercive telepathy, Ezra 1:1).

And they are undermining it by refusing to side with the single perfect, infinite being, who actually WILL remove evil forever in heaven.

Sorry, your classical theism might be biblical, but open-theism is also biblical.  See God's regretting his own prior choice to create man in Genesis 6:6-7, then ask yourself why the literal interpretation has support from the immediate and larger context, and the "anthropomorphism" interpretation has zero contextual justification.

And you are dreaming if you think evil will be forever removed in heaven.  God approves of and commissions liars while he is in heaven (1st Kings 22:19-23), so if he is unchanging, then his approval of liars is never going to change....meaning his approval of sinners will continue existing even up in heaven.

They're actually siding WITH the very evils they pretend to oppose!

Gee, if it weren't for you, we'd never have seen this truth.

And trying to use this argument to justify arguably the greatest evil ever -- luring others into hell.

That's your god's fault, as apparently his trivializing the seriousness of sin is as easy as a wave of his magic wand (2nd Samuel 12:13), or, if he's in the mood, getting rid of a person's sin is as easy as burning their face a little bit  (Isaiah 6:6-7).  Your classical theist notion that god "must" judge sin either through Christ's cross, or by eternal shame in hell, is bullshit even by the standards of your own bible.

Notwithstanding that we do not believe hell is literal torture, it's still endless, and we think shame matters a lot.

I'm worried.  Whenever I hear Romans 1:20, I start crying in fear and horror.  I thought you said your lesbian friends would be doing that strip tease at my house?  Beer-pong!

And actually, think about how callous the skeptics must be who actually DO think the Bible teaches literal torture!

Then you must think Hank Hanegraaff, part time employer of your James Patrick Holding savior, is callous, since all through the 1990s he was saying on the Bible Answerman show that eternal conscious torment is actually an expression of god's infinite love.  But because James Patrick Holding has no more spiritual spine than a dead-alligator, I don't suppose he'll be calling Hank a "moron" anytime soon.  We tend to think more highly of just anybody who makes our life easier to live, and play down any disagreements we have with such people.  Especially if we bask in their  reflected glory.

You spiritually alive fundamentalists disagree with each other all day every day on "basic" bible doctrine, yet you "expect" spiritually dead atheists to "recognize" biblical truth?  FUCK YOU.

Think about how risky it is for them to behave like little brats on this subject in light of the danger, from their perspective, that the Bible might be true.

About as risky as getting struck by lighting while shopping for groceries.  Let's just say I you are dreaming if you think you've said anything remotely disconcerting to an atheist bible critic. You don't have the balls to debate real skeptics, that's why you gave up your ill-advised challenge to me from some months ago.  Even stupid bullies retain their survival instincts after discovering they picked on the wrong victim.

Especially the ones who will insist 'atheism doesn't absolutely deny it, it just means we haven't see the evidence yet.'

Then count me out.  Both positions are viable, but I adopt "strong" atheism.  I'm about as confident in the non-existence of Christian hell as you are confident in the non-existence of Muslim hell.  Now what you are gonna do, fundie?  Quote the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus?  LOL.

Perhaps if they had logical disproof of God, but even informed skeptics admit that is not possible.

You cannot logically disprove lots of crazy ideas, including those found in other religions.  That hardly makes you worry they might be right.  Quit demanding from others more than you demand of yourself, and you'll successfully duck the "hypocrite" label that's currently welded to your forehead.

(And I know that's definitely impossible since I've proven God.

Your god is logically contradictory, he is "unchanging" (Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8) and yet he loves sinners (John 3:16) but also hates them (Psalm 5:5).  Since the thesaurus lists "hate" as an antonym for "love", we are reasonable to see a contradiction.  You cannot argue there's no contradiction, with the trifle that "hate isn't the opposite of love, only apathy is".  You also cannot logically disprove that the Christian god is really just an advanced space alien who visits the earth every few thousand years and lies to us because he gets a thrill out of watching us fight over what he meant.  But since you don't spend too much time worrying about this logical possibility, you have more in common with atheist bible skeptics than you admit.

By the way, my main route of sound support, the causality proof, also proves he HAS to be 100% good in order to be infinite, and MUST exist, ergo MUST be 100% good. So no "immoral God" argument will ever work.

Lots of dogshit to shovel away here:

a) you are just parroting Thomas Aquinas
b) most Christians think burning pre-teen prostitutes to death is objectively evil, so since it is God's command (Leviticus 21:9), under Frank Turek's logic that morals come from God, it must be the Holy Spirit who is telling most Christians that actions like those commanded in Leviticus 21:9 are objectively evil.
c) You are merely arguing divine command theory (i.e., the goodness of an act derives from nothing deeper than the mere fact that god commanded something), but even the bible says God gave evil commands (Ezekiel 20:25).
d) is is precisely this cultic obstinacy about an idol's unquestionable goodness that motivates fanatics to hurt others in the name of their god solely for subjective religious reasons, when in fact if they acted more consistent with their mammalian nature, they would be less dangerous for society.
e) you are also assuming classical theism, but classical theism bites the dust in Genesis 6:6-7.   Google Gregory Boyd, then trifle about how even Christians far more knowledgeable than you in the bible, can still go astray...then pretend that while god knows spiritually alive Christians can get biblical things wrong, he nonetheless "expects" spiritually dead people to "know better".  FUCK YOU.

And my argument against your god's goodness is airtight.  Under your stupid logic, you cannot really say that rape, kidnapping and parental cannibalism are evil, because your god not only causes such things to happen, he gets just as much thrill hurting disobedient people that way, as he gets out of granting prosperity to those who obey him (Deuteronomy 28:30, 41, 51-53, 63).

Yes, Matthew Flannagan tries to escape that biblical noise by pretending that the "context" indicates that these words are mere rhetorical hyperbole merely because not every description in that chapter is literally true.  But what Mr. Know it All fails to get is a) the rhetorical hyperbole excuse can also "explain" those passages that say god is infinitely good, and b) the presence of hyperbole doesn't imply that literal intent is entirely lacking.  If I told you I "kicked his ass", that would be rhetorical hyperbole, but it would not be merely hot air, it would only mean I described a literal reality with hyperbolic language.  If Flannagan had first thought for two seconds how the originally intended and mostly illiterate farm hands, who were the originally intended audience, would have taken Moses words when they heard Deut. 28:15-63, he might have noticed the probability that these words were meant to be taken as serious threats.  Finally, most of the threatened horrors were, in the days of Moses, realities not only in Israel's past but for most others living in the ANE.  Flannagan is a fool to think the literal interpretation is "obviously wrong".  And plenty of Christian scholars, like Bill Craig, disagree with Flannagan's "mere exaggeration" excuse to take the sting out of the divine commands to slaughter the Canaanites.  Consider shutting the fuck up before you bounce back with "anybody who disagrees with Copan and Flannagan are just morons."  Otherwise, if even the spiritually alive Bill Craig cannot detect the actual truth about the divine atrocities in the bible, how the fuck could you "expect" spiritually dead atheists to recognize it?

I show that when something is logically necessary, it cannot be the fault of the omniscient God who knew it was and allowed it.

Then you apparently haven't read those parts of the bible where God CAUSES and doesn't just "allow" evil.  Deuteronomy 28:15-63, supra.  See also 2nd Samuel 12:12.

It would be the "fault" of logical necessity itself, except that it is incoherent to speak of necessity being a "fault."

But if the evil was "logically necessary", then the humans who committed it were no more capable of avoiding it, than they are capable of creating a 4-sided triangle.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, if judges and juries believed the way you do about the logically necessary nature of evil, they would not see much difference between absolving god and absolving humans.  It isn't like humans have more ability than god to avoid logical necessities.

 The only "fault" would lie in the sinners themselves/ourselves.

how could you "fault" a sinner for doing something they couldn't avoid doing?  Oh, I forgot.  Your blind acceptance of the bible.  Like apostle Paul, you are worried less about logical consistency and more about blindly supporting biblical conclusions, regardless of the consequences.  Never mind.

So the Bible's portrayal of the relationship of God to sin is logically correct, it turns out.

Then because God can get rid of even the worst sins by simply waving his magic wand (2nd Samuel 12:13), the parts or the bible that show him constantly bitching about his kids sinning, can be safely dismissed as nothing more than rhetorical hyperbole.  Copan and Flannagan are currently sorry about opening doors they wish to god they'd never opened with their ridiculous sins of word-wrangling.

By the way, I noticed that you don't couch your logical conclusions in syllogistic form.  I'm wondering if the reason you refuse to do that is because it will make it easier for the reader to pinpoint where exactly your reasoning fails.  If your logic is so impeccable, cast it in the form of syllogistic deductions....where the proof you are wrong is narrowed to two options:  either one of your premises is wrong, or the conclusion you drew from them doesn't logically follow.

(Unsurprisingly to me since before investigating that I had already found that the Bible had unfakeable prophecies,

"unfakable" is a strong claim, you'd have to show fulfillment of the following criteria.

(1) Your interpretation of the prophecy is settled beyond reasonable doubt (i.e., the predictive words are not sufficiently vague as to reasonably accommodate a non-fulfillment interpretation).
(2) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that the the alleged prophecy's wording existed before the allegedly fulfilling event happened.  With all of the Christian scholarly disagreement about the dates of the biblical books and when the canonical form of the text was first completed, good luck.
(3) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that the alleged prophecy predated the alleged fulfillment so much as to reasonably eliminate the possibility of the prophet's prediction merely being educated guesswork.  Predicting in May 2019 that President Trump will be impeached, would mean nothing if he was later actually impeached, as any fool can currently make an educated guess that impeachment is on the table of possibilities, whose probability grows with each passing day.
(4) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that the people involved in the fulfillment did not intentionally contrive the "fulfillment".  If you claim Mary's hymen was still intact during her pregnancy with Jesus, something more than "she claimed throughout her pregnancy that she was still a virgin!" must be shown.
(5) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that the allegedly fulfilling event was a real event in space-time, not something restricted to "heaven".
(6) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that you used the grammatical-historical method of interpretation to reach your interpretation.  We have about as much patience for "midrash" and "pesher" as Moo had for Gundry.
(7) You must show beyond reasonable doubt that you arrived at your interpretation by employing the normative principles of historiography that are commonly agreed to by Christian and non-Christian historians.  You start complaining that Mike Licona's historical method makes it too easy for skeptics to attack something?  I start asking why James Patrick Holding doesn't publicly accuse Licona of being a "dumb ass" and "moron". Fair?
(my restatements and additions to Farrell Till's prophecy-fulfillment criteria, TSR, January/February 1996, p. 3).

Those criteria are fair because they reasonably guard against false interpretation.  Take your best shot.  I'm waiting.  What, Daniel 9 predicted Jesus? LOL.

that the Christ resurrection was historically verified,

Nope.  The identity and general credibility of each NT "witness", and their specific resurrection testimony, is severally impeached on the merits, using the same methods of historiography and hermeneutics that most conservative Christian scholars employ, to say nothing of how such ancient "witnesses" miserably fail the modern American court legal tests that John Warwick Montgomery unwisely aspires to.  Pick whatever witness or group of witnesses whose resurrection-testimony you think is most impervious to falsification, and let's get started.   Or come up with a face-saving excuse to decline the challenge, and just don't tell anybody that one of the other benefits you get by declining is avoiding getting shot out of the sky.

and that much in science clearly confirmed it in ways no primitive myth-maker could have guessed.)

Dream on.  Pick your best example and let's get started.

It is then usually asked, why, if it was logically necessary that we sin, we are still punished. But that question contains the necessary premise that if there are good reasons why something is not suitable to a task, then you should still use it for the task. If we test this premise we see it fails. My usual analogy is to the task of needing to dig a hole to plant a small tree, and the possible tools you have to select from are a shovel and an oven. In the analogy to keep it simple, assume the human who needs to perform the task is also the maker of the shovel and the oven. This person had good reasons to design the oven the way he did, but it doesn't mean the oven is good to use to dig a hole with when a shovel is available! (Or ever!)

But if god is infinitely holy and sovereign, he would not "need" to "dig a hole" for the tree, he could simply cause the tree to magically appear out of thin air, similar to how he magically willed the earth into existence from nothing.  Or did you never read Genesis 1:1?

Also, the mere fact that there are five-point Calvinists in the world who think your theory of human accountability is total bullshit (i.e., Steve Hays, who says everything we do conforms perfectly to god's secret will 100% o the time), makes it reasonable for the skeptic, if they so choose, to kick you and Steve to the curb and consider the whole "why does god allow evil" and "how can we be condemned if we couldn't avoid doing evil" discussions to be nothing but sophistry and illusion based on broken mirrors looking at each other from across an infinite chasm of debatable darkness.  Or maybe you are expressing your Calvinist sentiments incorrectly?

NOW what you need to argue is that the Calvinist theories of human accountability for sin are so wrong, spiritually dead atheists should be able to see why, and are thus still "accountable" to "know the truth" even more than the spiritually alive Calvinists who are apparently blind to biblical reality.  DREAM ON.

The objection then is to act all miffed that people are being compared with objects. But the Bible does this frequently, in Jesus' parables such as the one about the weeds, and in Romans 9 about "ignoble vessels" made from clay for practical use versus "noble vessels."

Then the biblical authors were just as stupid as you.  Paul actually pushed the analogy to the breaking point.  If he likes the fact that the pot never does talk back to the creator (Romans 9:20), he should also like the fact that the pots never talk, act, or have thoughts.  So under his logic, because it is foolish to think the pot would object to the creator, it's equally as foolish to expect the pot to make decisions...meaning under Paul's logic, it would be better if humans, like the pots they are, never made decisions.

Paul's predictable reply, i.e.,  that this is pushing his logic too far, would only prove what's already clear about Paul, that he made arbitrary argument, did not wish to go where his own logic led, and automatically consigned any disagreement with him to the "heretic" bin (1st Tim. 6:4)...making him nothing short of a delusional cult leader.

(The latter teaches my view explicitly.) And there is no sound reason to object this way -- only an arrogance-based one.

It's not arrogance to challenge corrupt authority that rests on fairy tales drawn from a continuously evolving theology rooted in primitive culture.

We are the creations; we should be humble enough to admit to it, even hypothetically for an honestly truth-seeking nonbeliever.

That's irrational to expect of atheists, who recognize they are not created by any god.

So what it boils down to after this is (the point tekton usually makes) that it isn't God who's leaving orphans unadopted, it's people.

Sorry, but since your god empowers pagans to kidnap children (Deut. 28:32) and then says he gets a thrill out of inflicting these ad other horrors on people (v. 63), I'm sticking with specific declarations from the bible in my attacks.

And Tekton would also be disagreeing with Calvinist Steve Hays' view that we leave orphans unadopted because God secretly wanted us to (i.e., every time somebody turns away from an orphan, it was god's will).  Now what?  Maybe unbelievers have some sort of moral obligation from God to go study the Calvinist controversy, while knowing that even if we study it for 30 years, Tekton will still call us stupid if we dare conclude Calvinism is biblical?  FUCK YOU.

  Ironically it's often (though not always) the skeptic himself. (Not that I've adopted anyone, but I didn't go around being obnoxious about it.)
 I've also read Miller's analysis of this, which might interest you too; he doesn't cover the disproof that I do, but he goes into very much detail about the logical impossibility of certain goods without certain evils and so forth that might interest you (I think it wasn't direct to the problem of evil but came up as a foundational discussion in his reasons for the atonement piece).

What a waste of time.  Of course good cannot be known without having background knowledge of evil, and evil cannot be known without having a background knowledge of good.  That's a major rebuttal to the standard Christian view of Genesis 3:  How can god 'expect' Adam and Eve, who were so innocent they didn't even know they were naked, to appreciate the seriousness of his prohibitions, anymore than a parent can 'expect' a toddler, who has never been burned before, to appreciate the seriousness of the prohibition "don't touch the stove"? We are reasonable to say the story is bullshit, and there's not enough evidence in favor of your trifles to render our reasonable dismissal unreasonable.  It's not like disagreement with Genesis 3 is equal to disagreement that cars exist. But because dogmatism necessarily invades the bible study of clueless fundamentalists, I'm sure you'll pretend the one error is equally as great as the other.

And no, the Bible can't be "rewritten" in any functionally distinct way, unless we assume atheism as a premise, which would be circular reasoning, because its moral teachings (this is including the sound deductions from everything it teaches) are the result of God's omniscience.

Have fun trying to convince anybody outside of blind fundyville that there was a time when it was "good" to burn pre-teen prostitutes to death (Leviticus 21:9). Have even more fun pretending it's "obvious" that "we shouldn't do this anymore".  Whenever the ancient Jews were able, they tried to re-institute the Mosaic theocracy (Ezra/Nehemiah).  Only naturalistic evolution would explain why the later post-exillic Jews started pretending that "god" was going to start a "new" covenant (Jeremiah 31).

That doesn't change, and cannot change. Situational responses based on heirarchical moral absolutes may change, but subjective situational ethics are NOT an option for God.

Of course they are.  If God knew what the fuck he was doing, he'd no more have to start a new covenant, than a construction contractor, who got it right the first time,  needs to tear down the house he just built and start over.  Unless the contractor knew, before starting, that he'd have to demolish the completed building and start over.  He's free to spend $100k in materials and labor just to create what he knows will need to be destroyed upon completion, but he's also crazier than a shit-house rat.

Your belief that god always knew the second covenant would be needed, is also bullshit.  The second covenant's roots are no deeper than "Jews of later times became more civilized, hated the Mosaic covenant more and more, but, not willing to say god got something wrong, pretended that god surely must have always known the Mosaic covenant was temporary."  The same Hebrew word in Exodus 12:7 that meant observation of Passover was permanently permanent (olam), is used to describe the permanency of Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16:31, with absolutely nothing in the context to even remotely suggest the latter was only meant in the sense of "temporarily permanent".  You have no trouble engaging in the sin of eisogesis, where doing so will help reconcile the OT with the NT.  Sorry, you lose.

We are not unreasonable to say the person who authored the Mosaic Theocracy intended it to be permanently permanent, and probably would have stoned Jeremiah to death, had he lived in the days of Moses, for daring to teach god wanted the Mosaic economy to end.

If you'd just specify in your apologetics writings that you are like James Patrick Holding, and you don't write to convince skeptics, but only to reassure Christians, you could save me a lot of time.

I've notified Logician Bones that this reply to him exists:

Cold Case Christianity: How God Doesn't Use Hardship, but just laughs at you

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

 

Cold Case Christianity:

Lessons from Law Enforcement: How God Uses Hardship 

Posted: 11 Mar 2019 01:15 AM PDT

One night, officers working the north end of our city were investigating a call of a suspicious person when they saw a suspect run from them and start hopping fences in a residential neighborhood. My trainee and I were working the adjoining beat area and we rolled up to assist them as they looked for the suspect. Once my trainee and I were in the neighborhood, I could see someone run across the street several blocks ahead of us. Unfortunately, once we got to the area, he was nowhere to be seen. We knew the suspect was nearby, so we started canvassing the area trying to see if he was hiding somewhere.

 And because your infinitely just god limits your police work to just empirical evidence, no miracles, sounds like your own god wishes for you to believe that the only hope anybody has in any situation is in looking to the empirical evidence.  How did you discover the Mormon church was heretical?  Prayer?  Or did you look at the empirical evidence?

snip

Have you ever felt like God treated you the way I treat my trainees?

 Once again, you clearly aren't doing apologetics, you are only pandering to those who come to you with their god-presupposition already firmly in place.

Ever felt like God has been unduly harsh, or that He responded to your requests for help with silence, answering your prayer requests with a “No,” or at least a “Not yet?”

 One wonders how the Babylonian women would have answered that after God said he would stir up the Medes to go rape them:

 15 Anyone who is found will be thrust through, And anyone who is captured will fall by the sword.
 16 Their little ones also will be dashed to pieces Before their eyes; Their houses will be plundered And their wives ravished.
 17 Behold, I am going to stir up the Medes against them, Who will not value silver or take pleasure in gold. (Isa. 13:15-17 NAU)

 Maybe you should ask the baby born to David and Bathsheba, a baby your god tortured unnecessarily for 7 days with a painful sickness before finally killing it:

 13 Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the LORD." And Nathan said to David, "The LORD also has taken away your sin; you shall not die.
 14 "However, because by this deed you have given occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born to you shall surely die."
 15 So Nathan went to his house. Then the LORD struck the child that Uriah's widow bore to David, so that he was very sick.
 16 David therefore inquired of God for the child; and David fasted and went and lay all night on the ground.
 17 The elders of his household stood beside him in order to raise him up from the ground, but he was unwilling and would not eat food with them.
 18 Then it happened on the seventh day that the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, "Behold, while the child was still alive, we spoke to him and he did not listen to our voice. How the (2 Sam. 12:13-18 NAU)

Wallace continues:

I don’t know if “love” is an appropriate way to talk about my feeling toward my trainees, but I can say that I honestly want to see them succeed and grow into the police officers I know they need to be.

 Then you are spiritually immature. Your religion requires that you put in less effort to achieve worldly goals, and more effort toward getting people saved.  If you train a trainee, they will have to split their time between work and church stuff, but the trainee who gives up the police academy and pursues ministry full time can do more for the Lord.  See the exact same rationalization from apostle Paul:

  32 But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord;
 33 but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife,
 34 and his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband.
 35 This I say for your own benefit; not to put a restraint upon you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord. (1 Cor. 7:32-35 NAU)

 I predict that Wallace is the most likely of all internet "apologists" to become "liberal" in his Christianity

If I, an imperfect FTO who knows only a little about each of my trainees, am willing to push them beyond their comfort to help them succeed, how much more would God, who truly loves you and knows everything there is to know about you, be willing to push you?

 Irrelevant, your god can wave his magic wand and get even an idolatrous pagan king Cyrus to do whatever god wants him to do, Ezra 1:1.  With such ability, we do good to stop our ears when idiots like you come along and assure us that god allowed our little daughter to be raped to death, for the sake of some greater unfathomable good. 

No, when you have the ability and opportunity to prevent evil, and and you can do so without causing a greater evil, and yet you just sit around doing nothing, this is called "neglect", and according to the moral opinion of most mature Christian and non-Christian adults, such neglect makes you culpable.

If you insist the case is different with your mysterious invisible 'god', then you need to stop pretending it can be beneficial to "reason" about him.  Every time a human analogy makes your god look good, you scream out praise.  Every time a human analogy makes your god look like a sadistic lunatic, you remind everybody that human analogies are too limited to place much confidence in.  Well FUCK YOU.

If I, an imperfect FTO who knows only a little about each of my trainees, am willing to push them beyond their comfort to help them succeed, how much more would God, who knows everything, be willing to push you?

The question is irrelevant to atheists about as much as "how much more would the tooth fairy, who knows everything, be willing to push you?" is irrelevant to those who deny the tooth fairy's existence.

By the way, you are once again merely coddling the classical theism of your followers (i.e, their belief that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-max, all just, all merciful, blah blah blah).  But there are Christians who think the bible teaches that God makes mistakes.  These people are called "open-theists".  See here.

And the open-theists are correct:  God regrets his own prior decision to create man, Genesis 6:6-7, and nothing in the grammar, immediate context or larger context indicate the information in those verses is any less literal the the information in the immediate context.  The single SOLITARY reason you insist this is a mere "anthropomorphism" is because you know the bible elsewhere says God is perfect, and therefore, as a believer in bible inerrancy, you are forced to find a way to "reconcile" that passage with the others in the bible. But objectivity says that what Genesis 6:6 actually means in context, is more important than whether it can be "reconciled" with something else in the bible.

It’s hard to understand why God allows us to experience pain and hardship.

 Not when you deny his existence and affirm the obvious truth that we are nothing more than smart junkyard dogs on a damp dustball hurtling about lost in space.   Belief in a cozy afterlife might help the parents of the child who died in a fire, but your problem is that you try to push that comfort to be more than what it is, as if there's an actual reality behind it.  No. Heretical Christians and Mormons "feel" the Holy Spirit on Sunday morning, but because you insist they interpret the bible incorrectly, this "feeling" isn't from the Holy Spirit. 

So just because something feels good or "works" for you during your hour of need, doesn't mean it must be something more than wishful thinking.

I know I have often hoped God would simply intercede and take care of all my problems. But sometimes hindsight can hep us understand. Looking back at every challenge offered by an FTO, even when it felt like they were belittling me for the sake of being mean, I now recognize the skills l I developed as a result.

 So what you are saying is that if God stands by and allows your child to be abducted and raped to death, this will work the good of causing you to grow spiritually.  The last I checked, the responsible objective person includes ALL the benefits that any human act is likely to cause, before they determine whether such act is morally good or bad. 

Is fatal child rape bad because it degrades the child's earthly life?

Or is fatal child rape good because it causes the parents to cling so much closer to 'god'?

The more you talk about how evil can work a greater good, the more you justify calling an evil act good.  Indeed, it is whether the act produces more good or evil, that we decide whether it is a morally good or morally bad act.  Yeah sure, your bible tells you to avoid saying "let us do evil that good may come" (Romans 3:8), but to me that's nothing more than a stupid ancient author obviously unwilling to go where his own logic inevitably leads.  You may as well call "feeding kids nutritious food" as "evil", then automatically banning any attempt to show the goodness of such act.  Sorry, but if more good than harm is intended to result from the act, then the act is obviously morally "good". 


If we aren't justifying evil by showing some good can be learned from it, then the fact that good can come from evil also cannot be used to vindicate god and his allowing evil

Your obstinate presupposition that God is always "good" regardless of the evidence, is precisely what stands in the way here, and this stupidity on your part stems from little more than your obstinate committment to bible inerrnacy.  If the bible had said the clouds form from god sneezing, you'd be insisting that all weather-related science is a trick of the devil.  FUCK YOU.

In fact, I don’t think I would have developed those skills if I had been protected from the hardships of the job.

 Nice try at justifying evil, but FAIL.  If God can do what he is alleged to have done in Ezra 1:1, then he can simply infuse your mind with whatever skills he wants you to have.  Calvinists aren't wrong to view Proverbs 21:1 as the final nail in your Arminian coffin.  See also Acts 16:14, God opens the heart of a woman who sells purple, which in that culture meant she was a business woman intending to convince other people to indulge their hedonistic desires and waste money and expensive vanities.  So you cannot even argue that God cannot do this until you first make the freewill decision to seek after him.  No, God also turns the hearts of certain sinners while they are in the midst of their worldly passions.  So why doesn't he do to the entire world of sinners, what he does in Ezra 1:1?   Too busy watching HBO?

Is God like the stupid parent who notices the children playing with a loaded gun, but then instead of removing it, simply bitches about it, then later tells the jury in court how wise he is, since because one of his kids died from a gunshot, the rest of the family has, in their grief, grown closer to Jesus?  Well gee, I guess allowing kids to play with loaded guns isn't quite as evil as the non-Christian might have thought?

I am indebted to my FTOs for all the times they were… jerks.

 So when a little girl is raped to death, go tell her parents they should be thankful that God stepped aside and allowed evil to happen as this created for them the opportunity to grow spiritually, which would then, under your own convoluted reasoning, justify them to be joyful and happy.

Do you ever look back on the tough times of your life and see your own growth as a result of hardship?

Do women ever look back on the time when they were raped as children and see their own growth as a result of that hardship?

When I am going through a hard time, I ask God for his help, just like my trainees ask me.

 So do the Mormons.  But you'd insist that because they have a non-existent god, any comforting feeling Mormons get out of prayer, is purely naturalistic and deceptive.  Likewise, if you get a good feeling after prayer to god, that doesn't get rid of the stark possibility that such feeling is purely naturalistic. I suppose the practitioners of voodoo feel exuberant as they dance around slitting a chicken's throat and pouring its blood all over themselves, but us modern day atheists know full well how powerfully deceived these lunatics really are.

And I’m still upset when things don’t go my way.

 Then you need to grow up.  If your daughter is raped to death, this is just god working through his mysterious ways to make you more spiritually mature.  Don't worry, be happy.   The more you are upset at the death of a loved one, the more you are allowing Satan to control your desires.  Remember how Jesus rebuked Peter when Peter resisted Jesus' plan to get killed?

 31 And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.
 32 And He was stating the matter plainly. And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.
 33 But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's."   (Mk. 8:31-33 NAU)

If God gave you a vision of his infallible foreknowledge, which showed that next Friday at 11 p.m. your time, your daughter will be kidnapped from her bedroom and raped to death...how would you respond?  In way that would cause Jesus to classify you as "Satan"?  Maybe you need to see how Jesus encouraged his followers to give up custody of their kids to free up more time to follow him around, so you can appreciate the fact that Jesus does not support the extremely powerful emotional bond between mother and child that typically characterizes the modern American Christian family.  Matthew 19:29.

But when I step back, I must acknowledge that God has always been good to me, even when he allowed hardship.

So God is being "good" to the little girl while she endures the hardship of rape?

Tell that to the little girls of the Congo whose only way to survive is as prostitutes in brutal trafficking rings.

I still struggle to feel “okay” through hardships, both professional and personal, but I have to acknowledge that a good God would not coddle me and prevent me from maturing.

 Correct, a good god would wave his magic wand, and cause you to suddenly have whatever level of spiritual maturity he wanted you to have, easy, done, no bloodshed, no pain, no rape, no need to rationalize lunacy.  Ezra 1:1.

Cold Case Christianity: Why Would a Good God Allow So Much “Christian” Evil?

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace, entitled

Why Would a Good God Allow So Much “Christian” Evil?

Posted: 14 Jun 2017 06:00 AM PDT

 Whenever I start writing about morality or the existence of evil, I almost always get an email (or two) from people who point to the historic actions of alleged “Christians”. For many skeptics, Christianity is the source of much evil in the past (i.e. the Crusades and the Inquisition). For this reason, some skeptics point to “Christian” evil as evidence against the existence of a good Christian God.

That's about as fallacious as saying the evil of the Nazis argues Hitler didn't exist.

While history may include examples of “Christian” groups committing evil upon those with whom they disagreed, a fair examination will also reveal Christians were not alone in this sort of behavior.

That's right, using religion to violently promote causes is a brain fart that infects all religions, Christianity included.

Groups holding virtually every worldview, from theists to atheists, have been mutually guilty of evil behavior. Atheists point to the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition when making a case against Christians, theists point to the atheistic regimes of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung when making a case against atheists. Death statistics are often debated in an effort to argue which groups were more violent, but all this seems to miss the point. The common denominator in these violent human groups was not worldview; it was the presence of humans.

It is also illogical.  How many people Christians killed not only cannot be used to falsify Christianity, but according to the bible, it remains a valid possibility that God inspired the Inquisition and the Crusades.  Those who think their NT god of love would never do such at thing, apparently never read Deuteronomy 28:15-63.

History has demonstrated a human predisposition toward violence.

And Jesus is no exception:

 12 And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. (Matt. 21:12 NAU)

(Wallace continues:)  Regardless of worldview, humans will try to find a way to justify their evil actions.

And the biblical authors were no exception, who think "shut up" is the best answer to the problem of God causing evil:

 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
 19 You will say to me then, "Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?"
 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, "Why did you make me like this," will it? (Rom. 9:18-20 NAU)

(Wallace continues:)  The question is not which group is more violent but which worldview most authorizes and accommodates this violence.

Then the Christian theistic view wins, since it's pretty hard to find a stronger authorization for evil, than God's admitted "delight" in watching those who disobey him, raping each other and eating their own kids:

  30 "You shall betroth a wife, but another man will violate her; you shall build a house, but you will not live in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but you will not use its fruit.
 53 "Then you shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters whom the LORD your God has given you, during the siege and the distress by which your enemy will oppress you.
  63 "It shall come about that as the LORD delighted over you to prosper you, and multiply you, so the LORD will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you; and you will be torn from th (Deut. 28:30-63 NAU)

 If that's mere "Semitic exaggeration", and you don't have solid criteria for deciding what impreccatory language in the bible is literal and which is exaggeration, you open Pandora's Box:  why isn't it mere "Semitic exaggeration" also when biblical authors talk about hell or hell fire or eternal conscious suffering in the afterworld? 

Christians who commit horrific evil toward other humans actually have to act in opposition to the teaching of their Master, Jesus Christ. The Gospels repeatedly demonstrate that Jesus came to “guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:79), and Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies (Matthew 5:44). Christians who have committed atrocities over the ages have had to do so in rebellion; they ignored or were ignorant of the teachings of Jesus.

You completely ignore the well-known divine atrocities of the OT, such as God's command that babies should be slaughtered and pregnant women should be forced to endure abortion by sword or "ripped up"

NAU  1 Samuel 15:1 Then Samuel said to Saul, "The LORD sent me to anoint you as king over His people, over Israel; now therefore, listen to the words of the LORD.
 2 "Thus says the LORD of hosts, 'I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he set himself against him on the way while he was coming up from Egypt.
 3 'Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.'" (1 Sam. 15:1-3 NAU)

 16 Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open. (Hos. 13:16 NAU)

 Copan and Flannagan, of course, say this is typical exaggeration language because the pagan nations in those days also exaggerated their divine threats and war victories.  Although I've written a strong unpublished rebuttal to this nonsense, the strongest rebuttal is the fact that we also believe a person can be guilty for allowing that which they know to be evil.  If you see a man raping your daughter, and it can be proven in court that all you did was stand there and watch, with no evidence the rapist was a danger to you or had threatened you, you become responsible for ALLOWING despite the fact that you didn't CAUSE.

As Copan and Flannagan well know, God "allows" the worst imaginable evils to take place daily in this world.  No, the "God gave us freewill" excuse doesn't work, because that doesn't get god off the hook any more than it would the owner of a dog, known to be violent, who chooses to unleash the dog and let it run loose anyway.  The owner didn't CAUSE, but the owner did ALLOW, and we still say failure to restrain dogs who bite others, makes the owner liable.  The point is that if God knew we'd do all this evil after he gave us freewill, God is not in a different moral position than the pit-bull owner who gives his dog freedom despite knowing the damage the dog will do.

So if our ALLOWING evil is not morally distinguishable from our CAUSING it, then there is no rational reason to think the matter is different with God, in which case, the undeniable fact that God ALLOWS evil, as Copan and Flannagan must admit, operates to make God just as culpable as if he had CAUSED said evil.

Indeed, what fool would say there's a moral difference between a Hitler who allows his nazis to gas Jews to death, and the Hitler who actually orders such death?  Not much!

But in an atheistic worldview (where humans are not specially designed in the image of God), there is little or no reason why any of us should feel compelled to treat other people with the respect that Jesus taught his followers to have for their enemies.

That is stupid, we are social animals, we recognize there's safety in numbers, so it only makes perfectly good sense under completely naturalistic reasoning to band together, elect leaders, vote laws over us to keep the peace, etc, so as to further promote flourishing.  Since we are civilized, that's the way we get things done, even if in nature there are less civilized life forms that get things done more barbarically.  We can obtain all the moral justification we need for our moral outlook by simply saying we were born and raised to think and act like this.  If a terrorist from another country comes to us and does criminal acts under our laws, we prosecute him because we think we are "better", but because we recognize that we need to do this in order to continue achieving our naturalistic goal of keeping the peace.  Although some atheists believe in objective morality, I don't.  The Christians are correct:  if atheism is true, then there's not going to be any objective way to prove that life in 1950's America was "better" than life under Stalin.

If the world is simply filled with species and groups competing for the same resources, and if history belongs to those species and groups who are best suited for survival and reproduction, why should we be concerned with those groups who are not “fit” enough to survive?

It is sufficient to argue that being social animals logically compels us not to just toss the sick to the side of the road and move on.  That is, we show compassion for the purely naturalistic reason that we all desire to live and flourish.  We don't need to prove that view better than the view of a psycho who wants to nuke everybody, before we can have rational justification to see things that way.

History is filled with examples of one population group replacing another in the natural struggle for resources. If atheism is true, and survival and reproduction are the only true concerns, then the struggle for resources authorizes and justifies human violence.

But we are social animals, so it's only natural that we don't automatically wish to war with each other just to weed out the weak.   

Unlike Christians, atheists can commit genocide without ignoring their worldview; atheists have the freedom to eliminate competing groups as a faithful expression of their worldview.

Indeed, America's compassion for the poor has shown the ugly consequence...the poor and degenerates and mentally ill have increased in number.  Evolution is not perfect, and we apparently evolved to have a bit more compassion than is consistent for the long-term good.  Providing for safe needle-exchange, and free STD testing, does little more than help the freeloaders flourish.  We've already decided to limit welfare more than we ever did in its' history, so apparently we are starting to discover that we need to make and enforce decisions that prioritize long-term good of the nation, over the short-term relief of suffering for individuals.  I hope we turn further and further toward meritocracy.  

God has given us the freedom to follow our own nature or to follow the teaching of Jesus.

And there you go again, talking in complete defiance of your Calvinist Christian brothers.  We can rationally dismiss your argument here until you first show the world that you and Calvinists have resolved your differences of opinion over the bible's teaching about human freewill.

Christians who have committed atrocities over the ages have simply submitted to their natural inclination rather than to the foundational teaching of the Christian Worldview:

Matthew 7:24-26

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”

Not everyone who calls himself a Christian is listening to the words of Christ (Matthew 7:21). Those of us who have identified ourselves as Christians, yet have perpetrated evil, are willfully resisting or rejecting the words of Jesus.

 But Jesus overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and the OT god's atrocities are too well known from Deut. 28:15 ff to need repeating here.  Your idea that the true Christian of modern times is one who doesn't commit "atrocities" simply denies large sections of the bible.