I am doing the AHS Annual General Meeting next weekend in Birmingham.. go here.
AHS AGM 2012: The Evil God Challenge with Stephen Law
01:50, Thursday, 28th of June 2012 in AGM , Events
Stephen Law
AHS AGM Talk at 15:00 on Sunday 8th July
Those who believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing and supremely benevolent God face a very significant problem - there appears to be overwhelming empirical evidence against what they believe. The world contains so much evil seemingly pointless pain and suffering that it cannot plausibly be considered the creation of a such a God. Maybe there's some sort of cosmic intelligence behind the universe, but it is not that one. But of course, as we all know, those who believe in such a God have developed all sorts of ingenious ways of explaining away the evil - in terms of free-will, character-building, God's mysterious ways, and so on. We will look at some of the most popular explanations. and then look at a novel, and psychologically very effective, way of revealing just how hopeless these explanations are.
Law has written several books including “Believing Bullshit” and “The Philosophy Gym”, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Commerce and also runs Centre for Inquiry UK, a science and education-centric organisation.
Tickets for the AHS AGM are still available and there are a few places left in the hostel for those who want them - BOOK NOW to ensure you don't miss out!
Written by Michael Paynter
On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
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