About the Friday Freethought Perennials in general: This subset of my blog is to answer questions, nearly always already answered by me and by many others but posed again and again—over many years and in many places—on freethought, atheism, secular humanism, church-state/”This is a Christian Nation,” and similar topics. These answers are mostly not intended to be original analyses, breaths of fresh air, so much as just putting a whole series of things on the record (I’d say “forever,” except I know better). One source for many of these answers is the 2012 Prometheus Books book by me and my son (Michael E. Buckner), In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty. It’s available in many libraries and pretty readily in the used book after-market. I’ll cite writings of others that answer these things in more depth if I’m aware of them when I post these.
The Spider in the Sink—or How Much Does the Alleged Inscrutability of ‘God’ Tell us About ‘His’ Existence?
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a spider in a bathroom sink. (That’s not our sink—or the spider I saw, either, above. Our spider—I’ll call her “Suzie”—is smaller and much better looking.) Neither Diane or I suffer from unreasonable fear of spiders, so I let Suzie be. (I sympathize with those who do have phobias—I have some of my own. And while the vast majority of spiders in the US are harmless—beneficial in fact because of the insects they help keep down—a few are somewhat dangerous. See https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/16639-spider-biteshttps://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/16639-spider-bites for more.)
The next morning, she was scurrying around in the sink still (or again?), but I thought little of it. That afternoon, she was still there and got down on all eight knees and begged me to help her. Well, OK, she was just still there. I decided in my unending omniscience that the spider might be trapped—so I nudged her over to the edge and got her to crawl onto my hand—and then I let her go nearby. Did I really care? I don’t think so.
What does this tale have to do with freethought perennials? Just that I have been assured, a number of times, that we human beings are to God as insects (or spiders—who’re not insects, of course) are to us. “God” is just so much more vast and knowing and powerful than we are that we simply cannot grasp what “He” is thinking or doing. If we did, maybe we’d understand that all those children and families that died horribly in the Indian Ocean Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004—about 230,000 of them—did not really die in vain, however pointless it seemed.
As the English poet William Cowper wrote, in 1773 (no, none of this is in the Bible)—
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill;
He treasures up his bright designs,
And works His sovereign will.
Ye fearful saints fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.
His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding ev'ry hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow'r.
Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain;
God is his own interpreter,
And he will make it plain
William Cowper (1731-1800)
We mere “spiders” must not judge God by our “feeble sense” as He hides a smiling face behind a frowning providence. As people sometimes put it to me as I was growing up, “Our ways are not His ways.”
But this quite seriously begs the question: how are we to know that He exists or that He wishes us well and loves us? After all, the feeble sense necessarily applies to us and to all the religious leaders who assure us that we should be eternally grateful, thankful to them as well as to Him. And how can feeble folks like all of us make correct sense of any holy books, either? or know which ones really are “holy”?
If God is too much above our intelligence to understand, it makes no sense to try to obey or worship Him.
The whole He-is-so-much-beyond-our-understanding bit moves the theistic defense not a centimeter closer to the goal, because it includes at its core the idea that nothing rational can even be offered.
Suzie didn’t express any gratitude to me (and it’d surely be petty of me to think she should’ve) and I don’t even have a clue what happened to her next. She hasn’t been back to the sink, that I know of.
Should I worry? Should you? Should she?
Got a question?—or an answer—let me know.
Happy Flag Day if you’re an American. Especially if, like MrTenorSax or OGH, you’ve worn the uniform of this nation.
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Why does there seem to be so much pointless, unnecessary, and gratuitous evil? Here are two answers:
1) That evil really is pointless, unnecessary, and gratuitous.
2) All of that evil (all of it, down to the last starving child) is necessary for the realization of God's Wonderful Plan which, over the course of eternity, will redeem all that evil.
It seems to me to be an acceptable epistemological rule is "If, by our best lights, it seems that X, then we can reasonably believe that X even though possibly not-X." Our best science tells us that the earth is about 4.6 billion years old. We certainly can accept this even though it is possible that the universe was created five minutes ago with everything looking old and our apparent memories being illusory. So, if theists want to make any headway with promoting #2, they need to show that it is not just possible but probable. However, the utter unknowability of God's putative plan makes such an argument impossible. What possible good could redeem the most horrendous evils? Either it would be a good of the sort we know or some kind of good of which we have no knowledge. Yet, no amount of any good that we know of could redeem the worst evils. If, on the other hand, it is some putative unknown good, then, since it is unknown, it cannot be adduced as even a possible compensation for evil, much less a probable one.
All makes sense and thanks for saving Susie. But doesn't their answer come in the - god coming to earth to show his love story?