Whence then is Evil?

The problem of evil in the presence of God has been around ever since humans invented the concept of God. The bible spends many pages throughout the Old and New Testaments trying to rectify the situation. How can a just and loving god allow suffering in the world?

It is fairly unanimous among the Old Testament authors that evil is the result of God’s wrath. God was angry at us for disobeying Him or not worshipping Him as prescribed in His Law. The New Testament authors were less certain about the evil-as-punishment scenario and tended to believe that we paltry humans could not understand the mind of God and that if there is evil in the world, it must be for some greater good. Some of the authors of the bible believe that evil is necessary for the growth of a person’s spirit. Others believed it to be a kind of Yin-and-Yang circumstance, wherein evil exists simply because good exists; you can’t have one without the other. Then there is the explanation that says that God knows best. Just as a parent takes her child in for an immunization because she knows it will benefit the child by preventing disease, but the child has no knowledge of this. To him, the parent is inexplicably evil for doing this to him. These are all described in various modern theodicies in one form or another.

None of the theodicies, explanations of the existence of evil in a world with a loving god, hit the mark very well. They are all conceits. For thousands of years, mankind has struggled with the question of how evil can exist if God could easily destroy it, but no answer has ever been suggested with which everyone agrees.

Epicurus formulated the following logic centuries before the birth of Jesus: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is impotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

Said another way, the Christian concept of God is that he is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-loving (omnibenevolent), and all-knowing (omniscient). And, yet, there is evil in the world. If God is omniscient, then he knows better than anyone that evil exists. If he is omnibenevolent, the he hates the fact the evil exists. If he is omnipotent, then he is fully capable of eliminating evil from the earth. So either God is not omni-something, or there is no evil in the world (which we all know is false), or God does not exist.

I’m willing to accept the possibility that God is not omnipotent. Perhaps He is really, really powerful, but not ALL powerful. Perhaps God is also not omniscient. Maybe He knows an awfully lot, but not everything. I’m also willing to accept the possibility that He doesn’t exist at all. Any of these possibilities would solve the problem of evil.

There is one theodicy, however, that would explain the existence of evil and still allow for the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God. I haven’t come across this theodicy in my study yet, but I’m not claiming authorship of it. If it already exists, which it probably does, it just isn’t one of the more popular explanations. And one wonders why not as it seems to do the best job of explaining away God’s problem of the existence of evil.

What if God allows evil to happen because evil invariably causes humanity to improve itself? It has nothing to do with growth as an individual; it is growth as a species. This would not only explain human-caused evil, such as crime, it would also explain natural disasters. Consider that famines of the past have forced humans to develop better agriculture to produce more food for a growing population. Or consider that the existence of droughts in the ancient world caused humans to develop and build aqueduct systems.

Maybe God, being eternal, is not concerned so much with conquering evil on the scale of individual episodes, because He knows that, on a societal level, evil tends to force us to progress. Maybe he wants us to overcome evil on our own because doing so makes us better.

Then again, maybe all these theodicies are just excuses for an entity that simply doesn’t exist.

Pro-Life is a Euphemism for Anti-Choice

When someone creates an organization to support a cause, they normally give it a descriptive name that let's people know what they are actually supporting: Save the Whales, Greenpeace, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, etc. If someone wanted to give their organization a name that has nothing to do with their cause it might be because they are brain dead, but more likely it is because theirs is really a clandestinely nefarious cause.

Take for example the Pro-Life movement. The Right to Life group claims to be Pro-Life. But aren't we all? Sure, some of us want convicted child murderers to be executed; some of us want to commit suicide, but by and large everyone is basically pro-life.

If a cause is pro anything, it generally means there is a large anti-something following. But what is the antithesis of the Pro-Life movement? You might think it would be the Pro-Death cause, but there is no such group. There is no Pro-Death or Anti-Life movement. What the pro-lifers are actually against is the Pro-Choice movement.

Pro-Choice is for those who support a woman's right to decide whether or not to have an abortion. It's the woman's own choice, to be made by her, in consultation with her doctor and whomever else she wants to invite into her decision-making process. But the Pro-Life crowd wants to be invited as well, and if they're not, they will crash the party.

The Pro-Life cause is not about being pro-life; we all are pro-life. Pro-Life is a euphemism for anti-choice. Of course, they couldn't name their group anti-choice because that sounds so negative and demeaning to those who value freedom of choice in this country. So they had to come up with a less sinister sounding moniker.

Of course, existing under a pseudonym sometimes means you don't want people to know your real identity. To know the real motive behind the Pro-Life movement means they would have far fewer supporters. Nobody wants to pronounce that they are anti-choice. But that's what the Pro-Life movement is all about, taking away the choice of free Americans and replacing it with their own twisted sense of morality.

Is the Bible Really the Word of God?

Is the Holy Bible the inspired word of God or isn’t it? Let’s look at the evidence on both sides of that question.

First, what is the evidence that the bible is, indeed, the actual word of God? Well, the bible itself says it’s the word of God. “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work,” from 2 Timothy 3:16-17. So if the bible says it is the word of God then it must be the word of God, right?

Well, no, not necessarily. Believing that would be like going into a coffee shop in New York that has a sign hanging in the window proclaiming that it sells the “world’s best coffee” and congratulating the owner for his great accomplishment (from the movie Elf). It is a classic case of begging the question, or circular logic.

So what evidence is there that the bible is the word of God, other than the bible itself? The answer to that question is a resounding, nothing whatsoever, nada, zilch, nary a smidgen of evidence.

Oh, there are sources that claim that a plenitude of evidence exists. But they are either lying or mistaken. There isn’t any.

The Christian apologetic site GotQuestions.org claims there is plenty of evidence, both internally and externally, that proves the bible is God’s word. It says, “One of the first internal evidences that the Bible is truly God’s Word is seen in its unity. Even though it is really sixty-six individual books, written on three continents, in three different languages, over a period of approximately 1500 years, by more than 40 authors who came from many walks of life, the Bible remains one unified book from beginning to end without contradiction.”

Really? Did the author of this statement have a straight face when he or she wrote it or was the tongue planted firmly within the cheek? The bible is, today, a canon published as a single book, but those 66 separate writings it contains are about as disjointed thematically, grammatically, and rhetorically as a compilation that might include the works of Dr. Seuss and Karl Marx. Even God Himself is not consistent within the pages of the bible, at once destructive and vile while also being described as loving and just. And the number of errors and contradictions, some of them irreconcilable, number in the hundreds, if not thousands.

The article continues, “Another of the internal evidences that indicates the Bible is truly God’s Word is the prophecies contained within its pages.” Well, there are two types of fulfilled prophecies in the Old Testament: The kind that almost any knowledgeable person could make based on the political climate of the day. A modern example might be the lady who told presidential adviser David Axelrod that Barack Obama could be the first black president years before he entered the presidential race. The other kind of fulfilled prophecy is the self-fulfilling kind. All the writers of the New Testament had access to the prophecies of the Old Testament. It would be child’s play to write a gospel that made it appear as though the prophecies were fulfilled, because nothing in the New Testament can be historically verified as actually having taken place. There is no record of Jesus’ crucifixion let alone his resurrection. There is no corroborating evidence of anything at all, not even Jesus’ birth.

GotQuestions.org also claims that the bible must be the word of God because it has so many historically-accurate verifications: “Through both archaeological evidences and other writings, the historical accounts of the Bible have been proven time and time again to be accurate and true.” This is just a false statement, plain and simple. There are some factual accounts of various cities and events in the bible. The Jews probably were taken captive by the Babylonians and Jesus probably was born, somewhere. But almost none of the “facts” stated in the bible can be historically verified. From the Exodus of the Jews to the Resurrection of Jesus, from Noah’s Ark to the Woman at the Well, nothing has been independently corroborated through archeology or through independent historical accounts. It just isn’t there. The claims made in GotAnswers.org are bogus. The author makes no attempt at all to document the claims. They are simply pronounced as being true.

So is there any evidence against the bible being the word of God? Yes, and plenty of it.

First of all, even IF the original manuscripts were written by God’s dictation, it doesn’t matter; we don’t have the originals. We don’t even have copies of the originals. We don’t even have third-hand copies of the originals. The best we can do is to translate century-old copies of copies of copies into our language and hope for the best. And there are mountains of evidence that none of our copies is even close to what the originals might have said. There are historical accounts of scribes complaining about the inaccuracies of the copies they were copying, because the scribes had multiple copies and none of them matched each other. So which one was the most accurate?

There are also surviving copies of works written by authors of antiquity complaining about the poor quality of copied works. There were no printing presses back then, and the bible is a big book, not to mention that it was not even a book in the days it was first being copies; it was just a collection of manuscripts from various authors.

Scribes even added their own verses in an attempt to make the original fit with their own theology or to perhaps replace what they think may have been lost. A good example of this is the story of Jesus telling the Pharisees that whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. This story, probably the most famous New-Testament story of Jesus’ ministry, was not in the original manuscripts. How do we know if we don’t have the originals? The story was not in the earliest Greek manuscripts we have, which are the ones that had been copied the least and, therefore, most like the originals. That story was added sometime later when the Greek manuscripts were being translated into Latin. And it was the Latin translation that was eventually translated into English, (Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus).

Logically, it seems odd that the creator of the universe would choose a backward time in history, a time when people were gullible and believed in superstitions, to reveal himself. It also seems unlikely that an all-knowing entity would find it so hard to convince everyone of his existence. It’s like the aliens who seem to only abduct and rape hillbilly rednecks in the swamp instead of showing themselves to the masses in the middle of Manhattan in broad daylight.

My conclusion: The bible is not the word of God but the word of man, from beginning to end.

It can certainly still be used for inspiration, if you’re in need of being spiritually inspired, and that’s what most modern Christians use it for. They know that almost all the stories in both the Old and New Testaments are apocryphal. Noah didn’t really build a big boat; Jonah wasn’t regurgitated from the belly of a fish, and Jesus was not really resurrected from the dead. It never happened.

For documented details of how the bible as we know it is not accurate and is, therefore, not the word of God, read: Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman, Why I Became an Atheist by John Loftus.