If God is powerful, knowing, and good, why does he allow pain, suffering and evil? Bart Ehrman’s latest book: How the Problem of Pain Ruined My Faith, a New York Times bestseller, details his journey from Christianity to agnosticism because he could no longer believe in a Christian God that permitted his creation to suffer. Shouldn’t a good father save his children undue pain?

Darwin and Mills wrote as much. 19th century atheists loved to prattle on about how they “in good conscious” could not worship a monster. They love excoriating God from this ethical high ground, using the fruits of the Christian tradition, such as compassion and the equal worth of all human life, to pummel the faith.

Last Friday night 3000 attendees packed Biola University’s gym to hear more of this exchange when Dinesh D’Souza debated Peter Singer, the Bioethics Department Head at Princeton University, on God: Yes or No? tothesource asked Nigel Cameron, who has twice debated Singer, to review the exchange.

Unlike atheists, God doesn’t have a problem with pain. He created pain. Suffering? He calls us to be long-suffering, as He is. Evil, on the other hand, is a whole different matter.

We need to debate Peter Singer.

He has been called the world’s most influential living philosopher. He is certainly the most controversial. Since he moved from his native Australia to Princeton his communication skills and media profile have made him the lightning-rod for Christians - and also much of the disability community, who believe he wants them dead. He has become our indispensable contrarian: the thinker who presses his thought even beyond the resting-place of those who are on his side. He challenges us, but unsettles them in the process. In one of my own debates with him, I pointed out his utility – a utilitarian thinker who is prepared to face some at least of the consequences of his ideas. We don’t need to invent him because he already exists. We can be glad that he is a pleasant fellow who is willing to join us in debate.

I have debated life and death with Singer. In this latest debate, Dinesh d’Souza tackled him on his denial of the existence of God. Thousands gathered in a gym at Biola University’s campus outside Los Angeles to watch the show. Singer is not simply a theoretician; he defends infanticide and euthanasia, and regards the “sanctity of life” as a mistake. He is something of an extremist. It might be unfair to call him a fundamentalist utilitarian. But if I were being unfair that is what I would call him. He drives widely-held liberal ethical views harder and further than anyone else in the public arena.

Is there a God? D’Souza opened with the 20th century’s litany of atheist crimes – far worse, he noted, than whatever crimes can be attributed to religion, even including the Inquisition, 9/11 and Islamist violence. Hitler and Stalin and Mao and the rest had demonstrated the bankruptcy of their atheist tenets. Singer countered that the debate was not about the bad things that atheists do, but whether God exists at all. Yet he too focused on evil to make his case – the classic case against God, that asks how a world so beset with pain and suffering could have been made by a God who is good. As an add-on he instanced the way in which the Old Testament presents a God who commits and approves genocide; and the New presents a Jesus who expected his Second Coming to happen any time (and was therefore wrong).

D’Souza laid out his rationale for theism: the universe had a beginning; the “laws of nature” had (as Stephen Hawking has said) to be just-so in order for life to arise and flourish. Singer countered that the universe may have had no beginning; that if God made it then where did he come from?; and that scientists do not all agree with Hawking’s contention.

And the debate flowed on, with questions from the audience – some from Christians wanting to underline D’Souza’s case, some from Singer fans, and yet others from unpredictable directions. What did Singer think of the idea that suffering in animals (a big theme of his in his argument against a good God) can be explained through reincarnation - justice winning out as creatures come back to atone for sins in past lives? Singer laughed this off as an incredible theory, and asked what it would mean for a kangaroo to die of thirst because it had been Hitler in a former life. D’Souza called Singer to account for this easy dismissal, and argued that a major theme of all religions is that of cosmic justice: that fairness will, in the end, win out; that what seems unjust in the here and now will one day be set to rights. As Singer noted, atheists don’t find evil to be a problem that needs to be explained; they do not like it, but it is just there.

Did either side win? If I were grading the debaters, I would give them a draw. They were both spunky without being aggressive, and the tennis match of Q and A was well balanced as arguments were raqueted across the podium. Their theme, the greatest theme in the world, was not resolved by a knockout blow. And the audience was reminded, perhaps, that when Jesus debated the Scribes and the Pharisees, and Paul the philosophers on Mars Hill, however compelling their case for belief, they could not compel its acceptance. Some joined the believers; some did not.

So it should not come as a surprise that many leading men and women of our day – the cultural elites who set the pace in our nation and shape the lives we lead – are not people of faith. As Singer pointed out, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two greatest philanthropists in history, are not believers. It is all too easy for Christians to take the view that the unbeliever is not only wrong, but stupid; that the arguments all flow one way; that apologetics, properly done, will sweep all before it. Which is, of course, nonsense – else Jesus and Paul, the Great Debaters of the first century, would have won the world at their first encounter. The unbeliever can make a good case. He can argue back, probe the logic of belief, raise the hard questions like Job did (as D’Souza pointed out), long, long ago.

That’s why we have to debate. We are not afraid of the facts; not perturbed by the skills of those with whom we disagree; not unwilling to trade argument and explanation with the smartest minds and the shrewdest tongues. The assumptions of our once-Christian culture have begun to shift. Time was when it was hard to be an atheist, as the Christian mind was embedded in the culture. Now it is the believer who finds it hard to get a hearing, and harder still to make our case.

But make it we must. We talk too much to ourselves, and too little to the wider world. We have no option but to raise our voices and articulate dissent in a society whose defining terms are now post-Christian. Like the dissidents in Soviet Russia we must not be silent. World and church alike must hear our voice, until like that evil empire the godless structures of the secular mindset begin to crumble as we state, and keep on stating, the truth of Jesus Christ; in season, and out of season.

Disability Rights groups alarmed by Peter Singer's views on euthanizing disabled infants regularly protest his public appearances

http://www.mndaily.com/articles/2006/03/24/67683/

Peter Singer is a card-carrying, hard-core Darwinist. That means he’s heir to the arguments Darwin himself presents in his Descent of Man (1871). So, we are not surprised to find Singer, like Darwin, embracing eugenics while erasing all the ethical lines between human beings and animals.

What may not be as apparent is Singer’s indebtedness to John Stuart Mill, whose Utilitarianism set out the basics of an ethic based entirely upon the feelings of pleasure and pain—i.e., feelings we share with the animals. The result is that we are forced to make room for animals in an all-embracing ethical system where full-grown gorillas and chimps count for more than human babies because human babies don’t count for anything at all.

A little background on Mill. Mill was an atheist who was almost entirely consumed by good intentions. A very dangerous man indeed. As an atheist, he was bent on constructing a not-God morality, i.e., one that did not depend on a creator God who defined good and evil. Since there is no creator God and hence absolutely no moral commands written into human nature, then (as Mill cheerfully admitted) there are no intrinsically evil actions. Consequently, the only way of judging actions morally, so he thought, is by how much pleasure or pain they cause. In this Epicurean calculus, pleasure is good, and pain is evil, and the entire moral aim of any society and any individual is to maximize the sum total of pleasure and minimize the sum total of pain.

The problem with this view, as both Mill and Singer illustrate all too well, is that every animal feels pleasure and pain, and therefore must rightly be included in our Utilitarian calculations of the sum of pleasure and pain. The result is rather morbid, defined by both aspects derived from Mill, eugenics and animals rights. We thereby become a society addicted to every pleasure (no matter how self-destructive, barbarous, or vapid), and so consumed by the desire to eliminate all pain that it attacks every inconvenience as if it were the devil himself. We also become a society that has cast away any distinction between human beings and animals, and is therefore filled with beasts that wouldn’t hurt a fly, but kill their own parents with euthanasia and their own offspring with abortion and infanticide.

Benjamin Wiker

When pleasure rules

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive--in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker.

http://www.benwiker.com

Bishop N.T. Wright and Professor Bart Ehrman take on the BIG questions of suffering and evil in a 6 part "blogalog" on Beliefnet.com

Bart Ehrman: How the Problem of Pain Ruined My Faith

(beginning of Ehrman's 1st blog post in a 6 part series)

For most of my life I was a devout Christian, believing in God, trusting in Christ for salvation, knowing that God was actively involved in this world. During my young adulthood, I was an evangelical, with a firm belief in the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God. During those years I had fairly simple but commonly held views about how there can be so much pain and misery in the world. God had given us free will (we weren't programmed like robots), but since we were free to do good we were also free to do evil—hence the Holocaust, the genocide in Cambodia, and so on. To be sure, this view did not explain all evil in the world, but a good deal of suffering was a mystery and in the end, God would make right all that was wrong.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/blogalogue/2008/04/why-suffering-is-gods-problem.html

N.T. Wright: God's Plan to Rescue Us

(Wright responds to Ehrman)

Thanks, Bart, for the clear and actually moving account of your former faith, your questionings, and your eventual abandonment of Christian belief. I was glad to hear you say that you wrote the book not to encourage others to follow you into agnosticism (though I guess that is how the book may well work rhetorically for some), but to encourage all of us to think. That is something I constantly tell people: I believe in the authority of scripture, and in Christian tradition as the community of discourse within which Christians hear that scripture – but also, importantly, in the proper use of reason. Our culture has fallen prey to emotivism, leading people to say ‘I feel’ when they mean ‘I think’, and then – an easy shift – to allow feeling to trump thinking, and then to replace it altogether. That way, I think we agree, lie chaos and folly.

There are two large, general elements of your book, and your blog post, which I want to chew over in this first response.

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