As promised, here is Part 1A of the case against God which I outlined in my last post:

1) The word “God” denotes an incomprehensible concept. A nonsensical concept. A concept as contradictory and absurd as “married bachelor” or “four-sided triangle.”

A) “God” is commonly described in my culture as all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. But as many others before me have pointed out, these three qualities are in conflict. If God really was all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, evil could not exist. But evil does exist. So: Either God isn’t all-powerful, and thus cannot eliminate evil; or God isn’t all-knowing, and thus doesn’t know evil exists (or how to eliminate it); or God isn’t all-good and has either created evil or allows evil to persist.

Theists have attempted to resolve this irresolvable conflict in several ways:

—– “The evil is only apparent. In reality, evil is merely goodness in disguise.” Which basically means that theists can look at an infant dying in agony in a cancer ward and declare “Don’t be fooled – this is really good!” I believe people who can say such things are a danger to themselves and others. Why? Because they’re basically saying that theycannot tell good from bad, so how can we trust them not to do what is generally considered to be bad? Their point of view basically destroys the distinction between good and bad, and renders every action as good (or bad) as every other. That’s madness. (And if that’s a bad conclusion – well, how in the world would these theists know it? How do they know it isn’t only apparently bad? Answer: They can’t. They’ve removed themselves from the debate by in effect declaring themselves too stupid to tell the difference between even the most obvious examples of good and bad.)

—– “We deserve the evil we suffer.” Really? Infants deserve to die in agony? Tens of thousands of people in India recently deserved to be killed by an earthquake? To conclude that infants, children, and vast numbers of people who apparently have done no one any harm nonetheless deserve to suffer and die of cancer, in natural disasters, and in countless other terrible ways would be a horrid conclusion in any case, but it is especially horrid given that there is no objective evidence whatsoever to support it or its premises. This reveals a frightening willingness on the part of some theists to believe whatever horrid things they must in order to remain theists.

And this particular horrid belief that “We deserve the evil we suffer” would seem to imply that we should “resist not evil” (as the New Testament in fact explicitly tells us in Matthew 5:39). After all, if we deserve evil, attempts to escape it are like a convicted criminal attempting to escape a justly imposed prison sentence. So: Why do theists who believe “evil is good” fund cancer research? Why do they design buildings to withstand earthquakes sent to punish us for our evil? (How do they even distinguish between “good evil” and “evil which deserves punishment”?) Why do they take aspirin when they have a headache? Why do they pay taxes to fund a military meant to defend them from evil invaders? If theists believe they truly deserve evil, why don’t they simply lay down and allow it to wash over them endlessly and without complaint? If they truly believe evil is merely good incognito, and that no evil ever occurs without God’s approval, what’s to keep them from inflicting evil on everyone they see in the belief that they’re actually doing good? Once again, the theist position seems to be a form of dangerous madness.

—– “Human logic is not God’s logic.” When confronted with the above objections, theists will often resort to this claim in a desperate attempt to protect their belief that God exists no matter what. In doing so, however, the theist is once again embracing ignorance and contradiction instead of rejecting them; and in the process, the theist forfeits his or her right to be taken seriously. When theists say that evil (the most obvious of imperfections) is a perfect God’s way, theists aren’t successfully saving their belief in God – they’re destroying the logic and rationality on which all rational belief must be grounded. When it’s clearly demonstrated to theists that their beliefs aren’t grounded in rationality, they don’t revise their beliefs as sane people do (or the way mathematicians revise their answers when errors in their addition are clearly pointed out) – they abandon rationality by claiming that “God’s logic and perfection is beyond our comprehension.” But this is merely another way of saying “God is incomprehensible.”

Such incomprehensible things cannot and should not be believed in anymore than sums resulting from incorrectly added numbers ought to be believed in.

And things beyond human logic are by definition absurd.

Go to Part 2B