Emma Goldman-The Philosophy of Atheism

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was a major figure in the history of American radicalism and feminism. Goldman was well known during her life, described as—among other things—“the most dangerous woman in America” but her fame has greatly faded. During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking “rebel woman” by admirers and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues including atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, prisons, capitalism, marriage, free love and homosexuality. Her criticism of mandatory conscription of young men into the military during World War I led to a two year imprisonment followed by her deportation in 1919. For the rest of her life until her death in 1940, she continued to participate in the social and political movements of the age, from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War.

I have found Goldman to be an amazing treasure from the past who was truly generations ahead of her time. Her wonderful views of homosexuality have still yet to be reached in America who as always remains one of the least progressive and poorly educated countries of the developed world.

This is an essay concerning atheism that I find enjoyable. Her high hopes for the fading of religion have not been reached but it is encouraging to read things like this and know how many people in the past saw the flaws of theism and the dangers those flaws presented both to true morality and society as a whole.

The Philosophy of Atheism by Emma Goldman

First published in February 1916 in the Mother Earth journal

To give an adequate exposition of the Philosophy of Atheism, it would be necessary to go into the historical changes of the belief in a Deity, from its earliest beginning to the present day. But that is not within the scope of the present paper. However, it is not out of place to mention, in passing, that the concept God, Supernatural Power, Spirit, Deity, or in whatever other term the essence of Theism may have found expression, has become more indefinite and obscure in the course of time and progress. In other words, the God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.

God, today, no longer represents the same forces as in the beginning of His existence; neither does He direct human destiny with the same Iron hand as of yore. Rather does the God idea express a sort of spiritualistic stimalus to satisfy the fads and fancies of every shade of human weakness. In the course of human development the God idea has been forced to adapt itself to every phase of human affairs, which is perfectly consistent with the origin of the idea itself.

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

Very aptly, the world-renowned atheist and anarchist, Michael Bakunin, says in his great work God and the State: "All religions, with their gods, their demi-gods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but the mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovered his own image, but enlarged and reversed – that is divinised. The history of religions, of the birth, grandeur, and the decline of the gods who had succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed it to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged it beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. . . .With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians or poets: the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice."

Thus the God idea, revived, readjusted, and enlarged or narrowed, according to the necessity of the time, has dominated humanity and will continue to do so until man will raise his head to the sunlit day, unafraid and with an awakened will to himself. In proportion as man learns to realize himself and mold his own destiny theism becomes superfluous. How far man will be able to find his relation to his fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow his dependence upon God.

Already there are indications that theism, which is the theory of speculation, is being replaced by Atheism, the science of demonstration; the one hangs in the metaphysical clouds of the Beyond, while the other has its roots firmly in the soil. It is the earth, not heaven, which man must rescue if he is truly to be saved.

The decline of theism is a most interesting spectacle, especially as manifested in the anxiety of the theists, whatever their particular brand. They realize, much to their distress, that the masses are growing daily more atheistic, more anti-religious; that they are quite willing to leave the Great Beyond and its heavenly domain to the angels and sparrows; because more and more the masses are becoming engrossed in the problems of their immediate existence.

How to bring the masses back to the God idea, the spirit, the First Cause, etc. – that is the most pressing question to all theists. Metaphysical as all these questions seem to be, they yet have a very marked physical background. Inasmuch as religion, "Divine Truth," rewards and punishments are the trade-marks of the largest, the most corrupt and pernicious, the most powerful and lucrative industry in the world, not excepting the industry of manufacturing guns and munitions. It is the industry of befogging the human mind and stifling the human heart. Necessity knows no law; hence the majority of theists are compelled to take up every subject, even if it has no bearing upon a deity or revelation or the Great Beyond. Perhaps they sense the fact that humanity is growing weary of the hundred and one brands of God.

How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness. Perhaps that explains the efforts fostered in all religious publications to combine variegated religious philosophies and conflicting theistic theories into one denominational trust. More and more, the various concepts "of the only tree God, the only pure spirit, -the only true religion" are tolerantly glossed over in the frantic effort to establish a common ground to rescue the modern mass from the "pernicious" influence of atheistic ideas.

It is characteristic of theistic "tolerance" that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe. To accomplish this end, the crudest and vulgarest methods are being used. Religious endeavor meetings and revivals with Billy Sunday as their champion -methods which must outrage every refined sense, and which in their effect upon the ignorant and curious often tend to create a mild state of insanity not infrequently coupled with eroto-mania. All these frantic efforts find approval and support from the earthly powers; from the Russian despot to the American President; from Rockefeller and Wanamaker down to the pettiest business man. They blow that capital invested in Billy Sunday, the Y.M.C.A., Christian Science, and various other religious institutions will return enormous profits from the subdued, tamed, and dull masses.

Consciously or unconsciously, most theists see in gods and devils, heaven and hell; reward and punishnient, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment. The truth is that theism would have lost its footing long before this but for the combined support of Mammon and power. How thoroughly bankrupt it really is, is being demonstrated in the trenches and battlefields of Europe today.

Have not all theists painted their Deity as the god of love and goodness? Yet after thousands of years of such preachments the gods remain deaf to the agony of the human race. Confucius cares not for the poverty, squalor and misery of people of China. Buddha remains undisturbed in his philosophical indifference to the famine and starvation of outraged Hindoos; Jahve continues deaf to the bitter cry of Israel; while Jesus refuses to rise from the dead against his Christians who are butchering each other.

The burden of all song and praise "unto the Highest" has been that God stands for justice and mercy. Yet injustice among men is ever on the increase; the outrages committed against the masses in this country alone would seem enough to overflow the very heavens. But where are the gods to make an end to all these horrors, these wrongs, this inhumanity to man? No, not the gods, but MAN must rise in his mighty wrath. He, deceived by all the deities, betrayed by their emissaries, he, himself, must undertake to usher in justice upon the earth.

The philosophy of Atheism expresses the expansion and growth of the human mind. The philosophy of theism, if we can call it philosophy, is static and fixed. Even the mere attempt to pierce these mysteries represents, from the theistic point of view, non-belief in the all-embracing omnipotence, and even a denial of the wisdom of the divine powers outside of man. Fortunately, however, the human mind never was, and never can be, bound by fixities. Hence it is forging ahead in its restless march towards knowledge and life. The human mind is realizing "that the universe is not the result of a creative fiat by some divine intelligence, out of nothing, producing a masterpiece chaotic in perfect operation," but that it is the product of chaotic forces operating through eons of time, of clashes and cataclysms, of repulsion and attraction crystallizing through the principle of selection into what the theists call, "the universe guided into order and beauty." As Joseph McCabe well points out in his Existence of God: "a law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts – a 'bundle of facts.' Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the 'law' because they act in that way."

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

It may seem a wild paradox, and yet it is pathetically true, that this real, visible world and our life should have been so long under the influence of metaphysical speculation, rather than of physical demonstrable forces. Under the lash of the theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man's capacity for immolation to the will of God. But the moment man attempted to ascertain the nature of that will, he was told that it was utterly futile for "finite human intelligence" to get beyond the all-powerful infinite will. Under the terrific weight of this omnipotence, man has been bowed into the dust – a will-less creature, broken and sweating in the dark. The triumph of the philosophy of Atheism is to free man from the nightmare of gods; it means the dissolution of the phantoms of the beyond. Again and again the light of reason has dispelled the theistic nightmare, but poverty, misery and fear have recreated the phantoms – though whether old or new, whatever their external form, they differed little in their essence. Atheism, on the other hand, in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea, and opposes the theistic principle as such. Gods in their individual function are not half as pernicious as the principle of theism which represents the belief in a supernatural, or even omnipotent, power to rule the earth and man upon it. It is the absolutism of theism, its pernicious influence upon humanity, its paralyzing effect upon thought and action, which Atheism is fighting with all its power.

The philosophy of Atheism has its root in the earth, in this life; its aim is the emancipation of the human race from all God-heads, be they Judaic, Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhistic, Brahministic, or what not. Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man's lot since gods began. There is but one way out of this blunder: Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.

Only after the triumph of the Atheistic philosophy in the minds and hearts of man will freedom and beauty be realized. Beauty as a gift from heaven has proved useless. It will, however, become the essence and impetus of life when man learns to see in the earth the only heaven fit for man. Atheism is already helping to free man from his dependence upon punishment and reward as the heavenly bargain-counter for the poor in spirit.

Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not, conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself. To what heights the philosophy of Atheism may yet attain, no one can prophesy. But this much can already be predicted: only by its regenerating fire will human relations be purged from the horrors of the past.

Thoughtful people are beginning to realize that moral precepts, imposed upon humanity through religious terror, have become stereotyped and have therefore lost all vitality. A glance at life today, at its disintegrating character, its conflicting interests with their hatreds, crimes, and greed, suffices to prove the sterility of theistic morality.

Man must get back to himself before he can learn his relation to his fellows. Prometheus chained to the Rock of Ages is doomed to remain the prey of the vultures of darkness. Unbind Prometheus, and you dispel the night and its horrors.

Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.

Can a Good God exist? An Atheist and a Christian Debate the Problem of Evil (2)

Just as the Charger did with my piece I will seek to move through his responses and address them in order to show their failure to solve the problem of evil.

(click here to see the beginning of this discussion on my blog)
(click here to see the Charger’s post that I am now responding to)

I want to actually begin with the end of the Charger’s response in order to prevent needless rabbit trails and expose one of the most obvious weaknesses in the Charger’s piece. The last section the Charger includes he labels as “The problem of good and evil for naturalism” He then goes on to describe what he believes are problems for atheists or naturalists when talking about evil like the idea that without God they have no objective basis for arguing that there is any evil in the world. And he does this in an attempt to show that atheists have even bigger problems then theists and thus can’t, or at least shouldn’t use the problem of evil to deny the existence of God. This entire section serves to demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of what the problem of evil really is. The Charger says outright that, “the problem of evil also exists for the atheist.” But that is simply not true. The problem of evil does not exist for the atheist rather it is an internal problem to the theistic worldview. Even if the entire planet were Christians the problem of evil would still exist. The Charger either does not understand that or seems to ignore it, which exposes as well as explains many of the problems with his response.

The way the Charger makes his confusion visible in this section is the way he uses the word “evil.” In this section he uses the word evil only as a moral category trying to demonstrate that atheists are unable to define that category without God. But the word evil as used in the problem of evil is not meant merely as a moral term defining a wrong action rather and more importantly it is intended to describe the fact that there is suffering in the world, which is undeniable and whether that suffering undermines the theists’ system of belief and therefore makes belief in their God unreasonable. So the problem for the theist is to resolve the seemingly obvious existence of senseless suffering in the world with their belief in God who is all-powerful, all-knowing and most importantly all-good.

This problem of evil (suffering) does not exist for the atheist because once you take the theist’s God out of the equation suffering is no longer a logical problem to be solved but rather it is just a fact to be observed. Atheists and Naturalists do have problems in their systems of belief that have to be addressed but the problem of evil is not one of them. If one reads Christian theologians who address the problem of evil like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga one will see that. They understand that what’s at stake with the problem of evil is the internal consistency of theism. So the fact that I’m an atheist, while it looks good in the title of this blog, is completely irrelevant to the topic we are discussing. Discussing issues facing atheists such as morality without God (look here for a previous post where I discuss that issue) and ethical standards for naturalists is important but it truly has nothing to do with the topic that was agreed to be discuss in this blog, which again was the problem of evil.

What this section amounts to is a fallacy known as a red herring, which serves only to avoid the issue, similar to what I said most Christians do when confronted with the problem of evil. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a red herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention away from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading people away from the current argument and to another topic and this is what the Charger does in this section as well as in part of his section concerning the evidential problem of evil.

I have to add that it is of little surprise that it is only in this last section in which the Charger even mentions the specific examples of evil (suffering) I gave during my discussion of the evidential problem of evil (Jose Stable who slashed the throat of his 12 year old autistic son Ulysses and left him naked in their bathtub; Sixteen men indicted for the use and maintenance of a protected Internet forum about child pornography, which includes thousands of images and videos as well as advice on how to beguile children into participating in sexual activity; and Robert Burdick a 40 year old man who has was accused of raping at least 12 different women in the last 14 years and has since been convicted of multiple rapes.) because it is only in this section that he could avoid dealing with them.

So moving forward I would just remind the Charger and those reading this that the issue meant to be addressed was the problem of evil, a problem specific to theists, especially the Christian theists. When talking about evil we are dealing with suffering and pain not merely ethical definitions and whether or not those evils make belief in the traditional monotheistic God unreasonable or not. And again we are not just talking about suffering in abstract terms rather we are talking about the type of suffering that is gut wrenching and horrid happening to real individuals with names. The theist cannot escape this problem whether I’m here or not.

The Logical Problem of Evil

So beginning again with the logical problem of evil I initially used the lay out given by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy;

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.

2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.

3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.

4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.

5. Evil exists.

6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil.

7. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

The Charger’s issue was with point number six for two reasons. First because, “it assumes that God has to act right now—a good being does not necessarily have to “always” eliminate evil as far as it can right now. This makes even more sense when you consider that God is not in space and time.” And second because, “if there is a greater good served by His inaction than this argument is defeated. Alvin Plantinga has suggested that free will is this greater good.”

Both statements work together so that the Charger seems to be saying that God will act to eliminate evil at the best time, which is when it will produce the greatest amount of good and/or prevent the greatest amount of evil. Alvin Plantinga, who the Charger cites, offers a similar idea saying that, “an omnipotent, omniscient person is wholly good only if he eliminates every evil, which is such that for every good that entails it, there is a greater good that does not entail it.” This seems to make sense but the problem this idea produces is the issue of creation itself; if evil was inevitable with creation why did God create anything?

Richard La Croix provides a different version of the logical problem of evil that demonstrates the new problem theists must face if they accept Plantinga’s statement.

1. There is a God who created everything.

2. Before God created there was nothing but God.

3. After God created, everything is causally dependent on God.

4. God had the choice of whether or not to create the world.

5. In one possible scenario, God could have chosen not to create anything at all.

6. If this choice were actualized, God would not have created a world in which evil existed.

7. Since God is perfectly good, if God had not created anything, all that would exist would be perfect goodness.

So the theist who believes with Plantinga that God will always act to eliminate any evil that does not prevent some greater good must now explain why God created anything at all? For if God is morally perfect and desires to eliminate all evil at the time when it will produce the greatest amount of good and/or prevent a greater amount of evil then he should have simply never created us to begin with. The Charger himself said when arguing against my original set up of the logical problem of evil that if a greater good is served by God’s inaction then God will not act. If that is true then God should have remained inactive never creating us in the first place. La Croix puts it this way, “If God is the greatest possible good then if God had not created anything there would be nothing but the greatest possible good. And since God didn’t need to create at all, then the fact that he did create produced less than the greatest possible good…Perhaps God could not, for some perfectly plausible reason, create a world without evil, but then it would seem that he ought not to have created at all…Prior to creation God knew that if he created there would be evil, so being wholly good he ought not to have created.” (see “The Impossibility of God” eds. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier)

According to traditional theistic belief God didn’t need us but chose to create us but by making that choice and knowing all the evil that would come from it God was choosing to make a state of existence with evil rather then one without it. So Plantinga’s answer to the logical problem of evil fails at the very moment of creation. And to those who would say that God desired to create us because he wanted us to love and know him all that seems to show is a God who cares more about getting something he wants (doesn’t need) then in what is actually good. It demonstrates that God was willing to create a world filled with suffering and pain as well as a place of eternal suffering (hell) where the majority of those he created would go just so he could be praised, adored and obeyed by the minority of people who would end up “choosing” him. There is nothing sacrificial or selfless in this creative act. God chose to make things worse then they had to be to get something he apparently wanted.

Perhaps my favorite way to expose the weaknesses of the theists’ response to the logical problem of evil is to point out the fact that almost all the answers they can provide to explain how it is logically possible for an all-good God (also all-powerful, all-knowing) to exist given the evil in this world can also be reversed and likewise used to explain how an all-evil God (also all-powerful, all-knowing) exists given the good in this world. See Stephen Law’s essay (link). This serves to show that the theists’ responses are basically word games to justify a belief that is inherently unreasonable given the world we live in.

And let me restate I don’t believe the logical problem of evil is as important as the evidential problem of evil so even if one still finds the Charger’s or any other theistic responses to the logical problem of evil compelling one still has a long way to go to solve the entire problem of evil.

The Evidential Problem of Evil

Concerning this section of the Charger’s response there is not much I can say because for the most part he avoids the issue. I said in my first piece, “The evidential problem of evil is the problem that I just don’t see any theistic answer to, the best they can do is side-step the issue or simply throw up their hands and say ‘I don’t know but I still believe.” The Charger even quotes this in his own piece and then funny enough he goes right on and confirms it. In his first section titled, “How much evil is too much evil?” he either intentionally or unintentionally avoids the real problem of evil facing the theist (to explain how all the seemingly obvious pointless and gratuitous suffering in the world is compatible with their conception of God as all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good) by changing the topic to issues facing atheists when dealing with definitions of good and evil as well as moral/ethical absolutes. This again all goes back to my initial critic of the fallacy of the red herring.

Then in his second section entitled “God may have a greater good by allowing things to go as they are” he merely restates his idea for solving the logical problem of evil, even weakening it a little by adding the word "may”. He then assumes it is true (God has a good reason for allowing the evil he allows) and then offers two possibilities (free-will and heaven) as to what could be “good enough” to make up for all the evil in this world. Both possibilities are mentioned very briefly without any real reason to accept them and no actual, specific examples of evil are dealt with. The section ends up amounting to little more then a few sentences that fail to actually deal with the evidential problem of evil.

So the Charger basically completely side stepped the evidential problem of evil pointing the reader in different directions and then offering a few brief theodicies (he expands on free will later) that could only address the logical problem of evil. So the problem I said theists’ can’t answer, the evidential problem of evil, is the problem the Charger failed to actually address.

The Charger’s Theodicies

Now let us address the theodicies the Charger offered.

The free will argument

The free will defense is the argument that dominates the Charger’s attempts to explain evil so it is the one I will spend the most time addressing.

Now for the free will argument to offer any type of solution to the problem of evil one must first accept the assumption that free will is a human trait of such supreme value that without it humanity would be worse off then with the evil that currently exists. This is an assumption I will later challenge. But even if we accept that assumption the free will argument must also demonstrate that having free will is necessarily connected to evil in the world such that free willed humans beings could not exist without evil and further that evil must abound to the great extent it has in our current world (no gratuitous suffering).

Beginning with the second issue I say the free will argument fails because there is no obvious impossibility, logical or otherwise, in the existence of human beings with free will and humans who have the inability to deliberately sin, or at least the inability to commit heinous crimes. The Charger again referenced Plantinga who deals with this issue at great length and argues that, “it was not within God’s power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil.” In order to explain this Plantinga created the idea of “transworld depravity” meaning that in any world were a person is significantly free, that person would on some occasion, act morally wrong. The key is defining what it means for people to be “significantly free”. For Plantinga significantly free persons must have three types of freedom; external freedom, internal freedom and logical freedom. Quentin Smith lays these out perfectly:

A person is externally free with respect to an action A if and only if nothing other than (external to) herself determines either that she perform A or refrain from performing A.

A person is internally free with respect to an action A if and only if it is false that his past physical and psychological states, in conjunction with causal laws, determine either that he perform A or refrain from performing A.

 A person is logically free with respect to an action A if and only if there is some possible world in which he performs A and there is another possible world in which he does not perform A. A person is logically free with respect to a wholly good life (a life in which every morally relevant action performed by the person is a good action) if and only if there is some possible world in which he lives this life and another possible world in which he does not. [Smith, “A Sound Logical Argument from Evil” in Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 149]

So Plantinga and other theists are arguing that these types of freedoms are of such intrinsic value that they explain why there was no world God could create that did not in some way contain evil. The problem with this idea is the third type of freedom, logical freedom because this is a type of freedom that God himself does not have. The fact that God by definition is all-good makes logical freedom impossible for him. There is no world in which God could commit a wrong act or make a wrong choice. Therefore logical freedom is not a trait that is metaphysically valuable or else God would have it. Consequently the theist is now creating a double standard saying that logical freedom is trait of such great value and goodness for humans that God allows evil and yet it is not a trait that God in his supreme goodness needs or shares. So one can argue (and Quentin Smith does) God could have created necessarily good (thus logically unfree) but internally and externally free beings, like himself, and therefore need not and would not have created a world in which moral evil exists. So the Charger’s claim that it would be logically contradictory for God to “create free-willed beings and only allow them to do what is right” fails because God himself is that kind of being. So too the Charger’s example of the person with 5 dollars whom God allows to spend it only on what is good fails to demonstrate a logical contradiction since by definition God himself cannot spend those 5 dollars on anything except what is good. (Now whether an action is good because God does it or God does it because it is good is another issue but either way the problem for the theist remains)

Moving on it is clear that the free will defense is only able to try and address the logical problem of evil not the evidential problem. Even if one accepts the theists’ arguments that some evil must exist it is unable to explain why there is such a great quantity of evil permitted by this all-good God. This is because free will only addresses moral evils therefore all natural evils (earthquakes, floods, birth defects, etc) remain outside the grasp of the free will argument. The Charger attempts to apply free will to the problem of natural evils by noting Richard Swinburne but based on what was presented I did not see any answer for how free will deals with natural evil. The Charger said, “Swinburne has suggested that natural evils would be the expected result from a fallen world.” But then the Charger does not elaborate on this point so I have no real understanding of why Swinburne believes that. I see no necessary connection between the fall of humanity and the natural evils (earthquakes, floods, tornados, tsunamis, etc) that exist in the world. And also free will does not do anything to explain animal suffering.

It is clear that the free will argument simply fails to properly deal with the evidential problem of evil because it’s not difficult to think of numerous ways God could have reduced the amount of evil and suffering in the world without restricting or changing our current amount of free will. God could have created all people with one skin color, ridding history of the massive amount of killing, oppression, segregation and inequality due to ideas based upon racial differences. God could have made us all speak the same language. How many problems could have been averted if people could just speak with one another and understand what the other person was saying? (yes I know the story of the Tower of Babel) God could have created us to have uncomfortable or painful physically responses to immoral actions. I have the freedom to eat my own feces but I don’t because it is physically nauseating and as such mentally disgusting. God could have given us this same sort of nauseating feeling at the idea of killing another person or raping someone or even lying. It would not take away people’s freedom to do those actions but few people would do them just like few people eat their own feces. God could have made people not need food to survive or at least not so much food and thus reduce the pain and suffering due to hunger and starvation and if God could not do that he could have increased the amount of food on the earth. Why not make oranges sprout like dandelions or make wheat grow like grass? God could have made women as physically strong as men thus enabling them to better protect themselves from men who would try to rape, abuse or assault them. God could have simply made us self-reproducing so that sex was not an issue. How much pain and suffering and crime would disappear if sex did not exist? Again none of these things would affect people’s free will. And perhaps the simplest thing that God could have done to reduce suffering and pain and retain our free will is education. All God had to do was teach humanity more about the world and the natural system he supposedly created. In an attempt to get God off the hook concerning natural disasters the Charger says, “Even in cases of natural disaster, such as the Black Death humans cannot get an out-of- jail free card. If people during the fourteenth century had actually cleaned their cities, then they have avoided most of the deaths.” He’s right that if people had cleaned their cities and themselves more often the amount of viruses and diseases would have been reduced (certainly not avoided) but what he ignores is the fact that they did not know that at the time and God never told them. All God had to do was tell people what viruses were and how they spread and then tell them the things they should do to help avoid becoming sick. That would not have affected anyone’s free will rather it would simply give people more accurate information to base their choices on and it would have reduced the amount of suffering that has occurred in history and yet God did not do that. Instead most people believed demons were responsible for their sickness and that witches could cast spells on them or curse them and that the solution was to pray, carry holy charms or icons, cast out the demons and kill the witches. God could have taught people about democracy and equality (gender; racial; sexuality; etc) but rather he himself displayed and demanded hieratical systems of government (monarchy/dictatorship) where obedience was the key virtue and individual rights were completely unknown. Really the list could go on the point is there are so many things God could have done to reduce suffering without impinging on anyone’s free will that it is hard to understand how anyone thinks free will solves the problem of evil.

Further when using the free will argument on the problem of evil one must also address what responsibility God would have in making sure we do not abuse or misuse the free will he gave us. The fact is that if free will is a gift provided by God and he knew exactly what we would “choose” to do with it then as the giver of the gift he does bear part of the blame for the evils that have been committed due to the use of our free will. Pierre Bayle observes that, “It is in the essence of a benefactor to refrain from giving any gift which he knows would be the ruin of the recipient…Free agency is not a good gift after all, for it has caused the ruin of the human race in Adam’s sin, the eternal damnation for the greater part of his descendants, and created a world of a dreadful deluge of moral and physical evils.”

The fact is that good parents do not give their children more freedom then they can be responsible for. If a parent gives their toddler a bat or a knife the parent is accountable for anything that child does with that bat or knife. When children abuse the freedom bestowed upon them by their parents the parents tend to discipline them by taking away some of those freedoms for a time until their children learn how to be more responsible. Shouldn’t we expect God to at least act like a good parent? Further most parents go to great lengths to protect their children from bearing all the consequences of their mistakes. If a child disobeyed their parents’ instructions not to play in the street those parents will not simply wait and watch while a car comes down the road and hits their child. Instead they will grab their child out of the street and save her despite her poor choice. The parents will then try to explain to the child why she should not be in the street (give knowledge) and likely restrict her freedom for a time by sending her inside or into the backyard. But with God he waits and watches us eat one piece of fruit and then gives us (theists would say allows) earthquakes, holocausts, crusades, floods, diseases and so on. It’s also fun to note that the piece of fruit Adam and Eve were not supposed to eat was the fruit of the “knowledge of good and evil” meaning that before they ate it they could not know what was good (obey God) and what was evil (disobey God). God again withholds knowledge so really what did he expect? (I’ve had fun with that story in my blog before see here)

Now a lot of the Charger’s response revolves around the idea that at some point in the future God will finally take care of all the evil (suffering) in the world and it will no longer exist making up for the current state of evil. So when using the free will argument to explain why evil exists now one must then figure out what changes in the future? Christians believe that after their death (or at some point in the future) they will go to heaven where there is no “death, or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:4) and they will have bodies that cannot be corrupted. (I Cor. 15:30) So one must ask is there free will in heaven? If the answer is yes then it seems it is possible for humans to have free will as well as no pain/suffering/evil. So if that is possible why didn’t God just start there in the first place? If the answer is no and free will does not exist in heaven then clearly it is not as valuable as theists claim it is. And one must then ask why it was so valuable to have free will on earth? Either way a good God should have simply created the world/heaven the way theists believe it will be, whether that means free will and no evil or no free will and no evil or he should not have created anything at all.

Going back to the beginning of this section I said that for the free will argument to have any merit one must first assume that free will is of such great value that it is worth any amount of evil and suffering which results from it. And that is what theists do that when they make the free will argument they simply assume everyone would prefer to keep the world as it is filled with suffering and pain to maintain their free will (to some degree) over any type of world free of suffering and pain without that free will. The Charger does this when he is trying to determine why God might allow so much evil in the world. He says, “it would be a direct violation of free will for God to stop suffering and evil—to me, this would be a much greater evil than letting evil go on unabated, since it would entail the destruction of the world as we know it. I think if you asked most people if they would rather have evil and the world, or a world where they don’t have a choice they would prefer the first option”. The part the Charger fails to mention is that with the second option you get a life free of pain and suffering where you wouldn’t have missed free will because you wouldn’t have known anything different. It seems like a detail worth mentioning because unlike him I would guess the exact opposite that if you go throughout history and offer people the world as is with all the pain and suffering they experience but their free will intact verses a world with no pain and suffering but only the illusion of free will a majority of people will take the later. I would.

I say that because the fact is that people don’t have as much free will as they think. We are limited by so many factors like our gender, race, age, nationality, genetics, place of birth, time in history, class in society, education level and so on all of which limit the amount of “free” choices we can make. As a white, American male adult from a middle class background with a college degree I have significantly more choices then an Chinese girl belonging to a poor family, or a boy starving in Africa, or a female concubine in ancient Babylon, or a slave in ancient Rome or Egypt. If you were to ask that girl in China, or that boy starving in Africa, or that female concubine in ancient Babylon, or that slave in ancient Rome or Egypt if they were willing to give up their free will in favor of a life without pain and suffering what do think they would say? I think they would say yes. How valuable is a free will that can’t be used anyway? (I don’t even think most of them would understand the concept of free will in the first place)

It is also worth noting that the free will argument is a fairly new argument historically speaking and has little to no scripturally support. For most of history God’s sovereignty has always taken precedence of any concept of human freedom. Even currently there are many branches of Christianity that do not accept the idea of libertarian free will, where it is actually possible for human beings to choose whether or not to do something as opposed to more clear forms of determinism.

God suffered the same evil as us

In this section the Charger offers more theology then philosophy as he himself admits. So the problem is this section offers little to nothing to the unbiased observer trying to make a rational choice about God’s existence based on the problem of evil. Instead Jesus’ atoning death on the cross and his resurrection are faith claims, which one can believe or not believe.

But even for Christians who accept these claims I believe they don’t really solve the problem of evil as the Charger tries to make them. Jesus’ suffering doesn’t erases other people’s suffering rather it merely increases the amount of suffering that has occurred. The idea that a friend of mine suffered through some sort of pain with me does not take away the pain that I myself suffered it merely means they suffered as well.

Another issue I would note here is that suffering is not solved by the promise of things being better in the future. Even if Jesus’ death made some sort of perfect future possible for some or all people it does not change or make up for the suffering of the past. If someone suffers from cancer and must endure all the pain (physical and psychological) that comes from it the promise that one day they will no longer have cancer does not make-up for the pain that was suffered. Pain is not a simple debt that one can erase by offering a lack of pain later.

Then of course there is the issue of hell. If hell is a place of eternal suffering as traditional Christian doctrine claims then the real problem of evil never actually gets solved it merely gets segregated so that while some people are enjoying the perfect heaven that God for some reason was unable to create originally the majority of humanity is suffering endless torment. Jesus’ death was clearly limited in its effectiveness. One must again question why God created humanity at all knowing only a small fraction of them would end up “choosing” to follow/obey/love him while the rest of us burned? It again makes God look fairly self-serving.

Finally Jesus’ suffering and death also did nothing to address natural evils or animal suffering. It is merely a theological answer to the problem of moral evil.

Animal Suffering

In this section the Charger offered three answers to address animal suffering. First he claims, “There are good reasons to believe that the animals in the Garden of Eden were herbivores…then man, as the free moral creature, ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and took away the perfect world.” So the Charger says there are good reasons to believe all animals used to be herbivores but then he doesn’t provide any. So the most obvious question is what are these good reasons to believe that? Beyond just animals being herbivores what about the existence of dangerous plants? Did some plants suddenly just turn poisonous? I recently read about a parasite called toxoplasma gondii, which can live inside many mammals but needs to get inside a cat’s stomach to reproduce. So it often infects rats or mice and has the property of being able to interfere with their nervous systems making them hyperactive and relatively fearless greatly increasing their chance of being in the vicinity of a cat. And when the cat eats the rat or mouse the toxoplasma gondii gets into the stomach, reproduces gets pooped out and starts the whole process over again. Where did these parasites come from? Did they suddenly come into existence the second Adam and Eve ate the fruit? And why did God make them at all? They don’t affect humans rather they only cause problems for animals that may be eaten by cats. Basically even if all animals suddenly starting eating plants that would still not solve all the problems associate with animal suffering caused by the natural world.

Now the big problem with this response besides the lack of reasons given for actually believing it is the fact that it requires one to accept the Garden of Eden story as historical rather then mythical and that simply does not work rationally. Animals were suffering, killing and eating one another long before human beings ever existed. Any potential fall of humanity could have only occurred millions of years after animals already existed. Similarly natural evils (earthquakes, hurricanes, etc) are events that occurred long before human beings ever showed up on the planet and animals suffered as a result of those events. So while the fall is a helpful story to explain the theology of the church and the need for Jesus it does not work to explain why animals suffer.

Second the Charger cites C.S. Leiws saying maybe it was Satan’s fault that animals suffer. Again no reasons are provided for believing that and one would have to accept the idea of Satan as real, who as a non-human agent of evil creates even more problems for theists trying to argue that evil exists as a by product of the existence of humanity.

Lastly the Charger argues that animals will be herbivores again in heaven. Similar to above the fact that something becomes good in the future does not erase the fact that there is suffering in the present. The idea that animals may one day stop experiencing pain does not resolve the fact that they currently do experience pain and have for their entire existence.

The Charger’s attempts to address animal suffering clearly fail and so he is still left with resolving the problem of animal suffering.

Conclusion

When looking at the Charger’s piece as a whole I think one finds basically what I described in my first piece. The Charger deals mostly with the logical (deductive) problem of evil rather then the evidential problem (inductive), then provides some theodicies none of which can address the problem of evil in its entirety and some of which offer almost no help at all and finally goes so far as to change the subject and introduce irrelevant topics seemingly in hopes diverting attention away from his inability to solve the problem of evil.

So moving forward there would be numerous issues the Charger needs to address. With the Logical Problem of evil he must first explain why God, who always acts (or doesn’t act) to produce the greatest good created humanity in the first place knowing evil was the inevitable outcome and thus destroying the greatest possible good. If he can do that he must then explain why God was not able to create us as beings that were significantly free yet could not sin since God himself is such a being. What is so valuable about a freedom that allows evil if that is a freedom God does not have? And if he can do that he must then turn right around and explain what changes to enable the existence of a perfect heaven (for some) where people will not/cannot sin or suffer, which was for some reason previously impossible for God to create. With the evidential problem of evil the Charger must actually deal with it since it was all but ignored in his first piece. Even if one accepts that God should have created humans and that for humans to be significantly free humans must be able to (and would) sin then one must explain why God allows humans to sin to such a great extent. Why did God not make a world that maintained the same freedom humanity currently holds yet reduce the amount of suffering? Finally one must explain natural evil and animal suffering since neither of those topics was resolved.

So I turn the floor back over to the Charger. I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts particularly concerning the evidential problem of evil.

[Click here for the Charger's response]

Martin Gardner-The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming

When it comes to the bible and biblical interpretation a large portion of scripture is fairly flexible and can be reinterpreted to fit the social needs and beliefs at any given time. But there are those parts of the bible that are fairly black and white in their meaning and given the passage of time they have clearly exposed themselves as errors both with facts and moral values.

One example is when Jesus foretold that his return would occur within the lifetime of some of those people who were listening to him speak. That of course did not happen so Christians have had to come up with ways to explain this obvious error. This is an essay written by Martin Gardner concerning the legend of the wandering Jew. This legend developed in an attempt to address this mistake of Jesus’ and is a wonderful example of how far people are willing to go to maintain their beliefs inspite of any and all evidence to the contrary, in particular their belief in the inerrancy of scripture and infallibility of Jesus

The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming by Martin Gardner

The legend of a wandering Jew, unable to die until the Second Coming, is surely the strangest of all myths intended to combat the notion that Jesus was mistaken when he said he would return within the lifetime of someone then living. I have summarized its sad, colorful history in an essay that appeared in Free Inquiry (Summer 1995)

As the year 2000 approaches, it would not surprise me to see a picture of the Wandering Jew on the front page of one of the supermarket tabloids. Some intrepid photographer will spot him trudging a dusty road, with his sturdy walking stick and long white beard, and perhaps obtain an interview about his sufferings over the past two millennia

“For the son of man shall come in the glory of his Father, with his angels, and then he shall reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you. There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming his kingdom.” Matthew 16:27-28

The statement of Jesus quoted above from Matthew, and repeated in similar words by Mark (8:38, 9:1) and Luke (9:26-27) is for Bible fundamentalists one of the most troublesome of all New Testament passages.

It is possible, of course, that Jesus never spoke those sentences, but all scholars agree that the first-century Christians expected the Second Coming in their lifetimes. In Matthew 24, after describing dramatic signs of his imminent return, such as the falling of stars and the darkening of the moon and sun, Jesus added: “Verily I say unto you. This generation shall not pass until all these things be fulfilled.”

Until about 1933 Seventh-Day Adventists had a clever way of rationalizing this prophecy. They argued that a spectacular meteor shower of 1833 was the falling of the stars, and that there was a mysterious darkening of sun and moon in the United States in 1870. Jesus meant that a future generation witnessing these celestial events would be the one to experience his Second Coming.

For almost a hundred years Adventist preachers and writers of books assured the world that Jesus would return within the lifetimes of some who had seen the great meteor shower of 1833. After 1933 passed, the church gradually abandoned this interpretation of Christ’s words. Few of today’s faithful are even aware that their church once trumpeted such a view. Although Adventists still believe Jesus will return very soon, they no longer set conditions for an approximate date.

How do they explain the statements of Jesus quoted in the epigraph? Following the lead of Saint Augustine and other early Christian commentators, they take the promise to refer to Christ’s Transfiguration. Ellen White, the prophetess who with her husband founded Seventh-day Adventism, said it this way in her life of Christ, The Desire of Ages: “The Savior’s promise to the disciples was now fulfilled. Upon the mount the future kingdom of glory was represented in miniature…”  

Hundreds of Adventist sects since the time of Jesus, starting with the Montanists of the second century, have all interpreted Christ’s prophetic statements about his return to refer to their generation. Apocalyptic excitement surged as the year 1000 approached. Similar excitement is now gathering momentum as the year 2000 draws near. Expectation of the Second Coming is not confined to Adventist sects. Fundamentalists in mainstream Protestant denominations are increasingly stressing the imminence of Jesus’ return. Baptist Billy Graham, for example. Regularly warns of the approaching battle of Armageddon and the appearance of the Anti-Christ. He likes to emphasize the Bible’s assertion that the Second Coming will occur after the gospel is preached to all the nations. This could not take place, Graham insists, until the rise of radio and television.

Preacher Jerry Falwell is so convinced that he will soon be raptured—caught up in the air to meet the return of Jesus—that he once said he has no plans for a burial plot. Austin Miles, who once worked for Pat Robertson, reveals in his book Don’t Call Me Brother (1989) that Pat once seriously considered plans to televise the Lord’s appearance in the skies! Today’s top native drumbeater for a soon Second Coming is Hal Lindsey. His many books on the topic, starting with The Late Great Planet Earth, have sold by the millions.

For the past two thousand years individuals and sects have been setting dates for the Second Coming. When the Lord fails to show, there is often no recognition of total failure. Instead, errors are found in the calculations and new dates set. In New Harmony, Indiana, an Adventist sect called the Rappites was established by George Rapp. When he became ill he said that were he not absolutely certain the Lord intended him and his flock to witness the return of Jesus, he would think this was his last hour. So saying, he died.

The Catholic Church, following Augustine, long ago moved the Second Coming far into the future at some unspecified date. Liberal Protestants have tended to take the Second Coming as little more than a metaphor for the gradual establishment of peace and justice on earth. Julia Ward Howe, a Unitarian minister, had this interpretation in mind when she began her famous Battle Hymn of the Republic with “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…” Protestant fundamentalists, on the other hand, believe that Jesus described actual historical events that would precede his literal return to earth to banish Satan and judge the quick and the dead. They also find it unthinkable that the Lord could have blundered about the time of his Second Coming.

The difficulty in interpreting Christ’s statement about some of his listeners not tasting of death until he returned is that he described the event in exactly the same phrases he used in Matthew 24. He clearly was not there referring to his transfiguration, or perhaps (as another “out” has it) to the fact that his kingdom would soon be established by the formation of the early church. Assuming that Jesus meant exactly what he said, and that he was not mistaken, how can his promise be unambiguously justified?

During the Middle Ages several wonderful legends arose to preserve the accuracy of Christ’s prophecies. Some were based on John 21. When Jesus said to Peter “Follow me,” Peter noticed John walking behind him and asked, “Lord, what shall this man do?” The Lord’s enigmatic answer was, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?”

We are told that this led to a rumor that John would not die. However, the writer of the fourth gospel adds: “Yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but if I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?” Theologians in the Middle Ages speculated that perhaps John did not die. He was either wandering about the earth, or perhaps he ascended bodily into heaven. A more popular legend was that John had been buried in a state of suspended animation, his heart faintly throbbing. To remain in an unknown grave until Jesus returns.

These speculations about John rapidly faded as a new and more powerful legend slowly took shape. Perhaps Jesus was not referring to John when he said he could ask someone to tarry, but to someone else. This would also explain the remarks quoted in the epigraph. Someone not mentioned in the gospels, alive in Jesus’s day, was somehow cursed to remain alive for centuries until judgment day, wandering over the earth and longing for death.

Who was this Wandering Jew? Some said it was Malchus, whose ear Peter sliced off. Others thought it might be the impenitent thief who was crucified beside Jesus. Maybe it was Pilate, or one of Pilate’s servants. The version that became dominant identified the Wandering Jew as a shopkeeper—his name varied—who watched Jesus go by his doorstep, staggering under the weight of the cross he carried. Seeing how slowly and painfully the Lord walked, the man struck Jesus on the back, urging him to go faster. “I go,” Jesus replied, “but you will tarry until I return.”

As punishment for his rudeness, the shopkeeper’s doom is to wander the earth, longing desperately to die but unable to do so. In some versions of the legend, he stays the same age. In others, he repeatedly reaches old age only to be restored over and over again to his youth. The legend seems to have first been recorded in England in the thirteenth century before it rapidly spread throughout Europe. It received an enormous boost in the early seventeenth century when a pamphlet appeared in Germany about a Jewish shoemaker named Ahasuerus who claimed to be the Wanderer. The pamphlet was endlessly reprinted in Germany and translated into other languages. The result was a mania comparable to today’s obsessions with UFO’s, Abominable Snowmen, and Elvis Presley. Scores of persons claiming to be the Wandering Jew turned up in cities all over England and Europe during the next two centuries. In the U.S. as late as 1868 a Wandering Jew popped up in Salt Lake City, home of the Mormon Adventist sect. It is impossible now to decide in individual cases whether these were rumors, hoaxes by imposters, or cases of self-deceived psychotics.

The Wandering Jew became a favorite topic for hundreds of poems, novels, and plays, especially in Germany where such works continue to proliferate to this day. Even Goethe intended to write an epic about the Wanderer, but only finished a few fragments. It is not hard to understand how anti-Semites in Germany and elsewhere would see the cobbler as representing all of Israel, its people under God’s condemnation for having rejected his Son as their Messiah.

Gustave Dore produced twelve remarkable woodcuts depicting episodes in the Wanderer’s life. They were first published in Paris in 1856 to accompany a poem by Pierre Dupont. English editions followed with translations of the verse.

By far the best known novel about the Wanderer is Eugene Sue’s French work Le Juif Errant (The Wandering Jew), first serialized in Paris in 1844-1845 and published in ten volumes. George Croly’s three-volume Salathiel (1827), later retitled Tarry Thou Till I Come, was an enourmously popular earlier novel. (In Don Juan, Canto 11, Stanza 57, Byron calls the author Reverend Roley-Poley.) In Lew Wallace’s Prince of India (1893), the Wanderer is a wealthy Oriental potentate.

George Macdonald’s Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876) introduces the Wandering Jew as an Anglican minister. Having witnessed the Crucifixion, and in constant agony over his sin, Wingfold is powerless to overcome a strange compulsion. Whenever he passes a roadside cross, or even a cross on top of a church, he has an irresistible impulse to climb on the cross, warp his arms and legs around it, and cling there until he drops to the ground unconscious! He falls in love, but realizing that his beloved will age and die while he remains young, he tries to kill himself by walking into an active volcano. His beloved follows, and is incinerated by the molten lava. There is a surprisingly happy ending. Jesus appears, forgives the Wanderer, and leads him off to Paradise to reunite with the woman who died for him. The novel is not among the best of this Scottish writer’s many admired fantasies.

My First Two Thousand Years, by George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge (1928) purports to be the erotic autobiography of the Wandering Jew. The same two authors, in 1930, wrote Salome, the Wandering Jewess, an equally erotic novel covering her two thousand years of lovemaking. The most recent novel about the Wanderer is by German ex-Communist Stefan Heym, a pseudonym for Hellmuth Flieg. In his The Wandering Jew, published in West Germany in 1981 and in a U.S. edition three years later, the Wanderer is a hunchback who tramps the roads with Lucifer as his companion. The fantasy ends with the Second Coming, Armageddon, and the Wanderer’s forgiveness.

Sue’s famous novel is worth a quick further comment. The Wanderer is Ahasuerus, a cobbler. His sister Herodias, the wife of King Herod, becomes the Wandering Jewess. The siblings are minor characters in a complex plot. Ahasuerus is tall, with a single black eyebrow stretching over both eyes like a Mark of Cain. Seven nails on the soles of his iron boots produce crosses when he walks across snow. Wherever he goes an outbreak of cholera follows. Eventually the two siblings are pardoned and allowed “the happiness of eternal sleep.” Sue was a French socialist. His Wanderer is a symbol of exploited labor, Herodias a symbol of exploited women. Indeed, the novel is an angry blast at Catholicism, capitalism, and greed.

The Wandering Jew appears in several recent science fiction novels, notable Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), and Wilson Tucker’s The Planet King (1959) where he becomes the last man alive on earth. At least two movies have dealt with the legend, the most recent a 1948 Italian film starring Vittorio Gassman.

Rafts of poems by British and U.S. authors have retold the legend. The American John Saxe, best known for his verse about the blind men and the elephant, wrote a seventeen-stanza poem about the Wanderer. British poet Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton’s forgettable “Undying One” runs to more than a hundred pages. Oliver Herford, an American writer of light verse, in “Overheard in a Garden” turns the Wanderer into a traveling salesman peddling a book about himself. “The Wandering Jew” (1920) by Edwin Arlington Robinson, is surely the best of such poems by an American writer.

Charles Timothy Brooks (1813-1883) was a New England Unitarian minister as well as a prolific versifier and translator of Goethe and other German poets. His “Wandering Jew,” based on a German poem whose author I do not know, was reprinted in dozens of pre-1900 American anthologies.

The Wandering Jew once said to me,
I passed through a city in the cool of the year;
A man in the grader plucked fruit from a tree.
I asked: "How long has the city been here?"
And he answered me, as he plucked away -
"It always stood where it stands to-day,
And here it will stand forever and aye."
Five hundred years rolled by, and then
I traveled the self-same road again.

No trace of the city there I found:
A shepherd sat blowing his pipe alone;
His flock went quietly nibbling round.
I asked: "How long has the city been gone?"
And he answered me, and he piped away -
"The new ones bloom and the old decay,
This is my pasture ground for aye."
Five hundred years rolled by, and then
I traveled the self-same road again.

And I came to the sea, and the waves did roar,
And a fisherman threw his net out clear,
And when heavy laden he dragged it ashore.
I asked "How long has the sea been here?"
And he laughed, and he said, and he laugher away -
"As long as you billows have tossed their spray
They've fished and they've fished in this self-same bay."
Five hundred years rolled by, and then
I traveled the self-same road again.

And I came to the forest, vast and free,
And a woodman stood in the thicket near -
His axe he laid at the foot of a tree.
I asked, "How long have the woods been here?"
And he answered "These woods are a covert for aye;
My ancestors dwelt here alway,
And the trees have been here since creation's day."
Five hundred years rolled by, and then
I traveled the self-same road again.

And I found there a city, and far and near
Resounded the hum of toil and glee,
and I asked, "How long has the city been here?
and where is the pipe, and the woods and the sea?"
And they answered me, as they went their way,
"Things always have stood as they stand to-day,
And so they will stand forever and aye."
I'll wait five hundred years, and then
I'll travel the self-same road again.

In England, Shelly was the most famous poet to become fascinated by the legend. In his lengthy poem “The Wandering Jew,” written or partly written when he was seventeen, the Wanderer is called Paulo. A fiery cross on his forehead is kept concealed under a cloth band. In the third Canto, after sixteen centuries of wandering, Paulo recounts the origin of his suffering to Rosa, a woman he loves:

“ How can I paint that dreadful day , 
That time of terror and dismay, 
When, for our sins, a Saviour died, 
And the meek Lamb was crucified! 

As dread that day, when borne along 
To slaughter by the insulting throng, 
Infuriate for Deicide, 
I mocked our Saviour, and I cried, 
Go, go, ‘Ah! I will go,’ said he, 
‘Where scenes of endless bliss invite; 
To the blest regions of the light 
I go, but thou shalt here remain— 
Thou diest not till I come again’

The Wandering Jew is also featured in Shelley’s short poem “The Wandering Jew’s Soliloquy,” and in two much longer works, “Hellas” and “Queen Mab.” In “Queen Mab,” as a ghost whose body casts no shadow, Ahasuerus bitterly denounces God as an evil tyrant. In a lengthy note about this Shelley quotes from a fragment of a German work “whose title I have vainly endeavored to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago…”

In this fragment the Wanderer describes his endless efforts to kill himself. He tries vainly to drown. He leaps into an erupting Mount Etna where he suffers intense heat for ten months before the volcano belches him out. Forest fires fail to consume him. He tries to get killed in wars but arrows, spears, clubs, swords, bullets, mines, and trampling elephants have no effect on him.

(end)

The Worrywart

The simple fact is that Jesus, according to the Gospel writers, made some clear prophecies about himself, which failed to come true and so Christians have been left scrambling to figure out a way to fix Jesus’ error. I enjoy this legend because it demonstrates that people throughout history have understood the problem presented by Jesus’ clear mistake and they have sought to fix it. But the way Christians in the Middle Ages into the modern period chose to fix it, through the story of the wandering Jew, is a way that most Christians today would reject. Rather they would offer new interpretations to explain what Jesus “actually” meant all the while refusing to just acknowledge the simplest and most obvious answer; Jesus was wrong. And what I find funny about this is that their new interpretations usually require a far more complex twisting of Jesus’ words then the legend of the wandering Jew, which at least accepted Jesus’ words to be as clear and straightforward as they were. So while most people can now see this legend for what it is, a legend when they then examine the issue for which the legend was meant to address, Jesus’ prophecy, they once again become blind to the obvious truth; he got it wrong. Truly, few things show the fallibility of humanity as greatly as their belief in the infallibility of the divine.  

Can a Good God exist? An Atheist and a Christian Debate the Problem of Evil

This piece serves to begin a dialog with a fellow blogger concerning the question: does the existence of evil disprove the existence of God traditionally defined in the West as all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good? As the atheist I will be arguing that it does, or at least that it makes the existence of such a God so implausible that it is irrational to believe such a thing. My fellow blogger as the Christian theist will offer his solutions to the problem of evil (theodicies) to demonstrate not only that this God could exist but that it is rational to believe that he does. Each of us will be posting on our own blogs so that after reading this piece one would need then go to his blog (http://wolfhartscharger.blogspot.com/) to read his response then back to mine and so on. As each response gets written I will add the links to my pages to make it easier to get back and forth. For my part I will likely only be responding to this dialog once or twice a month due to the amount of time that needs to be put into such an important topic and of course due to other obligations in my life and work.

As we begin I seek simply to lay out what the problem of evil is and then allow my dialog partner to offer his responses and we will see where it goes from there.

I believe the problem of evil truly is the strongest proof against the existence of the traditional concept of God and it was the number one reason that led me after years of struggle to reject my Christian faith. Dr. James F. Sennett a Christian philosophy professor has said, “By far the most important objection to the faith is the so-called problem of evil-the alleged incompatibility between the existence or extent of evil in the world and the existence of God. I tell my philosophy of religion students that, if they are Christians and the problem of evil does not keep them up at night, then they don’t understand it.” I agree and I can tell you I have lost a lot of sleep over this problem.

The problem is fairly easy to lie out. David Hume described it by saying: “Is he (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?” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, X) Basically if God is all-good, all-powerful and all-knowing then why the heck is there evil in the world and why is there so much of it? An all-good God would desire to eliminate evil; an all-powerful God would be capable of eliminating evil; and an all-knowing God would know how to make it happen. So the fact that evil exists suggests that there is something wrong (lacking) with God’s goodness, power, knowledge or that he simply does not exist. The last one is by far the simplest answer and thus I would say the most reasonable.

Now the problem of evil can be separated into two parts the logical (deductive) problem of evil and the evidential (inductive) problem of evil. I will look at each separately to show how both make belief in this God unreasonable though I will focus more on the evidential problem. One must also understand that there are different categories of evil. There is moral evil resulting from the choices of moral agents (people) such as rape, murder, bombings, molestation and so on. There is natural evil, which is suffering resulting from natural physical phenomena such as earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards, diseases, birth defects and so on. And there is a non-moral category of evil resulting from unintentional accidents due to human inaction or neglect such as a car accident. All of these categories of evil must be addressed by theists in order to prove there is any rational reason to believe in their God.

The logical problem of evil seeks to demonstrate that there is a logical inconsistency between the existence of evil and the existence of God. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lays it out as follows;

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

That this argument is valid is perhaps most easily seen by a reductio argument, in which one assumes that the conclusion — (7) — is false, and then shows that the denial of (7), along with premises (1) through (6), leads to a contradiction. Thus if, contrary to (7), God exists, it follows from (1) that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. This, together with (2), (3), and (4) then entails that God has the power to eliminate all evil, that God knows when evil exists, and that God has the desire to eliminate all evil. But when (5) is conjoined with the reductio assumption that God exists, it then follows via modus ponens from (6) that either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil. Thus we have a contradiction, and so premises (1) through (6) do validly imply (7). (link)


The argument is that simple. It should also be noted that the amount of evil in the world is not relevant to the logical problem of evil because the argument is that the existence of God is logically incompatible with the existence of any evil at all. Now this basic outline can be combated by theists and there are different versions offered by atheists but this simple version gives a good starting point for discussing the logical problem of evil.

Now while the logical problem of evil did cause me a lot of headaches as a believer it was never a deal breaker because even though I never found a suitable theistic response to the logical problem of evil I was not willing to reject my personal relationship with God for what at times felt like a word game being played by philosophers. As an atheist I think the ultimate weakness of the logical problem of evil is that while it has a way of engaging people’s minds it doesn’t seem to shake their hearts because it keeps the problem of evil abstract and thus very impersonal. It allows those discussing evil to keep it at an arm's length and avoid the true horrors of moral and natural evil and as such I think it is easier for theists to simply dismiss it. Where the real weight of the problem of evil can be felt is in the evidential problem of evil. It is the evidential problem of evil that made me toss and turn in my bed and ultimately walk away from God. The evidential problem of evil is the problem that I just don’t see any theistic answer to, the best they can do is side-step the issue or simply throw up their hands and say “I don’t know but I still believe.”

The evidential problem of evil moves away from the logical problem of evil, which was questioning God’s existence due to the existence of any evil in the world to now questioning God’s existence given the existence of so much evil in the world? So even if we grant that it is logically possible for both God and evil to exist the sheer amount of evil in the world serves as evidence against the rationality of such a belief. The question theists must now answer is not how God could let any evil exist but how could God let such a great amount of evil exist? Richard Swinburne, an important Christian theologian notes the danger of the evidential problem of evil saying it is, “the crux of the problem of evil…It is not the fact of evil or the kinds of evil which are a threat to theism; it is the quantity of evil—both the number of people (and animals) who suffer and the amount which they suffer.” So when dealing with the evidential problem of evil it’s not enough for theists to offer good reasons for how some evil can exist in the world rather they must demonstrate that there are good reasons for all the evil that exists in the world both past and present. No evil can be left unaccounted for because if any suffering can be shown to be superfluous or unnecessary then the all-good God himself becomes superfluous and unnecessary. And I believe the vast amount of evil plaguing the world both currently and historically makes it fairly clear that meaningless and gratuitous evil exists and thus God does not.

William L. Rowe lays out the evidential problem clearly. Rowe says (1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. (2) An omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. (3) Therefore there does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Now a theist can claim that no one can prove proposition number 1 with absolute certainty, which states pointless suffering exists and while that may be technically true one can easily demonstrate that there are rational grounds for believing that such meaningless evil exists. I would go further and say not only is it rational to believe meaningless evil exists, it is quite irrational to deny it. So if this first proposition is true taken with the second proposition you are led to the simple conclusion that God does not exist. All one has to due to assert that meaningless evil exists is to assert that there has been at least one earthquake that could have been prevented, one life that could have been spared, one rape that could have been stopped or even one cold that could have not been caught without preventing some greater good or avoiding a greater evil. Theists must deny all those possibilities to protect their beliefs.

Evil (suffering) is real. Histories pages are filled with suffering. Around 75 million people died in Europe during the pandemic called the Black Death which was between 30% – 60% of Europe's population at the time. 300,000 Jews were stripped of their positions and forced out of Spain in 1492 while those who remain were forced to convert to Catholicism. The Great Lisbon earthquake (1755) killed near 100,000 people. By 1860 there were almost 4 million slaves in the United States. 6 million Jews were murdered in the holocaust a quarter of them being children and including all the other people, who weren’t Jewish, at least 11 million people were killed during Hitler’s reign. Conservative estimates of today’s children’s slave trade counts 250 million children enslaved worldwide. Nearly 40,000 people, mostly children, die of starvation every day. Almost 33 million people have AIDS. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing killed 168 people and injured 450 (1995). And 15 people were killed in the Columbine shootings (1999).

And least the impersonal numbers dull one’s feelings a man named Jose Stable slashed the throat of his 12 year old autistic son Ulysses and left him naked in their bathtub. (link)  Sixteen men have been indicted for the use and maintenance of a protected Internet forum about child pornography, which includes thousands of images and videos as well as advice on how to beguile children into participating in sexual activity. (link) Robert Burdick is a 40 year old man who has been convicted of multiple rapes in multiple cases. He was accused of raping at least 12 different women in the last 14 years. (link) So please don’t forget that we are talking about real people not numbers when we are discussing evil and suffering.

Again a theist when presented with these evils must maintain that they all serve some greater purpose, whether producing greater good or preventing greater evils, for to admit to any evil that does not serve a higher purpose is to admit in the existence of meaningless suffering an idea that is completely at odds with Christian theism. One must believe that Jose Stable’s son Ulysses could not have been spared or that there could not have been even one less child molested and photographed for that Internet forum or that Robert Burdick could not have raped one less woman without somehow ruining some greater good in the world.

Perhaps the easiest example of pointless evil that no theodicy seems able to address is the existence of animal suffering. What greater good is served by animals suffering? Animals existed millions of years before humans and were hunting and killing one another long before we showed up due to the fact that some of them desired the flesh of other animals to eat. Why didn’t God just make all animals herbivores? What purpose does a carnivore have in expanding goodness or preventing greater evil in the world?

So that is the problem of evil and I lay it out there so as to begin a dialog with a fellow thinker who maintains the rationality of belief in the existence of God. I look forward to hearing his thoughts and hope others will take the time to see where this conversation might take us. And no matter what side one ends up on let’s keep in mind what we have in common, which is the problem itself. Both sides see evil and suffering as a real problem because we both understand and share the belief that all people genuinely matter in and of themselves and suffering should be limited as much as humanly possible.


Click here for the Charger's response