A Theist's Case for Atheism

My Devil's Advocate Speech

Last night I did a devil’s advocate debate on God’s existence. I (a theist) made a case for atheism, while Matthew Adelstein (an atheist-leaning agnostic) . It was a lot of fun. As Matthew reflected afterwards: “you were sort of powning me on the arguments for atheism, and I was sort of powning you on the arguments for God”. I think that’s broadly how it went, although Matthew is a better debater, and any impartial judge would’ve crowned him the winner. I got tongue-tied at points, and my objections to Adelstein’s Anthropic Argument were murdered (which is what you’d expect, since the argument is outrageously convincing). My only excuse is that Matthew’s arguments are not only better, but newer: it’s easier to find decent takes on the problem of evil, which has been around forever, than on, say, Cutter and Saad’s impressive argument from Nomological Harmony, which came out less than a year ago and has zero published responses. Like I said, it was a lot of fun; I look forward to doing more of these kinds of things in the future. The full debate is on Matthew’s channel, and an outtake of my opening statement is on mine. Here it is written down:

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There is a long list of things Matthew and I agree about: factory farming, charity, the ridiculousness of virtue ethics, you name it. One thing we agree on is how the debate between theists and atheists should be settled.

First, we should find the best version of theism, the best version of atheism, and then figure out the prior probability of each view—that is, the probability of each view prior to looking at the evidence.

Second, we should look at that evidence, and work out which view predicts it better.

Theism says there is a perfect, all powerful, all knowing, all loving person, responsible for setting up the world we live in. All atheists like me do is deny this; besides the non-existence of God, we’re not committed to any other positive beliefs—not naturalism, not materialism, none of it.  

I’m not going to discuss the prior probability question here, partly because I agree with Matthew that theism doesn’t have the lowest prior in the world, and because any quibbles I have with him about it would be more productive to talk about if there’s time in the discussion period.

I’m going to focus on the second thing: prediction. What does theism predict? If all you knew what that the world is governed by a perfect, all powerful, all knowing, all loving being, what would you expect things to look like?

The right answer? Not like this.

Matthew’s case followed a traditional philosophical recipe: good things exist. Therefore, probably, so does God. After all, if the world were governed by a perfect being, you’d expect to see good things. So good things—pleasure, people, stable natural laws—are evidence for theism.

But if that’s true, so is the reverse. If good things count in favour of theism, bad things count against theism. And the badder they are, they badder things look for any theory that says our world was made by a perfect being.

Obviously, there are a lot of bad things. I’ve restricted myself to six. Six inconvenient facts. Six facts that are very surprising on theism, but much less surprising if you think the universe doesn’t care about our wellbeing.

Here is the first inconvenient fact: horrors. Marylin Adams, the Christian philosopher who coined term, famously defined horrors as:

evils the participation in which (that is, the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to her on the whole.

Her examples include parental incest, the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, and the dropping of nuclear bombs on populated areas. A classic response to the atheist’s argument from evil is that many evils are in some way ‘soul building’. They make room for positive character development, helping us cultivate virtue in the face of hardship. Horrors are soul-destroying. Even when we twist ourselves in intellectual knots, it’s hard to see what reason a perfect being could have for allowing them. If theism is true, a world full of horrors is very surprising.

Indiscriminate Evils. In his response, Matthew might explain evil away by saying that, for all we know, each evil we endure is affecting our psychology and self-conception in way that will enterally make us more joyful and mature in the afterlife, as we process and integrate these bad experiences under God’s care for the rest of infinite time.

If this were true, we might expect a random-looking distribution of evils. People are very different. If God could somehow have the best psychological impact on someone in the afterlife by subjecting them to some specific evil in their life on earth, then since we’re all very psychologically different, and our differences are randomly spread throughout the population, what we wouldn’t expect is something like the Holocaust: the same type of evil being used indiscriminately by God on a group of people who all have totally different psychologies. If God is using specific, tailored evils to leave specific, tailored imprints on people, we wouldn’t expect the same type of evil being used on psychologically diverse groups indiscriminately. If theism is true, indiscriminate evils are very surprising.

Animal Suffering. God could have made us all herbivores. Yet he chose, according to Matthew, to design lions such that the only way they can meet their basic nutritional requirements is to rip into the flesh of sentient animals. He also lets animals burn up in forest fires, permits parasites to eat them alive, leaves them to languish in hot deserts, and lets whole species of dinosaurs go extinct. That’s not to mention what he lets us do to cows, chickens, pigs, and turkeys. Matthew and I are both vegan because we think factory farming is about the worst thing on the planet. I want to ask Matthew: If God wants us to be herbivores, why doesn’t he want the same for other animals, when he could have made them herbivorous at the tip of a hat?

YEC: This leads me to related question. Why aren’t Young Earth Creationists right? I’m not asking why they’re wrong scientifically—ask any scientist. I’m asking why, if a perfect being created our world, did he leave it empty for almost 14 billion years, and then introduce a period of life on earth in which animals suffered relentlessly for hundreds of millions of years before humans began evolving, when he could have just created the earth 6,000 years ago, like Creationists claim he did.

Imagine you were told a building was made by a perfect designer, but that when you looked behind the façade, you saw a 13.7 billion mile extension made of solid concrete with nothing in it, followed at the front end by a 500 million mile cage full of prehistoric animals, all tearing each other and dying of natural causes. You might think: maybe this wasn’t made by a perfect designer. Given that Young Earth Creationism is false, when God have made it true if Matthew were right, we should conclude the same thing about the world.

Insect Suffering. Suppose you’re told that a certain farmer is morally perfect. Now suppose someone told you that every year, he fertilizes his field with trillions of tiny ‘pain pellets’. Pain pellets are pellets that feel some small amount of pain. They feel pain when they dissolve into the soil, and pain when they finish dissolving. While they also undergo some small amount of pleasure, they don’t live very long, and have no interesting psychology to speak of. Now lastly, suppose someone told you that the farmer could have easily fertilized his soil with pain-free pellets, or could have used pellets that only felt pleasure: but that he chose to use conscious pellets, and chose them to feel pain. I think if you knew all this, you’d really doubt that the farmer was perfectly good.

Now apply this to insects. The number of bugs on our planet is ridiculous. There are somewhere between one and ten million different species of arthropods, and if we zoom in on insects, there’s something like ten quintillion of them alive right now. Many of them probably feel pain. Even if insects only feel a small amount of pain when they suffer, given the sheer number of insects, their pain in the aggregate is mind-blowing. As Dustin Crummett, theist philosopher and Director of the Insect Institute, has written:

If all insects can suffer, [and] they suffer pain about as frequently as humans but their pain is, on average, only one ten-thousandth as bad, and if the overall badness of human and insect pain is each equal to the sum of the badness of its parts, the total amount of insect pain at any given time will be nearly eighty-thousand times as bad as the amount of human pain.

This makes the problem of evil significantly worse. You might think: But surely insects dying is integral to the ecosystem. Without insects eating and being eaten, the food chain would collapse. That’s true, but only because of the way our food chain was set up. God is like the farmer: he could have set up the ecosystem so it didn’t require insects to endure harsh conditions and die—but if you’re to believe Matthew, that’s exactly what he did.

 Moral Dilemmas. A moral dilemma is a situation in which:

1.      There’s a moral requirement to do A and a moral requirement to do B;

2.      One cannot do both A and B; and

3.      Neither moral requirement ceases to be a moral requirement as a result of the conflict between them.

That is: there are times when people have no choice but to do something wrong. Why think this? For the same reason we should think any plausible moral claim: because there’s no good reason to think genuine moral dilemmas are impossible, and it really seems like they exist.

Imagine a mother has to chose between smothering her crying baby, and exposing the location of the people hiding with her from Nazi soldiers. Intuitively, it seems she’s in the grips of two moral requirements: a requirement not to kill her child, and a requirement not to expose her friends. Even if one choice is less bad than the other, the requirement doesn’t go away. It hangs around, leaving what Bernard Williams called a “moral remainder”.

The fact that people really do face these kinds of dilemmas is very hard to justify on theism, and very unexpected. Even if there are goods God can get from putting people in situations where they have to choose between right and wrong, it’s hard to see what good he’d get from putting people in situations where they have to choose between a greater wrong and a lesser wrong. Like I said: very surprising.

Severe Psychological Disorders. Matthew claims that so-called psychophysical harmony is evidence for theism. Insofar as our minds are clear, capable of reasoning, and fully in touch with reality, Matthew think’s that’s more likely if God exists than if atheism is true. But if Matthew thinks that psychophysical harmony is evidence for theism, he has to think that severe mental illnesses, which make our minds cloudy, bad at reasoning, and out of touch with reality, are evidence against theism. If theism is true, severe mental illnesses are not what we’d expect to see.

A natural thought to draw from all this is that if there’s a God, that God is malevolent, not perfectly good. But Matthew can’t defend that view: according to the motion we agreed to, he has to defend the existence of not just any God, but a perfect, omnibenevolent person. So if Matthew fails to back up this part of his claim – that God is good – the atheist side wins.

You might think Matthew’s argument for preferring the Good God Hypothesis to the Evil God Hypothesis is straightforward: according to Matthew’s opening statement, the God Good Hypothesis predicts all the good things he mentioned, like the existence of people.

But not so fast: the Evil God Hypothesis predicts these things too. Take Matthew’s claim that every possible person exists, and grant for the sake of argument that he gave good evidence for it. The Good God Hypothesis is meant to predict this on the basis that a Good God would want to create every possible person so he could benefit them forever. But in the same way, if that’s what the Good God Hypothesis predicts, the Evil God Hypothesis predicts that God would create every possible person so he could harm them forever.

I don’t have time to show this, but I think that for each of Matthew’s arguments, there’s a version of it you can run in reverse that supports the Evil God Hypothesis just as well.

This leaves Matthew with the task of showing not only we should belief in some God, but why we should also believe that he’s Maximally Good, as opposed to Maximally Evil. I look forward to hearing how he’ll do this in his response.