Since I began deconstructing my faith 10-12 years ago, I have been keeping notes in Evernote with various tags (later Notion, as I had to abandon Evernote due to its constantly-increasing fees and restrictions). I even made a Mind Map of all the points I had developed.
Two of the the several organizing points were Theodicy (why does God seem to allow evil to happen), and Dystheism (why does God do evil himself). It seems logical to address Theodicy before Dystheism, as Theodicy is more sympathetic to God and a shorter stop on the highway to atheism. Furthermore if you already have a grasp of Dystheism you don’t need to worry about Theodicy because it’s irrelevant. But I might have let the cart get before the horse and wrote about Dystheism before I had completed all my thoughts on the other topic, so I’m going through the notes I made during my deconstruction journey to see what I may have left out.
There are three chief elements in my thoughts on this: 1) Why does God allow evil to exist? (Theodicy) 2) Why is God bad? (Dystheism), and a midway point: 3) Why do God’s people do bad?
This is not the “best possible world”
God must be the best possible entity, otherwise he would not be God… God being supremely good (not merely good), the best possible entity is therefore bound to create not merely a good world but the best possible world, thus giving its inhabitants the best possible arrangements within which to live. Therefore if it is found that we do not live in what is hypothetically the best of all possible worlds, our world is not then the product of a supremely good creator and therefore God did not ultimately create the world—and therefore God does not exist.
Geoffrey Berg, The Six Ways of Atheism
Plato’s Idealism kind of indicates that this is not the Best Possible World. The nature of Platonism is that everything is a copy of an ideal version of the thing, elsewhere. If this were the Best World, the Ideal of everything would exist in this world. And there are plenty of things that are not ideal.
Obviously, a world in which slavery is condoned by the Church and where CSA is perpetrated by Church leaders is not the “best possible world.”
There’s an argument regarding Original Sin that Adam was created with free will, but the fact that he was created with free will means he was imperfect. Theologically, Jesus’ death and resurrection is supposed to free us from the curse of Adam. But all we would have needed for a “best possible world” would be for Adam to have chosen not to eat the fruit. I think I saw somewhere on the internet that if the fall had been delayed by even a fraction of a second that would be a better possible world than this one.
Was God blind to everything until Adam made his choice? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and free will is an illusion. When the Big Bang happened, if there was an omniscient being who ignited it, he/she would have had the foresight to see the ramifications of the trajectories of all those different little atoms as they shot out. If God isn’t in control then he’s impotent. If he’s impotent then he’s not God.
Leibniz argues that this is the Best Possible World because of math: the most goodness can be generated here, to counter all the evil. But that’s man’s philosophy. The Bible doesn’t say Adam’s fall was planned. It does not say God is most glorified by the fall. It says Jesus came to fix it. And it ought to have not been broken in the first place.
Why does God allow evil to happen…In the Church?
If Jesus came to fix the world, why is it still so broken… in the Church? Believers have supposedly been sanctified by Christ. Therefore, they ought to be exhibiting the “fruits of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. They ought to live by the Golden Rule, putting others first, but more Christians today are more concerned about guns and trans people and abortion. They deny and cover up CSA and condone slavery.
‘[R]eligion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass.’ It is surely true that black slaves in America were consoled by promises of another life, which blunted their dissatisfaction with this one and thereby benefited their owners.
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
John MacArthur said a couple years ago that black people deserve to be enslaved because of the “curse of Ham.” He also said, “Slavery is not objectionable if you have the right master. It’s the perfect scenario.” I don’t see how this can be reconciled with “In Christ there is neither slave nor free… All are one…” I think any sane person would agree slavery is bad. The corollary: anyone who thinks slavery is good is insane.
I won’t go into details about child sex abuse, because I’ve failed to add Content Warnings and don’t even know how to do that in WordPress, but I will leave you with an excerpt from what Christopher Hitchens concluded. There is a universal revulsion to the rape of a child that does not need to be taught, but this revulsion is lacking within the Church. Therefore:
Since religion has proved itself uniquely delinquent on the one subject where moral and ethical authority might be counted as universal and absolute, I think we are entitled to at least three provisional conclusions. The first is that religion and the churches are manufactured, and that this salient fact is too obvious to ignore. The second is that ethics and morality are quite independent of faith, and cannot be derived from it. The third is that religion is—because it claims a special divine exemption for its practices and beliefs—not just amoral but immoral.
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great