First off, it seems to me rather obvious that the existence God cannot be
objected to on evil’s account. Quite the
contrary: evil cannot exist unless our beginning assumption is that God exists. I have already argued this more extensively
elsewhere[1],
and it is not the first time that such an argument has been presented[2]. For now, we’ll have to do with a sharp and
concise summary of that argument, due to space constraints.
It seems to me
obvious that evil requires some standard of good; evil might be perfectly and
completely described as non-good, and in order to do that, we need some
standard of what good is. If evil is
that which is undesirable, we need a standard of what is desirable. If evil is injustice, we need a standard of justice. What we are interested with at present is the
particular qualities that this standard must possess in order to make sense of
evil.
First off, is the
standard objective or subjective? Is it
wholly independent of what others think about it or is it wholly determined by
what people make of it? We can clearly
conclude it to be the former for three reasons: 1) if evil is subjective, the
Atheist’s objection against God on its account falls flat on the floor. I have a few more insights to supply about
this later. 2) There is not a person on
earth who thinks that he is perfect; the one who does, we call “insane”. As such, there is in fact no person capable
of properly judging what is and is not evil.
The standard which judges whether or not something is evil cannot itself
contain a shred of evil; if it did, then by what standard should we say that that standard had been judged to contain
evil? We’d have an endless recession of
almost-but-not-quite-good standards. The
imperfection of man proves that there is some standard of good undetermined by
man himself from which he has fallen short.
3) If something is perfectly subjective, then it does not exist. What I mean to say in relation to goodness is
that there can be no coherent idea of goodness if it is perfectly subjective to
what someone says about it. Picture a
world full of mirrors and only mirrors.
Boggling as it is to realize, such a world has no color. The color in this world is perfectly subjective, but until any objective color is introduced, there is
still no color.
Second, is the
objective standard natural or supernatural?
Clearly the latter. When the
Atheist says that evil exists, it is more accurate to say that he is saying
that evil exists in the natural world. Note that this means that the whole natural
world is being compared to a standard of good.
And if the standard itself also exists in the natural world, we make the
following claims:
1. Everything in the
natural world is being compared to an objective standard of good
2. The objective
standard of good is in the natural world
3. Therefore, the
objective standard of good is being compared to itself
It is imperative that we opt out of this
argument because its conclusion is an absurdity; something cannot be compared
to itself simply by virtue of what comparison is. We cannot say that the conclusion does not
logically follow – the argument is valid.
Now, are the premises true?
Clearly, we cannot deny premise (1).
If mankind were to, say, fly billions of light years to another planet
and populate there, surely evil would still be a problem. There is, however, no good reason why we
cannot deny premise (2) by stating that the objective standard of good is, in
fact, in the supernatural world. We therefore conclude that the objective
standard of good is supernatural.
One last qualifier
must be brought up for this objective, supernatural standard. One thing which it makes us aware of is moral evil. The standard, therefore, must be a measure of
moral good. But moral evil is, in fact,
an abuse of free will; moral evil does not exist in the absence of free will. Furthermore, you cannot be morally good
without free will; someone who does something good mechanistically is not being
morally good. We are therefore forced to conclude that the
objective, supernatural standard has a
will of its own, and it always uses this will for good. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know that man’s will
was off kilter.
In conclusion, we
have an objective, supernatural standard of good with a will of its own. In other words, we have the theistic God!
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