Ahh theodicy, just what we need to distract us from pandemics and Trump telling the world he’s Number Wun on Fasebook.
Dude’s a theologian according to his profile. Ok so a theologian to theodicy is like infectious disease specialists to the coronavirus, yeah?
No, because there is no coronavirus equivalent in theodicy. There is no thing to know; there is no body of knowledge to master; there is no evidence to bring to bear. The theo of theodicy is a human invention, so expertise about it is like expertise about a literary character. You can know a lot about what people have said about the literary character, and a lot of opinions about what the author meant by the character, but you can’t have the equivalent of knowledge about how a virus operates. It’s not the same kind of thing.
So, sure, there could be things theologians have said that would make a kind of sense of a god who sent pandemics to kill millions of people. A kind of sense, because you have to accept a lot of very dubious premises first, but still something. But is it a kind of expertise that mere civilians shouldn’t try to challenge?
No. No, because “God” is also the god of the pews who tells people what to do, and we all need to be free to challenge that god and what the priests say about it.
Anyway…I for one am not “telling God how to deal with evil”; I’m telling godbotherers that their god is evil. The god is supposed to be in a position to tell us what to do, so there shouldn’t be professional-credential obstacles to saying why that god 1. doesn’t exist and 2. is a shit.
Comments
24 responses to “Not tentative enough”
I get tired of Christians talking about atheists like we are some weird minority. Most people in the world don’t believe in their theology. They don’t believe in the theologies of most other people in the world – not even that of other Christians. As far as Hinduism goes, they are not believers. As far as Shintoism goes, they are nonbelievers. Buddhism? Islam? Jainism? Sikhism? Non-believers. Everyone in the world is a non-believer in most other people’s religions. We atheists only disbelieve in one more religion.
And all we’re declining to believe in, really, is other people’s words. God doesn’t drop by every couple of weeks to present proof of identity, so why should we believe god exists?
@Ophelia That’s because God is ineffable. Obviously.
I love this place. Theodicy is a new word to me. Initially I thought it was a mash up of Theology and Idiocy. Actually, it might as well be.
Really it should be theodiky, because the Greek word is dike (deekay), but Greek Ks became Latin Cs which were always pronounced K but then Latin words migrated to English so we get theodicy.
@Rob
Like you, I also recently learned the word theodicy. And, like you, I also thought it was a made-up word, combining theology and idiocy. But, it is a real word! Theology is almost self-mocking.
Rob, the word you want is religidiocy, the proponents of which are religidiots.
Seems to me it’s the theologians who are telling their god what do about evil. They’re the ones claiming to be able to explain exactly how s good god is consistant and compatible with the existence of evil. They are, in effect saying ” This is how god does it/did it.” Atheists are just saying that this “explanation” is just handwaving to get past the fact that it’s a shitty explanation that does not get their god off the hook. Someone who claims to know the reasoning of a god who became a human in order to sacrifice his meat body self to appease his goddy self because humans whom he allegedly created behaved in a way that his omniscience was unable to predict, and who has a history of violence including, but not limited to, attempted omnicide, is hardly in a position to call upon reason, logic or consistency.
One of the problems of Christianity is that it’s tied to a book that’s a hodgepodge of all sorts of crazy, stupid shit that it has to justify and explain. Why does an omnibenevolent, omnipotent supreme being have to be appease himself by sacrificing himself? Can’t he just say “I forgive you” and be done with it? Nope; they’ve got this whole Jesus story they’ve got to use. It’s part of the contract. That story is the whole point of the religion. That it’s nothing but a huge, pointless digression in the face of such a simple question is a bit of an embarassment. That’s the way they must explain it, because that’s the game they chose to play. Not our problem; they’re the ones who started this game of Calvinball. It just bothers them that atheists can come up with a hypothetical supreme being who would be much better than the maniac whose fictional escapades they’re stuck defending.
Oh, goody, it’s the religious two-step again.
“God is loving and good.”
Oh, so what’s with all the evil in the world?
“He works in mysterious ways. He’s inscrutable to mortal minds.”
I see.
“Good. Now follow these rules that God has set out for you.”
Wait, I thought he was inscrutable — now you know exactly what he wants?
“Oh, well, yes, he’s clear about THAT part. Very scrutable on the issue of sex, for instance.”
Christians, ever smug to begin with, are at their most condescending and self-congratulatory when atheists bring up theodicy. They get that look on their faces. You know the look, it’s the one you see when a parent guffawingly indulges a child’s fantasy while rolling their amused eyes toward the adults in the room. If that parent is a self-important wanker.
We atheists can’t see the deeper meaning, you see, the deeper love behind all the needless suffering. We’re morally bankrupt and our hatred blinds us to the deeper truth. They feel sorry for us, really. It must suck being us and not being able to see how beautiful all this war and death and destruction and disease is if only you gaze upon all that deep, deep beauty hidden underneath it.
It’s hard not to speculate that if the beauty is so deeply hidden that nobody can see it, just perhaps it isn’t there at all.
My Text for today is from Genesis 2, 9 and Genesis 3, (KJV). My bold emphasis throughout.
And there you have it. All the soaring Gothic lacework with arches pointing heavenwards, all the bishops’ mitres doing likewise; all the wonderful stained glass windows, all the music of JS Bach and the other cathedral musicians, as well of course of the story of Christ’s redemptive self-sacrifice on the Roman cross; it all rests on the foundation of a folk-tale and the central role therein of a talking bloody snake.
Without the talking snake, no original sin (The Fall.). Without The Fall, no need for humankind to be redeemed through Christ’s the Son’s self-sacrifice on The Cross to his trinitarian alter-ego, God the Father in Heaven. And no need for all the rest of it either.
But, we may ask, what is this domain of ‘knowledge of good and evil’ represented by the fruit of that tree? The best answer I can come up with (someone please correct me if I am wrong) is philosophy. Philosophy includes science, and in the 6th C BC, it was on the move in polytheist Ionian Greece, with a rivalry between gods and their various priests hampering religion. But the rise of monotheism in the Eastern Mediterranean helped bring that rationalist era to a close, and did as much to commence the Dark Ages as did the later fall of Rome.
PS to OB: Hope this posts OK. No preview available. Hint. Hint.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3&version=KJV
The knowledge they gained was that they were naked, so modesty (some version of humility)? Yet they were fruitful and multiplied anyway (to the tune of 7.7+ billion), so they surely didn’t die off. Individually, Adam and Eve died, everyone does, not a huge revelation. Had they not eaten, surely the land mass of the world would be completely covered in immortal human beings by now, another slippery and untenable projection. In ancient folk epistemology, wrongness and falsity prevails, yet it survives to this day?
According to the analogy, we atheists are questioning God’s methods of dealing with the Coronavirus. But if it’s a theodicy, it’s poorly phrased. Within the framework of the Problem of Evil, Atheists would be questioning why there would be a Coronavirus in the first place, given a good God — and then there’s the explanation.
Instead, the second sentence looks like it conflicts with the first. Strictly speaking, God’s method of dealing with the Coronavirus is to let it rage unchecked over the world, sickening and killing most of the population. That’s what it would mean to let go and let God handle it instead of us. Who are we then to prevent His will by bringing in a lot of infectious disease specialists with their suggestions and ideas of how to deal with the Coronavirus? Quarantines and vaccines and ventilators are all human interventions. If Man was meant to avoid getting sick, he would have been born with immunity.
We shouldn’t question the methods of human experts who know how to fix the virus; we shouldn’t question the methods of God who knows why the virus is necessary. Pick.
Actually, the whole thing shows a (willful?) misunderstanding of what atheists are saying. We aren’t telling God (or gods) how to deal with evil. We are saying there is no God, so we humans have to do everything we can to deal with things like coronavirus. God isn’t going to fix it for us. He isn’t evil, he just…isn’t.
God’s only excuse is that he doesn’t exist.
That’s a pretty strong one though…
In this pandemic, you’d figure he’d stop talking about theodicy and talk about the ill ‘e ‘ad. But instead of discussing disease, it’s dis ‘e’s discussing. Disgustin’!
(I’m here all week, which mercifully ends soon.)
Ophelia,
The change in pronunciation from /k/ to /s/ happened in Latin. Apparently it was a series of changes before front vowels (a type of change that’s common across languages), and it’s reflected in all modern Romance languages. Since English borrowed so many words from Latin, mostly either directly or through French, we also inherited the spelling and changes in pronunciation.
There’s a couple of good discussions of this here: https://www.quora.com/How-did-the-letter-c-evolve-to-be-pronounced-s-instead-of-k-before-some-vowels-in-French-when-it-was-only-pronounced-k-in-Latin
iknklast @14,
True. We actually know that doctors and epidemiologists and public health specialists exist, and we have fairly good reasons to think that they are qualified and motivated to help us. Puts them way ahead of god.
What a Maroon – eh? C is always pronounced K in Latin…that is, classical Latin. Church Latin was a whole other story, but then Church Latin was a second language to everyone.
@Screechy Monkey – I’m way ahead of God? Awesome!
Ophelia,
Like all languages, Latin changed. Originally the c was always pronounced /k/, but at some point it changed, and early enough for the change to be reflected in all its daughter languages (including Church Latin). In the link I provided, one of the scholars says that there’s evidence for the change as early as the eruption of Vesuvius in 79CE. I don’t know what that evidence is, but as a general principle if all the daughter languages have the change, then the mother language must as well. As an analogy, since all primates have opposable thumbs, we can conclude that that was a mutation that happened no later than our last common ancestor.
One thing to keep in mind when you’re talking about Latin is that the Latin we have spans several centuries, and that it was undergoing changes during that time as all languages do. Those changes may not always have been reflected in the written language, but they shaped the daughter languages, and by extension much of the Latin we borrowed.
I’ve always been kind of fascinated by that transition…what it was like, the shift from Latin to what seems to us the much easier because simpler demotic descendants. That sloppy lazy trick of using “of” and “for” instead of memorizing all those declensions…
For the most part, it wasn’t Cicero and Cato who were settling in Gaul and Hispania, it was soldiers, who were mostly farm kids from the hinterlands. So already the Latin they were speaking was probably already different from the Latin that the elites were writing. Another thing to keep in mind is that written language tends to be conservative, and in some cases deeply conservative, so it’s entirely possible that the Latin that Cicero spoke with his friends and family was far different from the Latin he wrote (oh, to have videos of the Roman news broadcasts!).
An interesting parallel is what happened to English. Old English, which was relatively widely written until the Norman Conquest, was a lot like Latin and Greek and all the other old Indo-European languages in its morphology. But then for a couple of centuries it pretty much ceased to be written, and when it came back in the 14th Century it was structurally a lot more like modern English (just compare Chaucer to the Anglo-Saxon chronicles). One possibility is that the drastic changes all occurred during those two centuries, but it could also be that the changes were already occurring in the 10th and 11th centuries, but weren’t reflected in the written language. And from what I understand, there’s evidence for the latter scenario.
Caveat: I’m not an expert in these areas, and it’s been a long time since I’ve taken any historical linguistics courses, so have a grain of salt to go along with this.
Grain of salt taken but it’s interesting anyway.