The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #136446   Message #3117095
Posted By: Steve Shaw
19-Mar-11 - 02:04 PM
Thread Name: BS: Another View of Religion
Subject: RE: BS: Another View of Religion
My atheism is based on less profound bases than, say, Aquinas's paradox as to the Problem of Evil: ~~ a God supposed to be both omnipotent and all-loving; but, as there is evil, either he could stop it if he wanted but doesn't, in which case he is not all-loving, or he would stop it if he could but can't, in which case he is not omnipotent. (I have always considered Aquinas a very lucky man ~~ if he had lived three centuries later they would certainly have burnt him instead of making him a saint, wouldn't they?)

But I find the concept of a God as postulated incredible for much more mundane reasons. Surely, if we are the summit of his creation, he could have designed us a hell of a lot better ~~ not having this peculiarly inconvenient necessity for constantly pissing & shitting, for instance. Or all the piddling, petty little disabilities that plague us incessantly. Never mind the problem of Serious Evil ~~ why headaches and toothaches? - that's what I want to know.

Not to mention the agony of childbirth, to which I am grateful that I have never had to be subject. One of the few sensible aspects of the religion in which I was brought up ~~ not that it's particularly less sensible than the rest of them ~~ is that it requires men of certain orthodoxies within it to thank God daily "that I was not born a woman". The reason given in Genesis for this excessive disadvantage to which half of us are subject, that it is a punishment for Man's First Disobedience and Eve's Original Sin, seems, within the parameters of all these beliefs that we over this side just can't accept, the best possible explanation ~~ which, returning to my original postulation that it is the smaller things rather than the greater that seem to me to make the concept of an Intelligently Designing Being (as some of them over there tried to put it recently), to be, to express it with all possible moderation, so excessively unlikely as to be for all practical purposes entirely incredible. And, indeed, undesirable ~~ why would anyone want to believe in such a vengeful, vindictive entity as the source of all being!

Intelligent Design, forsooth. Unintelligent Design, more like... Now, I ask you, who can seriously believe in a deity so crassly inefficient?


This lot could indeed be seen as an argument against the existence of God, but there are much better ones. The points you make actually add up to a strong argument for evolution. There is no goal in evolution so there is no end-point, no perfect being. It has to be that way or natural selection will not have done its job. Life on Earth must keep adapting and changing as the environment changes, and we know that never stops happening. Evolution is thus excused from the criticism you might level at a supernatural being for not making you perfect. Your play areas are going to remain very close to your sewage outfall for the foreseeable future. And drink less and the headaches might go away.