Excusing God
Raymond Tallis highlights the problem of evil
The Imbalance of Good & Evil
More to the point, however, is that in the absence of a God, the God, good and evil themselves are largely existential constructs rooted historically, culturally and experientially in dasein. After all, it's not for nothing those like IC here will insist that in the absence of a God, the God, their God, Good and Evil are beyond the reach of mere mortals. Instead, they are derived largely from one or another sacred text. Moral commandments that then revolve around immortality and salvation. In other words, depending on which One True Path you are on, these commandments might pertain to any number of ofttimes contradictory assessments of conflicting goods.
Goff’s ‘God of limited power’ is at least benign. But then there is Steven Law’s ‘The Evil God Challenge’ (Religious Studies, 2010, 46:3). Law reminds us that there are, after all, good things in the world – beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness – which may allay the suspicion that the universe has been created by an ‘all-evil’ omnipotent God.
Again, however, back to the part where any number of these folks...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_philosophies
...will insist that only their own assessments actually count.
And really what are the odds that of all these assessments of "beauty, wonder, love, nobility, pleasure, happiness" etc., your own is always going to be the one smack dab in the bullseye?
As Law points out, however, it does not support the notion of a god who is all-good. In general, any attempt to rest the answer to the question of the benevolence of God on a ‘felicific calculus’ performed to determine whether the sum total of goodness or happiness exceeds that of evil or suffering, must fail.
As I [and other moral nihilists] point out, however, any number of moral objectivists [God and No God] will insist that, on the contrary, you are either "one of us" or...
..."or else"?
Thus this part...
Firstly, we cannot add up the quantity of happiness and the quantity of suffering over the history of the universe in order to see which is the greater. To put it mildly, we lack the data. And in any case, happiness and suffering cannot be quantified on a single scale, so the relevant sums cannot be performed.
...is no less problematic.
Still, "in reality" they are performed all the time. The objectivists' "calculations" are derived from the assumption that their own One True Path to Good and Evil had better be the one that others choose. It's then only a matter of just how fiercely dogmatic they are in insisting on it. And here we can go all the way to...to the reeducation camps, the gulags or the gas chambers.
Go ahead and ask them to explain that.
