Dr. Venkman said:
Quote:
The 'evil God' argument exists for the purposes of undermining your underlying presuppositions
I'm not familiar with this argument. What is it?
The original article that Derm posted references a couple of "evil" related arguments against God.
In one version of the argument, you start from an assumption that there is a powerful and all-good God that created existence and thus gets to define what is good and what is bad. The argument tries to then set up a feeling of dissonance between the described actions of God according to the Bible or according to church teachings with what we intuitive believe to be 'good' or 'bad'. Said actions could include OT violence or the proposition of Hell and eternal punishment as examples.
In another version of the argument, more formally known at 'The Evil God Challenge', one could utilize the exact same cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments to support a proposition that an evil God exists who wishes to maximize suffering in the universe. There is a symmetry between the arguments of an evil God and a good God, however, most people would say that the idea of an evil God is absurd and enormously unlikely. And because of the symmetry in arguments between the good God / evil God, we can therefore also say that the existence of a good God is equally absurd and unlikely.
The article also makes a very brief reference to simply the argument of the problem of evil or unnecessary suffering.
Ultimately, these arguments do not exist because atheists believe that an evil God actually exists. They exist as a tool for arguing that the reality we observe is inconsistent with what we would expect if we lived in a reality that included an all-powerful and all-good God.
One of the things that I am uncomfortable with in the article is that I believe the article makes the argument for something like Divine Command Theory. If 'good' is simply defined by the will of God, then we might as well say 'God is God' instead of 'God is good'. If morality is not something external to God, but rather derived from God, then what is moral is simply arbitrarily whatever God says is good. God could command that your children be tortured for eternity in Hell . . . and that would be objectively, absolutely, universally, unequivocally, and unquestionably good. And there would be zero reasonable or rational or emotional arguments you could make against the action. Divine Command Theory removes the value of all human knowledge, experience, and reason from the discussion and makes us all slaves to the will of God.