• President Obama signs a law to fight British libel tourism by barring such judgments from being enforced in the U.S.

• My esteemed guest author, Sarah Braasch, has an article in the latest issue of The Humanist on the French burqa ban.

• After a scary brush with mortality, everyone's favorite squid-loving atheist professor is back in action. Visit his blog and leave some get-well-soon comments!

• Did a Catholic priest carry out an IRA bombing? And if so, did the church help cover it up and shield him from justice?

• Susan Jacoby contemplates the theodicy of the bedbug.

• And last but not least, An Apostate's Chapel has this outstanding example of the eloquence, wit and wisdom of Robert Ingersoll, written in response to a Salvation Army-organized vigil of several thousand Christians praying simultaneously for his conversion. (Spoiler: It didn't work!)

The world has seen and heard enough about the misery and destruction in Haiti this past week that I don't think I need to dwell on it. But I do want to take some time to address the perennial question of theodicy, which comes up in the aftermath of every disaster like this.

To an atheist, for whom the Haiti quake was nothing more than the result of tectonic plates slipping - a disaster caused by impersonal natural forces and random chance - there is nothing to explain. The laws of the cosmos are not conscious of human beings and don't take our needs into account. No human action caused this disaster to occur, and no one bears responsibility for it. If we want to live comfortably and safely in this world, it's up to us to learn its rules so that we can mitigate their worst consequences through science and technology, and when disaster does strike, it's up to us to care for each other.

Such is the atheist's view, and it is comforting, in a sense. But to people who believe in a personal deity who set these laws in motion and foresaw their consequences, there's a much more glaring problem. In a post titled Why Did God Allow Haiti's Earthquake?, Christian pastor Dave Schmelzer reflects on the topic.

Schmelzer does have a dead-on and even, dare I say it, scriptural response to Pat Robertson's vile mouth:

The heart of the great biblical book on suffering—Job—critiques Job's false friends who are determined to figure out why Job is suffering. It's as if they can't live in the tension of seeing someone else suffer without establishing that somehow the sufferer deserved their suffering, so we, the onlookers, are safe.

I have no argument with that. But there's another section of Schmelzer's post that caught my attention:

The best thing I've read on this subject is Gregory Boyd's God at War. Boyd says that it's our Greek influence that makes us need answers to suffering and evil. The issue, he says, isn't intellectually figuring out evil. That will lead to two bad outcomes: torment (as Bart Ehrmann discovered) and complacency. To Boyd, the world is a thick spiritual battle. When we confront suffering and evil, our task is not to analyze the suffering and evil, it's to fight it.

What I find most interesting about this is Boyd's claim that we shouldn't try to find an explanation for evil that's compatible with Christianity. Attempting this, he says, can have only two outcomes, both of them bad: either we become convinced that God is malevolent or indifferent, which plunges one into despair (or leads to deconversion, as happened with Bart Ehrman), or we become convinced that God is justified in causing it, which leads to the Robertson-like callousness which believes that only evil people suffer.

Now, I'm not denying the logic of this argument. Those do seem to be the most common outcomes when Christians contemplate the problem of evil. But what I want to point out is his conclusion: therefore, Christians should stop trying to find an explanation for evil. They should just stop thinking about the topic, because it does damage to their faith if they dwell on it too closely.

Schmelzer endorses this conclusion himself:

"Why" never offered anyone any comfort, any power or any answers... So let's not over-analyze "why God allowed" Haiti's earthquake.

This is a rather surprising view, inasmuch as it categorically dismisses the possibility that apologists' attempts to justify evil and suffering could ever assist faith. It seems he agrees with us atheists that conventional Christian explanations for evil are insufficient.

But it's not just evangelical Christians who take this view. A Mormon blog calls the project of theodicy a "poisoned cup", and says:

I find myself increasingly ambivalent about the whole project of theodicy. On one hand, I want to reject a fideism that insists on belief in the irrational as a mark of true faith. Hence, I want a religion that at least holds out the possibility of increasing my understanding of the ways of God and the nature of the universe through the use of reason. We shouldn't have to crucify our brains in order to believe. And yet there is also a part of me that wants to maintain the mystery of evil... Ultimately... the most important reaction to suffering is its alleviation rather than its explanation.

This blogger, obviously an intelligent person, doesn't want to have to shut off his mind in order to believe. And to his credit, he rejects the Robertsonian argument that black people were justly excluded from the Mormon priesthood as punishment for sins they committed in a previous life:

I would much rather ascribe the priesthood ban to the tragic failings and racism of good and great men like Brigham Young rather than warp the cosmic narrative of the plan of salvation to make an injustice just.

This is an eloquent and laudable honesty, far superior to the usual apologists' approach of enshrining contingent historical prejudices as eternal truths. And yet he, too, counsels fellow believers to cease trying to explain evil and "simply let the mystery be" - as though the project of theodicy was a blister, or an unhealed wound: something that we only make worse by picking at it.

What's remarkable is that both these writers, in their own ways, implicitly acknowledge that the argument from evil is irrefutable. There is simply no moral way to reconcile belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity with the fact of evil and suffering in our world. This is just what atheists have been saying since the time of Epicurus. But rather than take the obvious next step - that the argument from evil is unanswerable because the atheists are correct - they instead advise their fellow believers to stop thinking about it.

Is this not remarkable? It's as though, for people in these religious traditions, an entire continent of their inner mental world has to be cordoned off and declared a forbidden zone. Their mental landscape is littered with locked doors, fences of barbed wire, and sternly worded "Keep Out" signs - all delimiting the sphere of dangerous ideas which they're advised never to examine.

Can anyone dispute that atheists have nothing like this? Is there any idea we place off-limits for examination, any question we deem too dangerous to ask? Is there any place where we say the free mind must never travel? And if your answer is "no", as it inevitably must be, then I have a followup question: Which kind of belief would need to be protected from scrutiny: a true belief, or a false one?

Hello Quixote,

Considering your last letter to me was some time ago, I apologize for the lateness of my reply. To tell the truth, this was the hardest one for me to write. It's not that I couldn't think of anything to say. Much the opposite: If I had said everything I wanted to say, this post would have been too long! Cutting it down to a reasonable length was more of a struggle than writing it. I've endeavored to edit in a way that does justice to your points and to mine.

I also want to say at the outset that this will be my last reply. I've enjoyed our conversation these past few months; I think we've both had ample opportunity to speak our minds and I'm glad for that. If you'd like to offer some final thoughts in reply to this letter, you're welcome to do so.

While you good folk may connect these observances, and they are real world observances, with logical arguments or rationale for unbelief, most do not. In ministry, we engage believers and unbelievers continuously, and it's a rare bird that cites any of the philosophic staples in my first paragraph, or others like them. The ones who do generally do not exhibit even a serviceable grasp of the attendant issues. This is my overwhelming and consistent experience firsthand.

That may be one of those points where we'll have to differ. In my experience, most atheists, even if they aren't experts in theology, come to atheism because they've decided that something about religious belief doesn't rationally add up. This may, of course, be self-selection bias - it's likely that most of the people who visit Daylight Atheism come here because they like to give thought to these issues.

However, I maintain that since there isn't (yet!) a thriving, real-world atheist community in the same way that there are religious communities, very few people are going to become atheists just because it's the default option in their peer group. Most people who become atheists do so as the result of a conscious decision on their part and an intentional effort to seek out the advocates of that philosophy. Granted, if we're as successful as I'd hope, that may change in a few generations. Greta Christina wrote a very thoughtful post about this (link), about how every social movement needs must start with the most independently-minded, committed people, and how that inevitably diminishes as its goals are accomplished and it becomes a more widely accepted position.

An insulating factor actively laboring against this realization is immersion. I define immersion as a progressive group dynamic which isolates and subsequently reinforces cognitive structures, mores, and peculiar linguistics — and a host of other things — among individuals sharing (un)beliefs and community. We're all guilty of it, and I can't speak for y'all, but one thing accomplished by this dialogue is the weakening of this exclusive immersive web by the coupling of new strands to existing ones.

I couldn't agree more! Why do you think I wanted to do this in the first place?

Lastly, I might also ask you a related question: to what degree is your atheism dependent upon your birth in a western culture steeped in secularism? Would that influence your estimation of the reasonableness of your atheism? I'd also like to hear to what degree you believe your birth into a Judeo-Christian culture has imported tenets from those religions into your atheism, whether consciously or subconsciously.

I don't accept that Western culture, particularly American culture, is steeped in secularism. On the contrary, I'd say that being an atheist where I live requires swimming upstream against an overwhelming tide of public opinion: opinion treating belief in God not just as the expected, but the only moral position. Look at the money in your wallet if you don't think that's true. There may be some places where your remark about our secularism-steeped culture has a degree of truth. But in vast swathes of this country, nonbelief in public life, or even in private life, is all but impossible unless carefully concealed.

I'll grant that living in this culture does make atheism possible - in the sense that, as god-saturated as our society is, we've still managed to carve out some breathing room between religion and government, creating a small space where nonbelief can exist. In many cultures of the past and the present, even that wouldn't have existed, and outspoken atheism would not be an option at all. In those cultures I'd have been imprisoned or worse for saying the kind of things I say nearly every day on this blog.

As for importing Judeo-Christian tenets into my atheism - I don't know, which tenets do you have in mind? There are many moral principles, like the Golden Rule, that find expression in every culture. In our culture, which is heavily influenced by Christian thinking, these universals naturally find expression in a Christian context. In that sense, I'll concede that my worldview has been influenced by these beliefs; it would be virtually impossible for anyone who grew up in 20th-century America to say otherwise. On the other hand, the Bible and historic Christianity have promoted many principles that are antithetical to my worldview, and many social reform movements to whose ideals I subscribe - separation of church and state, women's equality, secular public schools, birth control, GLBT rights - were and often still are viciously attacked for being anti-Christian.

I've never lived a moment without out it that I can recall. There's definitely times when it's stronger, though. After absorbing so much heat for this admission, I'm figuring I should just go ahead and claim it as an evidence for God — I've got nothing to lose! I'd enjoy hearing of your comparable experience...

Well, now you've asked me a hard question! Trying to do justice to experiences like this is like trying to describe the experience of listening to a symphony. But I'll give it my best shot.

This kind of experience tends to come upon me suddenly at my happiest moments, though it sometimes wells up for no apparent reason. (Maybe it's from a little trickle of current in my temporal lobes.) The most salient aspect is a sense of heightened awareness - a feeling that all the world has suddenly become much richer in detail, that everything has become immeasurably more significant. Always accompanying this is a sense of great affection, of love for all the beauty of the world and my fellow living things. And lastly, there's a feeling I can only describe as oceanic: like the boundaries of my self dissolving, being opened up to all the unimaginable vastness of the world, and experiencing it as a source of bliss. In those few perfect moments, it feels as if the world is full of magic, and I've only briefly gained the ability to see it.

I won't say that this state, this awareness, is present in my life every waking moment. But when it does emerge, it's like the sun breaking through clouds, and I wonder how anyone ever does without it.

When I read your commentary and essays, I sense that you consider some things to be right, and others wrong, in a manner that equates them with objective moral values — in a manner that you would consider them right and wrong if you and every other human had never existed; simply put: more than only the natural functioning of a human cortex, a deliverance of human reason, or an emergent consciousness. I'm not convinced yet that your and your commentator's actions match your beliefs. Where is my misstep here?

I do consider that some things are objectively right and others are objectively wrong. However, I do not consider that this is mutually exclusive with the natural functioning of the cortex. I think these explanations are complementary: the existence of conscious, reasoning beings brings right and wrong into the world, just as it brings in a whole host of other abstract concepts - democracy, for example, or money, or science, or music. It wouldn't make sense to say that those things aren't "real", that they're just tricks of the cerebral cortex. We make them real by participating in them.

How can you prove that the only reason God would permit evil to occur is to bring about some other end?

Truthfully, I think that's the only defense a Christian could possibly offer, even as unsatisfactory as it is (a point you seem to agree with, if I read you correctly). For if God did not create evil as a means to some other end, there's only one other logically possible option: that God created evil as an end in itself. In other words, he created evil for its own sake. That's the definition of what an evil being is, and that creates an irreconcilable contradiction with the core tenet of Christianity that God is good.

If a genuine free will exists, not every possible world is feasible for God to create, and the one we know may just be the possible world feasible for God to create that contains the most good with the least amount of evil given the counterfactuals of creaturely free action. As I think I'm on the side of reason here, I'll endure the Panglossian taunts happily.

I really doubt that very strongly. When you look out at this world, you can't think of any way it could be improved? We wouldn't stand to gain by making human beings more empathetic, less prone to resort to violence to settle their disagreements? We couldn't gain by making free agents who are more inclined to take the long view, less inclined to value immediate short-term gain? By making people who are more courageous and morally steadfast, less willing to compromise their principles for material benefit?

These are all contingent parameters of human behavior that could hypothetically be altered; a creator could twiddle those knobs without depriving us of free will. If you really think this world is unimprovable, that's your right. All I can say, though, is that if God turned things over to me, it wouldn't take long to draw up a list of fixes.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: if you were convinced there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, wouldn't you trust in Him with regard to evil?

If I was convinced of the exact statement you gave, yes, I'd pretty much have to. However, that's because your conclusion is contained in your premise: if there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, it follows as a matter of logic that there can be no unnecessary evil in the world. But that's putting the cart before the horse. I see no rational way to draw such an inference, given the fact that unnecessary evil manifestly does exist. How anyone could look at this world and infer that supreme moral goodness intended it all to be this way, that's a conclusion I simply can't see any way to justify.

As I've said before, to infer moral goodness, one has to have at least some understanding of the actor's motives. But you say we should treat God's plan as a mystery, that we can't know he doesn't have good reasons of his own and therefore should trust him. Again, this is putting the cart before the horse. If God's motives are unknown to us, to be consistent, you'd have to say that his moral status, good or bad, is also an unknown quantity. Believing that God is absolutely good and that he has a motive for all the evil he causes is an argument that goes straight from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps.

Hello Quixote,

In reference to your list of reasons why people become atheists or theists, I have to disagree. I don't think most of those are the initial reasons why people choose one or the other. Many of them are common causes that are frequently taken up by people on one side or the other, or are shared aspects of membership in those communities, it's true. But I don't think people become atheists because they have more fun than theists (although, if true, that might be a reason why people stay atheists), or that people become theists because of the sense of community they get from attending church (although, again, that might be a reason why they stay theists).

However, I would zero in one item of your second list, the first item: Most people who are theists were taught from childhood to believe that way. People do convert in adulthood, but we both know that that's relatively rare. For the most part, the things that people were raised to believe are the ones that they end up believing for the rest of their lives.

Would you agree with that? If so, I'm curious how it influences your belief in the reasonableness of your faith. If you (or I) were raised in a predominantly Muslim country, we'd almost certainly be Muslims; if in a Buddhist country, we'd more likely be Buddhists. Do you think that should mean anything to people who live in a largely Christian country and are Christians themselves?

That this particular portion of my initial post would have garnered the interest it has baffles me, to be honest. I inserted it as almost an afterthought, because I suspect many theists use this awareness as a basis for God's existence. I do not, nor am I the charismatic type Christian who would be prone to such experiences.

It doesn't surprise me at all. I think that many atheists find this the most novel claim in the theist's arsenal, as well as the one they're personally least familiar with. And notwithstanding the fact that you don't rely on it as the primary basis for your belief, I think most theists do. In fact, for many of them, I think it's the first reason they would give.

From what you've said so far, this is a hard thing to describe. I accept that, but I'd like to explore it a little more, with your permission. I've had experiences that strike me as comparable, but maybe if we talk it over a bit more, we can see if we're talking about the same thing. Here's the most important thing I'm curious about: Is this sensation a continual awareness, or are there moments when it's absent and others when it's especially intense?

...how you would ever conclude that there is evil and injustice. If these things come about by accident, as you say, why would we consider them good? If they come about by random chance, where's the injustice or the evil? Certainly you don't conclude that there's evil and injustice in the insect world, yet if we're the same product of naturalism that the insect kingdom is, and there's no higher authority overseeing our existence, why would we presume that there's actual injustice or evil simply because we're a more highly evolved lifeform with an emergent consciousness?

You've answered your own question, my friend. Insects are programmed by genes and instinct, and cannot choose in any meaningful way how to live their lives. But human beings are conscious, rational creatures who can explicitly reflect on and compare reasons in order to steer our own behavior. That makes us moral agents who bear real responsibility for the actions we undertake. If we suffer harm that is not merited by our actions, then an injustice is done, even if it's not done by someone. Similarly, a natural event may be good for us, in accordance with our reasons and desires, even if it was not caused by a conscious being. Our quest for justice is really the quest to impose a rational pattern on an irrational world, to bring the world into alignment with what a consideration of our reasons would suggest.

The primary cause of this wholesale withdrawal has been the inability for philosophers to demonstrate that God cannot possess a morally sufficient reason to permit evil.

With respect to the philosophers you cite, I don't agree. Assuming evil is not an end in itself, the only reason God would permit evil to occur is to bring about some other end, some other goal that he desires. But if God is omnipotent, that can never be necessary. That's what omnipotence means: an omnipotent being can directly actualize any logically possible state of affairs, and is not bound, as we are, by the necessity to use tools or contrivances.

If God wants to cross a river, he doesn't need to create stepping stones in the water; he can just teleport to the other side. If God wants to start a fire, he doesn't need matches or tinder; he just creates fire. I don't think you would disagree with either of those statements. What grounds can there be for reaching a different conclusion in the case of evil?

I know the usual Christian response to this question is that true free will requires the ability to do wrong. But - not to preempt your reply - I don't think that's the one you'll go for, unless I've misunderstood your views on the nature of humanity's relationship to God. Of course, I await your reply to see I've gone astray!

It's not only professional philosophers and theologians who have an opinion on matters touching the sacred. Sometimes, gold-jewelry-wearing, mohawk-having, former '80s television and movie action stars have words of wisdom to express on these weighty matters. Like, for instance, Mr. T, who recently gave an interview to Bizarre magazine in which he made a very interesting, and unintentionally revealing, comment.

The interviewer asked T if he'd ever seen a UFO, to which he responded:

I'm a Christian – I really don't believe in UFOs.

What one has to do with the other is not clear to me, but leave that aside. Mr. T is in fact an evangelical Christian, as he confirms in this Beliefnet interview:

I am a sinner who has been saved by grace. It's by the grace of God that I'm here. We all have sinned and fallen short on God's glory. I come home and I ask God to forgive me for my sins. Everyday I ask for a new cleansing. I say, "God, let me show kindness to someone, let me give someone hope. Let me be a light at the end of a tunnel for somebody." I tell people, they say I'm a farmer, I plant the seed of hope, plant the seed of inspiration, plant the seed so they can start praying and believing again.

He credits his surviving a bout with cancer (he had, yes, T-cell lymphoma - no, I'm not making that up) to his faith:

The story of Job gave me strength when I had cancer. I said, "T, if you just hang in there, God will give you double for your troubles." That's what I was taught in church and that's what happened to Job. What he lost, he gained more in the end. Job said, "Though you slay me, yet will I trust you." God giveth and God taketh away. Blessed be his holy name." And that's how I live.

So far, this is the standard evangelical Christian platter of beliefs. But in the Bizarre interview, the interviewer asks Mr. T a different question, and his answer gives the game away:

If you could have a magical power, what would it be?
Easy question! That's too, too easy Alix! Wow. I appreciate your sweetness giving me such an easy question! I'd have the power to heal little children. I'd want to make sure they all got an education and weren't scrabbling around in garbage and eating scraps of junk, like the kids in India shown in that movie, Slumdog Millionaire. I hope the people that made that film are investing some of the profits into cleaning up the area where they filmed, and doing something to improve those kids' lives. Yeah, I'd want to help the tiny ones who are blind, who have diseases like AIDS and problems like muscular dystrophy... I'd heal the children and save the babies.

If he had any magical power, Mr. T says, he'd end poverty and cure disease among the world's children. In fact, he doesn't even have to think hard about this: he considers it an "easy question".

But he seems to have forgotten something important. Mr. T is an evangelical Christian and therefore, presumably, he believes in a god who has the power to do all those things at this very moment. So why doesn't God do that? Does Mr. T even realize that he's just inadvertently outlined one of the strongest pieces of evidence against his own religious beliefs?

Theologians have tied themselves in logical knots for millennia trying to explain what reasons God could have for allowing evil and suffering. But Mr. T, in his own inimitable style, brushes those convoluted theodicies aside by saying that the choice to end evil, if he had the power to do it, would be an easy one. Either he is a more compassionate and loving person than the god he claims to serve, or else that god does not exist.

Mr. T isn't the first Christian to contradict his own beliefs like this. C.S. Lewis did the same thing, as I pointed out in "The Theodicy of Narnia". They, like many other Christians, insist on believing in a god who has deep and mysterious reasons for allowing persistent and terrible evils. But both of them, when apologetic considerations are not uppermost in their minds, inadvertently contradict their own belief by stating that of course they would create a world without evil if they could.

And of course they would - as would any of us, I hope. Of course we would abolish evil if we could. Basic decency and simple compassion mandate no other conclusion. It's only the necessity of accounting for the evil that does exist, in a world claimed to be ruled by a benevolent deity, that forces religious apologists to bend over backwards trying to excuse the inexcusable. But when religious concerns are not at the forefront, when simple human conscience is allowed to express itself, most believers prove by their words and actions that they themselves are better and more rational than the faith they claim to represent.

Hello Ebon,

To approach your larger question, what are the real reasons people believe or disbelieve, I've offered a bulletized list for anyone who's interested in pursuing this question:

• Some people do not believe in God for a variety of honestly considered reasons.
• Some people resent the Christian church's involvement in politics, usually the Christian right's involvement in the Republican Party. Atheism provides a natural outlet for this resentment, and becomes an attractive choice on that basis.
• Some people who value science highly find religion's involvement in the public school science class, and with science at large, deplorable. Atheism, though not formal in a creedal sense, shares this concern.
• Some people desire to drink beer on Saturday night, and the current religion in this culture meets on Sunday morning.
• Some people desire to resist authority structures. As a confederation of freethinkers, atheism provides a natural haven for this desire. This may occur against parents, churches, the government, mainstream culture, societal tradition, and other societal structures. The counterculture of the 1960's contributes to these phenomena.
• Atheism appears more fun than theism.
• An increasing number of once traditional societal structures, universities for instance, have increasingly taught atheism as a viable philosophic and lifestyle option. This has translated into a greater number of atheists.
• The notion on the street that science has disproved theism has contributed to the spread of atheism.
• The widespread belief that science, education, technology, and economics will lead to a humanistic utopia has disenfranchised the need for God in many people's minds, thus leading to atheism.
• Some people consider religion an evil, therefore atheism is a natural option.
• Some people hate, distrust, or have lost faith in God over bad events which occurred in their lives.
• The publicity campaign of the New Atheism.

For theists, then:

• Some people were raised to believe, and therefore believe.
• Some people choose to believe, therefore they believe.
• Some people revere the Bible, or another holy text, as the word of God.
• A sense of community is important to some people, therefore they attend church. Moreover, some seek influence or networks from a local community.
• Some people sincerely believe for a variety of honestly considered reasons.
• Some people feel God, therefore they believe.
• Some people have experiences they attribute to God, therefore they believe.
• Some people consider authority structures their duty to uphold. This is increasingly rare, I think, and descriptive of older generations.
• Some people consider atheism an evil, therefore belief is a natural option.
• Some people turned to faith in God over bad events which occurred in their lives.
• Some people look at a sunset or the stars, and find atheism a difficult option.
• Some people find a sense of hope in God, therefore they believe.

These, and probably more could be added, are reasons for belief and unbelief. Faith and unbelief, in my experience with people, is generally caught and not taught. The well-considered reasons generally follow; there are notable exceptions, I'm sure, but it's not normative for the well-considered reasons to lead. If you like, we can add, delete, unpack, and/or expand these.

To your specific questions, then:

"That said, I am interested to know more about this feeling you speak of, and I'd like to hear you describe it in more detail, if you can. Is it a unique quale, something indescribable through other sensory modalities, or is it an awareness that comes through the usual five senses?"

That this particular portion of my initial post would have garnered the interest it has baffles me, to be honest. I inserted it as almost an afterthought, because I suspect many theists use this awareness as a basis for God's existence. I do not, nor am I the charismatic type Christian who would be prone to such experiences. I suspect my temperament mirrors yours in many respects.

Nevertheless, we imagine ourselves separated by a gulf of experience, so let's press on the best we can. Can I describe this awareness to you in more detail? I doubt it. The closest I might bring you to the experience is your encounter with the sublime or perhaps the numinous, so let's take a quick look at both.

Certainly you've encountered the sublime: a gaze at a sunset, a fascination with the stars, a sense of something greater than yourself. In fact, I believe I recall your exposition of the sublime from an atheist's perspective in one of your essays. I'd not suggest to you that your confrontation with the sublime is equivalent to the awareness I've mentioned. It's not; however, theists tend to meld the two in their minds, so perhaps that experience of the stars at night is as close as I can guide you to my personal experience. I suspect it is.

But, perhaps the numinous, a term coined by Rudolf Otto as far as I know, is more fertile ground. Otto described the sense of contact with a being wholly other as the numinous. While I would not describe God as wholly other — there must be some common frame of reference for contact with God if we were to know him — the conception of a being similar to the attributes customarily ascribed to the Christian God should engender a sensation of the numinous. The feeling produced by the holy God described by Christianity may cause this aspect of Otto's numinous: the mysterium tremendum, an unsettling awareness, one perhaps of fear. Moreover, there's the mysterium fascinas: as the phrase suggests, an awareness of a being so infinitely wonderful that it's irresistible in its allure.

Hopefully, that gives you an inkling of the experience. It's an odd situation. I have no doubt of your honesty when you claim to possess no like experience, yet I'm certain that billions of theists would report similar experiences. They'll know what I'm talking about, but collectively we won't be able to adequately explain it to you.

In that manner, it does resemble a quale, doesn't it? But I hesitate to term it such, for it ushers in a host of philosophic associations that may or may not be helpful, and they may very well prove misleading. I also hesitate to utilize the conceptions of sensory modality and the usual five senses. An historic theological phrase, the sensus divinitatis, is more than likely the best descriptive vehicle, but it carries baggage when used around atheists that I'd rather not unearth, as I've stated previously on DA. What I can say — for myself, that is — is that it appears to be part of an epistemic cognitive function capable of apprehending this awareness.

But, of course, this last statement is contingent upon the de facto consideration of whether God exists. If He does not in reality exist, then your (and mine, actually) likely conclusion that I have a God gene or some other neurological peculiarity, as you put it, seems almost certain. That, or I'm simply deluded. Either way, it would seem that here I stand, I can do no other, unless of course you are successful in convincing me that God does not in fact exist, which may not prevent the awareness, but only provide me a better explanation for the phenomenon. Naturally, another option is that God actually exists, and this awareness somehow is reflective of an actual presence. And, if we care at all to logic, it would appear that there may be other possibilities available to us as well: perhaps God exists and this awareness is in no way related to him. Whatever the case may be, the question is bound inexorably to the de facto question of existence, so while it may be interesting to ponder, it seems to me it has to be tabled until the time that question is actually settled. Until that time, if there is one, the theist and atheist are likely to proceed with their thinking in relation to this question based upon their current beliefs.

So, then to your second concern:

"Why is it the case that justice, consciousness and the like raise the odds in favor of a world-with-God hypothesis over those of a world-without-God hypothesis?"

As you well know, this question, and any subsequent answer by a Christian, will mire us in the invariable discussions endlessly volleyed by Christians and atheists. And it leads the theist inexorably into an axiological argument for God's existence. For example, I'd be interested to know based on your description of the world as you see it:

"It's easy to see how those good things you mention could come about by accident, at least some of the time, in a world with no higher authority; random chance will sometimes turn out in our favor, sometimes not. But I think it's a lot more challenging to explain how evil and injustice could come to be in a world overseen by a deity that does not desire such things."

how you would ever conclude that there is evil and injustice. If these things come about by accident, as you say, why would we consider them good? If they come about by random chance, where's the injustice or the evil? Certainly you don't conclude that there's evil and injustice in the insect world, yet if we're the same product of naturalism that the insect kingdom is, and there's no higher authority overseeing our existence, why would we presume that there's actual injustice or evil simply because we're a more highly evolved lifeform with an emergent consciousness? Did we awaken in this world as Gregor Samsa, as monstrous vermin?

But before we do all that, let me address the greater question of the problem of evil:

"But I think it's a lot more challenging to explain how evil and injustice could come to be in a world overseen by a deity that does not desire such things."

We need to frame this question before delving into it. Many atheists, not to suggest yourself, are unaware that the logical problem of evil is now, I'm pleased to report, widely abandoned. The logical, or deductive form of the problem of evil attempts to demonstrate that the propositions "God exists" and "evil exists" are contradictories. The primary cause of this wholesale withdrawal has been the inability for philosophers to demonstrate that God cannot possess a morally sufficient reason to permit evil. Hence, there exists no persuasive deductive path to demonstrate successfully a contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil.

For instance, the highly esteemed atheist philosopher, and former DA poster, I believe, Dr. Michael Martin has stated "Most philosophers now believe that there is good reason why the Deductive Argument from Evil fails: it is logically possible that evil can exist even if God exists if God has good moral reasons for allowing it." Moreover, atheist philosopher William Rowe states "Some philosophers have contended that the existence of evil is logically inconsistent with the existence of the theistic God. No one, I think, has succeeded in establishing such an extravagant claim. Indeed, granted incompatibilism, there is a fairly compelling argument for the view that the existence of evil is logically consistent with the existence of God."

While this is inconclusive in itself with regard to whether the problem of evil is a true defeater for God's existence, I think it is important to note that there's no logical or deductive path between the existence of God and the existence of evil that impedes belief or founds unbelief. Thus, the problem of evil is relegated to inductive or abductive arguments.

In fairness, then, I would expect every atheist to approach the POE with the same level of skepticism they showed with my hinted at inductive arguments for the existence of God; that is, I would expect them to accuse themselves of the very things they accuse me of — appeals to ignorance, personal incredulity, and the like — before accepting the POE as evidence against God. For every atheist that truly applies this skepticism to his own argument, I take no exception to their rejection of God.

Moreover, inductive arguments often fall prey to emotionalism, and this fact is exacerbated with subjects such as evil. Very often an atheist's rejection of God is based on emotionalism combined with the problem of evil. I think this is self-evident with regard to your greater question as to why some people disbelieve, and I would guess that it is a common path trodden by those deconverting from theism to atheism. Again, if any of your readers have taken the intellectual steps to ensure this is not the case with their thought process, and still remain convinced, I take no exception. In general, I take no exception to honest, well-thought through belief or unbelief.

So, properly framed, let's see where the discussion leads. The POE, the axiological argument, or perhaps "And Now for Something Completely Different."

Since its inception, Daylight Atheism has been first and foremost a platform for atheist thought. We've had plenty of theist commenters, but never an entire post written by a theist - until now.

Some of you may recognize Quixote, who's been a commenter here for some time. There have been many theists commenting on Daylight Atheism whose beliefs I've strongly disagreed with, and (I like to think) many theists whom I've been able to converse with in a spirit of civility and friendship, but I don't think any other visitor on DA combines those qualities in as high a measure as he does. That's why I thought it would make for interesting reading for the two of us to engage in a dialogue, one that avoids the usual cliched arguments and gets down to the most meaningful differences in respective worldviews. When we more clearly outline the chasm between us, it may be easier for one side or the other to see across it.

My model is the 2007 debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, which I thought was both civil and illuminating. I hope ours will achieve a similar standard. I don't have a specific plan for how many rounds this will continue; I trust the time will become clear when we've both spoken our peace. My opening statement follows below, and his will be posted tomorrow. Your comments are welcome as well, but please be sure they show the kind of civility that attracts commenters like Quixote here in the first place!

Hi Quixote,

So, as I believe we had agreed, we were going to talk about the most fundamental reasons why people become atheists or theists. In my case, there are two main ones. These are similar to arguments I've made before, but in this letter, they're described more personally: I wanted to emphasize the reasons why I'm an atheist, the ones that I myself find most convincing. You may disagree, of course. If you want to respond to these, or if you'd rather discuss the reasons that motivate your beliefs, either is fine with me.

The first reason is that, when I look at the world, I get the strong impression that no one's in charge. History lacks a discernible moral order. Happiness and misery are distributed randomly, without regard to morality; good people sometimes succeed and sometimes suffer, and evil people sometimes are punished and sometimes prosper. Humanity has made some moral progress by its own effort, but even so, this world is not one that consistently rewards virtue or punishes vice. In short, the universe gives every sign of being ruled by pure chance and mechanistic, unintelligent natural forces. And when people are suffering unjustly - by which I mean, suffering in a way that bears no relation to any choice they have made - there is no divine help for them.

That last point is the one that sticks in my craw the most. If there is a god that loves us and cares about our well-being, why doesn't he do anything to aid people who are suffering or in need? How could he not?

If I were God, I would pass through all the hospitals in the world and heal the suffering in their sickbeds. I would miraculously cure AIDS, so that millions of children don't have to grow up orphans. I would calm hurricanes before they could hit coastal communities, or at the very least, send angels to pluck people from the raging floodwaters. I would send rain where there's drought and turn deserts into fertile breadbaskets where crops grow in abundance, so no one would go hungry. When violent people tried to harm the innocent, I would make their guns turn into flowers in their hands. I can't believe that, if there is a god, I'm more moral or more compassionate than him. Yet all these evils and many more remain unalleviated, and the only aid for those in need is the aid that we give each other. My sense of conscience rebels at believing that a god is responsible for this state of affairs.

The second major reason why I'm an atheist is the diversity and confusion of religious beliefs among humankind. When you look out at the world's cultures, you don't see a uniform testimony of faith; you don't see the same creeds arrived at independently in different societies, you don't see prophets preaching the same god and the moral lessons among every people. Instead, every culture has its own beliefs and its own stories, all of which are wildly different from the ones that predominate elsewhere. If every culture in the world past and present held what was recognizably the same faith, that would be extremely difficult for an atheist to explain. But what we see instead is a vast sea of religious confusion and discord, and this suggests that what we're dealing with is the diversity and creativity of human imagination.

Again, if I were God, I would not leave humanity in darkness and ignorance. I would not communicate through hazy oracles, ancient anonymous writings, or vague promptings of conscience. I would make my message as clear as daylight and as brilliant as the sun. I would not have a chosen people; I would raise up prophets from among every people, from every region and every era, speaking my message to the populace. Or better yet, I would speak to all people individually - not in an ambiguous inner voice, but in visible, tangible manifestation, making it perfectly clear what I desired from them, so that even people who chose to ignore me would know exactly what my message was. I would not remain silent, hidden, invisible, leading some people to doubt my existence and others to cause chaos and strife as they battled over competing ideas about my wishes. This strikes me as the more rational course of action by far, and again, my sense of reason rebels when I'm asked to believe that an all-knowing god chose a plan so obviously inferior.

In my eyes, these are the two most persuasive reasons. What do you think?

In 2006 and 2007, I wrote several entries in a series called A World in Shadow, bolstering the atheist's argument from evil by describing particularly shocking or egregious instances of natural and moral evils. However, I haven't written any new entries for this series in some time.

To be honest, I stopped writing these posts because I found them too upsetting. There are more than enough - far too many - examples of tragedy and catastrophe in this world to make the case against a benevolent overseer; we need not dwell on them. But today, I have to make just one further exception. I don't like writing about these things, but this is one case where the tragedy is so shattering, the suffering so horrendous, and the action needed to stop it so trivial, that it perfectly sums up and encapsulates the argument from evil.

I'll begin where Gene Weingarten begins, from his March 8 article in the Washington Post:

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept.

This ordinary man, Miles Harrison, was a loving father who made an irrevocable mistake: on his way in to work one day last summer, distracted and beset by daily trivialities, he forgot to drop off his infant son at daycare. He entered his office, leaving the child still strapped into his car seat in the parking lot. And over nine hours, on a sweltering July day, the temperatures inside the car rose until the boy slowly boiled to death.

It seems incredible, unbelievable that any parent could forget their own child. But this case is not the first, and it will not be the last. It happens, on average, around 20 times a year in the United States alone, to parents of every occupation and social class:

Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.

Part of the reason why this happens is the recommendation of safety experts that young children in child seats be in the rear of the car, facing backwards, to protect them from injury in crashes. A child who can't easily be seen by the driver is easier to forget about. But the larger reason, as Weingarten's article explains, simply has to do with the fallibility of human memory and attention. Though we value the lives of our children, that does not mean the memory is treated any differently by the neural circuitry of the brain. In people who are stressed, sleep-deprived, distracted, the higher executive functions can be shunted aside by the lower, more primitive system of the basal ganglia, an evolutionary autopilot that carries out frequently rehearsed tasks with mechanical single-mindedness. (This is why you can sometimes drive a familiar route and end up at your destination with no memory of the journey.) Usually this is a harmless mental shortcut, but when it goes awry, this is the tragedy that results.

I have no desire to place blame on the parents who do this. For the most part, they're not bad people; they're loving parents who made an awful mistake, and who've already punished themselves far beyond anything a judge or jury could ever impose. But consider, now, how little a benevolent god - if there was one - would have to do to stop this from happening. It would take no dramatic interventions, no obvious miracles - just a small, possibly even subconscious nudge to the parent before it was too late. It would interfere with no one's free will to do this. These parents, after all, are not murderers, did not desire to kill their children.

But these tragedies continue to occur, and that can only mean one of three things. Either there is no cosmic authority watching the affairs of humankind, and we are on our own and must take the initiative ourselves if we are to prevent tragedies like this. Or there is a god who lacks either the knowledge of what is going on or the ability to do anything about it. Or, most horrifyingly, there is a god who knows perfectly well when this happens, could save these children if he so desired, but does nothing - only stands by and watches while innocent infants slowly broil to death behind glass.

For reasons I cannot fathom, millions of people adopt the third of those three choices and call it comforting. What comfort they find in believing that their lives are overseen by such a heartless monster, I couldn't say. But there is reason to believe that at least some people to whom this has happened have drawn the obvious moral:

The Terrys are Southern Baptists. Before Mika's death, Mikey Terry says, church used to be every Sunday, all day Sunday, morning Bible study through evening meal. He and his wife, Michele, don't go much anymore. It's too confusing, he says.

"I feel guilty about everyone in church talking about how blessed we all are. I don't feel blessed anymore. I feel I have been wronged by God. And that I have wronged God. And I don't know how to deal with that."

Four years have passed, but he still won't go near the Catholic church he'd been working at that day. As his daughter died outside, he was inside, building a wall on which would hang an enormous crucifix.

Other posts in this series:

• A World in Shadow

A correspondent to William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith column writes in with a very good question, one that atheists have often raised:

An acquaintance of mine recently asked me why it is necessary that we be able to choose evil for us to have free will, while it is not necessary that God be able to choose evil for Him to have free will....

I cannot explain why, if God could create us free without the capacity to choose evil, He did not do so (especially given the fact that we are created in His image, and He is unable to choose evil). Is it because we are finite?

Craig's first response is to suggest that possible worlds such as this exist, but are somehow worse than worlds with moral evil, in some unspecified way:

It’s consistent with the Free Will Defense that although there are possible worlds such as you describe, they have other overriding deficiencies that make them less preferable to worlds in which humans can choose both evil and good.

Again, Craig is tripped up by the most common problem that plagues Christians who argue for the necessity of evil: what about Heaven? That is a type of existence in which, presumably, we retain our free will but no longer choose evil. Craig seems to concede that it is possible for God to create such a world. All we're asking is why, if this is going to be the end state anyway, God didn't simply start out with that and not create a world of suffering in which billions of people end up condemned. Is Craig arguing that Heaven has "overriding deficiencies" that make it inferior to Earth?

The atheist has to prove that, necessarily, God would prefer a world without evil (for whatever reason) over any world with evil if he’s to prove that God and evil are logically incompatible.

This is a bizarre point for Craig to deny. Is he really claiming that God does not prefer worlds without evil over worlds with evil? That would fly in the face of two thousand years of Christian theology by implying a God who was either malevolent himself or, at best, morally indifferent. The usual Christian apologetic response is that God values free will highly enough that he considers it worth the cost, but Craig has already foreclosed that argument: he agrees that there are possible worlds with free will and no evil, but claims that they have unspecified "overriding deficiencies" that make them even less desirable. Left unexplained is why God's omnipotent power is incapable of correcting those deficiencies as well.

Craig's second response, which seems to contradict his first, is that it's actually not possible for God to create beings who only choose the good:

A free being which possesses a nature which is characterized by less than complete moral perfection... lacks the power to choose infallibly the Good. For God to create a being which has the ability to choose infallibly the Good would be, in effect, to create another God, which is logically impossible, since God is essentially uncaused; and, of course, omnipotence does not entail the ability to bring about the logically impossible.

This entire chain of inferences is built on a starting premise that is obviously nonsensical. A being possessing moral perfection, but not omnipotence or omniscience or omnipresence or atemporality or other attributes usually identified with God, would not be another God; it would simply be a free-willed being possessing moral perfection. Again, Christianity itself supplies an example of this: angels are traditionally believed to have free will - they must have, else how could any of them have fallen? - and yet, they are said to infallibly carry out the will of God.

Indeed, if God is uncaused by definition, then there ought to be no problem here. He could create a being possessing all of his other attributes - omnipotence, omniscience and so on - and yet, since this being was caused and not eternal, it would not be God.

There's a larger issue which neither William Lane Craig nor this week's questioner explores in detail. Namely, an abiding puzzle for Christian theology is why, if God hates evil and sin so much, he created a world that would guarantee the production of massive quantities of it. As I've written in the past, free will is not a mathematical point, nor is it a simple binary choice between good and evil. Free will is a complex bundle of desires, habits and predispositions, any of which can be altered or taken away. Even if we grant the premise that free will is necessary for a world of meaningful choice, why wouldn't God create human beings with inclinations toward virtue, so that few people exercise the evil options that are theoretically open to them? The reality of our world seems rather to be the opposite.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting Reasonable Faith

In "All Possible Worlds", I wrote about the various religious responses to the problem of evil. Today, I want to say some more words about one of the common theodicies, the "teaching" or "soul-making" theodicy, as it's defended in the Christian tradition. This theodicy holds that experiencing and resisting evil is the only way to produce the kind of genuine moral development and strength of character that God desires.

In the Christian view, one could imagine that the universe is like a testing ground, with human beings sitting for their exams under the eye of a divine proctor. But God, according to the Christians, is not a stern, disinterested examiner who grades on a curve. On the contrary, he wants as many people as possible to pass. Why, then, would he not make the test as easy as possible?

Even if we grant that moral development requires facing and overcoming real temptations to evil, there is no reason why the choice needs to be as difficult as it is. Our world, according to the teachings of many religions, is fraught with temptation - nearly every situation offers an opportunity to sin. Worse, the path of evil often holds the promise of considerable material rewards, whereas the path of virtue entails continual sacrifice and self-denial.

A wise and benevolent architect would not have done things in this way. Instead, he could have arranged things so that the world steers us toward good rather than toward evil. He could have seen to it that, in most circumstances, obeying the rules was the only realistic course of action, and opportunities for disobedience only reared their head in special rare and limited cases. He could have ordered the world so that the good were blessed with happiness and prosperity, whereas evildoers suffered privation. A world like this would still have provided for moral development by offering real opportunities to do evil, yet would have guided far more people to the correct path.

It might be objected that a world like this would encourage people to do good purely out of self-interest, rather than practicing virtue for its own sake, and that this is not the kind of moral development God wants. But if that's true, then we already have a problem: the traditional monotheistic religions all teach that there is a Heaven for the obedient and a Hell for the disobedient. These teachings, too, could inspire people to believe purely for the sake of self-interest, but it is not believed that such conversions are unacceptable to God. Thus, there's no reason why a more perfectly ordered world would cause a greater problem in this respect.

Another point against the soul-making theodicy is that, often, evil does not give rise to good but only to more evil. Many people respond to unjust suffering with anger, frustration and vengeance, rather than developing patience and fortitude. Severe and incessant suffering, such as many people experience, does not produce virtue but only trauma, passivity and despair. A world where evil was restricted to special circumstances would give people more of an opportunity to resist and overcome it than a world such as ours where evil can be pervasive and inescapable.

Finally, the soul-making theodicy has one more big problem to confront: the fact that most conceptions end not in birth but in spontaneous abortion. Via the Christian "age of accountability" doctrine, the bizarre, yet inescapable conclusion is that most of Heaven's residents will never have had a mortal life at all.

The age-of-accountability doctrine is incompatible with the soul-making theodicy. How could it possibly be true that God had no choice but to fill the mortal world with suffering and disaster to temper our moral fiber, yet he has no problem granting salvation to those souls who avoid mortal life altogether and are never tested at all? This would be like a professor giving a complex, difficult test, which most of his students fail, yet giving straight As to those who skip the test and never show up in class.