In the ongoing quest to figure out if God exists or not, one (or at least I) have for many years thought that what might be called the "moral argument" against God was definitive. Unfortunately, I think it might be flawed.
Here's my "reasoning":
I thought earlier that the belief in evolution entailed a disbelief in
God. The Christian explanation for the presence of evil in the world is the concept of the Fall. According to this view, mankind fell when he sinned and nature fell with him. What had been nice became vicious and arbitrary. Suffering rained down on all.
Now the evolution and the Fall do not fit together. If one says that evolution occurred before the Fall, what are we to do with
those eons of suffering on the part of animals? One might claim that (a)animals don’t (or perhaps didn't) feel pain or (b)that even if animals do feel pain, animal pain doesn’t matter. In order to feel physical pain one must have a developed nervous system. Let’s keep in mind that man came very late in the evolutionary process. We are distant cousins to the cat. Cats and ourselves are both Eutherians. We split up around a 100 million years ago. So there is this extremely old ancestor of the modern cat that had many millions of years to develop a nervous system equal to the modern cat. There can be little doubt, I suppose, that many animals had nervous systems capable of causing them to feel pain long before the emergence of man--that is, long before the purported Fall.
What are we to do with all this pre-Fall animal pain? To say that animal pain doesn’t matter doesn’t seem right. Pain is pain, no matter who or what feels it--an animal, an alien from
outer space, or a human being. The animals are innocent presumably. It’s not their fault that they evolved to feed on one another and fight with each other. Who is responsible for this animal
pain? The obvious answer is God. God is cruel.
But to say that God is cruel is another way of saying that God does not exist. At any rate, that’s what people generally mean when they say that. This is the moral argument against the existence of God.
But there’s a flaw here, I think. If God does not exist, then our morality is subjective, by which I mean it’s just something we made up. There’s no logical basis for it. However we try to justify
some moral rule, the justification itself is a veil for yet another moral rule for which there is no valid justification. If I say, “Thou shalt not murder,” and somebody says, “Why not?”--what is
my response? Because you would not want someone to murder you? The Golden Rule? The response can be, “Well, I feel perfectly safe; I don’t think anyone is going to murder me. So why not do it if I can profit from it?” What are we to say? Can we say, if everybody felt that way, civilization would collapse? The response can be that obviously everyone does not feel that way, and anyway, why should we care if civilization collapses or not? Why shouldn’t we concentrate only on what is of immediate value to the Self--not the long term self but the short-term self?
Ultimately, the only reply can be, “Because it’s not right.” We might as well have just stuck with the moral rule, “Thou shalt not murder.” We haven’t advanced the argument at all.
But if our morality is subjective, then our moral judgments are subjective also. One moral judgment we might make is that God is cruel, based on the fact that animals suffered before this
purported Fall. But this is just a subjective judgment on our part since our morality overall is subjective. The moral argument against God fails due to the fact that we have no objective evidence of His cruelty. We only have our subjective feelings, which don’t count as evidence. I might as well claim that because I prefer red to blue, that red is objectively superior to blue or that because I went to a certain school, and have a liking for that school, that this proves that school is superior to other schools. Our morality might very well be a bias.
We can only judge God’s morality if he exists, not if he doesn’t exist. If God exists, he’s cruel (assuming the truth of evolution). But we can’t prove he doesn’t exist by claiming he’s cruel. Nonetheless, that is the main argument offered against the existence of God--that if He did exist, he would be cruel.
Any responses to this admittedly lengthy explanation would be appreciated.
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