There is no Atheist Problem of Evil

Atheism, and secular humanism, do not have a problem of evil. That problem only arises within worldviews that posit an all‑powerful, all‑knowing, perfectly loving being who could eliminate suffering instantly, but does not. Once that assumption is removed, the tension disappears.

From a secular humanist perspective, suffering is easily explained as a function of natural causes, human choices, and how life is. The humanist response is a straightforward one: understand the causes and find ways to reduce the harm. If there are gods, they are not out to help us.

The problem of evil becomes pressing only for classical theism, because it must defend the coherence of a God who is supposedly both willing and able to prevent suffering while allowing the world to remain saturated with it. And when you examine how theistic arguments try to survive this contradiction, the pattern is remarkably predictable. Some redefine “good” so radically that it no longer resembles anything humans would recognize as moral. Others quietly scale back divine attributes, so that God becomes less powerful, less knowledgeable, or less involved than advertised. And when those strategies fail, the final refuge is mystery: “God’s ways are higher than ours”, a phrase that functions less as an explanation and more as a retreat.

None of the standard responses actually preserve classical theism. Redefining “good” removes all moral content. Weakening God’s attributes resolves the contradiction, but only by abandoning the very conception of God that created the problem in the first place. And appealing to mystery is not an explanation.

At some point, the concept of God becomes so compromised, so hedged and qualified, that it collapses under its own weight. This is why many people, myself included, come to the conclusion that the idea of God is unsalvageable.

Comparing Gaza with Nazi Germany

This one popped up today.

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In World War II, we didn’t provide aid to Nazi Germany, and, likewise, we shouldn’t provide aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

ANY QUESTIONS?

That’s an interesting analogy, but it does raise some serious questions:

  1. How is Gaza, a densely populated territory that has been home to over 2 million civilians – mostly children – at all comparable to a sovereign state, with a powerful military, like Nazi Germany?
  2. Do you recognize the difference between military aid to a regime we’re at war with and humanitarian aid to civilians who are starving?
  3. Do you believe that the standards of 80 years ago, and our complacency with the atrocities committed during that war, should be used to justify the atrocities we know are happening today?

Gaza, as a territory, lacks formal industrial capacity and large scale weapons manufacturing. While Hamas has some clandestine workshops and improvised methods to produce rockets and other weapons using salvaged materials, this is a far cry from the industrial war machine that Nazi Germany operated. Much of Gaza’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble, and lacks meaningful ability to sustain any war production.

If World War II was fought today, we would have an obligation to fight under the standards of modern international law, rather than the rules of 85 years ago. If mass numbers of German civilians were starving, we would have a legal and moral obligation to provide humanitarian aid. The very nature of war has changed since the 1940’s, precisely because of the atrocities of that war. The targeting of civilians and the use of starvation as a weapon, helped us to shape these standards. Actions like the bombing of Dresden or the nuclear attacks against Japan would likely be considered war crimes under current standards. The obligation to shield civilians from suffering is not suspended because of war.

This kind of rhetoric dehumanizes the victims of the Gaza conflict. It seeks to blame civilians for the actions of Hamas and proposes that we let them die as punishment. We can oppose Hamas and recognize the suffering of innocent people. We can both condemn terrorism and uphold our obligation to minimize harm to civilians, even when those we fight do not.

These questions aren’t rhetorical and they demand honest answers. If we allow outdated standards and historical complacency to excuse present day suffering, we are repeating the very horrors we claim to have learned from. Gaza is not Nazi Germany and its people are not enemy combatants. They are civilians caught in the crossfire of geopolitics and militant extremism. Our moral compass should not be calibrated by the worst chapters of history and we should uphold the standards what we’ve vowed to stand behind. Humanitarian aid is a reflection of our humanity, even in the face of adversity. To fail in this moment would show that we’re willing to abandon Gaza when compassion becomes inconvenient.

William Lane Craig and the Ontological Argument

What’s going on with William Lane Craig? The prominent Christian philosopher and apologist has reversed his skepticism of the ontological argument for God’s existence. Once dismissing it as unsound, Craig now endorses Alvin Plantinga’s modal version of the argument as both logically valid and sound. In a recent video, Craig explains his philosophical shift. Here is a transcript with emphasis added:

I changed my mind on the ontological argument. This is one of the arguments where I changed my opinion. I believed for a long time that the ontological argument was not sound and certainly not persuasive.

But then as I became familiar with Alvin Plantinga's modal version of the ontological argument, it struck me that this is indeed a sound argument for God's existence. That is to say it's logically valid, and I think that its premises are true. The only question concerning the soundness of this argument is the truth of the first premise. Is it true that maximal greatness is possibly exemplified? And it certainly seems to me that it is. It seems to me that it's possible that there omniscient, omnipotent morally perfect being in every possible world. And therefore I'm committed to the truth of the first premise. 

What I've come to realize since then, in doing my systematic philosophical theology, is that some really good arguments, I think convincing arguments, have been offered as well on behalf of that first premise. Philosophers like C'zar Bernstein and Joshua Rasmussen have offered a non-circular, independent argument in support of the possibility of a maximally great being. And that makes the soundness and cogency of the argument all the more evident.

For those unfamiliar, the ontological argument, famously proposed by Anselm and later refined by the like of Plantinga, hinges on the idea that if it’s possible for a maximally great being to exist, then it must exist necessarily.

Why Critics Remain Unconvinced

While Plantinga’s version improves on Anselm’s original formulation, it still relies on a dubious premise: that a maximally great being is metaphysically possible. Craig asserts this possibility, but asserting it is not the same as demonstrating it.

For many, this argument amounts to defining God into existence. Once you grant that “it’s possible a maximally great being exists,” the modal logic carries that being into every possible world. This makes the argument feel circular because the conclusion is effectively baked into the premise with no outside support to hold it up.

As Kant argued over two centuries ago in Critique of Pure Reason, you cannot derive facts from mere definitions. In this case, existence isn’t a predicate you can simply include in your concept and expect reality to obey. If it was then we could just as easily argue for the existence of neccessicorns – unicorns that necessarily exist, though we’ve yet to find one.

Ultimately, the ontological argument tends to resonate only with those who already believe in God. For skeptics, it’s not much more than a sophisticated philosophical magic trick. It may sound clever, but it’s certainly not convincing.

The Problem with Craig’s Reasoning

Craig’s embrace of the ontological argument raises some serious concerns. While the logic may be valid in form, any persuasive power is entirely rooted in prior theological commitments. For a philosopher known for intellectual rigor, this feels less like genuine reasoning and more like confirmation bias in action. If one is to argue for the existence of God, defining it into existence and playing semantic games with modal logic just seems philosophically lazy. A strong reputation can’t salvage weak philosophy.

What do you think about Craig endorsement of the argument? Has he brought new life into the ontological argument, or is it still just a metaphysical magic trick?

Four Questions for Young Earth Creationists

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with young earth creationists, discussing their views and responding to their questions about evolution. While I’m always open to dialogue, I’ve noticed that when I pose questions of my own, I rarely get answers, let alone clear answers. That’s unfortunate, because I think these questions could reveal a lot about how well they understand evolution and where their objections truly lie.

Here are the four questions I’ve been asking:

  1. Why do we never find feathers in any extant species besides birds, despite their usefulness for flight? Why do the highly efficient lungs found in birds not appear in other flying animals like bats?
  2. Why are mammals the only taxonomical group with hair and mammary glands? Why don’t we ever find these traits in non-mammalian species?
  3. Do you believe that evolution predicts that a species like dogs will give birth to cats?
  4. If evolution were true, what kind of evidence should we expect to see and how does that differ from the evidence we actually have?

If you’re a young earth creationist, I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment below and let me know your answers.

When Christian Purity Culture Meets Reality

Christian purity culture, often associated with sexual abstinence and rigid moral discipline, extends beyond personal behavior. It seeks to impose a strict and structured vision of reality through language, identity, and belief. At its core is the impulse not simply for moral uprightness, but for control over every aspect of human existence and experience. It is a worldview that resists ambiguity and demands that everything be categorized, purified, and named according to some fixed divine blueprint.

This rigidity becomes especially visible in two areas: how purity culture assigns fixed meanings to words, and how it enforces biologically essentialist views of gender. Take, for example, the word “atheist.” Depending on who you ask, the word can mean different things. Within purity culture’s framework, it must mean someone who definitively denies the existence of God. There’s no room for nuance, no spectrum of doubt, only hatred for God with nothing more to be said. Similarly, the categories of “man” and “woman” are treated as divinely ordained binaries with immutable boundaries, anchored in anatomical distinction. Transgender identities, nonbinary expressions, and even evolving gender language, are seen not as legitimate self-definitions but as acts of rebellion, because, in their eyes, these people hate God.

Yet this imposition of “pure” meaning tends to collide with reality’s inherent messiness. Experiences refuses to be neatly categorized or compiled. Human beings constantly navigate contradiction, change, and complexity. The result of that navigation is that our language and understanding evolves to reflect that. Fluid and dynamic expression allow people to say what rigid categories simply cannot capture or encompass.

This obsession with purity doesn’t stop at personal identity and language. It also extends into science. Scientific ideas like climate change and the theory of evolution are cast not just as empirical claims to be debated, but as affronts to divine order and revelation. Evolution disrupts the perceived purity of the creation narrative, while climate change breaks the promise of divine protection against planetary destruction.

Beneath purity culture’s rigidity lies what is fundamentally a fragile worldview. It seeks to insulate itself from critique and struggles to accommodate complexity and nuance. When reality becomes too contradictory or unpredictable, the impulse is to sanitize it, reduce nuance into binaries, and cast ambiguity as moral threats. This fragility spills outward as cultural warfare. The so-called “culture war” can be seen less as a clash of ideas and more of “purity war” that seeks to enforce itself onto every aspect of our lives, whether we are believers or not. Through legislation, education, and language policing, these efforts seek to reshape reality through a theological mold that cannot tolerate non-conformity. Dissenting voices, alternate identities, and even empirical evidence, must be met with dismissal rather than genuine dialogue. The goal isn’t merely to defend faith but to render it immune to challenge. In this sense, purity culture doesn’t simply resist the impure, it fears it, because legitimized impurity signals the possibility that the entire worldview may collapse into absurdity.

Perhaps the challenge we should undertake is not to purify reality, but to find ways to engage with it honestly. Reality is messy and so allowing for language to stretch, identities to shift, and our understanding to grow, is fundamentally part of what it means to be human and experience this complex and wondrous world.

The Failure of Theodicies

The problem of suffering (or alternatively, the problem of evil) has long posed a serious challenge to theists who believe in a God who is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient. What makes this problem especially damning is the sheer number of defenses offered—soul-making, consequences of free will, and more. There’s a plethora of explanations all attempting to rationalize how suffering can exist in a world supposedly created and governed by a loving, all-powerful deity.

But if God really did make humans, and understands what causes them pain, shouldn’t we expect something more than vague gestures toward questionable justifications? When apologists appeal to mystery, claim that suffering builds character, or somehow glorifies God, it often resembles a form of gaslighting: “The problem isn’t as bad as you think.” We’re expected to ignore our deepest moral instincts and accept that horrific suffering is part of a divine plan we’re neither allowed to question nor truly understand.

If God does exist, wants a relationship with us, and cares deeply about our well-being, why is there such silence in the face of one of life’s most pressing challenges to belief? Why leave us floundering, with apologists writing countless books trying desperately to answer a question God could have resolved with clarity from the beginning? It all reeks of ad hoc attempts to patch up the problems that all the holy books in the world cannot fix.

Worse still, the issue isn’t limited to human suffering. Unless one appeals to a miraculous cosmic exception, there’s a wealth of natural suffering that appears utterly disconnected from human agency: animals torn apart by predators, ecosystems devastated by natural disasters, innocent beings enduring pain simply for existing alongside us in this world. It seems impossible to rationalize all of this away with a God who could have done otherwise.

Christians will undoubtedly continue to appeal to theodicies in an attempt to protect their theology, but these explanations are far from persuasive. Do people genuinely read them and think, “Oh yes, that makes sense now”? Or is it more likely that they simply want them to make sense, clinging to any lifeline that might preserve belief in the face of the cognitive dissonance they encounter?

The problem of suffering isn’t just some intellectual challenge for people to sit back and ponder over. It’s the suffering of every creature that has ever lived. Every theodicy that fails to offer clarity only reinforces the silence that many find indistinguishable from a God who isn’t there. The defenses may endure, but they offer little in the way of understanding. In the end, we’re all left frustrated.

Guest Post: The Face of America

Today we have a guest post, brought to you by a reader and friend who you can address as Z. I’ve given them a platform to share their thoughts with you. They are Canadian, and like me share concerns about the future of our country because of what selfish American voters elected.

I once met an older man with quite the British accent. He sounded perhaps trained for radio or TV, I had no idea he was German. We got to talking and he explained a few things to me. There is a day called Volkstrauertag, the people’s day of mourning. Not like Remembrance Day. Volkstrauertag was not a day of salutes or flags, rather truly a day of mourning. For all those who lost their lives in war time. And for some, a time of shame. As a young person at the time he’d been learning English in school and was told he would be a translator. I learned from him that the people were brainwashed. It was real and it was terrible. They were starving at the end. He did what he had to do to stay alive and when the war was over he got the fuck outta Dodge and immigrated to another country. At the time when he moved, it was hard for the world to distinguish between Germans and Nazis.

I’m not saying that all Americans are Nazis, Musk’s salute and his copycatters to the side for a moment. What the White House presents to the world, and who Americans are, even though these things are not always the same, it won’t matter. It will become even harder to distinguish in our world where social media is so very fast to spread information. Just two months ago seems like an eternity already.

Every day it becomes harder to distinguish between the face of America and Americans.

As always, let us know what you think.

The 1950’s? As if

People often discuss how Trump and Republicans aim to turn back the clock on rights, restoring power to white men, taking us back to the 1950s. However, this perspective seems limited. The clock is turning back much farther with the desire to bring back the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. During that time, figures like Rockefeller, bankers, and industrialists wielded enormous power and influence with little to no opposition or regulations against them.

Numerous signs point this way. Consider the number of billionaires Trump appointed to his cabinet. Look at how Elon Musk – a person who was not elected or appointed by anyone – is using his influence at the Treasury, USAID, and other government oversight offices. Trump and his cronies are systematically dismantling the federal government to eliminate obstacles for billionaires, that would give them unfettered power. They will leverage their wealth and influence to dominate elections, all to accumulate even more wealth, far beyond what they could spend in countless lifetimes. They will hold the power, leaving ordinary citizens powerless.

These changes are a direct threat to workers’ rights as well. Recent firings at the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demonstrate a clear desire to undermine workers’ protections. This is about stripping away rights that impede corporate profits, often disguised as removing “unfair hiring practices.” The aim is to erode your rights, exacerbate income inequality, and permit unsafe working conditions -issues that unions fought hard to address during the end of the Gilded Age.

What makes this even more disheartening is the number of everyday Americans cheering on this destruction due to a conspiratorial belief – fueled by Trump’s rhetoric – that the federal government targets them for being conservative. Much like the anti-vaxxers who died during the height of COVID, they seem oblivious to what lies ahead. The trajectory of this story would seem to take us to something of a Dickensian nightmare from Oliver Twist, rather than the idyllic dreams of Leave It to Beaver.

“But if you ask for rise
it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away“
Pink Floyd – Money

A Creationist AI

Apparently everyone is getting on the AI hype train, even creationist Christians. Answers in Genesis has created their own Answers AI that will respond to your questions with creationist propaganda.

This development highlights an important point: even AI can be skewed if it is trained on a narrow dataset that relies on a singular perspective. It feels a bit like this AI was brainwashed and indoctrinated, doesn’t it?

The good news is that you too can now sign up for a free Answers account and ask all your burning creationist questions of the Answers AI. It will undoubtedly provide whole minutes of excitement.

If anybody signs up and has an interesting experience with it, let us know below.

Post Hoc Reasoning and Narrative

If you haven’t heard there was a horrific mid air collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter recently. The story can be read about here.

US President Donald Trump has been quick to blame Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives for the crash, and many seem inclined to agree with his pronouncement.

Can someone explain why many people only want to consider DEI for causing this crash, while the firing of the FAA director (due to pressure from Elon Musk) a week prior, or the fact that the FAA has had a shortage of air traffic controllers, are not considered? All of these preceded the accident, yet it is DEI that gets the blame. Why is some amount of possible DEI hiring seen as a more plausible and better explanation than the organization operating without a leader, or operating with too few and overworked staff?

The truth is that we do not yet have much data on this accident. If you’re convinced that the problem lies with DEI before we’ve even gathered data, let alone analyzed it, perhaps the issue is that you’re not looking for objective data, but rather searching for any explanation that fits your narrative.

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