If YES, you do believe in God, then your religion should provide an answer. Whether or not it's the correct answer, that's another matter! Wars have been fought and are still fought today over the issue. An atheist philosopher asks this question partly to exploit and deride religious answers because the divisions have run so deep and so long. Yet the atheist applauds and rigorously defends a host of debates, arguments and stances, all in the name of Science and HumanityThe interesting question is how do we even know what evil is? How do we know when we're "being bad"? The next time some philosopher asks this question, you might inquire "What do you mean by evil? Can you define it?" Some may say boldly, "Evil is all relative...what is evil to one person might not be to another." This is an evasion. Ask for specifics! You'll be surprised to find that, if the philosopher is honest enough, he'll fall back ultimately on evil as defined by religion. The nature of this question requires the definition of evil as God sees it, anyway, since God has been brought into the picture! To define evil otherwise is irrelevant to the question. Yet he'll dismiss religion as nothing more than "superstitious nonsense", a mere outcome of us Talking Monkeys evolving and living in social groups. To consider God as First Cause is dismissed as a "Russian doll"...a toothless argument, considering the same can be said of the universe, from immensity (multiverses) to infinitesimal (subatomic particles). Or, he'll say the soul is a by-product of streaming brain function from one moment to the next, that it stops at death. Near death experiences are waved off as awareness of brain death. Or, to receive a revelation from God, much less write it down, that's psycho.
So why ask the question at all? The agenda is simply to strip away a competing world view and supplant it with relativistic materialism. That's what philosophy is all about, to rationalize existence apart from God, to do Science a favor, to make for better thinking, confining experience and observation to the physical, to what one sees, hears, touches, tastes, or smells, extended by technology. But here's the question, is that all there is? My observation therefore: Atheisim makes not for superior thinking, it's thinking with blinders on, skewed by self-centeredness, rigidity and despising higher power ("Away with crown and altar!"). The closest modern philosphy comes to acknowledging a higher power is to speculate that we may hardly exist, or have any significance at all, except as "bits of information" in a virtual reality composed by a "Higher Artificial Intelligence." As C.S. Lewis sums up in Perelandra . we are invited to listen to "...the enemy's talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe, with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds for ever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness."
If all else fails, the question is to pass judgement against God, because, after all, if God is "good" and "all powerful" then He should never allow evil to exist at all...moreover, to believe in such a God could tag you as "soooo stupid", unfit for scientific endeavor! This is a smoke screen. You might counter, "Well, having admitted what evil is, and since you say there is no God, are you not accountable for your own evil? Further, if you know what it is....why can you not stop doing it? Why do you permit evil?"
Answered by
Vipan Thapar
, an ibibo Master,
at
1:38 PM on September 18, 2008
