Paging Dr. Evil

At the Sam Harris/William Lane Craig debate at Notre Dame the other night, Craig made a statement that I wanted to return to. I was so struck by it that I wrote it down verbatim in my notes, and then wrote it on my “To Write About” list so that I didn’t forget it. (I have little notepads and notebooks all around me. I try to keep them tidy, but they really are a necessity for me. I’ve got so many thoughts going through my mind that I have to corral them somehow!)

Craig’s statement was this: “Evil proves that God exists.” Nothing fancy there, just five little words, but said with great certainty. I knew that I needed to think about this.

I’m no philosopher, and have read very little of any of the great philosophers’ writings, so I can’t really approach this question from that sort of viewpoint. I was raised with religion and have done a lot of pondering through the years, so this will only be from my perspective. I can’t really make any of those sorts of philosophical arguments and back it up with data or references. This will be only my own questions and thoughts on the matter.

I suppose I could take the sarcastic viewpoint, and make the observation that because there has been so much misery in the world throughout the millennia, stating that evil proves that God exists makes a lot of sense, and places the blame entirely on God. (For the purposes of this entry, I will be capitalizing the word “god,” because Craig obviously intended it to mean the Judeo-Christian god, rather than any of a number of other gods, or a general descriptive term for a divine being.) But I know that wasn’t his intended meaning; no, he meant to say that the existence of evil in the world somehow proves that there must be a counter-force, and he says that counter-force is God.

I honestly don’t see the logic in that statement. Is he saying that God created evil? If so, why? What purpose would that serve? Was it to be a test for his creations, to see if we were tempted and succumbed? Isn’t that sort of like giving an alcoholic a bottle of scotch and telling them not to drink it or be damned? Isn’t that sort of sadistic?

If God didn’t create evil, did Satan? And if God is omnipotent, why did he let Satan do that? Didn’t he want to protect his creations from such evil? For that matter, didn’t he see it coming when Satan rebelled...and why didn’t he put a stop to it? Wouldn’t that have been better than unleashing such evil upon the world and the people he created?

If I recall, the whole concept of evil and misery goes back to Eve defying orders and eating the fruit that was forbidden to her, and then getting Adam to join in, all after being tempted by Satan. (Sure, blame it on the woman.) Again, this God seems like a rather malicious sort, one who would taunt his children by placing things within their reach and then telling them to not partake, or be damned. Again, if he is omnipotent, didn’t he know exactly what would happen? What sort of bizarre scenario did he set up in which he knew exactly how his children would behave, but then damn them and their descendants for the rest of time?

As for Craig’s original statement, that evil proves that God exists, I still don’t understand this logic. I could just as easily say that happiness proves that Bigfoot exists. Or that shame proves that unicorns exist. There is no correlation there. It is attributing the existence of some entity to a human trait, which seems completely arbitrary to me.

For that is what “evil” is: an entirely human trait and behavior. Some see a killer and say that they are evil. Chances are good that they are mentally ill. Some see genocide taking place in our world, and say that it is evil. It is a societal ill perpetrated by those in power upon others. Can people be evil? Of course. But how does the behavior of a madman prove the existence of God? How does the presence of one thing guarantee the existence of another thing? This makes no sense to me.