The way I see it, it’s not so much that “theism” is itself irrational as that it has accumulated an awful lot of baggage around it.
Loosely speaking, yes, the universe could have had a creator. The hypothesis that the universe has a creator and that creator performs miracles, on the other hand, is not consistent with empirical evidence, although demonstrating this isn’t trivial—it takes modern science (and philosophy of science) to explain why various forms of vitalism and mind-body dualism) are wrong.
On the other hand, any idiot should be able to see that the problem of evil is a knock-down argument against folk Christianity and many other religions. Things could be a lot better than they are, but they’re not.
According to Christianity, there is no lasting evil; hence, no serious problem of evil. Evil, like everything else, is a tool of God; the Bible makes references to God deciding to allow demons etc. to do evil, such as in Job. Jesus in some places performs miracles with commentary to the effect that he isn’t doing them in order to help people’s earthly lives; he’s doing it so that they may believe. Evil causes a crisis of faith only for those whose faith is weak, who suspect that maybe this world is all there is.
If you think about it, the argument from evil is more of a problem with the cogency of a concept of God.
If I invented malaria in a laboratory and released it on the world, the only difficult moral question is what way of killing me wouldn’t be too nice.
God does the exact same thing (under a creationist model) and he is still considered, “good.” Thus, either we infer that I’m morally entitled to kill millions of people, or that when we say God is “good,” we literally have no idea what we mean by it.
And for the idea of the devil created disease, or some other such cop-out, the issue is that God allows its continued existence, which would imply that the relief of suffering caused by others is not a good thing, since if it were a good thing, God would do it.
Then again, I doubt many theists think about having a cogent concept of God.
The way I see it, it’s not so much that “theism” is itself irrational as that it has accumulated an awful lot of baggage around it.
Loosely speaking, yes, the universe could have had a creator. The hypothesis that the universe has a creator and that creator performs miracles, on the other hand, is not consistent with empirical evidence, although demonstrating this isn’t trivial—it takes modern science (and philosophy of science) to explain why various forms of vitalism and mind-body dualism) are wrong.
On the other hand, any idiot should be able to see that the problem of evil is a knock-down argument against folk Christianity and many other religions. Things could be a lot better than they are, but they’re not.
According to Christianity, there is no lasting evil; hence, no serious problem of evil. Evil, like everything else, is a tool of God; the Bible makes references to God deciding to allow demons etc. to do evil, such as in Job. Jesus in some places performs miracles with commentary to the effect that he isn’t doing them in order to help people’s earthly lives; he’s doing it so that they may believe. Evil causes a crisis of faith only for those whose faith is weak, who suspect that maybe this world is all there is.
If you think about it, the argument from evil is more of a problem with the cogency of a concept of God.
If I invented malaria in a laboratory and released it on the world, the only difficult moral question is what way of killing me wouldn’t be too nice.
God does the exact same thing (under a creationist model) and he is still considered, “good.” Thus, either we infer that I’m morally entitled to kill millions of people, or that when we say God is “good,” we literally have no idea what we mean by it.
And for the idea of the devil created disease, or some other such cop-out, the issue is that God allows its continued existence, which would imply that the relief of suffering caused by others is not a good thing, since if it were a good thing, God would do it.
Then again, I doubt many theists think about having a cogent concept of God.