Another Evolution Analogy

In a previous post I discussed (among other things) Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable," in which he laid out a good analogy comparing the gradual process of evolution to a walk up a very gradual slope that eventually leads to the top of a very high mountain.  It's a very good analogy, but I fear it may require a bit too much work to accept it since (a) not everybody has experience with climbing up gradual slopes and (b) a change in altitude is not really in the same conceptual ballpark as the change that species undergo over time.  It's strength is, I believe, primarily in the way it conveys how extremely small changes can add up to large changes over extreme lengths of time.  But some folks will probably still reject it because they simply can't get their minds wrapped around the comparison of time to distance.

After much thought, I believe I have come up with, if not a better analogy, at least a complimentary analogy to the one Professor Dawkins discussed.  It lacks the sense of vast time in Dawkins' analogy, but is more grounded in everyday experience and deals with actual biological processes.  It also helps deal with the common objection heard by Creationists that there are no "transitional" fossils that show one species evolving into a completely different species.

Let's imagine a father who photographs his newborn child and decides to take a new photograph of the child once every minute of every hour of every single day from that point on. At the end of the first day, the father has 1400 pictures, after one week he has 10,080 pictures, and at the end of a year he has a whopping 525,960 pictures. At the end of ten years, the stack has grown to 5,259,600 pictures, and by the time the child is 50 years old, the stack has grown to 26,298,000 pictures. And (assuming the father was extremely long-lived or passed the duties on to somebody else), by the time the child is 90 years old, the stack has a massive 47,336,400 pictures, all showing the gradual growth of a baby into an elderly man one minute at a time.

Now, over a period of ninety years, the child has changed from a newborn infant to an elderly man, and along the way the child progressed through various well-defined stages (infant, toddler, child, pre-teen, adolescent, young adult, adult, middle-age, senior citizen, elderly) . And if you randomly selected any example from that stack of 47,336,400 pictures, you would be able to clearly identify which stage of life the child was in at the time that photograph was taken. No photograph, however, would show a clear "transition" from one stage to the next. You wouldn't, for example, find a picture showing the child with the body of a baby and the head of a toddler. Or the arms of a teenager but the legs of an adult. Or (to mirror some of the extreme examples asked for by Young Earth Creationists), the body of an infant and the head of a senior citizen.

The point is that the change from infant to elder is so gradual that there are no clear-cut transitions from one stage of life to the next. Somebody may legally be considered an adult at the age of 18, but it would be impossible to detect any physiological differences between a person one minute or one hour or even day before his 18th birthday and one minute, hour or day after his 18th birthday. And this isn't to say that there aren't any transitional photographs of the child; instead, it means that every single photograph shows a transition from the previous minute to the next minute and the supposedly "well-defined" stages of life are really just shortcuts we use to describe people instead of actually having some sort of absolute definitions.

The same is generally true with regard to the fossil record and the evidence it provides for evolutionary processes.  Just as children gradually change into adults over time, species gradually change into other species over time.  The only difference is that species change over millions of years instead of 90 years, but the principal is the same.  Just as you will never find a photograph of somebody who has the head of an infant and the body of an adult, you will never find a fossil showing the head of one species and the body of a previous species.  And this isn't to say that there aren't any transitional fossils; instead, it means that every single fossil shows a transition from the prior generation to the following generation and the concept of "well-defined" species is really just a shortcut we use to describe life instead of actually having some sort of absolute definition.

Religious Freedom to Discriminate?

There has been a lot of discussion in the news lately about various state and federal laws that purport to "restore" religious liberty but which, in reality, are specifically designed to allow people and businesses to discriminate against other people based on their religious beliefs.    Despite the broad language of the laws, the legislative history shows that they were specifically implemented to prevent people and businesses from being "forced" to provide services to gay couples looking to get married.  So, for example, a cake shop couldn't, under these laws, be sued civilly for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding and a photographer couldn't be sued for refusing to take wedding pictures for a gay couple.  Because, you see, in many states the existing laws prohibited businesses from refusing to provide services on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin, gender or sexual preference, so these new laws provide a loophole if the discrimination is based on one's religious beliefs (as opposed to garden-variety bigotry, I suppose).

The language used to draft and support these laws is positively Orwellian, of course, as they try to argue that it's not at all about discrimination and solely about religious freedom, despite the fact that the freedom being sought is, in fact, the freedom to discriminate against others.

All of this has been said before by many other people.  One key thing seems to get ignored during discussions of these laws, however.  Since when does Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) actually teach that it's OK to discriminate against anybody in the first place?  I mean, if the government passed a law saying that, for examples, Mormon churches had to perform temple marriage ceremonies for gay couples, or Catholic churches had to start ordaining women to the priesthood, I would agree 100% that this was an unconstitutional intrusion of the government into religion.  And that's because a core Mormon belief is that temple marriages are reserved for the joining of a man and a woman, and a core Catholic belief is that only men can hold the priesthood.  You may disagree with those beliefs, but they are certainly things actually taught by those religions and accepted by the members.

However, while the Mormon church does teach that gay couples are not "worthy" of being married in the temple, I don't recall any teaching saying faithful members are not allowed to provide services to gay couples who are getting married elsewhere.  Similarly, while the Catholic church does not allow female priests, I'm pretty sure there's no prohibition against providing services to a woman who happens to be a clergy member of another religion.  Heck -- the Catholic church prohibits divorce and I doubt you'd find a single catholic photographer or baker who refused to provide services at a wedding that involved a divorcee remarrying.

The point is that Christianity teaches that you should not sin, true, but it does not teach that you should discriminate against those who believe differently than you.  So, while your "religious freedom" certainly includes the right to practice your religion the way you see fit, it doesn't give you the right to discriminate against those who don't share your beliefs.  And, while you may claim that discrimination against others is how you practice your religion, you're just using your religion as a shield for your own bigotry since that's not what your religion actually teaches.

[As an aside, I can't help wondering why nobody claims to be unable to provide services to people who, say, violate the sabbath by holding their wedding on a Sunday, or who have committed adultery, or who worship some other God, or who have shown disrespect to their parents, etc.  These are all sins specifically prohibited by the Ten Commandments, which is supposed to be the most important thing in the entire Bible.  Maybe it's because the people who want to discriminate against gays commit all those other sins themselves?  Or maybe it really is just the fact that they are prejudiced against gays and are looking for a justification for their prejudice.]

The Argument from Design

I’ve touched upon aspects of this in other posts, but I thought it was time to try and put all my thoughts on this subject together into one post.

The so-called “Argument from Design” is one of the most common and most powerful arguments that theists have at their disposal when they want to argue for the existence of God.  It gets trotted out during nearly every debate between theists and atheists, it underpins the entire “Intelligent Design” movement, and is often the sole argument that your average, run-of-the mill theist (as opposed to professional apologists) can think of when asked to justify his or her belief in God.  And when I say it is a powerful argument, I simply mean that it is highly persuasive, not that it is actually a particularly sound or valid argument.

In a nutshell, the Argument from Design simply states that the entire observable universe provides evidence that some intelligent being purposely designed it, and this being is what we commonly call “God.”  A more formal statement of the argument might look similar to the following:

1. Much of what we can observe in the universe has the appearance of being designed.
2. Things that appear to be designed most likely were designed, especially when they are too complicated to have happened any other way.
3. Anything that is designed must, by definition, have a designer.
4. The act of designing requires intelligence and purpose.
5. Therefore, there must be an intelligent and purposeful being or entity who designed the universe, and this is a label that fits our traditional notions of God.

Let me try and tackle these points one at a time.

Much of what we can observe in the universe has the appearance of being designed.

It is certainly true that much of what we can observe in the universe, especially here on Earth, has the appearance of being designed.  The key word, of course, being appearance.  To say that everything we observed actually is designed is to assume the very point being argued, so we have to stick with appears to be designed at this stage in the argument.  We also need to keep in mind that the whole “appears to be designed” thing really doesn’t apply to everything we observe.  Yes, we have learned through centuries of careful scientific observation how cells work like tiny machines and that higher organisms are made up of trillions of cells working together in unison.  But much of what we observe beyond our planet has the appearance of sheer chaos.


Things that appear to be designed most likely were designed, especially when they are too complicated to have happened any other way.

This is really the crux of the entire Argument from Design.  If something appears to be designed and there’s no way for it to have happened other than being designed, it must therefore have been designed.  This is the argument made so famously by William Paley some two hundred years ago when he used a pocket watch as an analogy to the natural world.  When we encounter something as complex as a pocket watch, the very fact of its existence and complexity testifies to the fact that it was designed by an intelligent creator and did not just occur by chance.  Similarly, we can look at the natural world – the complex organisms, the cycle of the seasons, the movement of the stars and planets – and know that it couldn’t all have happened by chance.

Another, more modern, analogy compares the natural world to a painting found hanging from a tree in a forest.  Only a fool would see that painting, frame and all, and think it possible that it could have just happened by the chance accumulation of elements over time or that it just grew there exactly like that.

The problem with analogies, however, is that they are just that – analogies.  They are attempts to explain something by comparing it to something else and are not statements of fact or proofs in and of themselves.  As a result, an analogy is only as good as the things being compared.  In this case, the watch and painting analogies fail for a number of reasons, including the following:

• In both analogies, the object in question is found in isolation in a situation where it is clearly different from its surroundings.  Nature, on the other hand, is a unified whole.
• It’s easy to identify a watch or a painting as designed because we have seen numerous other examples of watches and paintings that have all been designed.  We know the processes involved in making a watch or painting a picture, so it’s safe to assume that any other watch or painting we discover was made in a similar fashion.  The same is not true with items in nature, however.  We have never seen anybody make a cell or a bear or a tree and therefore can’t say that the process must be the same as things made outside of nature.
• We can “know” that a watch or a painting is designed because there is no other way to explain how it could come to be.  The same used to be true for items in the natural world, but we now have much greater knowledge and can explain how seemingly complex natural items could arise purely by natural processes.  And keep in mind that “by natural processes” is not the same thing as “by random chance,” since natural processes can include a great degree or organization and direction, even if not driven by any purposeful intelligence (see my post on Accepting Evolution for a more in-depth discussion of this).
• Any claim that something “couldn’t impossibly have occurred unless it was designed” is really just a statement of personal ignorance as to the mechanisms involved.  This is often referred to as the problem of “Irreducible Complexity,” which sounds scientific, but is really just a made-up term that means “I don’t understand how evolution works.”  It used to be argued, for example, that the human eye was so complex that it had to have been created all at once and couldn’t possibly have evolved over time.  Recent studies have shown, however, exactly how a complex eye could have evolved over time, starting from light-sensitive cells and eventually becoming the imperfect organs we have today.  “But what good is a partial eye,” you may ask?  Just look at all the creatures alive today that have less evolved eyes and ask them how their “partial eyes” benefit them compared to not having any eyes at all.

Anything that is designed must, by definition, have a designer.

Well, true, I suppose that’s purely a matter of definition.  If you assume that something is designed, it must have a designer of some sort.  The problem with this (aside from the fact that it’s really just a tautology like saying “anything painted has a painter” or “any thought has a thinker”) is two-fold:

• As discussed above, the mere appearance of design doesn’t necessarily mean that something was, in fact, designed.
• The word “designed” presumes the existence of intelligence and purpose, whereas more neutral terms like “created” or “formed” do not.  A falling meteorite can create a crater.  Years of dripping water can form marvelous looking stalactites and stalagmites in a cave.  Neither of these occurrences involves purpose or intelligence.  Unfortunately, some people like to use the term “design” to simply mean “created” or “formed” and thereby claim that some purposeful and intelligent designer must, by definition, have been behind it.

The act of designing requires intelligence and purpose.

This point is really nothing more than anthropomorphism at its worst.  Since we design things and we are intelligent and purposeful, we assume that all things that are “designed” must also be done by some entity that is intelligent and purposeful.  However, as discussed previously, what many people call “design” is more properly referred to as “creation” or “formation” and these words do not require any sort of intelligence or purpose at all.

Therefore, there must be an intelligent and purposeful being or entity who designed the universe, and this is a label that fits our traditional notions of God.

Well, since I’ve already addressed the problems with all the underlying premises, there’s no further need to show why this conclusion is false.  I will point out the leap in logic, however, required to go from “an intelligent being who designed the universe” and “my personal concept of a God.”  There are many different and contradictory notions of God throughout the world and throughout history, and everybody who uses the Argument from Design seems to use it to justify a belief in a different God.  If the Argument from Design works just as well to “prove” the existence of Jehovah as it does Allah, Shiva or Zeus, maybe the argument isn’t quite as powerful as it’s cracked up to be.

In reality, all the Argument from Design attempts to prove is the existence of some sort of intelligent designer.  Sure, it could be the particular God of the person making the argument, but why assume so?  Heck – given all the observable flaws with the natural world (genetic diseases, blind spots, vestigial organs, etc.), one might argue that the Argument from Design best provides evidence for a malevolent or incompetent god or gods instead of the all-powerful, all-loving Christian God.

Top Ten Misconceptions about Atheists - Part Three

Misconception Number Three -- It Requires More Faith to Be an Atheist than to Believe in God

No, actually it doesn’t require any faith to be an atheist.  All it requires is for you to not believe that “God did it.”  This argument is usually accompanied by a whole bunch of blather about how ridiculously improbable it is that our universe came to exist exactly the way it did and that the only possible explanation is GOD.

I won’t go into all the flaws with the so-called “argument from design” or the “finely tuned universe” (check out some of my other blog posts for long-winded discussions on those issues), but the bottom line is that even if atheists had no explanation whatsoever as to how the universe came to be the way it is and how we came to be in it, that still just leads us to a big fat “WE DON’T KNOW” and not “GOD DID IT.”  Why God?  Why not some as yet undiscovered universal force?  Why not a multiverse? Why not aliens?  And if God, why YOUR God and not somebody else’s God (Allah, Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, etc.)?

I get it, though.  I really do.  Having been there myself once upon a time, I know what it is like to look around the world in wonder and think that it all couldn't have just happened on its own without some sort of intelligence guiding it.  And, since we just happen to have this book of scripture describing exactly such an intelligence, and since billions of people believe in that intelligence, and since all my family and friends tell me how important it is to believe in such an intelligence, well, you'd think that believing in such an intelligence is so blindingly obvious that it would take an extreme act of will to actively NOT believe in such an intelligence, right?

Except, all you’re really saying is that, since you personally (and those you hand around with) cannot understand how it all came to be, it “must” be the way it was described in the particular ancient text that you personally accept as true, despite the fact that there are lots of other ancient text that are accepted by other people that say completely different things. Sure, billions of people believe that the entire universe was created by some sort of God, but they certainly don't all share belief in the same sort of God.  Just because you have the Bible and think that proves what you believe to be true, other people have their Koran or Bhagavad Gita or what have you.  And to those people, it is just as obvious how the universe was created as it is to you, except that they believe something completely different.

No, it doesn’t take faith to admit ignorance, just honesty.  But keep in mind that many of the things that supposedly “can’t be explained without God” are either wholly specious in the first place (such as the supposed “finely tuned universe” argument) or else actually CAN now be explained perfectly well.  We don’t know all the answers, and perhaps never will, but we certainly know a heck of a lot more about the universe now than the desert tribesmen who wrote scriptures thousands of years ago.

Top Ten Misconceptions about Atheists - Part Two

Misconception Number Two -- Atheists Have the Burden of Proof to Show that God Doesn’t Exist

It used to be that theists would claim that science and religion operated in completely different realms.  Science deals with “how” things work and religion deals with “why” the universe is the way it is.  Science deals with things that can be proven via evidence, whereas religion is all about faith in things that neither can be, nor need to be, proven and for which no evidence is required.  And certainly there are still plenty of theists who feel this way today.

There has been a shift in recent years, however, as science has made more and more inroads into solving many of the “deep” questions that were once thought to be solely the domain of religion.  Where did we come from?  Why are we here?  What happens to us after we die?  In addition, people have started to realize that many religious claims, such as miracles, the historical accuracy of scriptures, etc., should be verifiable with evidence.  As a result, people are much less willing to accept religious teachings based solely on faith and are expecting theists to shoulder the burden of proof that science requires whenever anybody makes a positive claim.

Some theists do attempt to provide “evidence” to support their beliefs, but many try to avoid the issue by claiming that atheists can’t prove their assertion either that there is no God.  It’s not enough, these theists claim, for atheists to simply claim not to believe in God – they somehow have to prove God doesn’t exist, or admit that he does.

Sadly, that’s simply not the way science or the burden of proof works.  Yes, we ask theists to provide justification for their belief in God since they are making affirmative statements that contradict observable reality.  That’s how science works – you make a claim, you provide evidence as to why your claim is true.

Atheists, however, are not necessarily claiming that God doesn’t exist.  All we are claiming is that theists haven’t given us any good reasons to believe that he exists.  We don’t need to prove a negative.

Having said that, though, I will say that with regard to specific descriptions of god contained in various religious texts and worshiped by specific religions, it is rather easy to “disprove” those gods in the same way you could easily disprove the existence of an adult African elephant living under my desk as I type his.  All you have to do is consider what evidence would have to be there in order for the claim to be true, and if the evidence is missing than the claim is disproved.  So, while no atheist can possibly disprove the existence of an immaterial being who exists outside of space and time and whose existence, by definition, cannot even be proved in the first place, it is actually pretty easy to disprove the existence of a being who is described as having specific attributes, interacting with humanity in specific ways, making specific promises, etc.  When presented with this fact, however, the theists who require atheists to "prove that God doesn't exist" always seem to fall back on the other type of "god" (i.e., the god that bears no relationship to the one they claim to actually worship) and then say, "HA!  You can't prove that no concept of God could possibly exist, therefore I win!"

*sigh*

Bait and switch.  It's like saying that, just because I can't prove that there is no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe (which I can't, of  course, since the universe is such a vast place), I therefore can't prove that a particular grainy photo doesn't actually depict an alien spacecraft, despite the fact that it bears a striking resemblance to an aluminum pie tin, the string holding it up is visible and the person who took the photo has admitted in the past to creating hoax UFO pictures. 

Top Ten Misconceptions about Atheists - Part One

All right, I should probably have called this “Top Ten Lies about Atheists” or “Top Ten Misrepresentations about Atheists” or even “Top Ten Things People Claim about Atheists Even Though They Know Full Well They Aren’t True and Have Been Refuted Repeatedly,” but I figure there must be at least some theists out there who are sincere and honestly believe what they have been told about atheists.  This post is addressed at these hypothetical sincere theists and not those who go out of their way to repeat stuff they know to be false for the purpose of advancing their own agenda (“a.k.a. “Lying for Jesus”).

As always, I apologize if any of the “misconceptions” I describe seem like straw men arguments of their own, misrepresenting what theists say about atheists.  I certainly don’t claim that all theists have these misconceptions, but they are all legitimately misconceptions I have personally encountered from different theists.

Oh – and this list isn’t ranked in any particular order and probably won’t have exactly ten items….

Misconception Number One -- Atheists Believe There Is No God, Are Angry at God or Hate God

First off, let me preface this by pointing out that the word atheist literally means somebody who does not have a belief in a god of any sort.  Beyond that, it’s really hard to lump all atheists together and say what they do, or do not, believe or what their “true” motivations are.  Just like, beyond the fact that all theists, by definition, believe in a god or gods of some sort, it’s impossible to say anything else about “all theists.”

Having said that, there are certainly gradations as to how different atheists approach or define their non-belief in god.  There are many atheists, true, who have investigated the claims of different religions and have come to the conclusion that the gods described by those religions can’t possibly be true, whether because of logical impossibility, contradictory statements in the holy scriptures about the god in question, lack of any supporting evidence that should be there if the god existed, actions of those who profess belief in those gods (“by their fruits ye shall know them”), etc.  But there are also many atheists who haven’t really given it much thought and simply have no reason to believe in any particular god, usually because they were raised in a family or a culture where God was never discussed.  Many theists may believe that a belief in God (they’re personal version of God, of course) is the natural state of man and that one must actively resist that belief in order to be an atheist.  In fact, however, all you need to not believe in God is to not be taught to believe in him in the first place.  It's sort of like claiming that belief in Santa Claus is the natural state of man (despite the fact that many people have never even heard of Santa Claus and there are wide variations in how Santa is depicted even among those people who do believe in him).  You don't need to be actively taught that Santa Claus doesn't exist in order to not believe in him -- you just have to never be taught that he does exist in the first place.

As for atheists being angry at God or hating him, I suppose it is certainly true that some people who call themselves atheists feel this way. Again, though, as comforting as it is to think that God’s existence is so obvious that the only people who claim disbelief are those who KNOW he exists and actively reject him, the truth is that most atheists either have lost their belief due to learning more about the world or never had a belief to begin with. 

Inconsistencies

No, this is not a going to be a discussion of apparent contradictions in the Bible. Instead, this will be a discussion of common inconsistencies in the arguments used by some people to defend the Bible as well their core beliefs based on the Bible. It's kind of an omnibus post of all the things that drive me crazy when listening to people try to justify their beliefs despite the fact that the Bible doesn't actually agree with what they are saying. As always, the views I ascribe to Christians in this post reflect things that I have actually heard or read Christians say, but may certainly not reflect the views of all Christians or even most Christians.


Why Would a Loving God Condemn His Children To Eternal Suffering?
 
A core Christian belief is that God is all-loving, cares about each and every one of his “children” and wants only the best for us. At the same time, however, God has apparently set up a system wherein THE VAST MAJORITY of his children will spend all eternity being tortured since only a very small percentage of all of humanity belong to whatever religion is the "right" religion (or even have “accepted Jesus into their hearts” if you believe that all Christian religions are equally valid paths to get to Heaven). Apologists try to wriggle out of this problem in a number of ways, including the following:

• All humans are sinners by nature and the demands of justice require that all sinners suffer eternally for their sins. God, through his great mercy and love, found a way to satisfy the demands of justice by sending down his son (a.k.a. himself) to take upon him all our sins and die for our sakes. Therefore, all we need to do is accept of Jesus (and possibly obey all of God’s commands and belong to the right denomination, depending on who you ask). The problem with this, however, is that God himself set up the whole system in the first place, including what is “demanded” by justice and the fact that these demands “must” be satisfied. Surely an omnipotent God could have set up a system where all his children could live in heaven forever. Or a system where the punishment demanded by justice was, say, only 1000 years of penance instead of an eternity of torture. So either God fully intended (and knew in advance) that the majority of his children would end up suffering forever, he’s not a very loving and/or omnipotent God in the first place or he doesn’t actually exist.


• God doesn't "condemn" anybody to an eternity of torment and suffering - we choose to condemn ourselves to an eternity of torment and suffering by deciding not to accept Jesus into our hearts, follow his commandments, belong to the correct denomination, etc. Except that, first of all, the vast majority of all humans who have ever lived throughout history never even had the chance to hear about Jesus, let alone have the the choice to accept and follow him. And, second of all, even if our choices do lead us being punished, God is still the one who determines what that punishment should be. If a brutal dictator issues an edict restricting free speech, making it a capital offense to say anything bad about the government, and then somebody gets executed for posting a message on their Facebook page complaining about the government, do we just blame the victim and say he chose to be executed? Or do we blame the dictator for setting such a harsh punishment in the first place?


• God does love us all deeply, but he values our free will more than anything else. So much so, in fact, that he would rather us suffer in torment for all eternity than take away our free will and force us to be good. Again, however, it is God himself who set up the system wherein not being “good” leads to eternal damnation (are we detecting a theme here yet?). Also, none of us actually have absolute free will in the first place, since physical laws (created by God, of course) limit what we can do regardless of what we wish to do.


• The Bible doesn't actually say that sinners or those who do not accept Jesus will suffer eternal torment. Yeah, well, first of all, the Bible kinda sorta does actually say that. "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (Matthew 25: 41)." "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal (Matthew 25:46)." Second of all, this is the actual doctrine that has been taught for centuries (thousands of years, actually) within Christendom. It was acknowledged by the early church, it was endorsed by the "church fathers" and it was defended by the theologians of the Middle Ages and the Reformation period. Hundreds of millions (billions?) of people lived and died throughout history believing this was the true doctrine of Christianity, so you don't really get to show up 2000 years later and say what Christian doctrine "really" teaches without acknowledging that it was all made up by man in the first place, do you?

Why is there so much suffering in the world if God loves us?
 
On a similar note, God supposedly loves us all absolutely and cares deeply about each and every part of his creation. And yet, we live in a world where all of creation must struggle to survive, where predators must hunt and feed on prey, where creatures of all types contract hideously painful diseases and where natural disasters cause all manner of pain and suffering. Christian apologists acknowledge this so-called “problem of evil”, but attempt to justify it in a number of ways:

• God values human free will above all else and therefore will not or cannot intervene to prevent one person harming another person. This argument is really just one big non-sequitur, since the inviolate free will that humans possess really has nothing to do with fact that animals eat other animals to survive, that we all suffer painful diseases, that natural disasters occur, etc.


• Our life here on Earth is but a moment compared to an eternity in heaven, so any suffering here is trivial.
Good point! Except, of course, for the fact that only a very small percentage of humans will actually make it to heaven. And, unless you want to claim that every single bug, bird, squirrel, bat, etc. (and not just your beloved pet) is going to heaven as well, then they are all doomed to spend their one, short life primarily in a state of suffering and torment.

• The sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden caused the world to enter a “fallen” state and therefore it’s somehow our fault that everything in the universe suffers so much, not God’s fault. This justification is just specious, since (as mentioned earlier) God set up the whole system in the first place and it was his decision to make the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgressions be what they are. God is supposedly omnipotent, so you just can’t say that the Earth “had to” enter a fallen state after Adam and Eve ate the apple. God surely could have found a way to punish Adam and Eve and their descendants without punishing the rest of creation. But that’s what he chose to do, so either he likes seeing so much suffering in the natural world, he isn’t really omnipotent after all or he doesn’t really exist. To once again go with the "brutal dictator" analogy I used before, what if the dictator decrees that, not only will anybody who speaks out against the government be executed, but so will all that person's family members, neighbors, friends and pets. Is it fair to then blame the one person who posted on Facebook for the deaths of everybody else? Or is it more proper to blame the dictator who issued the harsh decree in the first place?

On a side note, many “intellectual” Christians acknowledge that humans evolved over millions of years and that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is simply an allegory. If that’s so, however, how can we all be suffering because of something our non-existent ancestors never actually did?


Why don't we get what we faithfully pray for?
 
The Bible clearly and unequivocally states, over and over again, that God will grant whatever you pray for in faith. And this is taught in sermons to justify having faith in God -- we must have faith in God, faith like that of a mustard seed, because if we have faith in God he will give us whatever we ask for. Except that when we don’t get what we pray for, it’s suddenly, “Oh -- God promised to answer our prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.” Even though the Bible clearly says we will get what we ask for, not just get an answer. And when that doesn’t work, then suddenly it’s “God works in mysterious ways.” Pretty convenient the way that works, don’t you think? If we actually get what we pray for, God gets all the credit and it’s proof that God exists since he did, in fact, promise to give us what we prayed for. But if we don’t get what we pray for, it doesn’t mean that God is a liar or that he doesn’t exist, despite the fact that he broke his promise.


What does it mean if the Bible is the literal word of God?
 
To many Christians, the Bible is considered to be the literal word of God and, therefore, it is important to follow everything in the Bible in order to attain salvation. And yet, no two religious groups (or religious scholars, for that matter) can seem to agree on what everything in the Bible actually means. It’s easy to strip out a few key sentences and phrases and claim that those are the parts that really matter, but you can’t do that and also claim the entire thing is divinely inspired. When you start hearing people say things like, "Of course the entire Bible is the literal word of God, but the only part that really matters is the 'Two Great Commandments' mentioned in the New Testament," you have to wonder. You have to wonder, first, how can they say something like that with a straight face in the first place and, second, how do they actually know that that part of the entire vast Bible they have cherry picked is the part that "really" matters?


What does it mean if the Bible isn't the literal word of God?
 
Alternatively, some Christians acknowledge that the Bible isn’t the literal word of God and, while much of it is important and true, there’s also a lot of stuff that is purely allegorical and not meant to be taken literally. Unfortunately, all the “allegorical” stuff in the Old Testament (the creation of the Earth, the fall of Adam, the story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, etc.) is also the stuff that justifies believing in the supposedly non-allegorical stuff (the teachings of Christ, his atonement and resurrection, etc.) It’s a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, since the only thing that makes the Bible something other than a collection of ancient writings that contain some nuggets of gold amid a huge load of camel excrement, is the supposed “fact” that it is the literal word of God in the first place.


The Bible is the source of "absolute morality"
 
Many Christians claim that “absolute morality” (i.e., the unchanging set of rules that distinguish between right and wrong in all cases) can only come from God and therefore atheists must rely on “relative morality” instead of “absolute morality.” Further, this “absolute morality” can only be found in the Bible, since it is the literal word of God and the reason why its principles supposedly form the basis of our entire judicial system (even though that is not actually the case.) However, the Bible is full of commandments from God to do things that most Christians would find deeply immoral today, ranging from general laws (it’s OK to beat your slaves as long as they you don’t kill them) to specific instances (kill all the inhabitants of a city, including their children). The Bible is also full of commandments that no Christians bother following today, such as the laws of kosher and the prohibition of wearing clothing that has two different types of thread in it. When asked why we don’t have to follow all those commandments today, the answer is invariably because they were given to a particular people at a particular time and do not apply to our situation today. Which is, of course, the very definition of moral relativism. Oh, except for the Ten Commandments, which still need to be followed. today And the parts talking about how bad Homosexuality is. And maybe the part about not suffering a witch to live. And any other part we personally agree with. But definitely not all those other laws and commandments which we can apparently decide for ourselves no longer apply…


Arguing the necessity of a Deist god to justify belief in a Theist god
 
I have read and heard numerous Christian apologists claim to be able to prove the existence (or, at least, the necessity) of the Christian God, as well as a few Muslim apologists who claim to do the same with regard to the God of Islam. These arguments typically involve a lot of special pleading (“Everything that has a beginning must have been created, but that doesn’t include God”) and a whole lot of tortured logic to explain why something must have created the universe as an act of will. Much of the proof, however, presupposes (or outright states) that the type of being required to create our universe is one who lives wholly outside of time and space, who is not composed of matter or energy and who cannot (and therefore does not) interact with the material world in any detectable way whatsoever aside from somehow being able to create it all in the first place. In other words, the classical god of “Deism”, which posits a creator who got the whole ball rolling in the first place and who has not been seen or heard from since. Even if all the arguments for such a being were valid, however, (which they aren’t) these apologists are left with no way to reconcile this notion of a deity with the sort of “hands-on” Theistic deity they are actually seeking to prove. At best, they are left with personal anecdotes of how they know in their hearts that their particular brand of God exists and loves them, which doesn’t really prove much of anything…


You need to have a "deep understanding" of the Bible in order to make sense of all these apparent contradictions.
 
This one is actually my favorite. There is a certain breed of Christians out there who style themselves as serious Biblical scholars, who claim to have learned various languages in order to read the original text of the Bible (as if such a thing even actually existed today). They claim to have studied history, sociology, psychology, archaeology, etc., to such a degree that they have a nearly perfect understanding about who wrote the Bible, when it was written, to whom it was written and, most importantly, what it originally said and originally meant in the context of the time it was written. These self-proclaimed experts will then state that it is impossible for anybody to "truly" understand the Bible unless that person has done all the research they themselves have done.
Assuming these people are not just making this all up from whole cloth, there is one glaring problem with the whole idea that you need to be an "expert scholar" in order to understand what the Bible is "really" talking about. And that is the fact that, for thousands of years, people have been told that the Bible is the literal word of God and that it is only through following the words in the Bible that we can know how to obtain salvation. If God really loved us and wanted as many of us to be saved as possible, would he really put the necessary instructions for salvation into a book that most people would not actually be able to fully understand? All these "you must be an expert to fully understand" arguments are plausible if you are talking about something like, say, the works of Shakespeare or the writings of Homer, but they fail completely when you're talking about a book supposedly provided by an omnipotent, all-loving, all knowing, and infallible God whose sole purpose in proving the book was to tell his children what they need to do in order to rejoin him in Heaven. If I don't grasp the subtleties of "Hamlet", no great loss. But if I don't understand exactly which parts of the Bible I need to follow and what those important parts actually mean? It's not just an English test I'll be flunking...