Omnibenevolence at its finest

Drew LeBow
Aug 26, 2017 · 7 min read

Here’s a question: What kind of sorry excuse for an all-powerful and all-loving god ends up in a situation where he thinks the best possible action is to drown everyone on the planet?

The story of Noah’s Ark strikes me as odd for many reasons. My first grievance comes from the above question. How incompetent do you have to be to get yourself into that kind of situation? Plus, God regrets it afterwards. He’s supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, so he knew this was going to happen from the start (but, using Creationist Logic™, it wasn’t predetermined), and yet does nothing to stop it. There are so many ways such a thing could have been prevented, and yet this god allows it to happen and then regrets it (even though he’s perfect and never makes mistakes). This is all plainly absurd.

The second thing that perplexes me is the execution of God’s plan to kill everyone. Instead of magically killing all the world’s evil people via a heart attack or something, God decides that drowning everyone and everything is the best idea. And instead of just giving all the creatures he wanted to survive (including Noah and co.) a boat, or even better, some kind of magic bubble, he makes Noah, a centuries-old man, do the back-breaking labor of building a giant ark. Not cool, dude!

Finally, I must ask: Why exactly is this story so common in Sunday Schools? They tend to leave most genocides and other Bible atrocities out and focus on the happy Jesus stories, but this one makes the cut anyway. Why? Is it because this particular mass genocide had cute animals?

Oh no! I forgot the unicorns!

You might hear the arguments that the people were all evil God-haters and that Noah was the only good one, so of course God had to drown them all and this was absolutely moral and just and righteous.

This response raises more questions than it answers, not the least of which being the problem of evil. As Epicurus put it so long ago:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Even the ancient greeks could tell that an all-loving, all-powerful god was bullshit.

The free will defense never convinced me. Sure, it accounts for human evils like murder and rape, but to me it seems to show that God’s priorities are out of order, and it fails to account for things like natural disasters and diseases.

So what gives?

I posit that if there were truly an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god, we would live in the best possible world*, in which the only evil and harm would arise from our own free will. Here’s my argument in syllogistic form:

Premise 1: If an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent god existed, evil and harm would arise only from human action.

Premise 2: Evil and harm arise from sources other than human action.

Conclusion: Therefore, an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god does not exist.

So, why do I think this? Here’s my reasoning:

Premise 1: This premise is based off of the idea that the “best possible world” is one where there is minimal harm, but still free will, and that an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being would want us to live in such a world. These ideas come from

  1. The belief that suffering and pain are undesirable, and that a benevolent being would wish for as little pain and suffering to exist in the world as possible.
  2. The Christian idea that God values free will. When debating about the problem of evil with Christians, you will likely encounter the free will defense, which would have God value free will above a whole lot of basic things like well-being. For the sake of the argument, I concede in this syllogism that such a god would indeed value free will.

Premise 2: This premise states that evil and harm arise from sources other than human action. For example, diseases and natural disasters are examples of harm not caused by human action. Why would an all-loving god with the power to prevent children from being born with cancer or to stop Hurricane Katrina not do so?

Conclusion: Here, I reason, since we do not live in the world described in Premise 1, then there cannot be an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god.

Now, this seems to leave us with three options. Either you must argue that this IS the best possible world, that evil and harm do not arise from sources other than human action, or that this is the only possible world with free will, and thus God would value it above wellbeing.

The first two options are clearly false. A world like ours, but with no AIDS, is a better world. No AIDS means less suffering and less death. A benevolent being would not prefer more suffering and death to less suffering and death. Of course, it’s impossible to know, for now, how every possible world would be different, but ours is plainly not the best one.

Similarly, it’s pretty apparent that people are regularly negatively impacted by sources other than human action. People get injured or die in natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods. People die or become crippled by diseases from micro-organisms and viruses. These are not the result of free will.

The final option, that this is the ONLY world with free will, poses major theological problems, and yet fundamentalists seem to imply it without realizing. If one is to discuss hypothetical scenarios and ask questions about WHY, for example, the Tree of Knowledge was necessary, or why Noah’s Ark happened the way it did (or at all), the discussion tends to end right up back at “But free will!”. This is aggravating. Surely, from the beginning, something could have been changed to allow both free will and minimum harm. God must have been able to see it coming, after all. I’d like to know, is this the ONLY possible world with free will? Could a greater god not have created yet a better world still with free will? Doesn’t the idea that it couldn’t be any other way contradict the very idea of free will in the first place?

If you’re still not convinced that the free will defense is stupid, here’s a question posed by Alex O’Connor, a prominent atheist YouTuber and secular activist, in a video on his YouTube channel, CosmicSkeptic, that further destroys this argument:

Can consciously imposed evil and suffering exist in Heaven?

There are a few possible responses to this question, all of which are problematic from a theological standpoint.

Yes, it can, as God values free will: In this case, what we have can’t be considered Heaven. Evil and suffering would have no place in the good bit of the afterlife. So this, of course, can be ruled out.

No, it cannot, as evil is impossible in Heaven: In this case, God has removed your free will (or part of it) in order to prevent evil and suffering in Heaven. Unfortunately, this falls flat as well. An argument creationists are fond of using is that God doesn’t want you to be a robot with no will of your own, so for this reason he gives us free will and allows for evil. Surely in Heaven, of all places, your free will wouldn’t be restricted.

No, it cannot, but free will is still preserved: Here, through what O’Connor calls “theological magic”, free will remains in Heaven, but there is no consciously imposed evil or harm. I’m not entirely certain how this would be accomplished, but hey, let’s give the big guy some slack. He’s omnipotent, after all. Now, you might think this gives the apologists an out. But this falls flat again because it defeats the entire purpose of the free will defense in the first place. If there can exist a place where there is no evil and yet free will is retained, then Earth certainly doesn’t need to have evil.

All in all, nothing I’ve said here is anything new. Epicurus spoke of the problem of evil before Christianity even existed, and the other points I’ve made have already been made by various people, in some form or another. My goal here is to shed light on these objections. The fact is, any god that really cared and had the power to keep us from unnecessary harm, would.

Stay skeptical.

*The best possible world would be a world with the best balance of free will and maximum prevention of harm and evil. For example, there would be no mental disorders, no disease, equal distribution of resources, no natural disasters. The only harm or evil would arise from human action, and would be minimal.

Special Thanks:

  • My home-slice Lil’ Marco for proofreading and contributing to this article.
  • My good friend Sean for proofreading this article.

)

Thanks to Lil' Marco

Drew LeBow

Written by

18- Skeptic, science lover. The universe is big and amazing.

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