Even Atheists Can Denounce Evil
Where morality fits into nature, contrary to the apologist’s cheap demonization of nonbelievers
Brian Holdsworth is a Catholic apologist with a large following on YouTube, and in one video he tackles the well-known problem of evil.
More precisely, instead of addressing the problem that a benevolent, all-powerful, and all-knowing deity wouldn’t have allowed evil in the sense of unnecessary suffering to exist, Holdsworth tries to turn this problem around on what he calls the “materialist atheist.” The problem of evil for the atheist, he says, is that the atheist has no grounds for speaking of evil in the first place since in godless nature there would no such thing.
The problem of evil for atheists
At least, says Holdsworth, this is supposed to apply to a “materialist” who thinks that “the physical properties of the universe are all that exist, or that there is no invisible, transcendent dimension of reality, but only what can be observed physically.” Such an atheist could account for evil “by appealing exclusively to material causes.”
For instance, this atheist’s explanation for an act of first-degree murder ‘would be something like, “Evolutionary conditioning in unattached male members of a mammal species…
