We are judged by the sins of our father… who art in heaven.
2 Likes
Well our forebears did exist… it’s just unlikely their story played out the same way as depicted in Genesis.
9 Likes
Well, maybe if people got bone cancer because of their own choices, and not as a random side-effect but only things that clearly would lead to it…no, still not good enough. I can’t imagine any series of choices a child could make bad enough for me to think them having cancer was fair play.
Yeah, maybe. I’m familiar with them and can assure you that doesn’t keep people from considering them to be only dodges, severely lacking for just what horrible things are visited on people.
I’ll second @daneel: what exactly do you think Byrne should have expected from such a freshman-level question? If he asked a theologian the same thing, would you fault them if the answer was likewise something a freshman might come up with?
6 Likes
How human choice is supposed to have created cancer, pathogens, carnivores and parasites whose entire life-cycle inflicts misery on other life-forms isn’t something the Bible even attempts to address. It’s not self-consistent. (And this is leaving aside the whole “sins of the father visited upon the children” horror that’s at the root of it all.) There’s this incredible cognitive dissonance with creationists who believe that life is too perfectly adapted to have evolved, and that there was “no death” (i.e. that parasites and carnivores etc. didn’t exist) before “the fall.” The two notions contradict each other. For both to be true, “the fall” would have necessitated nothing less than a second act of creation that would have completely re-created every living thing on Earth - even the herbivores would have been reshaped for speed, armor, quills, keen senses, camouflage, etc. that would have been unnecessary before. I’ve never seen any theists claiming that man did that, and certainly human choice can’t un-make the guinea worm, etc.
4 Likes
Essentially God created the world as this sort of Rube Goldberg Machine set to utterly explode if two people made an uninformed decision to eat the wrong thing. That alone is pretty much a dick move. That every subsequent generation gets fucked as a result (and independent of what they do) is completely monstrous.
5 Likes
Giles Fraser, writing for The Guardian has an interesting take:
“There’s bravery in the entertainer’s imagined confrontation with God – but in describing it he shows that he misunderstands the nature of Christianity.”
‘Interesting’.
I’m inclined to go with the commentators that say this is sophistry.
When I was a kid, the old guy in the toga sitting on clouds was totally what I was taught god was (and it’s clearly the kind of god Byrne was asking about).
If he wants to argue that god isn’t a conscious being with autonomy and power (and therefore responsibility), then I don’t understand what he’s arguing he does worship, or why.
Well, if by removing agency you mean discarding the idea that omniscient anthropomorphic metaphysical deities are the universe’s prime movers we’re on the same wavelength. In Spinoza’s theology, for example, the “problem of evil” does not exist.
However, if you are going to debate someone, you have to use a commonly understood language and agree to some basic definitions. Fry does so; he is clearly talking about a Judeo-Christian concept of god, and he contrasts this against the gods of the ancient Greeks to good effect. It’s very nicely put, although of course these ideas are thousands of years old.
Leibniz, who invented the word “theodicy” for this purpose, pointed out that we live in an incredibly complex universe in which everything influences every other thing, and theorized that there could be no better universe that would allow human minds to exist in any recognizable form. It’s an idea that Voltaire, among others, thoroughly mocked - but it’s a reasonable defense within the logical framework of Christianity, where deities are only nominally omnipotent.
Both process theology and open theology address the theodicy problem better (imho) than the conventional neo-platonic “omni-this” and “omni-that” view of God.
I would agree if this was an actual discussion. I think Fry quite reasonably treated the question as a cue to talk to a general audience. In that context the “Theodicy for Dummies” answer seems forgivable. It is a light-weight lowest-common-denominator answer, but one would hope that Fry could expand on that if you asked him for real.
6 Likes
Wasn’t the concept of the ‘Prime Mover’ intended to remove agency?
That each cause has an effect that can be traced to the prime mover, which has no agency.
Like the cat who jumped on the table to reach the cream, and knocked over the vase that frightened the mouse, that scampered across the floor, that frightened the housewife who dropped the tray etc. etc. ad-infinitum.
The cream being the prime mover that had no agency in the resulting commotion, but sat still doing nothing.
I don’t really know what the intention was, I’m afraid… but your analogy of the cream fits well with what I know of Leibniz’s philosophy; the divine milk product is much like Aristotle’s prime mover, that primarily exists as a self-sufficient and immobile target of desire.
1 Like
Playing with an x-ray machine in an abandoned hospital? 
2 Likes
That’s a fucking load which carefully ignores that the old testament is a thing.
“But but in chapter two we fixed all the petulant cruelty of yahweh and made him suffer his own cruelty - so he’s one of us!” is not a very convincing argument as far as I’m concerned. We have to think about the bible metaphorically, apparently. Who gets the decide what’s the “true” translation of the metaphor?
The thing that shits me off about the religious is their wilful ability to ignore parts of their own bullshit story when inconvenient for arguing the point at hand.
2 Likes
Just makes him a sado-masochist instead of a masochist.
3 Likes
I thought the interesting thing about it was that the author was showing that Fry was arguing for his atheism by defying a specifically Christian God —that neither of them believe in— and was presenting the Christian counter argument to suggest that Fry needs a more robust basis for his atheism.
I don’t think this is Fry arguing for his atheism so much as it’s a response to a hypothetical question about a mythical character in which he doesn’t believe, which requires him to phrase the answer in such a way as to make it clear that he’s an atheist. He’s not saying “cruelty exists, hence a god of loving grace must not” he’s saying “if I’m wrong and god exists, this is one part of his creation that makes no sense to me”.
Fry was also careful not to say “Why did you create cancer?” but to phrase the question about things that, according to religion, god specifically created: the world, insects.
5 Likes
While we’re on the topic, I saw this recently and it’s pure, unadulterated hilarity: Dawkins reads his hate mail.
2 Likes
Brilliant. I wish they’d left the background music out, it would’ve made for great samples.
AFAIK there is no Hell in the Old Testament. It was Jesus who introduced the concept.
So yeah good point re. ‘one of us’. Unless you don’t believe, then you’re gonna burn fuckers!
