Tom Lee and I have been chatting again, this time he presents an argument about the problem of evil, and makes a case for the whole "argument from evil"[1] being an unsound argument. Particularly, his argument is here, and I highly recommend taking a look. I won’t be directly quoting it, but I’ll do my best to be fair in my interpretation.
That said, Tom, if you feel I’m being unfair in my characterization of your argument, feel free to respond. I’ll add notes to this post indicating your disagreement, and respond to them in turn, in a different font or something. I will not delete anything I write here, so that in the future, I will not (if I were of the nature to do so) be able to deny having said it. I want this to be a fair and logical discussion, with no author/commenters bias. I say this here principally as a disclaimer, and so that in the future, no one will think otherwise. I respect your civility (I’ve had lots of uncivil commenters in the past), and as such I want to encourage it by being as fair as possible to you.
Okay, now for the fun part.
* Factual Errors
First, just some factual errors. Hitler wasn’t an atheist. It’s a common mistake, since many ascribe that the use of social darwinism (a pseudoscience, I might add) requires atheistic beliefs, because only atheists could be so evil/whatever (so the usual gambit goes). However, as we can plainly see in here that Hitler spoke positively of Christian beliefs, and even referred to the Christian God as "His Lord and Savior" — now, this does not mean Hitler was Christian, but I don’t know of any atheists who would do that. Further, I’m not trying to imply that Hitler was the kind of Christian you or any other modern Christian is (for the most part, the KKK often claims they are Christians). In reality, I think that Hitler had a perverse notion of Christianity in which the Nation was the direct manifestation of God. However, I do my best to leave the Nazi’s out of discussion. As I do with Stalin, and Torquemada, and the myriad other piss-poor examples of human beings from history. These people had messed up beliefs, poor systems of ethics (Stalin was not the kind of atheist I am, his system of ethics and his beliefs were vastly different from mine and most atheists today).
Further, Darwin did not imply that the "weak" should die — at least not in the sense you mean it. Darwin observed a fact. Those creatures who are not as capable at survival tend not to survive. This notion that Darwin advocated running around and murdering the weak is ridiculous. Babies are weak, and incapable of surviving on their own, the assertion that Darwin says the weak should die would imply that Darwin thinks we should go around murdering babies! But this is a gross misunderstanding of the theory. Evolution, particularly, natural selection, is just an observation of a fact, not a mandate. Furthermore, the notion of "weakness" is dependent on the environment. That is, I have poor eyesight, so in a long range marksmanship test, I am "weak" — I am thus likely to lose the test. However, I am very good at mathematics. The same person who may have bested me on the marksmanship test is now the "weak" one, and will likely lose if presented with a complicated math problem. Thus, this notion of Social Darwinism (which is what we’re talking about) is bunk on it’s face. The idea that we should actively "select" the "strongest" is stupid — we have, nor does there exist, any notion of fitness which is good for all environments. Hilter did not apply social darwinism, he applied genocide, and tried to justify it using psuedoscientific jargon. Darwin’s ideas weren’t the inspiration for the Holocaust, they were just abused to become a justification for it. A piss-poor one at that (though, I think there is no justification for the mass slaughter of 6 million jews and 5 million other minorities).
Still further, Darwin didn’t "complain that keeping unhealthy people alive in hospitals and asylums must be detrimental to the human race", nor did he conclude "We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind." At least, not in any of the books by Darwin which I’ve read, If you have a source, please provide it. Those things sound more like propaganda provided by Goebbels than any scientific observation by Darwin.
* The Argument Proper
Moving on, we’re actually moving back to talk about the substance of your argument, beyond the factual errors, let’s consider the first portion first, namely your discussion of — to sum up — "How evil requires an absolute standard"
First point, you make the assertion that the existence of evil requires a absolute standard, I disagree. If you’ll pardon a little math lingo, I can define any arbitrary standard I care for to the set of all human actions, and call it an ethical code (eg, something that delineates good from evil). More or less, I assert that I can arbitrarily ascribe an action to be good or evil dependent on nothing more than random chance. Is it a "good" ethos? Well, it is in the sense that it’s as valid as any other, but it does not appeal to our intuition of what is "right" and "wrong" morally, and there’s the rub. Humans have a sense of "morality" a notion which is more emotional than logical, there is an intrinsic "rightness" to some actions and a "wrongness" to others. However, where you see God, I see evolution and altruism. I argue that morality is principally genetic in nature. Namely, that as populations of creatures grew, it became evident that sometimes the sacrifice of an older member of the group (in some way, whether sacrifice means death, or other ill-effect to the ability of that creature to propagate it’s genetics) to protect a younger member was genetically "worthwhile" as the next generation would thus have more opportunity to propagate the genes of the species as a whole. Thus creatures with strong altruistic tendencies tend to spread their genes more, thus there become more genes which cause altruistic tendencies [2], thus there are more creatures who are altruistic, and so on. As mentioned in [2], this set of basic instinctual acts — protect the young, defend the tribe, don’t kill other tribemembers etc — become cultural mores, which in turn evolve into things like "Stealing someone’s car is immoral" etc. That is, I argue that a system or morals evolves based on ones culture.
But this implies that morals can vary across cultures — and sure enough, they do. If you examine the morals of aboriginal people of the various regions of the world, you find that some cultures treat Honor Killings as a moral necessity. Are these practices ethically sound? Well, it depends on who you ask. If you ask me, I think they’re horrific. If you ask someone with a different ethos and set of mores, you may find otherwise. That is to say, I don’t disagree that we judged, say, the defendants at the Nuremburg trials absolutely, but it was only absolute within the framework of western ethics and morality.
What’s more, Morals change over time. At one point, it was considered immoral to marry someone of another race, that is no longer the case. It was similarly considered morally acceptable to own slaves, persecute Protestants, etc. None of these things are considered valid anymore. If morals were granted by God and are immutable and absolute, how can it be that morals have changed so much over time?
In general, the existence of evil is determined by ones culture, but every culture has some definition of evil, so consider an omnibenevolent God in any culture, the existence of evil in that culture — I argue — is contradictory with the notion of an omnibenevolent god within that culture. So really, this is an error on my part, I should have specified that the definitions of evil and omnibenevolence are indexed by culture, but I still hold that the overall argument holds within a specified culture, and I was simply arguing from "our" particular culture. Thus, evil does not require an objective standard universally, but rather a objective standard within the particular culture where the argument takes place.
Thus, I argue, the atheistic argument is not invalid, in fact it is quite valid, given appropriate specification — I was implicitly arguing from a particular cultural definition of "good" and "evil". This is somewhat ethnocentrist of me, and so I should have been more careful, however the argument is sufficiently parametric to function in any context, after noticing that the good/evil question is not absolute. I leave you then with the following question, which I dearly love to ask, a kind of thought experiment.
Consider if your particular god (so that we remain polymorphic over all gods, I don’t specify which one, just assume it is "absolutist" in his or her moral code) ordered you to murder all shorter than 5′ 6”, without prejudice or hesitation. This was written in no uncertain terms in a book you believe to be perfect and infallible. Is it therefore "right" to simply slaughter all of those people? Is is morally sound to do so? I argue it is not, that murder (at least in our ethos and with our set of mores) is wrong regardless of the particular deity who advocates it.
This thought hearkens back to the "Lawgiver" fallacy, that is:
- Every law has a lawgiver
- There exist natural laws
- Thus there must be a lawgiver for natural laws.
However, this is an equivocation fallacy, natural laws and civil laws are not the same thing. Similarly here, evil, more specifically good, is being equated with following the absolute laws provided by some deity, which in turn assumes that moral codes can only come from a deity.
So, in summary, Tom, I disagree with your argument, however, I think you also misunderstood my argument. You end your comment with "Thus, the theist does not have to defend his position" etc. (that’s paraphrased, by the way) — but my argument doesn’t attack your god, or any god. If you observe my axioms as I laid them out in the beginning of the "Deconstructing God" series, I argued that the only gods I could address would have to obey the following rules (paraphrase):
- Everything obeys the rules of a consistent logic.
- There is no logic that is both complete and consistent
- There is no unexplainable phenomenon, no inherently impossible feat within the universe.
- Any entity must obey the Self-Consistency Principle
These rules are completely inapplicable to the God most Christians worship (I assume you’re Christian based on the content of your comments, please correct me if I’m wrong), who generally is assumed to exist outside of the realm of so-called "human" logic. What I’m saying, effectively, is that there is no way you can possibly convince me that this particular kind of God exists — that is, one that exists outside of logic — without demonstrating my axioms to be incorrect, which — I’ll be honest, I don’t think is possible, I’ve tried very hard to do just that! I just felt that there might be a little hostility / resentment in those last lines, so I wanted to assure you that I could not care less about disproving your particular deity. I just like asking questions, the whole series was mostly an intellectual exercise.
Alright, I’ve procrastinated enough, I have English homework to do, and then I get to work on Topology and Abstract Algebra, so I really want to get through the English homework… 
/Joe
[1] As he puts it, which I think is not a bad bit of terminology, modulo the implicit association with fallacies, which I think is not particularly strong.
[2] Though, I would argue that altruism spreads more on the level of meme (eg, evolution of ideas, rather than genes proper. The term is due to Richard Dawkins), there is (in my opinion) some level of genetic basis to "jumpstart" the notion.
