Harlequin ichthyosis and the Justice of God - The American Vision
Someone in another thread, here or on the religion forum, referenced this article, and I got around to reading it this morning. He acknowledges that the Problem of Evil (or as I prefer, the Problem of Suffering) is "atheism's most powerful argument" and that a particularly nasty example of human suffering (babies with horribly painful / fatal skin disease and deformity) gave even him pause. For about 2 minutes.
So I was interested to see how he would rationalize this.
Ultimately his argument degenerates to (1) Jesus suffered, too and besides (2) Real Christians endure in the face of suffering, believing that it will be made right Someday, whereas people with "latent unbelief" make "hasty decisions" to reject god.
(1) is a little like saying that the fact that your child has a horrible illness which dooms her to untreatable suffering and premature death is okay because after all I broke my leg once and had to have it repaired. But as for (2) ...
I have never seen such a slick way to sneak in the "You Were Never Really One of Us" argument.
I've debated theists for a few years now on the POE / POS, listened to various lame theodicies that generally involve necessary consequences for sin and the need for god to not interfere with free will (I call this "robot phobia"), but this is the first time I've seen anyone cut right to the chase and bypass theodicy altogether and just use the circular argument that anything that is cognitively dissonant between scripture and reality which then causes someone to be unable to believe simply is evidence of "latent unbelief" that was there in the first place. He even seriously suggests that bearing witness to horrible suffering simply strengthens the faith of True Believers and exposes the un-faith of unbelievers. Suffering is acceptable, even good, because it flushes out the faithless and unbelieving. WTF??
This is one of those "wow ... just ... wow." moments for me. I need to go do something mindless for awhile just to keep my head from exploding.
So more level headed people may be asking at this point, "is there a question here?" Well ... yes. Yes, there is.
Is there such a thing as "latent unbelief"? I would say not. (Un)belief is a state descriptor. You either believe, or not, at any given moment, based on what you know of available facts and evidence. To suggest that unbelief is a character defect that needs to be hunted down and exterminated before it can take root is making the assumption that skepticism is a Bad Thing and credulousness is a Good Thing.
I would actually say the opposite. All humans are skeptics because all but the most prodigiously dim among us -- all of us who function at all in the adult world -- have some sort of criteria for what we will believe and what we will not believe. If I ran up to you on the street and warned you of an oncoming stampede of invisible pink elephants, it's likely you would be unconcerned about the elephants and concerned about my sanity.
Most of us have figured out that the world runs largely on BS and therefore must be approached skeptically. To deliberately cultivate across the board credulousness in a particular area of one's life -- to encourage people to believe not only in the absence of evidence but in the presence of contrary evidence -- is a ghastly inversion of reality.
And so ... I declare "latent unbelief" a canard.
Thoughts?