The Problem of Suffering: the Seven Supernatural Answers vs. the One Naturalistic (part 2 of 2)

Of the following eight explanations for suffering:

I. THE SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATIONS
I. A: In the “Big Picture,” everything is for the best because …
A.1 – suffering is punishment for wrong-doing
A.2 – suffering benefits us
A.3 – suffering must exist for the greater good of Free Will
A.4 – it’s beyond our understanding
A.5 – the perceived world is just an illusion, hence suffering, too, is just an illusion

I. B: The Divine is not All-Powerful

I. C: The Divine is not All-Good

II. THE NATURALISTIC EXPLANATION: the natural world is indifferent to creature suffering

—which explanation (or combination of explanations) can most accurately describe and predict a wide set of observations?

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The Problem of Suffering: the Seven Supernatural Answers vs. the One Naturalistic (part 1 of 2)

Of the following eight explanations for suffering:

I. THE SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATIONS
I. A: In the “Big Picture,” everything is for the best because …
A.1 – suffering is punishment for wrong-doing
A.2 – suffering benefits us
A.3 – suffering must exist for the greater good of Free Will
A.4 – it’s beyond our understanding
A.5 – the perceived world is just an illusion, hence suffering, too, is just an illusion

I. B: The Divine is not All-Powerful

I. C: The Divine is not All-Good

II. THE NATURALISTIC EXPLANATION: the natural world is indifferent to creature suffering

—which explanation (or combination of explanations) can most accurately describe and predict a wide set of observations?

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The Pre-Religion, and Pre-Human, Roots of Morality

PRE-FACE The main body of my book, Dialogue with a Christian Proselytizer, is a Socratic dialogue between two characters: a Christian proselytizer and a skeptic. The skeptic does not discuss atheism, but instead tentatively accepts—for argument’s sake—the Christian’s premises that there is a Creator of sorts, that this said-Creator has made some sort of communication [...]

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Death, Destruction, Starvation and Evolution

Theistic Evolution and the Creator I should probably state upfront that this is not an attack piece. Despite Alden’s protestations otherwise, Intelligent Design is clearly a form of creationism.  The concept, as drawn, tries to impose limits on the natural processes of evolution where they have not been demonstrated through the process of science.  If [...]

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Lincoln vs. Darwin

My life outside of blogging has been a little hectic recently.  This has led to a few new experiences for me. I haven’t had much time to blog. I haven’t done much reading outside of medicine. I crave real-life information so much that I’ve bought magazines just to keep in touch with the outside world. [...]

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How To Defend Creationism Against Evolutionism

From Wiki-How I found this Wiki-How site, apparently a guide for life which can be democratically edited much like Wikipedia. It has several guides on how to effectively argue a position, and one of the ones that I like best is the guide to defending Christian Creationism based on Genesis against Evolutionism. Being editable, this [...]

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