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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Obama’s Christianity: why it might be sincere, why it might not, and why it might not matter

What to make of Barack Obama’s professed Christianity? My own conclusion is that although there are valid reasons to believe that he might well be a Christian (as religious faith is a complex area with many shades of gray), as well as valid reasons to believe that he might not (that his public declarations about being Christian could be for political reasons only), the best answer may be that it might not matter, given Obama’s determination that when it comes to public policy, religious values must be translated (as he writes in The Audacity of Hope) “into universal, rather than religion-specific, values … subject to argument and amenable to reason.”

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