Read Online Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole by Stephen Law - Free Book Online Page B

possible doubt that something does not exist, well, that may, arguably, be true. But so what? That point is irrelevant so far as defending beliefs in supernatural entities against the charge that science and/or reason have established beyond reasonable doubt that they don't exist.
    PLAYING THE MYSTERY CARD IN RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
    As we have seen, the evidential problem of evil constitutes one of the best-known and most powerful-looking threats to the rationality of Theism (that's to say, belief in God with a capital “G”). Theists respond in a variety of ways, by, for example, constructing theodicies. However, many Theists acknowledge that, while many such theodicies have been developed, the evidential problem of evil does still appear to constitute a significant problem. How else might they try to deal with it?
    One popular response is to appeal to mystery. In some mysterious fashion, the suffering we and other creatures experience is all for the best. In some incomprehensible way, this is the kind ofworld a good God would create, despite the fact that it contains enormous quantities of horrendous suffering.
    Of course, as it stands, this is not terribly convincing. After all, we could deal with evidence against any belief by making a similar move. Suppose you are a juror at a murder trial. You are presented with abundant evidence that the accused is a serial killer—including independent eyewitness testimony, excellent forensic evidence, and so on. It appears to be an open-and-shut case. In response to this wealth of evidence, the defense simply says, “In some mysterious way we can't understand, all this evidence was concocted. The accused is, in fact, innocent.” If that's the best the defense can come up with, it's clearly still reasonable for you to find the accused guilty. In effect, the defense is admitting defeat—acknowledging that the evidence against the accused really is compelling. They're right, of course, that there remains the possibility of error—of some sort of elaborate conspiracy to frame the accused—but that possibility exists in every legal case. It doesn't prevent prosecutions establishing guilt beyond reasonable doubt.
    The philosopher Quentin Smith expresses his frustration with this kind of appeal to mystery:
So how do theists respond to arguments like [the problem of evil]? They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil. 18
     
    Smith is surely right to condemn such crude and evasive appeals to mystery. However, it's worth taking a quick detour at this point to consider a rather more sophisticated and, I think, intellectually respectable way in which Theists sometimes appeal to mystery in order to deal with the problem of evil. For example, they also often say something like this:
God, let's not forget, is not only limitlessly benevolent and powerful, but also infinitely intelligent and wise. Just as a toddler cannot be expected to grasp the good reasons why its loving parents sometimes do things that cause the toddler to suffer (e.g., give them immunizing injections) so we should not expect to understand everything a loving God does. God's reasons for allowing suffering are often likely to be beyond our grasp. Yes, we cannot understand why such a being would produce hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering, or bury thousands of children alive, but that does not mean such suffering provides us with good evidence that there is no such God.
     
    The philosopher Stephen Wykstra, for example, suggests that “if we think carefully about the sort of being theism proposes for our belief, it is entirely expectable—given what we know of our cognitive limits—that the goods by virtue