I consider this the best dialogue I have ever been involved in (out of 700 or more), with anyone, ever.

The “Problem of Good”: Great Dialogue With an Atheist

by Dave Armstrong


(the Flip Side of the Problem of Evil Argument Against Christianity) + the Nature of Meaningfulness in Atheism (vs. Mike Hardie)


I consider this the best dialogue I have ever been involved in (out of 700 or more), with anyone, ever. My opponent did an excellent job and really gave me a run for my money. I offered him gushing, grateful praise at the end:

I want to express my heartfelt appreciation and respect for what you have done. This is true dialogue; I enjoyed it immensely and I have been enriched by it, and I think readers of my website will be, too, when I put it up. You answer everything comprehensively, with great substance, cogency, relevance, a refreshing economy of expression, understanding of opposing positions (avoiding straw men, which is a great blessing indeed :-), and with unfailing amiability. Thanks so much, and I look forward to much more dialogue with you (if you found this also worth your while, to throw some ideas back and forth with me).

This puts the lie to the myths (from the hostile, demeaning sorts of atheists) that I supposedly 1) don’t dialogue with atheists, or 2) always have unpleasant relations with them. This dialogue was the very model (the quintessence) of what I have always sought to achieve ever since, and will continue to seek, in any dialogue I get involved in. On occasion I can get close to it, but it has never been matched (over more than 13 years) as a genuine, mutually respectful (hence very constructive) dialogue: all the more remarkable because it was between a Catholic and an atheist.

I don’t know what became of Mike Hardie. I found a brief (archived) biography on The Secular Web (infidels.org) and an “About Me” with photo from an old website (1998), along with a list of several of his philosophical papers: including one on “The Problem of Evil”. He is a philosophy major and was 24 years old at the time of our dialogue (obviously an extremely bright student). I lost contact with him shortly after this dialogue and have never heard from him since. I can find nothing about him beyond the late 90s time period. He seems to have fallen off the face of the earth (Internet-wise, anyway). How many good dialogues we might have been able to have! The search continues for someone of his very high intellectual (and civil) calibre.

Enjoy!

*****

[Mike Hardie’s words will be in blue]

I think the “problem of good” is a far more troublesome difficulty than the problem of evil (even granting that the latter is a very serious and substantive objection, one concerning which even most Christians often struggle in some sense or other: mostly due to lack of understanding, rather than a disproof of God’s existence; and especially when we ourselves go through some suffering :-).

I hope you will be more willing to pursue in depth the logical and moral implications of your position (as I view them, anyway), than has been my experience with atheists (and also moral relativists) in the past. Usually, the opponent of Christianity is quite willing to critique what they feel to be our glaring deficiencies, but quite unwilling (for some strange reason) to examine what we regard as the shortcomings in theirs. People in all worldviews seem to be much better at levying charges and poking holes, than at scrutinizing their own beliefs, wouldn’t you agree? Just human nature, I would argue.

In an earlier paper which Mike cited, to start this discussion going, I stated that:

The atheist:


1) Can’t really consistently define “evil” in the first place;

2) Has no hope of eventual eschatological justice;

3) Has no objective basis of condemning evil;

4) Has no belief in a heaven of everlasting bliss;

5) Has to believe in an ultimately absolutely hopeless and meaningless universe.

This is arguably one of the most common kinds of popular replies to atheism, and I have never seen a really robust attempt to really explain it, much less justify it.

Good; nor have I seen a robust attempt by an atheist (at least those I have come across), to grapple seriously with the objections. There are plenty of Christian apologetic works which make a similar case vis-a-vis atheism. You obviously haven’t looked very hard. That’s okay; I haven’t looked very hard at all that many atheist works, either. I would love to read all the books in the world, but I have to be selective, unfortunately.

To put my objections to it in a nutshell:

(1) and (3) come down to “atheists cannot have objective morality”, when there are a multitude of non-theistic ethical theories — i.e., theories which do not require God — which seem to be at least as coherent as theistic ethics (i.e., Divine Command Theory or Natural Law Theory).

What is it that rules out these non-theistic ethics in one fell swoop? Let us be clear here: we are not talking about scientific materialism versus theistic ethics, but merely non-theistic versus theistic ethics. (Scientific materialism is often characterized as the view where nothing is meaningful unless it can be reduced to a purely empirical theory of some kind, and it seems pretty obvious to me that this view would have no relevant account of objective morality. But obviously, not all atheists are scientific materialists in this sense.)

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