The problem of Good
A current and official document on the Vatican website, from The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, states that the stories in the Bible about Satan and Jesus “cannot be treated as fables to be demythologized”, and Satan “cannot be simply the product of the human faculty of inventing fables and personifying ideas, nor can he be an erroneous relic of a primitive cultural language.”
So Satan officially exists in a literal sense if you are a Catholic.
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19750626_fede-cristiana-demonologia_en.html
Also, exorcisms are still officially a thing in the Catholic Church. (And of course you are not allowed to pick and choose what you believe.)
I find it fascinating that this kind of primitive belief is still upheld by what is supposed to be the belief of such a huge number of people. I wonder how they reconcile this? I think a lot of people just don’t think very much…
The problem of evil
Christians have the problem of evil — if the Christian God created everything, why is there evil. Did their God create that too?
The problem of good
Atheists have The problem of good — how do you explain the good in the world if there is no good god, just soulless atoms jiggling around?
Richard Feynman was wonderful at explaining things. It’s worth watching some of the videos of him where he explains the physics of everyday things. But even he was defeated when it came to explaining magnets. Magnets are really hard to explain. You need to study a lot of difficult things to understand what’s going on. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t understand magnets, or that they are a supernatural force. Magnets are just difficult to explain. The same is true of “good”. Why do people do good things? Why do we help one another. Why do we feel joy when we see people being nice to each other? We do have good answers to these questions, but they are not simple answers. They involve studying and understanding:
- Biology, especially evolutionary biology.
- Psychology, especially evolutionary psychology.
- Evolution, including difficult stuff like multilevel selection.
- Animal behavior, especially of the social mammal and primates.
- The mathematics underpinning evolution, especially Game Theory.
- Philosophy, especially ethics, preference and hedonistic utilitarianism.
Emotion as evidence for God.
Mistaking emotions for truth data about the external world
Why do otherwise intelligent people believe dumb things. Author of The Devil’s Best Trick — had an emotional experience.
- St Augustine and his weird religious experience with his mother.
- A lot of the arguments of C S Lewis and his “knowing” that Christianity is true because of his emotions.
- For example the Argument from Joy.
- “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” (Mere Christianity)
- Reddit forums and relationships — What you did upset me, therefore what you did was wrong. Added to the issue of assuming our emotions are reflective of all people or of our sex.
A lot of biblical writings are based on visions. St Paul.
In those times brain modifying experiences where probably more common:
- Hallucinogens in gathered foodstuffs. Fungi on wheat, honey collected from particular plants, non-cultivated fruits and seeds would have contained higher concentrations of poisons. Poisons in fermented drinks like wine or fermented unpasteurized milks.
- Fevers, dehydration, extreme physical states like extreme hunger, diseases and infections.
- Also neurodiversity of course.
Also the “problem of good”, equivalent to “the problem of evil” but for atheists. Explaining good is hard because you need to understand some difficult stuff:
- Evolution.
- Gene selection and multilevel selection.
- Game theory.
- Work on animal behavior.
- Evolutionary psychology.
One thing is that you have to look at these stories in the context of when they were written. It’s hard for us to get our heads around how different life is if one year of drought can kill half your family, or where half your children may die from childhood diseases. In those circumstances, more extreme philosophies make sense.
But the curious thing is how they persist over millennia. The stories evolve of course, and have “hooks” that tie into our psychological flaws which come from evolution. Unfortunately one of the “hooks” of the Adam and Eve story seems to be that it’s the woman’s fault — the sexual attraction of a man to a woman (as an object, the body) is frustrating to him, because it gives the woman power over him, and is so central to his drive that it makes him to do stuff he doesn’t want to. So the woman gets the blame for the results of the biological drives of the man.
In a natural society of Homo sapiens it could be that the female had a lot of control - whilst physically weaker, work on primates has shown that females are able to exert a lot of social control by being more socially sophisticated. Whilst males of the species tend to be more individualist, females can group together to exert control over the group as a whole. If females control reproduction then they control the most fundamental aspect of life from an evolutinoary perspective, so the Abrahamic religions manage to wrest that control from the female and into the hands of the males. All the Abrahamic religions seem to have a focus on removing the sexual attractive qualities of the female, thus removing their power.
Also of course the “knowledge is bad” meme plays into the hands of those with power, as knowledge is actually power, and so if the plebs think that knowledge is bad then that gives you control over them.
It can both be true that:
- 95% of people are good natured and
- collectively, we can be destructive/do bad/dumb things.