Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun Jan 23, 2022 12:25 am
Although the 'argument from evil' is pretty fuckin solid,
Against Atheism, you mean? Yes, it is.
An Atheist has no grounds for calling anything "evil." He believes there is no objective basis for any such assessment. He's simply complaining about things that, according to his own view, are inevitable products of an indifferent universe.
So if evil actually does exist, then it means that Atheism is not true. And if Atheism is true, evil does not exist, and there's no possibility of complaint.
This person is not thinking in terms of abstract arguments against the existence of god, but rather a personal vendetta against god, at this point.
That reminds me of a quotation from C.S. Lewis, who was once a devout Atheist himself. Reflecting on that period in his life, he wrote:
"I was at that time living like many atheists; in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with him for creating a world. Why should creatures have the burden of existence forced on them without their consent?"
A "whirl of contradictions" indeed. One cannot be angry or have a vendetta against the God one declares does not exist. And can you get back at Him, the one who allegedly does not exist, by refusing to believe in His existence? The project is laughable: such an Atheist cannot even figure out what he (dis-)believes.
So no, you can't reverse-psychologize Freud's premise here.
Yes, you can. Even Freud himself thought you could. Paul Vitz has an entire book called,
Faith of the Fatherless (Ignatius, 2013), in which he looks at the correlation between famous Atheists and their hatred of their own fathers. I have the book here, on my shelf, actually.
Transference of that kind is not at all rare. Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Hitchens...all could serve as case studies of that. And it's obvious even from common sense, it's no harder to long for God
not to exist than to yearn for His existence. Either can be mere "wish-fulfillment fantasy," to use Freud's term.
Either way, one's desires are irrelevant to the truth. If God does not exist, all the yearning in the world won't bring Him into existence; but if He exists, He exists....regardless of all Atheist aspirations to the contrary.
If the Atheist's desire to eliminate any heavenly Father is appropriate, he'll never know it. He''ll die, and go to the oblivion he expects. But if the Christian's faith in God is right, then both the Atheist and the Christian will find it out one day. So we will see what is wish-fulfillment, and what is not.