In your article responding to Stephen Fry's televised comments, you confessed your initial anger at his description of god as capricious, mean-minded and stupid. That's understandable, but what may surprise you is the anger the rest of your article kindled in me as an atheist.
You didn't set out to insult anyone, of course, and I am sure even now you do not think you did. But in a way that's precisely what's so aggravating. Allow me to explain:
1. You leverage compassion to forestall your readers taking criticism seriously.
Your words:
"But then I caught myself. Perhaps Fry has lost someone close to him with bone cancer and he needs my sympathy and care for his grief rather than my offence?"
This has been a bad habit of many Christian apologists I've encountered: faced with unpalatable criticism you begin by attributing it to an irrational motive. You play down the need to mount a robust intellectual defence, and get to give yourselves a little pat on the back for being so understanding and sympathetic.
Obviously there are times when it's right to make allowances for the emotional state of others. This is not one of those times. It is disrespectful to imply that Fry's judgement is clouded simply because you don't like what he has to say.
2. You paint likable atheists as closet Christians by twisting their words and misrepresenting atheism.
"Atheism has no response to the outrage you feel...For Dawkins, atheism's answer to the problem of suffering is basically 'Tough luck. Bad things happen. Deal with it.'"
The intended implication is that, since two prominent atheists have such different views, at least one of them can't be comfortable in his atheism. This is deeply and, so far as I can tell, deliberately misleading.
Firstly, Dawkins is describing how things are, not how it should make us feel or what we should do about it. Atheism is not scornful of sympathy or empathy. Its answer to suffering is not as you describe. Rather it says: "Terrible, unfair things do happen, and if we want them to stop it's up to us. There is no grand, secret plan to magically keep us safe, no rapture waiting to bail us out of our debts, no comfort to be found in the death of a child other than the knowledge that, thanks to our efforts, it will happen less often tomorrow. We must care for each other because there is nobody to do it for us."
Secondly, Fry isn't outraged. He was speaking to the hypothetical circumstance in which he is presented with a god. In that case alone he would consider the existence of undeserved misery evil and monstrous, rather than merely an unpleasant reality. His moral outrage was not directed at the existence of bone cancer or parasites, but at the idea of a god who creates or permits them to exist. It is dishonest of you to conflate the two in an attempt to appropriate a popular public figure and outspoken atheist for the Christian cause.
3. You imply that atheists are just Christians who haven't thought things through properly.
I refer here to CS Lewis, and the quotation you provided. Lewis presents an interesting and subtle logical argument, which can be illustrated thus:
Imagine there's a fatal disease that's known to afflict half the population. There is a blood test available, which is 90% accurate if you have the disease (it will only give a false negative 10% of the time). But there's a catch: the test is thought to be only 1% accurate if you
don't have the disease (it gives a false positive 99% of the time).
This means that, of every 11 people who get the 'good news' of a negative result, ten of them will actually have the disease and only one will not. A negative result is, perversely, a strong indication that you have the disease!
Lewis proposes an analogous scenario: he argues that in the absence of a god to define his morality he would be overwhelmingly likely to accept the world, warts and all, as fair and just. On the other hand, if there is a god, Lewis's sense of injustice could be a misfire: a failure to understand god's plan. On balance, then, the most likely explanation for his outrage is that there is a god.
Lewis was a smart guy, and his logic is sound. But his conclusion is only correct if it is indeed true that, lacking divine inspiration, we would surely fail to perceive nature's lack of justice. What Lewis could not anticipate was the discovery, a decade or so after his death, of the means by which our sense of morality would inevitably evolve, even unguided.
I'm speaking of stable strategies in game theory: the inexorable tendency for groups to converge on particular cooperative behaviours. The existence of these 'moral attractors' - objective truths about successful cooperation that closely match our actual morals, such as the Golden Rule - invalidates Lewis's assumption that a godless humanity would tend to see an indifferent universe as right and fair. On the contrary: it is inevitable that successful societies would sooner or later recognise the absence of natural justice, reversing Lewis's conclusion.
4. You invoke original sin, which is an insult to anyone's intelligence.
"At the heart of the Fry's argument is the idea that the world that exists is as God intended it to be. He assumes that God deliberately created a universe with appalling undeserved suffering. But a central doctrine of the Christian faith is that God created a good and perfect world and after the fall of humanity nothing is fully as it should be. To blame God for natural disasters and childhood cancer is like blaming the landlord after tenants have trashed their house."
The concept of original sin is ludicrous. It's an example of what you get when you apply Sherlock Holmes's famous maxim to the wrong impossibilities.
Firstly, what's the mechanism by which our actions brought these specific maladies into being? Walk me through it. Explain how our disobedience caused the continents to start rubbing against one another, while god stood by and wrung his hands. No? Well, perhaps you can describe the domino effect we set in motion that spawned the malaria parasite. Really? Nothing? Then what exactly do you mean when you claim we
caused these things, that we
brought them on ourselves? If I kick a hole in the wall of my flat, I wake up the next day with a sore foot in a flat with a hole in the wall. I don't wake up with
AIDS. That would not be a consequence of my actions; it would be a punishment for them.
But OK, let's suppose for a moment there was an Adam, and he was naughty and had to be punished. Who made up the rule that his offspring should also suffer? What kind of landlord would insist my children and grandchildren also hobble around on sore feet? With AIDS? Again, that decision was entirely down to your god.
Given that god decided to execute Adam and Eve as punishment, despite having created them incapable of knowing right from wrong (and despite the fact their first impulse upon learning the difference, according to the bible, was to try and correct their mistakes), surely it would have been more humane to simply kill them and start over. Maybe plant the tree in a corner this time; hide it behind some trellis. Or on, you know, the
moon. He could have done that easily, as often as necessary. But no: he decided that what ought to happen is that billions of people would suffer for a mistake Adam and Eve couldn't even know they were making. I can just
feel the love, can't you?
In fact, there is really no way in which the alleged fall of humanity is comparable to tenants trashing a rented property. Here's a true analogy:
A man opens a day-care centre. Then he digs a pit in the middle of the floor and lines it with broken glass and used syringes. He covers it with a colourful activity mat and adds a cuddly toy that dares anyone who wanders past to hop on and play. Then he warns the kids
once not to play on the mat, and leaves them to their own devices. Later, when the first toddler falls in, he shrugs and says "He was warned. He brought it on himself." Then he pushes all the other kids into the pit and sprays them with anthrax.
That's the story of Genesis.
If there's one genuine truth this 'central doctrine' of Christianity reveals, it is the scale of the problem the obvious indifference of the universe presents to your narrative of a loving god. You must be truly desperate to clutch at such a straw.
Final thoughts.
By comparison, the atheist perspective appears almost shockingly sane and straightforward. Life takes the form it does - the only form that could plausibly evolve unsupervised - because it
did evolve unsupervised. We have
these morals because they demonstrably work better than
those morals. We detect no pattern of justice overlaying the vagaries of nature because there is none to detect. The world is exactly as it appears, and it is endlessly amazing.
See how simple it is? No need to bypass critical thought by indoctrinating children. No agonising over whether humans without penises are worthy to occupy this or that ceremonial position, or which arrangements of protons, neutrons and electrons god has randomly declared unclean. No tormenting ourselves with imaginary guilt. Just an acceptance of responsibility for each other and the future.
