Saturday 17 April 2010

Why does God allow disasters?

The embarrassingly simple answer to the question "Why does God allow terrible natural disasters like earthquakes? is "Because he doesn't exist". Yet for centuries theologians have been tying themselves up in knots trying to find an alternative explanation.

When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle of Occam's Razor recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question. While this isn't  a principle of logic, it seems a good kicking off-point. What a pity theologians haven't spent their years of study first trying to answer the question "does God exist"? Perhaps they dimly sensed that this would quickly put them out of a job.

3 comments:

  1. Like Thunderf00t, I think God, if he exists, might be a volcano, therefore maybe all powerful, but to Hell if I ever worship that.

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  3. The previous post from "atheismwar" has been removed because the author does not allow access to his profile.

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