Extraterrestrials And The Problem Of Evil And Suffering
Dr. Aaron Adair is coauthor of Aliens and Religion: Where Two Worlds Collide
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The problem of evil and what happens when aliens are involved.
So for the audience's sake in case they're not familiar with the problem of evil it is the inconsistency between the idea that there's an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creator of the universe, and there is horrendous, unexplainable suffering.
In that same universe, one would think the Almighty Creator, who has nothing but benevolence in his actions and in his works, would have a world that includes childhood leukemia, tsunamis, and supernova that just destroyed entire civilizations. That sort of universe that is just phenomenally able to bring untold suffering? That just does not seem to be necessary. Every attempt we've had to try to explain it away has just not worked. So at the very least, even if this sort of intense suffering is somehow logically consistent with an all-good God, which itself is a bit of an order. We would just say it's at least improbable. It's unexpected, and all the more so if the Christians and others are saying and heaven is absolutely perfect. So it's like God could create a perfect universe but somehow didn't and had some other weird reason, OK. If this is what you would expect with a God run place, why is it that our world this is at least unexpected? Now? Unexpected means improbable. How improbable? Maybe we can have disagreements about this, but we figured out a way of realizing if aliens are involved, it makes the problem of evil worse. And how much worse it should make it. We figured out a way of calculating that. So the basic thing is we took our idea of the Copernican principle from before. Whatever we have experienced here on Earth is probably not exceptional. So are there are lots of other civilizations out there? Some of those civilizations have suffered. Less than we have. Some of those civilizations have suffered more than we have. Some of those civilizations have probably had things so fantastically terrible we cannot even comprehend it, even though we have had such horrible things. The trench warfare, World War One, Holocaust are, you know, the easy go to from just the 20th century. Or even just from about 10 to 15 years ago, the tsunami was in 2004 that swept away almost a quarter million people just in one go. And the destruction of animal life, a huge numbers that we've seen throughout the history of the Earth. We could just look at them and say, OK, if this sort of tremendous suffering is average for the universe. Well, now, if aliens come along and we can see that, hey, there's a good chance that they've suffered even more, that should mean there's even more evil. And if there's more evil, it's more unexpected and it brings the probability of God's goodness or the God's existence down even more so. So one of the fun things that we had in the publication of this is. We started with the work from another philosopher riding with Samuel. Group conflict started showing. Here's how we could try to mathematically treat this and see how much worse it gets on how much worse the problem you will get. Indians exist. We took it a few more steps and actually then created a way of doing an updating function. So if you say the Holocaust is. You know 5050 on the existence of God's like half the time God would stop this. Half the time it would, You know, it was it was an off day for him for whatever excuse there is. Alright, so we're saying. There's two to one odds. The Holocaust would have happened with an all good God, Alright, to me that is so stupid, stupidly generous, but let's just go with that now. The idea is like, OK, if what happened here on Earth is the norm, the very existence of aliens means, hey, they have probably some experience, something even worse than that. And so we can update that and we can see how much worse it is. 15 You know, you know one or two odds on the existence of God, and now drops to something close to one and four on. Conversely, if you think the Holocaust is a one in a million thing, with the call could God, it drops us over like one in a billion. It makes the problem of people measurably worse, and the only way you can avoid that is, say, all evil of. Any possible level is always consistent with an all-good God, which is. A pretty hard pill to swallow if a guy who does nothing is all good, then he’s all good for nothing.