God does not exist

Closing Statement I thank Con for participating in this debate and hope the reader has found it informative and entertaining.My opponent and I have mostly spent our debate talking about the second premise of my argument: ‘If any child that suffers will ultimately benefit from it, then no one ought to prevent any child from suffering’. As I’ve argued, premise (2) must be true because its negation is impossible. Con summarizes my line of thought succinctly: “[O]bviously a child can't ultimately benefit from the suffering it was prevented from going through in the first place.” And if no one can prevent a child from suffering something it will ultimately benefit from, then no one ought to. Now, he alleges that this is ambiguous: there are two ways to prevent a child from suffering X: a proactive prevention wherein the child is protected from suffering X in the first place, and a reactive prevention wherein someone stops the child from suffering X any longer. He says that “Obviously in the second sense [reactive prevention] a child could still ultimately benefit from their suffering even if they are prevented from experiencing more suffering” and wonders which sense I’m using. But, this strikes me as odd: there is only one sense of ‘prevention’ under which I could reasonably claim that it’s impossible to prevent a child from suffering if it will ultimately benefit from it, and he seemed to acknowledge it when he summarized my line of thought as that “a child can’t ultimately benefit from the suffering it was prevented from going through in the first place.” That is to say, I must be using the proactive sense of prevention or my claim is complete nonsense. So, I’m not sure why he finds this ambiguous, unless he doesn’t think I’m all that bright of a lad. :P Regardless, he says even on a proactive sense of prevention, someone would still be morally obligated to prevent a child from suffering even though it will ultimately benefit from its suffering. But, this is impossible folks! If the child will ultimately benefit from its suffering, then it will suffer in the first place, and if it will suffer in the first place, then it won’t be proactively prevented from suffering! To deny premise (2) is to say that a child will and will not be proactively prevented from suffering X. That is, you deny (2), you deny the law of non-contradiction. So, I’ll reiterate my claim as true using his distinction: ‘If any child that suffers will ultimately benefit from it, then no one ought to proactively prevent any child from suffering’. Finally, Con addresses my concerns about the after-life his CBT theodicy requires. The idea is that in order for the goodness of the relationships between people that arise from having endured an evil (or some such) to outweigh the badness of the evil, some of these relationships are gonna have to deepen throughout an after-life. But, I retorted that there are numerous after-life scenarios where these relationships wouldn’t deepen, and thus that his CBT theodicy requires us to believe in a very specific kind of after-life. Since he didn’t seem to provide any reason for thinking this kind of after-life would obtain rather than any other kinds, if God existed, I pointed out an unmet burden. Finally, I alleged that the kind of after-life he needs (one with an eternal heaven) presupposes God’s existence. In other words, we can’t accept his CBT theodicy unless we already believe in God, so his theodicy shouldn’t convince anyone who doesn’t already believe in God to change their mind. He responds to this by listing some conditions on which we might expect the kind of after-life his CBT theodicy needs. If God is the supreme good, and if communion with him is the greatest benefit a child could incur, and if this communion isn’t satisfied in this life, and if full communion with God partially involves the deepening of the relationships his CBT theodicy describes, then we might expect such an after-life. Folks…that’s a lot of ifs. Granted, some are more plausible than others, these are controversial theses. God’s being the supreme good is to theism what Calvinism is to Christianity. Can you imagine how much work my opponent would have to do in order to sufficiently establish each of these conditions? Think of the innumerable objections that are bound to be lodged. Furthermore, you’d pretty much have to accept all of these ifs. For instance, suppose you accept the first three ifs. You’re free to believe in after-life scenarios like reincarnation under which my opponent’s required relationships wouldn’t deepen. So, just take a look at this heap of claims that you’d have to believe in order to accept his CBT response. Ask yourself if you endorse any of them, or all of them. What would it take to convince you of them? All this aside, even if you did endorse his theodicy, it wouldn’t help since premise (2) would still be necessarily true. In summary, I’ve given a validly deductive argument against God’s existence with just three premises. Its first premise is true on pain of God being a child abuser. Its second premise is true on pain of denying the law of non-contradiction, and its final premise is true on pain of things like child abuse not being wrong. With all true premises, the argument is sound, and the conclusion necessarily follows: God does not exist.