Atheist's View of Evil

If a theistic perspective collapses on the evidence of evil, how then does the atheist better explains evil?

How does theism collapse on the evidence of evil? What do you define as evil, anyways? I can assume many answers to this question, but it’s very ambiguous as it’s asked. I would believe that a purely secular explanation of evil would rest on human nature. Man is naturally evil because he is prone to his own desires and wants, and puts those above any sort of social order or reason, or eschews his own ability for rational thought and reason and choses that which is chaotic and destructive to himself or those around him.

Whatever the atheist defines it.

Hmm, well my assertation, although I’m not an atheist, still stands, and so does my other question.

As the nature of the world, most probably. The difference is that the atheist has no obligation to explain evil.

Why not? Why the senseless murders of hundreds in Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Najaf, Bali? Why earthquakes, floods, tornadoes and famines that killed “innocent” man, woman, children and animals?

Do we not, humanly, need explanations for them?

Even if we do not have the answers we certainly, instinctively, asked, “Why? Why? Why?”, especially if evil touches you and your love ones. How then do an atheist feel and think and reason, when they and/or their loved ones “suffer” tragedy, death, diseases, sickness, senseless crimes, abuse, injustice, corruption, etc etc.

Just shrug the atheistic shoulder and say, resignedly and fatalistically, "It is just the nature of things … ", and move on without shedding even a tear? Hardly human I say! Can an atheist then be so aloofed and detached to say, “We are not obliged to explain evil”?

Are there are no such things as despair, pain, sufferings, hopelessness, meaninglessness in the atheistic world view? that these words do not exist in its vocabulary?

Are you stating evil is death, or someone feeling wronged or emottionally hurt? You never answered my question, I don’t think, but is this one of those types of questions as to why bad things happen to us? Surely, if you’re looking for a purely secular reason, you found one:

I was talking to chanbengchin, and making the point that the atheist doesn’t need to explain evil, or even define exactly what it is.

Oh wait - I thought you were responding to me.

Meaning: “That’s it dude, that’s the world, take it or leave it; learn to live with it, make of it what you want of it, but if you can’t, that’s too bad, dude, you’re toast; you not gonna survived for you ain’t the fittest around …”

And so I say to life, thanks and no thanks, and I’ll leave it for I cant take it.

A fair, entirely logical and reasonable, conclusion?

Okay? I didn’t think otherwise, I juse used your point because I agreed with it. Forgive me.

Not if you sardonically downplay it as you did, but to think that evil is a result of nature would indeed be logical reasoning. Certainly if you dismiss any supernatural force or explanation of evil believed in many religions, you are left with a chaotic world based on natural law. If you consider evil to be death, destruction, and/or anything chaotic, then you are playing into the laws of nature, and that includes the nature of man and why perhaps one would eschew reason and social order to cause pain on others. It is certainly a logical way of seeing the world around us, and it is not simply a “well that’s the way it is,” but rather defines what we have observed, studied, and discovered about our world.

So how does the atheist answer this question? This is what I am asking.

Natural law and the chaotic world we live in. Natural selection perhaps. I don’t think theres any explanation other than it happens because the world around us cannot be controlled and thus affects us in adverse ways.

Yeah, I realise that now - see? I edited it. I just thought initially that you were responding to me because you quoted at the bottom of the post before.

Why is the atheist trying to answer the question?

Yes, I saw it after I had posted what I did. :wink:

Because the atheist claimed that “evil” is proof that there is no God.

But if the atheist do not, or cannot, define what is evil, there is no argument to being with; and this is over and above the practical, human and stark reality of living life.

My point is that the atheist doesn’t need to explain evil to justify his belief system. The theist does. Neither is disputing the existence of evil, however.

So why evil’s existence then from an atheist’s perspective?

  1. Atheism’ is a fancy word for impudence. In reality there is no such a thing as ‘atheism.’ It is, quite simply, a myth. The proof? All atheists can be bought.

This is wisdom, real philosophy, the facts, not classroom theoreticals! You ostriches prefer to bury your heads in the sands of pedantic quibble! Will you ever learn?

  1. And how many times do you people have to be told that there is no evil in the world? Seventy times seven? You have a kind of immunity to the truth. It just doesn’t seem to sink in. You have been so brainwashed to believe the contrary over the course of your lives that you cannot entertain new ideas.

Evil is in me alone. No-one else. Tell yourself that. Deal with your own evil. Stop moralising start being moral! And you might begin to make progress! (I doubt it somehow!)

Well, from this Atheist’s perspective, “evil” is a product of theology. Satan, evil, bad apples, … are all imposed as absolute truths from some theological perspectives and I think the Atheists just use “evil” against it’s source to generate what they consider to be a rational view which if looked upon is rather a contradiction of verbal juggling to compromise inconsistencies as opposed to an explanation.

I think evil is subjective and there isn’t anything to compromise. However, I’m willing to take that a step further and impose that anyone claims that evil pisses off God because God dispises the capacity for it is just pushing irrationalities that make me an Atheist from this perspective in the first place. This is the “God” that I am an Atheist to. The “Perfect God” that created evil only to dispise it. It is irrational and the problem of evil is just a segment of the entire problem of rationalizing such an irrational God.

Theists can be bought - in fact, it’s far more common for the religious to become disillusioned with the concepts of religion, come to think them contradictory and “convert” to atheism or agnosticism. Also, it’s simply ignorant to think atheism is somehow “hiding” from reality. Real beliefs can’t be chosen, and even if we accept for argument that they can, one cannot choose to be the kind of person who chooses beliefs.

Great. Tell that to all the holocaust victims, or the victims of the Rwanda genocide, or any of the many other horrific evils in the world.

No one can rationally believe there is no evil in the world. And even if you try (somehow) to suggest evil is but an illusion, the illusion itself is evil.