Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Analysis

In the text “God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist” Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and William Lane Craig, an atheist and a theist philosopher respectively, debate the existence of God. They present their informed opinions on controversial topics to prove God’s existence, such as arguing the problem of evil, which I will be focusing on. In this paper I will argue that the idea of God is possible, however, given then problem of evil, the idea of a traditional, monotheistic God is not. When I refer to a traditional, mono-theistic God, I mean the characteristics of God depicted in the mono-theistic religions of today, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. This will be shown through exploration of the problem of evil as presented in the text,

To provide a logical flow for his argument, Sinnott-Armstrong presents a process of elimination, stating that gratuitous suffering exists, therefore, an all-good and all-powerful God must not (85). To prove this point, Sinnott-Armstrong gives a series of analogies, mainly involving cases of suffering towards babies (84) as an example of the extreme unfairness of evil, as it affects even the most innocent of humans, undeserving of any form of suffering, calling attention to suffering’s gratuitous nature which God supposedly allows. In addition, Sinnott-Armstrong further justifies his conclusion by critiquing eleven main responses Christian theists have posed throughout history to account for the existence of evil, taking the angle that humans cannot prove that suffering has any purpose that may be proven to be directly linked to God, therefore making it more likely that gratuitous suffering exists

I particularly identified with the idea of testing character through suffering, as I have personally experienced growth in my character resulting from times of suffering. Therefore, I disagree with Sinnott-Armstrong’s ideas of avoiding gratuitous suffering if we only experience “one stubbed toe” (Sinnott-Armstrong, 90) in our lifetimes, as it provides less opportunity for development, and potentially growing closer to God. I see Craig’s logic as flawed, however, in that I have seen no justification as to why an all-powerful and all-good God would create humans on Earth, exposing them to great pain and suffering, simply to put them through this test of character, when he would assumably have the ability to gain this same relationship without this process. When looking at the Christian doctrines from this perspective, I would compare it to God using humans as pawns in a chess game for entertainment, who would let us live out difficult when he already is aware of our overall fate, defeating the purpose of a loving God that monotheistic religions