Thursday, August 6, 2015

Logical Disproof of God

It is good to have true beliefs that reflect reality and toward that purpose let's perform a simple yet plausible thought experiment. Suppose we have a newborn fawn in a forest and a forest fire sweeps by and leaves the fawn severely burned but still alive. The fawn lays there for three days in excruciating pain before finally dying.
If there is an all knowing God, He/She was aware of the suffering fawn.
If that God was all powerful, then He/She was also able to stop the fawn's suffering.
The fact that the fawn suffered for three days proves that this all knowing, all powerful God either does not exist or doesn't care about the suffering of the fawn.

This is a logical disproof of God that has been around in one form or another since the early Greek philosophers. Theists have no answer to this logical disproof of God. They just ignore it and hope no one brings it up or spout something about God having some hidden purpose. There is no purpose served by the fawn suffering. Rene Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher, provided the only logical counter to this line of reasoning when he argued that animals must not actually feel pain. They just appear to feel pain but not really. So when you accidentally step on your dog's tail and he lets out a yelp, he didn't really feel it and if you can convince yourself of that, then the disproof of God as outlined above is invalid since the fawn really wasn't suffering. But we all know that the fawn lying there crying out in excruciating agony does indeed feel pain. If there was an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God, the fawn's suffering simply would not happen.