Theism, Agnosticism and Atheism - which is irrational?

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Theodicy, the problem with evil if the world is created by a good god, needs to be answered.

In short, if you are proponent of Theism, with the exception of describing god = satan = evil, a good god would allow suffering because he has no other options. While God is omnipotent, he is still bound by the laws of logic and rationality. You can't change any little tiny bit of the universe, without the entire universe to collapse or cause even more suffering for others. This world we have with the history we have in common and the future we will experience, is the only possible way to create both life, goodness and happiness. Unfortunately this has some nasty side-effects, such as suffering and evilness too.

Even if there is 90 % evil in this world, and only 10 % good, you might say in order to experience any good at all, you need to live with 90 % evil. However, if we are talking about a 90 % evil world, God ought to be questioning wether creating a universe at all is worth it.

The proponents of Atheism however, would reply that we have no reason to believe in a deity, good or bad. First of all, the universe perfectly describes itself. It needs no other forces "outside" the universe.

The Agnostics would say that "we don't know wether there is or isn't a god" - after all, you can't prove a negative.

This is exactly the argument the atheists use to defy theism, because if you can explain the universe without a god, and moreover, you can't prove there ought to exist a god, it is a very strong indication that we are very close to prove the non-existence of god.

However, theists would be able to argue against both atheists and agnostics with the following:

Imagine you are inside a box. You have lived you entire life there, and know nothing about the outside. You hear no sounds, you can't see anything and nothing from the outside has ever affected you or anything inside the box. You can describe the inside of the box perfectly well however: You know all the dimensions and the space, and you know all about the inside.

That you can't possibly know anything about the world outside the box, it is not proof there exists nothing outside the box.

So no matter how well we can describe and explain the universe, we can't prove God doesn't exist. But why would we want to believe in a benevolent, omnipotent deity we can't see, touch nor have any scientific reasons to believe in?

The answer is simple: Because we have no other choice. We do have one: Atheism, not agnosticism, but atheism. But that would make our life pointless, without meaning. I know atheists say they make perfect meaning in their life without god, but I doubt everyone can do so. Also the hardships we are about to face would become only that much harder. Not that it affects our morality (we can still refrain from killing one another even without the belief in a god imposing some morals on us).

The problem with disbelief has nothing to do with anything about society or the scientific explanation for the evidence or lack thereof of God. Rather it is a personal issue:

I think that people who do hold a belief, a very strong belief, do not suffer as much as those who have nothing to believe in.

To be tortured to death still hurts quite a lot. And I don't think the pain is any less painful physically with or without belief. But I do believe it is a tiny bit less uncomfortable, psychologically speaking, if you hold a strong belief in a benevolent deity.*

THAT is the reason why both Atheism and Agnosticism is irrational.

From a purely personal level, the belief in an omnipotent and benevolent deity is crucial for our well-being. Death in inevitable, and so is suffering. Death may no be the issue, but suffering is.

* - Set aside the many painful execution methods used by religious people against those who did not share the beliefs (an entirely different thing is that I believe this has more to do with politics than religion), being able to die for your faith (without harming others) is proof that strong faith can make people do miracles. Enduring a life despite all the suffering is a miracle in itself.

I think these are really 18th/19th century models of thought and we probably want to get away from them. For starters we have absolutely no clue what we mean by the word 'God' when we try to reconcile it with the world as we experience and measure it.

It's interesting to point out that many micro-organisms seem acutely self-aware and urgently work toward given tasks, if they make up a composite organism that composite organism can be very aware of itself, its own existence, and its purposes but yet it has no intuitive understanding of how its own organs work and it's taken hundreds of years of science to figure out what's going on inside our own bodies. Even with respect to our own minds there's this thin layer that we're perfectly well aware of but everything that bubbles up to the surface seems to be populating from a sort of black box. It's a bit like each human being could be made of hundreds of trillions of small minds, dozens of mid-level minds, and one conscious mind at the top of the hierarchy and all of these minds experience one another as external or 'not I'. Similarly when I consider people having religious or mystical experiences it wouldn't shock me at all that we're butting up against yet another mind that we have no particular capacity to read directly, nor can it read us directly, although I'm sure - like my stomach might hurt if I eat the wrong things and I can be aware of it, such higher tiers can probably sense exquisite suffering and occasionally will step in.

All of the above can be summed up in a particular philosophical stance on consciousness that could be referred to as functionalism with multiple realizability. Similarly I find myself listening to some of the more intrepid explorers of the unknown such as Gordon White, Mark Stavish, Stephen Skinner, etc. and I find that they tend to steer toward models like animism (Gordon's case), a sort of border between pantheism and metaphysical atheism (Mark's case), and it seems like most other thinkers along these lines consider something similar - much closer to a consciousness model rather than a theistic model.

This is where I think that the kinds of theists who hold a particular religious text to be perfect or forever supreme to their own knowledge (especially when they read it in the mot literal sense possible) impervious to context or gaining any better understanding of just what it is they're reading or professing to be perfect knowledge. Similarly, and I say this after being rather saddened by some aspects of the most recent Harris/Dawkins/Dillahunty public discourse, a great many strong atheists have an equally obtuse relationship to these texts and ideas as the strict believer and I think my problem with them boils down to this - they assume that there is nothing subjective in the universe that isn't alive or breathing, ie. the unexamined notion that neurons have to be somehow special (IMHO supernatural) things where consciousness didn't exist, then the right number of neurons and pow - consciousness. While I'll admit that the atheists swallow far fewer camels while straining at gnats, and I'd also have to admit that Harris is particularly generous to the validity of the mystical experience itself as well as the value of brain software being cultivated the right way, they still have a lot of unfortunate philosophical commitments. Like Dawkins roundly stating, often, that you believe in any sort of non-physical or non-local sentience then your not an atheist, ROFL, what does that have to do with believing in a God?

I think this is where the atheist/theist debate really loses the plot. Sure it's really dumbed down and low-resolution and everyone feels like they can take a side, but IMHO it's every bit as pernicious as the Democrat vs. Republican or Tory vs Labor debate because it's a fight between mixed bag ideologies, none of which have everything as right as the current state of knowledge could allow, and IMHO it's just not progressive enough to move us forward as a species.