One Piece of Evidence That There Is No God

Or more precisely that there is no God in the traditional Western sense of being benevolent and all-powerful. This morning I went for a plateletpheresis donation, more than ten years after my first donation in which it turned out that my platelets collected were less than perfect and so rejected, though after several visits to a haemotologist I was assured that this meant no health problems for myself. A few months I was called by Canadian Blood Services and asked to try again, since my platelets may well have come up to the level required for donation. This time within five minutes of the procedure (the last time it was within a week) I was informed that my platelet count was insufficient and that it was pointless to try again at a future date. Even though I had lost a small amount of red cells in the process I would not be able to make another whole blood donation for 56 days.

My point, and I do have one (as Ellen DeGeneres would say) is this: If we assume the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful deity, at any time in the intervening years between my last apheresis attempt and today's, He could have improved my platelets so that I could donate and thereby help the cancer and other patients who have developed an intolerance for whole blood donations. It would not have been considered a miracle and therefore not an event that would have overcome the lack of knowledge of God's existence that, so it is argued, God Himself desires so as to ensure we have the freedom to choose whether or not to believe in His existence. Putting aside the question of why a benevolent, all-powerful God would permit cancer in the first place, what possible purpose could be served by denying me the capacity to help my fellow beings when so enabling me could be done without endangering human free-will? Perhaps one could justify God permitting the actions of the mentally ill murderer at Virginia Tech on the basis of the free-will defence, assuming that that mental illness had no organic causes (is that possible?), but I see no justification for this.

While I have been for the past several years an agnostic, I have also been in relative terms an atheist, relative that is to the existence of a God who is both loving of humankind and omnipotent. Today I have yet another example to confirm my position. To my mind traditional Western theists have never satisfactorily answered the question put over two thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Epicurus: Either God is willing to take away evil but is unable, then He is not omnipotent; or He is able but unwilling, then He is not benevolent; or He is both able and willing; why then is there evil?

An American Tragedy

Today there occurred on the campus of Virginia Tech University the worst civilian shooting in U.S. history. Thirty-three people including the gunman (it is believed that he shot himself) were killed, fifteen were wounded (as usual we are not told how badly). What was his motivation? This puts me in mind of a finding by the naturalist and co-theorist of natural selection Alfred Russel Wallace, who among his other accomplishments was a noted explorer of the Malay Archipelago. He informed his readers about the customary way of committing suicide among the natives of the Celebes in Macassar: "The fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties" was to take their 'kris', a wavy bladed dagger, and kill person after person until they were finally killed themselves.

Imagine if they had guns, and you have a custom that appears to be well in evidence in American society.

A Matter of Rights

I haven't made any entries for quite some time, as I have resolved not to do so until my previous postings have all been completed, but on this day I decided to make an exception, it being the 25th anniversary of the formal passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or as we Canadians simply refer to it, the Charter of Rights. It is our constitutionally entrenched bill of rights, and in my humble opinion it is moving our country in the right direction. Before it could be enacted our constitution had to be patriated, and I recall my embarassment at the behaviour of some Progressive Conservative MPs in the House of Commons as the majority of MPs voted to bring our constitution home. Running up to the Speaker they shouted that Prime Minister Trudeau was going to establish a dictatorship among other things. As right-wing as I was then, I knew that their charges were idiotic and was disgusted at the behaviour of that section of the party I then supported. I was satisfied to know that at least they were a small section.

No longer unfortunately, as the right-wing of the party in power, the Conservatives (I do not consider them the Progressive Conservatives without the adjective), are now the leaders. And they are clearly hostile to the Charter. In that they are clearly representative of a sizeable number of Canadians who confuse democracy with majority rule, something admittedly I have found that even some political scholars have been guilty of. Decision by majority is a device of democracy but it is not democracy itself. The original, direct democracy of ancient Athens recognized this, according certain rights, admittedly few (right to trial, right to speak before the Assembly etc.), that could not in principle be overridden by the majority. What we call liberal or constitutional democracy extends this greatly by greatly increasing the number of rights protected against the majority, but in so doing better lives up to the literal meaning of democracy, the people rule, meaning all the people not just the majority, than a rights regime based on whatever majority sentiment permitted would.