The Infantile Fixation of Atheism: The All-Powerful Arrested Development and The Problem of Evil

       You were given free Will (Free Agency) by a Creator, and Atheism has contaminated even that by suggesting God should intervene with Free Will and make everyone happy and answer all of their wishes like Santa Claus. It is a little bit short of hilarious that Atheists would be in such a delusional state about Free Agency, and theology, in general.

       You hear this all the time from Atheists, "If God is All-Powerful, why can't He stop all the suffering in the world? I see suffering. Therefore, God does not exist!" This is the type of circular syllogistic, logical fallacy that Atheists employ when speaking of God. It’s a prejudicial view forged in the vacuum of monosyllabic logic. The idea of Free Will is not even factored into the equation for them. To Atheists, God only exists if he can wave a magic wand and transgress Free Will and just make everything good...like Mommy and Daddy used to do for them.

       Thus, it is not a stretch to see the etiology of Atheism, for some Atheists, as a product of a person who is still fixated in the magical thinking of childhood. The world is too cold and scary of a place for them, so they are compelled to conjure up an IDEALIZED version of Mommy and Daddy, but since no such entity actually exists in the real world, the Atheist assumes an infantile protestation against any notion of Authority or God. It's as if to say, "If Mommy and Daddy cannot make everything better now, I do not believe Mommy and Daddy even exist!"

        We see this syndrome happen in the cool remote look of false independence in the infant who expresses the infantile rejection of a Mother who had just returned to the room after having momentarily stepped outside to check the mail. The baby needed that mother while she was gone.

       And so, the baby goes into a denial of having ever needed that mother in order to defend against the feelings of abandonment, loss, and primal need it had experienced in her absence. It's just too painful to re-experience that attachment-loss scenario again.  Borderline Personality Disorder and its adult onset psychosis share the same etiology as this infant based trauma syndrome.

       Fear of Abandonment becomes the modus operandi of the child who felt abandoned by its mother. That baby grows up falsely self-reliant, and falsely independent, in a world that dependences upon, social inter-dependence. That baby grows up to need no God. That baby grows up to view the need for God as a sign of weakness and cultivates a loathing for all things Theological.

        The end result?...a love of smearing the character of Christianity by equivocating the belief in God to the belief in Santa Claus. And yet, when have you ever seen a Christian present God with a wish-list? Christians are taught that they cannot manipulate God. They can pray for God's Will to Be Done, but that is hardly presenting God with a laundry list of demands. A Christian accepts that there are forces antithetical to God's Will and that these forces are in opposition to anything good or harmonious. Christians call it Satanic Activity. Science calls it Entropy. Rose is a rose is a rose...

       By some measures, an Atheist suffers from an Arrested Development Syndrome, a kind of psychological Infantile Fixation. We see this in children quite often, obviously. They want everything to be better, immediately, by way of the "magic" of their parents.  And again, I am not talking about ALL Atheists. Not all Atheists fit this profile, of course. If the shoe fits...

        The Atheist has filed a formal complaint with God saying, "Why me! Why can't you make my life better? Why can't you stop all suffering? Why are you hiding, if you indeed exist? Why can't you reveal yourself if you are real? etc..." These are the kinds of magical thoughts that children have about the world and their place in it. Children tend to idealize their parents and see them as All-Powerful, and this is no different than an Atheist idealizing God.

They learn from theology that a certain definition of God exists where God is All -Powerful, and then they run across the Trilemma of Epicurus which takes on the classical “Problem of Evil”:

1.      If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful.

2.     If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good.

3.     If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?

With regard to the third point, he concludes:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?

The inevitable conclusion Atheists arrive at is that there is suffering and “evil”, and so God does not exist. There are multiple problems with the what the Atheist’s conclude:

1.)   They do not factor the variable of Free Will into this equation. With Free Agency, Man will certainly do evil things. It is not God’s fault. If you were an automaton, without free Will, God could logically intervene to make the world a perpetual Disneyland. But, Free Will makes you free to do both good and evil. That is the design of reality for Man. Atheists seem to take great issue with the Creator about this particular moral aspect of the Creation...as a child would with its Mommy and Daddy. Epicurus was a Greek philosopher 341 BCE – 270 BCE. As such he was not a Christian. "Epicurus is a key figure in the development of science and the scientific method because of his insistence that nothing should be believed, except that which was tested through direct observation and logical deduction." His philosophy denied the afterlife. The questions above ignore the most fundamental concept of God. GOD IS LOVE. Free Will is a dictum of Love. God must allow freedom of choice otherwise He would be a dictator and have no merit So we have free choice. Everyone must use it wisely.

2.)   They do not account for the idea that suffering is part of life, and the idealized version of God who rescues them from all threats is merely an infantile projection of a caretaker who used to be there for them when they were infants.

3.)   Who says God is All-Powerful? Not all theologians agree with this as an attribute of The Creator of Earth. Atheists, thanks to Epicurus’s help, have Cherry-Picked attributes of God from certain definitions of God that enabled them to create what is referred to in theology and philosophy as the classical “Problem of Evil”. Perhaps God is not All-Powerful and whatever God’s adversary is may have a certain amount of power? What if God is All Loving but not All-Powerful, and desires to help Man in this fight against evil, but it is not so easy. The Problem of Evil is an age-old riddle for both Atheists and Theists to ponder. The Gnostics suggested that the real God did not even create Earth but lives beyond it in the Fullness of the Pleroma, the Pleroma being the fullness of being of the divine life held in Gnosticism to comprise the aeons as well as the uncreated monad or dyad from which they have proceeded. In this Gnostic context, God did not even create Earth, matter is intrinsically evil, and God certainly cannot be blamed for any doings on the Earth where Free Will reigns and lesser powers fight for stature in the pantheon of existence.

4.)   God permits evils for the sake of greater goods which it would otherwise be logically impossible to bring about or to maintain. Are you malevolent for inoculating your children, or taking them to the dentist? There may be suffering and pain involved that seem monstrous in the child’s eyes. Fear and even terror may overcome the child. But are you an “Evil God” for taking your children to the dentist? Think about this. Are we the final authority on what suffering and even mortality is for, or about, or what form it should take? What if all this business about the soul is correct? What if you could end up in some eternal state of misery if you were permitted to murder your wife, rape a child, etc...and God allowed for you to lose your legs in an automobile accident to spare you from some eternal misery that such deeds might afford you for such wickedness? What if Sins are real and you are accountable to your Creator for your thoughts and deeds? There are so many complexities to entertain but the Atheist mind merely says, “God does not exist.” ...in the form of “I lack a belief in Gods”, of course). And of course, Auschwitz is not a dentist, but again, Man has Free Will and Man is responsible for his choices, not Man’s Creator.

5.)   A faulty understanding of omnipotence is key to this. So is the faulty understanding of goodness, or of the implications of goodness. Admit either error, that omnipotence means not having even logical limitations or that goodness requires that no evil be permitted for any reason whatsoever, and then the existence of evil would disprove the existence of a good, omnipotent God. Who says God possess all these attributes: Goodness, Omnipotence, Omniscience, etc... Again, this is the Strawman tactic that Atheists use to attack Theists by claiming that all Theists embrace the same definitions of God. In my experience, Atheist go straight to the Old Testament Godhead and start ranting about how genocidal God is, which betrays their obvious fixation and biases towards destroying Christianity. I have yet to hear an Atheist talk about Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, etc... these are all religions, but Christianity is generally the target. (And speaking to the issue of genocide, was it actually evil for God to destroy the Fallen Nephilim of the Old Testament Flood? People have been misinformed by Satanists that The Great Flood was an IMMORAL Act of Genocide, when it was actually The Wicked Abominations of Genetically Perverted Luciferians that God erased to PROTECT HIS FAITHFUL CREATION. God wiping out the Abomination of Lucifer with The Great Flood is looked on as IMMORAL and Genocidal. But remember, God SAVED HIS FAITHFUL on The Ark. It was the ABOMINATION of Lucifer, that Genetically Manipulated Satanic Enemy that He wiped out, not His own the "Genocidal God" argument holds no water, pun intended.

6.)    There is a false premise in that assuming Omnipotence allows God to do anything when, in fact, He is limited to being able to do anything that is not logically impossible. That would invalidate Epicurus’s first conclusion that because He is willing but not able does not mean he is not Omnipotent due to a faulty understanding of omnipotence.

7.)   Finally, speaking more to Christianly, another problem with Epicurus not yet mentioned (though indirectly when "free choice" was mentioned") is that an All-Powerful God may decide to SELF-LIMIT his Potency, in the same way a father may allow his child to fall down while learning to ride a bicycle, so the child can learn what it feels like to fall, and the importance of not falling and practicing the skill of riding with diligence. The father self-censors his “Omniscience” over his child to allow space for his child to learn. So, I suppose that yes, this means that, in a certain sense, God is not "All Powerful." The Christian understanding of Creation/Redemption seems to involve such a loving, self-limiting (self-giving) on God's part. That is, God created human nature, by nature, to be incomplete. In a certain sense our natures are imperfect as they cry out for something they do not have. So, we must actively complete God's creation and stewardship of the world and our very selves. We have the freedom to choose or not to choose whether we complete ourselves in the right or wrong way. That is what makes us human. If we choose to complete our humanity in the wrong way we hurt ourselves, others and the world. By definition, in the act of Creation God chose to let us finish off what he started, he lovingly passed some of His Power to us. For Him to go back on this loving, self-limiting is to deny us our very human nature. God is loyal and consistent, that is why evil exists. Evil proves he lovingly (but painfully) respect’s our autonomy (if that is what we decide). Evil therefore comes from us abusing the Power God "lent" us.

Epicurious's dry, sterile logic and words comes nowhere near understanding these deep and meaningful realities of Christian wisdom.