The Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville

Author:Andre Comte-Sponville [Comte-Sponville, Andre]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781409081616
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Excess of Evil

This brings me to the three positive arguments that incite me not only to not believe in God (the position of negative atheism, virtually indistinguishable from agnosticism) but to believe that God does not exist (the position of positive atheism, that is, atheism in the strict sense of the word).

The first of these arguments is at once the oldest, the most banal and the most powerful: it is the existence of evil, or rather its amplitude, its atrocity, its outrageousness. Is this in fact a positive argument? Definitely, in so far as evil is a fact that not only points up a weakness of religion (as was already the case for the three preceding arguments) but also provides a strong reason to be an atheist. This argument seems so self-evident and has been made so many times since Epicurus and Lucretius that one almost hesitates to return to it. Yet return to it we must, for evil and religions continue to exist.

Epicurus, as was his wont, went straight to the heart of the issue – which heart, according to Lactantius, he summarized in four hypotheses. Since none of them is plausible (this is what I sometimes refer to as the tetralemma of religion), the hypothesis of a creator God is not plausible either.

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