Sam Harris on The problem of evil
Harris frames the problem of evil in concrete, scientific terms — pointing to natural disasters and animal suffering as evidence no loving God exists.
Sam Harris approaches the problem of evil with the precision of a scientist and the moral urgency of someone who thinks the question matters. In The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, he presents the existence of gratuitous suffering as the single most powerful argument against the existence of a benevolent God.
Harris is particularly effective at deploying specific examples. He asks believers to consider the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed a quarter of a million people in hours — including tens of thousands of children. No free will was involved. No lesson was learned. No soul was refined. The suffering was simply inflicted by the mechanics of plate tectonics on human beings who had done nothing to deserve it.
He presses the point further into evolutionary history: hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering preceded human existence. Parasites that eat children's eyes from the inside out were 'designed' long before any human could have sinned. If this is the work of a designer, Harris argues, that designer is either incompetent, indifferent, or malevolent — and none of those is the God of Christianity.
“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary.”
“An atheist is simply a person who considers the specific claims of religion to be bad claims — especially the claim that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God who is simultaneously permitting the suffering of children.”