Disclaimer: This entry contains the views of an SSU member, and does not necessarily represent the views of the Secular Student Union.

This is a quick sketch of my responses, reading Jay’s refutation. Please, feel free to point out flaws in anything I say. If I’m snarky, Jay started it

Jay makes many serious philosophical claims without much justification. In my opinion, his only worthwhile point is that this story didn’t actually happen.

“If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil.”

So the professor’s argument could be said to run like this:
1. God created everything.
2. Evil exists.
3. Character traits of a creation are present in a creator (or at least, if said creator was the only thing in existence at the time of creation, perhaps).
Therefore,
4. God is evil.
And, because I’m feeling snarky:
5. Christians say God isn’t evil.
Therefore,
6. All of Christian faith is a myth.
This is somewhat a strange formulation of the argument from evil, mainly because it is so easy to blow premise 3 out of the water (I have so many more problems I won’t bother, just use a decent formulation). There are numerous solutions to it more clever than the student’s. Read Plantinga, for example (if I may quote Wikipedia, “since the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s free will defence, the majority, though not unanimous, view among contemporary scholars is that logical arguments from evil are not successful.” Or read J.L. Mackie for a decent formulation of the argument from evil.

“A is the lack of B
C is the lack of D
Thus, E is the lack of F”

Arguments from analogy are a valid form of argument. They can never prove the conclusion, however, only make it more likely, and always are a little sketchy.

Oh, and darkness, it actually happens to be an absence of light. You can be very much in the dark surrounded by radio waves. While scientifically, complete darkness is impossible, and so darkness isn’t the complete absence of light, it is still the relative absence of light. In fact, I believe most theists would argue that, just so, it is impossible to have a complete absence of God. This was, in fact, a perfect metaphor for this student to choose for his argument

Furthermore, while temperature is related to average kinetic energy, Jay isn’t quite correct here. Degrees of freedom are also relevant.

Furthermore, while Jay is quite right that this student’s use of analogy may be partly flawed, you can’t simply dismiss the student’s definition of evil. It is quite Platonic, actually, that evil is only privatio boni. While this student’s answer is perhaps not sufficient to refute decent formulations of the argument from evil, it a valid argument against the 3rd premise of this professor’s “argument,” or at least could easily be made such if expanded slightly, following the natural course of the student’s reasoning.

“Good and evil imply action. A human, doing nothing, cannot logically be good or evil.”
This is highly debatable. However, I believe most philosophers would agree that there are situations in which inaction is unethical. Although Jay fails to define what counts as “action,” and it is unclear if a human can ever be “doing nothing.”

“Why aren’t all atheists pure evil?”
Throughout this argument Jay seems to feel that Christians appeal to a divine command theory of morality, something not present in the anecdote.

“Morality is subjective, not absolute. Thus, it has little to do with science. Even in religion, morality changes.”
Again, this is an incredibly, incredibly complex argument within philosophy which this refutation seem to entirely discard in a sweeping statement. While I believe most philosophers would agree that morality can change (one common example is that if alien overlords enslaved us and made it so that, upon a person feeling compassion, the subject of their compassion would be obliterated, then compassion would cease to be a virtue), I have yet to see a valid argument for the cultural relativism of ethics.

“According to this story, once I trip the old lady, I am then lacking God. It’s like God suddenly leaves? This is ridiculous.”
I’m not going to give this an in-depth analysis, however, I’ll just say that Jay and the author have very different concepts of God, and as neither of them have defined them, this is hardly a meaningful “attack” to make.

On the bright side, the philosophy in this rebuttal isn’t as bad as that of Dawkins. It has always appalled me how the atheists in the spot light have no grasp on philosophy, and always revert to simple (long since shown to be invalid) rebuttals for simple, ancient (often the oldest formulation that can be found) arguments. Probably because it is impossible to find real philosophy on the internet or in a public library.