The Problem with Natural Theology

I want to expand a bit on a concept I talked about a while back in my post on ontological naturalism: namely, the idea that supernatural concepts are fundamentally incoherent. Theologians argue that theology is, like science, a viable means attaining knowledge; I am going to argue that theology is in principle incapable of imparting us with knowledge.  I'm not concerned with theological debates over doctrine (revealed theology), but rather natural theology. From Wikipedia:

Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology (or revealed religion) which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds.

Natural theology is what most apologists, from C.S. Lewis to William Lane Craig to Francis Collins to Alister McGrath, are preoccupied with; it's the idea that we can use our understanding of the natural world to make inferences about the existence and nature of divine or supernatural things. Take, for example, the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause to its existence
2. The universe began to exist
3. Ergo, the universe has a cause to its existence

The purpose of this argument is to articulate what we feel is intuitively true – the idea that something can't come from nothing – and cantilever those intuitions into realms that are beyond our immediate, objective reach. In other words, it's attempting to use our intuitive understanding of the world around us to infer things about worlds beyond us. That's the crux of all natural theology and, as I aim to show, its downfall.

The Problem of Suffering

It felt both a little cliche and a little inaccurate to give this post the more predictable name: "The Problem of Evil". That's how it's generally written in Christian apologetic literature, but I think that, strictly speaking, "good" and "evil" are fairly abstract and often arbitrarily defined religious terms. "Evil" seems to work fine for things like murderers, rapists, child molesters, fascist dictators, and other behavior of generally unsavory characters in human history, but I think the acts of humans against each other could be (and generally is) theologically dismissed as a mere consequence of free will. "Evil" seems much less appropriate a descriptor when the subjects are things like natural disasters, cancer, disease, famine, and other natural occurrences that inflict great suffering on people indiscriminately – that is, cancer does not seem to care if you are a good person or whether you go to church. Bad things do happen to good people, and in their grief the faithful can only naturally wonder why a loving, all-powerful God would allow such things to happen. For these things, I think a better question than "Why is there evil in the world" is "Why do people suffer?" I don't think "evil" is what concerns most people; rather, it is suffering that makes believers question the view that somehow, God is a god of love and justice. How could a loving God allow children to suffer and die of starvation, cancer, or disease? How could God allow thousands of people to die in an earthquake or tsunami? I don't claim these questions as my own (obviously of course, since I am an atheist!), but these are precisely the kinds of questions that people of faith struggle with often, and questions I too struggled with in my days as a Christian.

I am going to examine some prominent theologians' explanations for these issues, and explain why I find them unpersuasive. Then I will describe a secular, naturalistic explanation for suffering – a scientific view of why bad things happen to good people. But first, I think it's important to describe the issue in detail, and really drive home just how deep and powerful a problem for believers this really is.