JB has a question:
I have never heard this question answered before. If there is no God (or Devil) why is there evil?
The reason you haven’t heard it answered before is because most atheists shy away from explicitly revealing the true extent of their beliefs. I’ve pinned a few atheists down on this, and to a man, they have admitted that they don’t actually believe in the existence of evil. Of course, this doesn’t prevent them from making rhetorical use of the concept and insisting that it is the Christian concept of God that is truly evil and so forth. In doing so, they are either being deceptive or inconsistent.
But the only position on evil that is consistent with rational materialism is that there is no such thing as essential evil or essential good, these are merely subjective labels that are inconsistently applied to various human behaviors and natural events. Of course, this is not an aspect of atheism that most atheists are eager to advertise, since so many people already tend to consider them amoral or even immoral by definition.
This is one of the reasons I entitled my book on the subject “The Irrational Atheist”. Most atheism is irrational, as the atheist attempts to reconcile his continued belief in the existence of some sort of objective good or evil while simultaneously denying the existence of its only possible source. Of course, it’s not the irrational atheist one has to worry about, it is the rational atheist who realizes that in the absence of a lawmaker, there is no law except that which he wills.
That is the reality, though. If there is no God, there is no good or evil. This is also the core of my argument for the existence of God; because we materially experience evil, we must logically conclude that God exists.