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Stephen Fry asks the wrong question about God.

Stephen Fry asks the wrong question about God. He asks why a God would allow human suffering with diseases such as cancer.  By asking such a question he implies that the real answer is that there couldn't really be a God, or at least not a God that is benevolent.  His assumption is that if such a God existed then there would be goodness and no badness in the world.  It simply begs the question of what such goodness would be.  Goodness and badness is clearly a human viewpoint.

It is 'good' that there is a world of nature, but it is also 'natural' that it changes, grows, develops and reproduces, else the world about us would not exist other than as a permanent fixed entity, and we along with it would also be fixed - no thoughts, no human decision, no cultural development, no history,  no Steven Fry. The later would, I think be very bad.

All this doesn't suggest Stephen Fry is wrong to question the existence of a God. I do that also. But his question is misplaced because it doesn't answer the question in the way he clearly supposes. He asks it as a rhetoric which fails to provide the answer he thinks it does.

It presupposes an interventionist God. If such a god existed then what would be his priorities? Would he intervene in every detail? In which case there would be no 'free will' and Stephen Fry would not be able to ask his question, let alone answer it.

No, if God does not exist it is not because of the answer to Stephen Fry's rhetorical question. If God does not exist, whatever a 'god' is,  it will be because the proposition of a god is found to be unnecessary as an explanation.  I do not know whether that is so or not.


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