Problem of Evil

Alright, it’s a well known problem. Uccisore claims it’s been addressed, but I haven’t seen a good argument against it. I’m sure you’re all familiar with it:

I’m interested to hear from those with faith that God exists, simply because there is no riddle for those who believe morality is a human idea, and “good” and “evil” truly don’t exist in a universal sense.

I can stop my kid from doing something stupid, but I don’t. Why? Am I being just plain old malevolent? No I want the kid to learn. Sometimes learning takes doing something stupid. Sometimes we need pain to really learn.

Why must God be malevolent? I think its a very parental thing to do and an extremely hard thing to do.

So would you let your child be raped? How about being stuck in an oven and cooked alive? Or perhaps burned at the cross?

“Stupid” doesn’t equate to “evil” in my books.

As long as there is in fact a lesson to be learned, and also that the lesson is able to be retained and applied to future situations, then you have an excuse to not intervene. But in the god case there’s no way to definitively determine if there is an actual intended lesson to be learned.

Here’s how I see it (assuming that a god exists):

The Able/Not Willing case is a tricky one, because its impossible to determine if it is lack of willingness based on sloth, or based on action through inaction.

Consider an amputee. This person is missing a limb. So far the current idea of “god” in regard to amputees has stayed out of the willing/able section, so either the god is not able, not willing, or neither.

But if it all comes down to a lesson being taught and learned, what exactly is the lesson for say, cancer patients. “Don’t get cancer… or… you’ll get cancer”?

There should really be a third dimension to the chart. Lovingness should be taken into consideration. I’d add a third dimension but Excel cant display 3d charts.

Here’s my take on theodicy: If God took away mankind’s free will, along with the ability to do evil, He would reduce us to being robots; robots incapable of wrongdoing, and in turn, learning.

A loving God wouldn’t want evil to happen to his creation, but He himself would be evil if He were to prohibit his creation from learning, not to mention obliterate our free will.

I didn’t want to turn this into a free will discussion, but what kind of free will requires that you either follow the “correct” path or face punishment?

“Do it either this certain way or face damnation,” doesn’t sound so free to me. Perhaps you could start a new thread on free will.

The problem of evil is that it’s so much fun. :evilfun:

Me? oh hell no, but, then I am not God am I? Why presume that god is only interested in our species as individuals? Why can’t God be interested in us as a child species? Big difference.

Sorry, but my best answer depends on free will. The point is, God isn’t responsible for evil; we are. God is good because he let’s us do evil. If we’re forced to be good, would that really be moral?

Plus, who said freedom was “this way or the other?” There are multiple ways to do right, multiple ways to do wrong, and a few good ways to do neither.

But yeah, I should think about a free will thread.

You gotta pick two of the three, and then as much of the third one as possible. The Pope knows he can’t get out of this problem. That’s why you can’t really have all three atritbutes of God:

All powerfull
All knowing
Perfectly good

If you still insist that God is all three, then this is the best of all possible worlds.

Thank you Kriswest, I’d been wanting to articulate something more or less along these lines for some time now.

This is an easy out. Why, if you take the Bible literally, did God kill the first born of all of Egypt? All those innocent children? Who knows why God does what he does, but he’s God, so anything goes! Let him send angels down to rape and pillage women. Let homosexuals be treated brutally throughout all of history, and let all of mankind find justification for it in the Bible for as long as we believe the Bible has relevance. Let women be treated as the lesser seed. Who knows why God wants it, but if that’s what he wants, it must be for a better purpose!

And I found it poorly articulated, what’s the difference between a species and a child species? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Whoa whoa whoa…stop right there. God isn’t responsible for evil? When I made my exit from Christianity, part of it was to do with the fact that in the theology, God created Satan, who was capable of evil. If god wasn’t capable of evil, then none of his “creation” could be.

A being has to contain the possibility of evil in order to create something with the potential of evil, no two ways around it. If God contained no evil whatsoever, and the concept was completely foreign to God, it would be outside the limits of possibility. This obviously isn’t the case.

Many atheists, such as Hitchens and Dawkins, bring up an excellent point: how moral is a person that only does “good deeds” simply because they fear punishment from a higher power? If the only reason somebody is good is because they don’t want to go to hell, or because they want an other-worldly reward, I wouldn’t consider them as moral as somebody who performs good deeds simply because they want to better mankind, and serve our own species.

In Christianity, as most other religions there are right things to do, wrong things to do, and then everything else is neutral. It’s right in many religions to disfigure infants’ genitals. It’s wrong to use a condom. It’s wrong to be homosexual, it’s wrong to allow stem cells to be destroyed, etc. These are freedoms that many have revoked because of this brainwashing.

Why argue with Christians? You can be logically correct in all areas, but even then they can say that God operates outside of logic and doesn’t necessarily follow y/our rules.

Hi D0rkyd00d,

An easy out? Sure. So what? It’s still plausible. I’ve never understood how anyone can be so sure that because humans feel a particular way about something, God must feel that way too.

Evil is a human concept.

btw, I was under the impression that this comes from Hume. ???

You assume I’m Christian and that I believe in the Devil, but neither is true. My theology is based on my reasoning, not the Bible.

I’m saying that God doesn’t give free lunches to his creation; He wants us to learn through mistakes. Do you expect anyone to learn what good is without ever knowing what bad is? The light bulb was invented because Edison knew how not to make one.

It’s an attempt to give justification for an untenable position.

Why only target the Bible is the one thing I’m wondering? The Q’uran and their Cosmic Pimp, (Allah, God of Habib or Abdulla or whatever), is equally as insidious and far more vile in its segregations and denouncements.

As long as God can be said to exist, which it cannot be proven to not exist, those who cannot deal with an emotionless and unconcerned Universe can find comfort.

Not withstanding, biologically, we were damned to create God, whether it exists or not.

“Good” and “Evil” are human emotive responses to being incapable of dealing with chaos and entropy logically. God then becomes the scapegoat, and comfort is found.

Although I’m vaguely familiar with the vile passages of the Quran, being raised a fundamentalist Christian, I’m far more familiar with the Bible.

I’d like to learn more about how that came about, but perhaps that’s another thread.

How do you know?

Let’s put it this way…If I’d never heard of rape and murder, I still don’t think I’d be inclined to walk out of my door and start raping and murdering people. This largely has to do with my evolutionary inherited traits…our species just wouldn’t fair very well if our instinct was to walk out and murder whoever we wanted to.

I think of those who murder and rape as having a mental short circuit. The rest of our brains function “properly.” Besides, I don’t think good and bad truly exist, which is perhaps another reason we’re not seeing eye to eye.

I realized science was on the hunt for the God concept being hard-wired into the brain, but wasn’t aware of any recent breakthroughs. Have you heard any recent news on that?

I don’t know, I assume.

I assume, since His creation is going about and doing wrongs anyway, and since all the things we have done in the past we have learned from or have yet to learn from, and since God has never intervened in preventing tragedies (visibly, at least), that that would be the way of things.

I guess we have to agree to disagree.

What is evil?