Toto

Interview on Fresh Air - NPR - Feb 19

schilling.klaus

no, as the Saviour is not omnipotent, just good (Chrestos),
and has to struggle against the demiurge and other evil gods

Klaus Schilling

Jedi Mind Trick

But where did the evil God come from?

Jedi Mind Trick

Then we live in an eternally insecure system?

Jedi Mind Trick

Don't get me wrong, schilling.klaus, I am predisposed to gnostecism myself, but I have a hard time with the demiurge concept. This may be because i am not well read enough on it. However I do tend toward monism.

James Brown

I suppose it's possible, but it isn't ethically or intellectually satisfying.

For one thing, as others have mentioned, free will doesn't explain away natural disasters, disease, famine, random acts of violence, etc.

Second, if you were the father of two children, and you observed the older child inflicting harm on the younger, would you restrain yourself from acting for fear of inhibiting the older child's free will? And if you did do so, would you be able to claim the title of a Good Father?

Third, as Ehrman points out in his book (which I'm currently reading and enjoying, btw), God HAS intervened in the past (according to the Bible) such as rescuing the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. So if God is willing to subvert human free will in order to alleviate suffering during Israel's captivity, why wasn't he willing to lift a finger to help the Jews during the World War II Holocaust, when one of three Jews in the entire world were slaughtered?

From his book (p. 13):

thedistillers

It seems Ehrman never gave up his "fundamentalist" thinking (ie, everything must be black and white). Why is it a problem that the Bible offers more than 1 answer to the problem of evil? Where is the contradiction?

mens_sana

I think the problem lies in the foundation of those multiple answers, i.e. in whether or not the Bible is inspired by the Deity. If it is a collection of human wisdom (sic), then there is no problem with a multiplicity of answers. If it is the record of interaction within history of the divine and the human realms, contradictory answers reflect on the character of the Deity.

A Stable Flux

I think the problem is both the quality of argumentation of the Bible's responses to the problem of evil and the quantity of arguments. From what I remember Bart Ehrman critiques both these matters as well. He details how the book of Job is two different texts woven together (or a Christian redaction to the earlier poem), one an older lyrical poem with an aesthetic concern and the other a more later prose piece which is centrally theological.
It seems to me that the multiplicity of problem of evil counterarguments is an issue as something that's considered sacrosanct shouldn't have desperate shotgun type arguments to make their point. For the stubborn believers who insist there is divine inspiration the noticeably poor editorship flat out contradicts this.

James Brown

Don't forget that according to Ehrman, not only are the different answers contradictory, they are all weak and inadequate. No one answer found in the Bible explains the multiple types of suffering that occurs in our world. The one possible exception is the Ecclesiastes answer, and of course its the most agnostic solution in the bunch.