orac

Child abuse has to exist in order for it to be necessary for us to need to eliminate it.

That's seriously the best you can come up with?

Can you explain why the process of eliminating child abuse is so important? Wouldn't it be simpler to skip the entire argument by not having child abuse in the first place?

I'ld argue that suffering needs to be eliminated, but only because it exists. It does not exist in order to need to be eliminated. (In any case, self-caused suffering is one thing, the abuse of defenseless children by adults is significantly worse than just suffering the consequences of your own mistakes.)

I'm not impressed by "free will is so important!" arguments, either.

"Permitting the choice of child abuse" for one person results in "the inability to escape being the victim of child abuse" for another. In this case, the other person is essentially defenseless. This ends up as an argument that an abuser's right to choose to abuse someone is more important than a child's freedom from abuse. This is completely unacceptable to me - any being worthy of my worship could come up with a better plan than that. (ie: your God is either non-existant, or so weak and ineffectual that he is not worthy of worship.)

(Btw, just a small comment: the reason for choosing this argument is that it is an extremely clear example of a truely evil thing. There are few things more abhorent and unjustifiable. Unfortunately, if you want me to accept that an omnipotent deity exists, you need to explain why such things happen. No theist of any religion has ever successfully done so. There is no cheerful or happy explanation, and wishing that there was won't make it happen.)

The Problem of Evil doesn't prove that there is no God - just that if there is a God after all, he's not a particularly pleasant person.

So far, you haven't argued that evil is either necessary, non-existant, or somehow irrelevant. Wern't you trying to refute the PoE?

Zadok001

orac:

Pssst!

Choir, you, preaching, are.

DMB

I would like to ask Soma:

If, as you maintain, "God" (whatever that means) is the fount of morality, how are humans supposed to know the moral status of any action?

Are you, for example, suggesting that the bible is an adequate guide?

the_cave

For the heck of it, I'll respond to these, though I'm otherwise not aligning myself with Soma's argument.

Agreed, God can create a world without evil--"eden". However, this is the state of the world before the "fall"--before humankind uses its freedom for ill.

Now I also agree that God can create a world without evil after the Fall--in heaven. But how will he create this world? He simply calls his creation (without violating their free will) to choose to do good. Thus, he both can bring it about, and wills it--yet must leave it up to us to cooperate. He can only bring it about indirectly, by inviting us to participate in heaven's creation. This seems to me to be a quite orthodox opinion.

Hawkingfan

Is punishing me ETERNALLY for a FINITE number of sins just?

MrDarwin

I agree that the PoE isn't the "smoking gun" that many believe it to be. I really don't have a problem with some deity creating the universe in such a way to maximize free will, even if doing so entailed much suffering.

Where I think many atheists and agnostics (and even some theists, I suspect) have a problem is the idea that, on top of the evil and suffering that are permitted in this world, many of the souls God caused to come into existence will die, only to go on to suffer eternally. I have already addressed this problem in another topic, The problem of punishment out of proportion to the crime.

So eternal damnation is good for mankind? What "greater good" is served by neverending suffering, without hope of forgiveness, relief, or mercy, ever? Especially considering that this suffering is supposed to continue even after all humans--in fact humankind itself--are no more?

MrDarwin

Oh, it's much, much more than abuse, as the sad case of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey amply demonstrates:

Now, here's the problem: why was the free will of the murderer more important than the life of a little girl? Why was the free will of the murderer more important than the innocence of a little girl? And finally, why was preserving the free will of the murderer more important than preserving the free will of Lesley Ann?

Philosoft

If we are judging God's actions, we do so under our own conceptions of "good" and "evil." According to your reasoning, we have no way of knowing, or judging if God really does have our best interests in mind - his status as creator is not a sufficient condition for this. Once again, we are reduced to some kind of faith that things are actually as an old book tells us they are.

Clutch

The English word "good", as it occurs on its own or in "goodness", does not describe God according to your argument, Soma. This is an explicit part of your view, and a view you attribute to Aquinas.

But of course, the question was always whether your god is good. (He said, speaking English.)

It's the lamest kind of equivocation, to admit that God is not good in any human comprehensible way -- in other words, not good, as we use the words "not" and "good" -- but to invent some completely different concept, calling it "good" as well, and hoping that the similar shape of the two words will somehow amount to a rebuttal.

When Christians tell me that God is good, either they mean good or they don't. If they mean something else, they should at least have the minimal honesty to call it something else -- eg, "shmoopy".

Of course, the message "Rejoice, for God is shmoopy!" is a bit underwhelming, and once people figure out what you mean by "shmoopy", they'll wonder why you wanted them to rejoice at all. Because it looks like we already had a word for "shmoopy" too.

We call it "evil".

Treacle Worshipper

Disclaimer: I'm not any sort of philosopher, I'm just confused.

Originally posted by Soma
You could argue that God could endow man with full knowledge of good and evil, but that would strip man of His free will.
This is the part that I don't understand. Why would endowing someone with full knowledge of good & evil meddle with their free will? I know that murder & rape are bad. Being told how truly evil they are is just going to be that knowledge with greater magnitude. It's not going to influence my actions on the matter.
And you also wrote this:
Heaven is devoid of evil because once a man enters Heaven, He attains and understands all goodness, thus he has no need to do evil.
which would indicate that there is no free will in heaven, if full knowledge of good and evil removes free will.

It is impossible to have good without evil, because we understand goodness only through evil (and vice versa).
This would indicate that Adam & Eve had no idea what they were doing. They could not understand goodness because they had not experienced evil. (And also had no idea what evil was.) Therefore, it seems to me, they were in a state of extreme ignorance & shouldn't be held responsible for their actions. Which makes the whole fall/hell thing seem a rather evil response from a supposedly benevolent god
TW