Problem of Evil

[Vagabond]

I agree with Wingates & Draggar's viewpoint.
Without evil, how would you know what is good?

Such that, if all you ate were cookies, how would you know how nasty <insert food procuct, or vegetable here> is?

Only once you step into the light do you realize there is darkness and/or a shadow.

[draggar]

Are you saying that baking cookies for my neighbor (or any other good deed) becomes a neutral act if there is no evil in the world?

No, drag's saying that without negative experiences, positive experiences mean less if anything at all.

If you baked your neighbor cookies and they had had a perfect life, then the cookies would be meaningless.

Something like that.

The concept of "good" cannot exist without the concept of "evil". Good and evil are comparisons of each other and without one the other shifts to neutrality or at least a shift, now neutral becomes evil, lesser good becomes neutral, and overly good becomes good.

Sure, it's nice to bake cookies for your neighbor but in an all-good world then people are always making cookies for their neighbors so where is it good if it's happening all the time? It becomes commonplace.

As for the question how can an all-knowing, all-seeing god figure allow evil to happen? I think the movies Dogma and Bruce Almighty summed it up pretty well.

In Dogma Bartleby expresses his frustration that humans have a choice to worship god (and thus other choices) and in Bruce Almighty god tells Bruce that the only thing he cannot do is mess with free will.

We have a choice - a choice to be good (helping each other etc..) or be evil (helping ourselves all the time)

[jackfaire]

The evil that happens could be a tool of God's

We hunt animals to control overpopulation. God lets people be killed horrifically to allow for population control.

[lordlundar]

Even without God's perspective, I can see that there is unnecessary evil in this world. I don't see what perspective would cause anyone to think that the holocaust was necessary. Or a child being raped and murdered was necessary.

And from a mortal perspective, it is unnecessary. But you are a mortal, and cannot understand God's position. Until you can, you cannot answer as to why it's allowed to happen.

So God is effing ineffable*? If you're saying that no one can understand God, I don't see how that applies. The problem of evil must be discussed in human terms. No other context makes sense.

*Apologies to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

But your original point is how God can allow it. To that end, a mortal understanding of the situation is insufficient. So you're right, no other context than a mortal one makes sense to us, because we are mortal. We're not immortal, let alone an omnipotent being. So the aspects of an omnipotent being are impossible for a mortal to understand, as is their reasoning.

To be honest, when you said we had to dismiss God as a factor in this discussion, your argument fell apart. You cannot say "God's stance doesn't matter" when the discussion is how God allows evil to exist.

[Ghel]

Free will is important because without it whatever we do is meaningless rather than good.

So if somebody does something intrinsically good, such as saving a life, but has no knowlege that the act was good, it's meaningless? I think the person whose life was saved would disagree.

[Ghel]

...God can see a far bigger picture than is ever possible for a mortal...
<snip>
God grants free will, which some people use to commit evil. God does not actively prevent this because it would serve to essentially rob all humanity of free will...

So if a young child is raped and murdered, is this because God needs the rapist's free will so that his actions could result in greater good? Certainly the child doesn't have any choice in the matter.

What's so great about free will, anyway? If we didn't have it, we wouldn't know we didn't have it, and so we wouldn't miss it.

Edited to add: As for Zeus, he was not considered to be omnipotent, omniscient, or necessarily good. He was also not the creator of the world nor the giver of free will as the god that we're discussing is.

[Ghel]

You are not a deity, and as such cannot have that perspective.

Even without God's perspective, I can see that there is unnecessary evil in this world. I don't see what perspective would cause anyone to think that the holocaust was necessary. Or a child being raped and murdered was necessary.

Do I have an answer? No. But then again, no one can have this answer.

So God is effing ineffable*? If you're saying that no one can understand God, I don't see how that applies. The problem of evil must be discussed in human terms. No other context makes sense.

*Apologies to Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

[HYHYBT]

I still think a piece of it depends on *precisely* what 'omnipotent' means, and God's being eternal. I don't think omnipotence can include doing something intrinsically self-contradictory; within one universe, "God did this" and "God did not do this" cannot both be true*. Free will is important because without it whatever we do is meaningless rather than good. But it inherently includes the ability to choose wrong; a world with only right choices available, or where wrong ones are always miraculously undone which amounts to the same thing, is one where there aren't any significant ones to make.

*and I leave out "at the same time" because of that 'eternal' business. God is supposed to have created time; it doesn't apply to him. Anything he has ever done or will ever do, he is, in a sense, doing right now. Which makes me wonder whether, omnipotent or not, he could possibly do anything that he does not, in fact, do. It does fit in with what I was trying, badly, to express before: the reason I wouldn't buy the argument that God's omnipotence means he cannot grant us free will (because he could override it) is that I think giving it to us makes it impossible *not* to give it to us. Of course, I could be completely wrong.

[Arcade Man D]

That's exactly the problem. Just like the ant has no framework to truly understand what humans are thinking, humans have no framework to understand a deity's thought process. (Example of a non-Christian deity: Zeus essentially raped scores of women, and was still considered a good deity by ancient Greeks)

And while The Problem of Evil is always a good discussion point, I prefer The Problem of Will. (popular discussion point for John Calvin)

1. God is omniscient.
2. God is omnipotent.
3. God is omnipresent.
4. Humans have free will.


However, how can an all-knowing God - who knows the past, present, and future - exist at the same time as free will? If a human has free will, the outcome of his decisions is unknown until they are done. If humans are predestined, then God can be omniscient, but any laws passed are essentially unfair because a human predestined to be a murderer can't help it.



Now, my take on both is that any deity would necesarrily be beyond the ken of a mortal man. In the case of Jehovah being omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent, it is because God can see a far bigger picture than is ever possible for a mortal to see that these aspects can exist in the face of the Problem of Evil and the Problem of Will.

God grants free will, which some people use to commit evil. God does not actively prevent this because it would serve to essentially rob all humanity of free will, because you could not even have a stray thought about pocketing a candy bar or punching that really annoying person in the face.

God can be omniscient in the face of free will because God exists in all places and times at once (omnipresence). God not only sees all paths, but also sees which one is being taken at any one moment. (If you start to pocket a candy bar at a store, God would know all possible outcomes, but he'd also know that before you left the store you placed it back on the shelf because you thought better of it. Because for God it is both yet to happen, and has already happened.)

[lordlundar]

Gehl, you keep thinking as God in a physical, tactile presence in this situation, that has the same perspective as a mortal being, and therein lies the problem. You are not a deity, and as such cannot have that perspective.

Do I have an answer? No. But then again, no one can have this answer.

[jackfaire]

Jack, I'm not sure I follow your train of thought, but you seem to be saying that if God can see that a murder is about to happen and does nothing to stop it, then he cannot be benevolent. I agree.

I am actually.

What I was also saying was that choosing not to stop one human from doing something isn't restricting another's free will.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

No, drag's saying that without negative experiences, positive experiences mean less if anything at all.

If you baked your neighbor cookies and they had had a perfect life, then the cookies would be meaningless.

[Ghel]

Are you saying that baking cookies for my neighbor (or any other good deed) becomes a neutral act if there is no evil in the world?

[draggar]

Without evil good becomes neutral.

[Ghel]

Jack, I'm not sure I follow your train of thought, but you seem to be saying that if God can see that a murder is about to happen and does nothing to stop it, then he cannot be benevolent. I agree.