Problem of Evil

I believe you are all familiar with this quote. Let's discuss Veeky Forums!

>Why do you agree?
>If you disagree, why?

No God, no problem.

*tips fedora*

Found the atheist

To be fair, i did expect something like that

The only actual question he poses is asking where evil comes from.

No, just why it exists if a presumed benevolent god also exists

I don't think that really makes sense if there is an afterlife of a certain kind.

I mean being a good parent means letting your child experience pain in order to grow. If the afterlife was infinitely long, it could eventually be the case that being raped to death was of no importance.

I think it definitely forces people who believe in a benevolent God into talking about the afterlife.

I guess it presupposes the existence of evil/good in the first place

Ye m8 but the whole religion is stipulated on the belief that god is a being of infinite good, and if he was all powerful he could make us perfect as well without suffering.

I don't think being unwilling to stop "evil" makes one malevolent. It could very well just be indifference.

Besides, good and evil are relative concepts.

>and if he was all powerful he could make us perfect as well without suffering
Actually I'm with God on that one. Nobody interesting was ever made without suffering. You're suggesting that God would want to make a bunch of cosmic millenials.

Maybe this is the lobby where we all become diverse people by going through trauma, then in the next life we can relax and chat to each other.

If you had the power to stop someone from dying, say you're the only one in the room with CPR training, and you just decide not to? Perhaps not purely malevolence but definitely a high degree of callousness. I would not describe a person like that as "loving".

God decreed men do evil in order to bring about a greater good.

Yea, but to a religious person they are absolute terms defined by an infallible being, so when the being is self-contradictory within it's own parameters that really undermines the religions credibility

Morality is a spook.

What we consider good or evil is based on our tribe.

If God is all ""good"" as people define him to be, then he is not all powerful

And if he all powerful, then he is not all ""good"".

>Perhaps not purely malevolence but definitely a high degree of callousness.

I could see a being like God being pretty callous when it comes to suffering.

> I would not describe a person like that as "loving".

I'm not so sure. As someone said above, even parents have to allow their children to suffer sometimes.


> to a religious person they are absolute terms defined by an infallible being

Not necessarily, maybe if one's deity of interest bothered to define good and evil in the first place. I think the problem of evil only really is valid against such a god, and can be argued against even then.

here are some points to consider

it is not gods goal to make everyone as happy as possible but he wants as many people as possible to initiate a relationship with him
it is totally possible that in a world of free agents many people come to know god through intense suffering

also you cannot possibly know whether god might have a sufficient reason to allow some suffering because it might bring about a greater good in the future

also there is a difference between logically possible and feasible worlds even for an omnipotent god

the classic example is that god could not make a prime number into a prime minister
so it might not be feasible for god to create a world with less or no suffering in which the same amount of people freely come to know god

>isnt heaven a logically possible world in which everyone freely comes to know god without suffering ?
no heaven might not be feasible without the previous life in the earthly world

"God's only excuse is he doesn't exist." -Some French dude.

The fact order of some sort exists in the universe implies god is somewhat benevolent

What is considered evil is an opinion
If there is a god he doesn't have to cater to you, even if the silly book says so

Again, if he was all powerful he could make us so that we didnt need to suffer to be perfect, or interesting or whatever

Plotinus wrote specifically on this. While there is a goodness in people and nearly all things, it is mutable, unlike the supreme good found in the all or God. Since it is mutable, it has the ability to "create" "evil"

t. person reading the enneads

I agree with it. It is pretty much inescapable if you want to posit an all-good and all-powerful god.

From what I've seen, religious people have two ways to rationalize themselves out of this problem.

>Sure, the world SEEMS bad, but what's waiting for us somewhere down the line makes this all worth it!
Which is wishful thinking at best; and

>God is good, therefore everything he does is good by definition
Which is a delusional word game that refuses to address the problem on the terms it's been posited in.

No, not really. If we have free will, it seems to me that our characters could only be created by experiences.

It's like if you had a learning AI. You can't teach it in any other way than putting it through an AI regimen. But with humans with free will, there's the added factor that the humans have some input as well. When you put it like that, it seems like the best possible setup, even though it sometimes sucks right now.

It really all hinges on the afterlife.

don't know why any Greco-Roman philosophers question the Omani-benevolence of gods

aren't the Greco-Romans gods kinda dicks?

Actually a lot of them believed vaguely in "God" or some sort of more unified idea. Pagan mythologies are weird, they weren't really treated by intellectuals as if they were The Truth. Just a bunch of metaphors, really, that you shouldn't think about too much because it's spooky.

Evil is whatever a group of people define as going against their collective norms and values.
It's scientifically worthless because it's not objective and can't be measured.

Debating evil is literally debating
>opinions
hence the question
>agree or disagree
rather than
>is this correct or incorrect

It's a loaded question because it assumes that 1) there is a god, 2) there is evil.

>tl;dr
No God, no problem.

There is no problem. If God exist, than he directly responsible for everything. How evil is everything? This is the subjective matter. For God it is pretty world, for example.

> Nobody interesting was ever made without suffering.
True, but a suffering in hell is a pointless one as it is a static place of eternal suffering where nothing interesting happens anyway. If afterlife in heal is a real one, than even your excuses stop working.