Hostage to fear

[Randy Carson]

Let's recap the game so far...I'm in bold; you're in blue.

The Four-Question Approach to Thinking About Theodicy

Question #1:

Would you like to see laws prohibiting a person from choosing to have or obtain an abortion, prohibiting premarital sex, or prohibiting homosexual behavior?

And no.  If there is any more of a position to take here, it will be to the credit of humanism and not religion.

So, your answer is NO. Okay...that's fine.

Question #2:

Would you agree that it's a good thing that you have freedom to make moral choices regarding abortion or premarital sex, etc.?

If you're demanding that your subjective questions end in objective answers;

1. Yes, it is a good thing.
2 (alternative). Yes, it would be bad.

Again, if these conditions exist, they depend wholly on humanistic systems and the people (no deity required) that make them possible. Both answers neither require your god as the source of our morality or justify why such morality exists.

Randy, if you are going to read the next line in your script from the presuppositional argument, please read it here. Do not save it for the innocent children that bare your genetic signature, despite being disadvantage by the poison you have (no doubt) instilled in your off-spring, who deserve much, much better.

Okay. Again, these are not trick questions...and we're almost home.

Question #3:

If it's a good thing to have moral choices, would you agree that requires not only that we have complete freedom but also the possibility of choosing either good or evil? In other words, wouldn’t our freedom be severely restricted if we could only choose good?

Your question is nonsense because "good" is not objective, assuming the noun form which you have proposed. But, I'll do my best to answer.

It is knowledge and special empathy combined that allow one to 'choose good'. Your question posits that good is objective. I wholly reject your ignorant presupposition regarding the philosophy of goodness.

Therefore... your question is not only fallacious to begin with, but malformed at best.

Try again, Randy.

So, to sum up:

1. You do not want restrictions placed on what moral choices you can and cannot make.
2. You agree that it is a good thing that you have the freedom to make these moral choices.
3. You say that knowledge and special empathy enable you to "choose good". However, you have not yet addressed the question of whether the freedom to make those moral choices requires that you are free to choose either good or evil.

So, let's try again: does freedom to choose entail any sort of limitation or restriction by definition? Are you truly free if you cannot actually choose from a full range of possibilities whether good or evil?

The answer ought to be pretty straightforward given your response to question #1...you do NOT want restrictions on the choices you make...therefore, it seems that you value freedom that comes from your ability to choose to do good or to do evil.

Alright, Spacetime, I see what the problem is. You don't want to be seen agreeing with the Christian apologist now that you've come out as an atheist, but my questions are so simple and innocuous that you couldn't help going along...at first. But then your Spidey senses started tingling because you realized that there must be a gotcha coming at the end, so now you're tying yourself up in knots overthinking your response to question #3 because you can't for the life of you figure out what's coming in question #4. Well, I'm going to put you out of your misery...it's just another simple, innocuous question:

Question #4

If an all-powerful creator exists, would it be possible for him to grant us full moral freedom without the ability to choose evil?

Now, remember that you said in answer to question #1 that you did not want restrictions placed on your ability to make moral choices. In your response to question #2, you agreed that having freedom to make moral choices is a good thing. You tried to avoid answering to question #3 (for reasons just explained) by arguing that "good" is not objective, but it is intuitively obvious that freedom to make moral choices requires that we can select from a full-range of options which includes some "good" (like baking cookies for a shut-in neighbor or going out on a patrol in place of a buddy who is due to rotate stateside in a couple of days) and some "bad" (like murder and rape).

So, restating Question #4: Is God's omnipotence capable of creating a scenario in which we have complete freedom to make moral choices while at the same time limiting those choices to only good options?

Can God grant us full moral freedom while simultaneously granting no possibility of doing evil?

+++

The answer to these variations of Question #4 is no. Although God is all-powerful, it is not possible for Him to grant us free will and the ability to make moral choices while simultaneously limiting our choices to the "good" only. Limiting our freedom would itself be a bad thing, and God does not make bad things.

Consequently, we have been given free will and the potential to choose to do evil; but the actualization of that potential is our decision, not God's. We could freely choose to do only good, but we choose to do bad or evil things all the time. The responsibility for those choices is on us, not God.

In summary, there is no logical contradiction in the fact that both God and evil exist, and the possibility of choosing evil is a necessary condition of having true freedom to make moral choices. Thus, it is simply a false notion that an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God would be able or even want to eliminate evil for the reasons we have seen in this exercise.

While your concerns about problem of evil and suffering in the world are understandable on an emotional level, they do not justify the complete loss of faith in God which you seem to be struggling with, and the healing of the pain you are experiencing can only come from Christ Himself.

You need MORE God - not less, Spacetime.