Epicurus riddle.

[Mudhammam]

Hopefully you can accept that what I say when I tell you that I in no way want to minimize the misery of human existence. It’s awful and heartbreaking. There is much joy as well, but it never seems to be enough.

I agree that the logical structure of the argument is sound. Its validity all depends on the nature of those “certain attributes” found in the premises: omnipotence and omni-benevolence. I have already explained my position on these, so I see no need to repeat. But it may help, since Epicurus lived before the Christian era, to put those positions in a better context.

It seems that the Bible doesn’t actually say that God is omnipotent, only that He is Almighty. This is to say, it tells of a god more powerful that all other gods. I would say the early Christians, minus the Gnostics, would have maintained this Judaic god concept. Grappling with their own special revelation, Muslim scholars before the Scholastic period expanded on the concept of God’s transcendence to the point that, in Islam, reason is insufficient to say anything meaningful about God, i.e. Allah is beyond the reach of reason
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What makes the late Christian concept of God unique is the belief that God is intelligible. That puts Him somewhere between an ancient Jewish god that merely the most powerful one and an Islamic god that is capable of doing the inconceivable. When the Schoolmen reconciled the Biblical God with a neo-Platonic “God of the Philosophers” they gave us to understand a God who can do anything that is logically possible. He cannot alter the value of pi. He cannot be both complete and immutable. He cannot cease His own existence. With respect to miracles, from the biblical examples given God seems to intervene with no other goal than to make Himself known in ways not inferable from nature. Providence nearly always works in accordance with natural processes, which presumably reflect God’s nature. Even if these limitations are granted, it is still hard to rationalize that logical limitations prevent Him from curing an infant’s cancer. I take these as matter of degree and not differences in kind. I could give many analogies, none of which seem emotionally satisfactory.

The same kind of thinking applies with regards to God’s omni-benevolence. If I am not mistaken, either Drich or Godschild has promoted the concept that the Bible doesn’t say God is omni-benevolent. That’s actually true. The most it says is that He is Just. Conversely many New Age Christians believe in a mysterious emanation of Love, if only we could receive it (i.e. blame the victim.) Both the Church of Rome, Orthodoxy, and New Church theology have more subtle doctrines, but review of those would far exceed the scope of a single post. As mentioned previously, these revolve around restorative justice and kenosis. If reason did not firmly assure me of God’s existence, I would not be swayed by the possibility of God’s mitigating actions. If God is indeed all-loving, then creation must be metaphysically optimized in such a way that it is ultimately made whole by our participation and struggle within it and Christians have as their example our Lord’s ultimate triumph over betrayal, brutal torture, and painful death. We suffer nothing that God Himself has not endured to achieve Glory.

This was a good read. Thanks for the reply.


Granted that one of the solutions to the Epicurean paradox is to conceive of a God whom is neither omnibenevolent nor omnipotent, but who is in some sense just, and very powerful (though with certain limitations), it sounds to me like you're saying this is in fact the biblical conception of God, at least in the Old Testament. This doesn't accord with the Christian scholastics, as you say, who argued for God's perfection, which they thought included infinite power and goodness, but I see no reason why this is required if we understand "god" in a looser sense... unless we are obliged to argue as Anselm or Descartes did in their respective ontological arguments. But, if this is so, it seems that we would have to say that God is not powerful enough to intervene in nature to prevent what do in fact appear to be obvious injustices, such as the example you cited regarding infants with cancer, or we must make a choice between a powerful (not necessarily all-powerful) deity capable of the miraculous, but not just, or a just and powerful god who cannot prevent nature from acting differently than the way that the laws were initially arranged for nature to act, for which he more likely than not lacked a complete grasp of their often devastating and unjust consequences when they were first put into action by him - which exculpates his responsibility for both natural and moral evil.