RE: The Problem of Evil (XXVII)
June 8, 2016 at 8:05 am
(This post was last modified: June 8, 2016 at 8:11 am by Gemini.)
(June 7, 2016 at 1:03 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: IMHO, all a Christian believer can really say is that skeptics have not adequately shown that a better world than ours was possible. Skeptics have only their incredulity.
I daresay we have more than mere incredulity. The logical incompatibility of the claims "a tri-omni God exists" and "gratuitous suffering exist" is not terribly controversial. (Many theist philosophers such as Wykstra themselves agree with this).
To illustrate, consider a two-year old who falls in a ditch and breaks his arm. He lies there in pain, screaming "Mama! Mama!" His mother does nothing to help him. It's possible that she doesn't know he's hurt; or that she knows, but doesn't have the power to help him; or that she knows, and has the power to help him, but looks on with indifference and leaves him to cry until he dies a slow, painful death.
In the last case, by the doctrine of morality that has been historically orthodox for Christians (and pretty much any moral realist), we would say that the mother is not perfectly good. She allows suffering that she could have prevented. In other words, evil. There is no question that many of God's children endure exactly this kind of suffering.
To salvage the doctrine of a tri-omni God, theists by and large take the skeptical position and argue that we don't know that God isn't morally justified in permitting such instances of suffering.
It isn't mere "incredulity" to reject this answer. The burden of proof is not on me to show that paradigmatic instances of evil are not in fact evil. It's the theist who is obligated to defend his astonishing incredulity at a moral judgement that, for any other person, would be a damning indictment of that person's moral character.
A Gemma is forever.