The Problem of Evil (XXVII)

[Gemini]

You are flat out wrong. As confirmed by the Aquinas quote I gave above, I am in full agreement with the Roman Catholic Church’s definition of omnipotence, the clearly premiere Christian denomination. It is you that maintain an unorthodox definition of omnipotence and as such your formulation of the PoE has no relevance to Christianity.

What about my definition of God as "all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good" is unorthodox? How is this a "dishonest use of an unchristian version of god?"

...Your positive claim is that some of the evil we see is gratuitous. You have not demonstrated that any, much less all, evil is gratuitous.

Mea culpa on that point. As I said earlier in the thread, my claim is that the logical argument from evil succeeds, granting some reasonable assumptions, and I should have restated that.*

Reasonable assumptions are that we are excluding from consideration:

1) Preposterous theodicies, such as Plantinga's free will defense of natural evil, or David Lewis's parodic theodicy.

2) The claim that God's actions are justified under some moral framework which is unintelligible to humans.

What I'm claiming is that if it is morally permissible to allow a two-year-old to die a painful, lingering death, it is permissible under a moral framework which is unintelligible to humans. It's a million miles away from anything we would understand as being morally justified. If God's moral nature is thus inscrutable to us, then how are we to trust him on anything?

Consider this. Perhaps theism turns out to be true after all, and when you die, you go to heaven. Where seraphim scream an endless, piercing cacophony of praises in your ear as the glory of God sears your mind with unbearable agony. I, in turn, am damned to eternal separation from God, which it turns out is being cast into space on a starship populated with other friendly infidels. We proceed to spend our immortal lives studying the universe.

This would, of course, entail that you and the Catholic Church had been mislead. So what? If God has morally sufficient reasons to allow a small child to die in agony, perhaps he has morally sufficient reasons to permit you and millions of believers to be mislead.

*Not that I'm convinced the logical argument from evil needs these assumptions to succeed. I'm just pointing out what David Lewis observed--it's no triumph to solve the problem with a preposterous or overly skeptical theodicy.