Solved Theodicy?

[robvalue]

The problem of evil neatly shits all over any all powerful and benevolent god.

He causes or allows suffering. If this is somehow necessary or beneficial, he set things up so that it would be this way.

Watching people try and wriggle out of this is almost exactly like listening to battered spouses making excuses for their abusive partners.

(emphasis is mine)

Gawd causing or allowing suffering isn't necessarily bad. Suffering can, after all, lead to someone becoming greater than they are because of what they suffered. It's the unnecessary suffering that kills the idea of the christer gawd. An omniscient, omnipotent being would know that his design would lead to uncountable unnecessary suffering within it's creation, yet it went and did it anyway. That is evil with malice aforethought.

While I will concede the possibility of some form of watchmaker gawd that set everything in motion with no plan or even any notion how it would all turn out, I simply cannot believe that an all-loving gawd could create the mess that earth is, fully knowing how much pointless suffering would come of it.


Then again, you don't even need the evil/suffering arguments. The logical contradictions are enough to snuff out yahweh. How can a perfectly merciful yet perfectly just being even exist. If it's perfectly merciful, no one ever gets justly punished. If it's perfectly just, everyone who doesn't perfectly follow all it's laws gets denied mercy.

Yeah, but the very fact that suffering can lead to someone becoming greater is how God set things up. If the theist insists God is somehow restricted and had to set things up so that suffering was in any was necessary to achieve any particular goal, God is not all powerful. This is the flip-flopping I always see between "all powerful" and "turned up one day with rules in place" God, because they need both to be true at once.