The Problem of Evil and the Free Will Defense

[Ryantology]

The conflicts you perceive are based on conflating moral with natural evils, not accepting finite knowledge as part of the human condition, ignoring the utility of pain, dismissing the role of our attitude while suffering, and limiting God’s justice to the earthly existence.

1. For a god, there is no difference between moral and natural evil, since he is personally responsible for every drop of rain that falls.

Taken individually, these mistakes appear to present a conflict between a just God and a fallen creation. A complete picture of the human condition reveals a different story, one in which He, brings justice to the wicked, restores the losses of the innocent, and redeems the suffering of the righteous.

Conveniently, none of this justice is visible to those who might benefit from knowing that justice is being served. It's a closed court in which no part of the process is ever revealed to anybody outside of it. Foregoing the obvious implication that God runs the ultimate kangaroo court, it's just another way that Christians rationalize, to themselves, that there is a just universe and we have to believe in it, lest we become victims of it.

Conflating moral with natural evils: A moral evil is when one person wrongs another. Fraud, murder and fornication are all moral evils. A natural evil is when natural events harm an unsuspecting person. Examples of natural evil include hurricanes, disease, famine, and wild animal attacks.

God is wronging people when so-called acts of God cause death, misery and devastation. I don't feel inclined to share your opinion that God deserves a special exception.

First, “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” God gave us the gift of life. It may be long or it may be short. Nevertheless it is life. To complain about the inequality of His blessings, shows a lack of gratitude, i.e. looking the gift horse in the mouth.

People who take back gifts after they are given are rightly regarded with derision (and occasionally, a mildly racist epithet).

Second, in themselves, naturally occurring processes hostile to humans are neither good nor bad. The believer considers them a net good, because they are part of the providential order. Forest fires clear the land for new growth. Earthquakes produce islands and mountains that serve as niches for various types of wildlife. Etc. Only our ignorance places us in harm’s way, which takes you to the next part of the response.

Naturally-occurring processes are neutral only in a universe that is not designed and directed by omnipotent supermonsters. Accounting for the presence of such a supermonster makes these acts deliberate and calculated acts of evil, by that supermonster's own moral codex.

Mankind lacks the omniscience that would allow him to avoid these hazards. God cannot be blamed for failing to make us equal to Himself in this regard. For God to create equals to Himself is logically impossible, like squaring the circle.

Justify this assertion.

Any created being must of necessity be less perfect than God. But could we not be made sufficiently aware? Perhaps, except that brings you to the next two mistakes.

Mankind need not be omniscient for this danger to be nullified. One need only a sufficient, absolutely finite, increase in sapience for that to be the case. Thus, God is to blame for his neglect.

Ignoring the value of pain & dismissing the role of our attitude while suffering: I like the proverb that, “Pain is a given; suffering is optional.” Pain serves as a warning of harm and signals injury. As such it is a net good, because it helps protect and inform us about dangers to our health and well-being.

An omnipotent being is, by definition, capable of creating beings that could enjoy all the benefits of pain without the pain. We feel pain because God wishes for us to feel pain. Another failure of reason.

Suffering relates to whether the pain we endure has value or is in vain. Athletes willingly endure pain to increase their strength and stamina. Patriots risk life and limb to protect the liberties of their country. It is only when your pain seems senseless that you suffer. It is at this point that you pray to the Lord for comfort and to give you strength. This is how you grow spiritually, by recognizing His authority and trusting that your suffering has purpose.

Again, suffering is necessary only because God wishes for people to suffer, as he could have chosen a theoretically infinite number of other ways to confer this benefit without the drawbacks.

“But why must suffering even exist?” you ask. A life without hardship would thwart your spiritual growth and personal development. A life of perfect ease* would not provide you with the opportunity to attain the spiritual maturity necessary to partake in the blessings of Heaven.

Again, for an omnipotent being, necessity is irrelevant. He designed it this way intentionally when he could have designed it in any other way.

The only reasonable objection to this of which I can think is this: still-born infants and the untimely death of small children seem not to allow enough time for such spiritual development. How do I account for this? I don’t know. In my denomination, children in the afterlife are raised by angels to become citizens of heaven. I suppose they can build on whatever small amount of suffering they experienced and observation of earthly injustice. I don’t know. To me this is a very minor objection.

Yet, Christians compare abortion to the Holocaust. It is, again, applying lower standards to the being who could have designed it in any other way. God could simply prevent these tragedies by not allowing conception. He deliberately allows conception and then kills them. Again, his omnipotent nature invalidates any explanation other than that he wants it to happen this way.

The problem of evil is only a problem if the wicked go unpunished and restitution is not made to their victims. If you only allow God to work his justice in this earth, then of course you find Him ineffective. You cannot forget that reward and punishment in the afterlife corrects the failures of our species.

Yet again, it is not necessary for God to operate this way. He can prevent the evil from happening, or he could punish the doers where it can be known that they are punished. He opts not to, why?

None of what I have presented makes any sense without taking God as a given, nor have I presented any of this as proof of God's existence, only to show that free will, local/temporary injustice, and natural disasters are not incompatible with a just and all-knowing God.

You have succeeded only in demonstrating precisely the opposite of what you intended, by assuming that an omni-max God has to operate within limits. Those omni-max qualities, all by themselves, invalidate every single point you have made. The only justice of the God you describe is the sort of 'justice' meted out by cruel and vindictive tyrants throughout history. That, of course, is the point of the Problem of Evil: it doesn't address whether God exists or not. It addresses the fact that you worship the purest form of evil.