The Ultimate Why There Is Evil in the World Thread.

[Pyrrho]

"show that a better world is possible without resorting to speculation"? The whole damn setup is an exercise in speculation! It's like saying "bake me a better cake without resorting to ingredients"!

Yes.  And that is exactly what I previously stated in post #40:

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Now, I will go back to what I was mentioning at first in my post, about how this will go.  The religionist refuses to accept any evidence of anything on this issue.  It does not matter what proofs one puts forth; they are rejected out of hand, with some bullshit like, "God's ways show infinite foresight, " etc.  Basically, they take a position in which there is nothing that they would accept as evidence against their position.  So it is a pretense to reason, as the reality is that they reject all reason on the matter and simply dogmatically assert that this is somehow best, in some mysterious, inscrutable way.

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What we have are Christians making ridiculous claims, for whom nothing could possibly count as counter-evidence.

In this case of the nonsensical claim that this is "the best of all possible worlds," as stated in that same post, even if that were true, it would still not be enough to show that this world is compatible with a perfectly good being:

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There is another point, though, which you are wrong about.  Specifically, "...the atheists need demonstrate the stronger result that God has failed to create the "best of all possible worlds," not merely that he has failed to create a perfect one."  The theist needs to prove that creating a universe is better than not creating one.  Creating a bad universe is worse than nothing, and we have no reason to suppose that this universe is, overall, better than nothing.  Think of all of the suffering in the world, of children starving to death, children being raped and brutalized, children burning in fires, children dying of all manner of painful diseases, etc., etc., etc.  The idea that this world is better than nothing is ridiculous.

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That God created this world means that if this world is not better than nothing, then God is not good.  So the Christian needs to not only prove that this is the best of all possible worlds (which they have obviously not done), they need to also prove that this world is better than nothing (which, of course, they also have obviously not done).  Until those things are done, there is zero reason to believe them.

But matters are even worse for these Christians than just all of that.  I will quote myself from another thread:

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Additionally, even if we grant you the absurd claim that this is the best of all possible worlds, that gives rise to yet another problem for Christianity (other than the fact that, if I am a murderous rapist child molester, that MUST be part of the best possible world, so I OUGHT TO DO IT!), it makes total hash of the idea that there is another world called "heaven" that is better than this one.  If this is the best of all possible worlds, heaven is logically impossible.

If this were the best of all possible worlds, then Charles Manson must have been right to have his followers kill people, as, per hypothesis, the way things are in this world is all part of the best possible world.  You wouldn't want to live in some second-rate world without murder, would you?

Additionally, it means that heaven, which is supposed to be a world that is better than this one, cannot possibly exist, because no world can be better than the best possible world.  To be better than the best possible is self-contradictory, and thus logically impossible.  If this world is the best possible world, then heaven is not merely physically impossible, it is logically impossible.  Thus, if the Christian were to prove the absurd hypothesis that this really is the best of all possible worlds, in so doing the Christian would be proving that heaven does not exist!