The Ultimate Why There Is Evil in the World Thread.

[Pyrrho]

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If that were true, God would never have created anything.  He would not create if he did not want to create.  Indeed, he would not do anything, if he did not want to do anything.

Therefore, since God (as described in the Bible) does various things, God does want things.  And, as you rightly point out, that means he must not be perfect, or he would not have created anything.

I'm using "want" here in the sense that God is lacking or wanting for something. He is not.

In the sense that He wills things to happen, sure...He "wants" them to happen for our benefit. But not because he is making up for something missing in His own life

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Yet more of your typical bullshit nonsense.  Before we were created, it was impossible to do anything for us, because there was no us to be benefited.  The act of creating in the first place can only be because God wants to do so, which means he lacks something that he desires.  This is proof that god is defective.

And the idea that creating the world as we have it is for our benefit is so fucking stupid you should be ashamed to say such nonsense.  Right, we have diseases for our benefit.  And earthquakes.  And too many other bad things to list.   Your claim that this is for us is so ridiculous, you could not say anything more idiotic if you tried.

I suppose you think hell is for our benefit, too?

It is amazing how religion warps one's understanding and gives rise to seemingly infinite stupidity.

[Cyberman]

Then I too hope for the same in reciprocation. You're not selling, I'm not buying - what is there to chat about in this direction?

Dunno.

I was responding to dahrling...

And you don't know what you were talking about?

If you're trying to insinuate a private discussion between the two of you, I'd just point out that this is an open thread. If you're not insinuating that, I'm still pointing it out.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Really the ball is in the atheist court because it is up to them to show that a perfect world is even possible. You cannot blame God if a perfect world is analogous to a square circle. So atheists step up! Prove that this is not the best of all possible worlds.

[Cyberman]

I've got all the proof you could ever want. 100%, copper-bottomed, irrefutable proof. But you'll just deny it because you hate the implications of a godless world and just want to go on sanctimising. So why should I tell you?

[dyresand]

Let's say for shits and giggles evil existed which it doesn't god created it because eve tempted adam to eat a apple.
god's retaliation of said action was unfairly justified and caused him to create evil. the fact being he set up adam and eve
to fail is pretty much that sick and malevolent. But we live in the real world were good and evil are just 2 sides of the same coin.
You can look at Hitler and Nazi Germany you may call it evil they thought they were doing good. Stalin, Polpot etc again
they thought they were doing the right thing. When it comes to good and evil there really is only shades of gray. I mean you
could call me evil because i am a atheist but i know i am good because i do the right thing. All in all its all skewed there is no good
and there is no evil. The only thing that does exist is good intentions and malevolent ones.

[Cyberman]

I would add neutral ones to that.

[Whateverist]

Really the ball is in the atheist court because it is up to them to show that a perfect world is even possible. You cannot blame God if a perfect world is analogous to a square circle. So atheists step up! Prove that this is not the best of all possible worlds.

Another nonsense claim which no one who isn't god-obsessed would ever have reason to consider.  "A perfect world": what the hell is that?  Me, I'm just grateful there is anything instead of nothing at all.  Perfect?!  (Somebody must be missing the womb.)  The fact that theists chirp on about it doesn't mean the non-chirpers need to respond.

[Salacious B. Crumb]

Now to be fair, we don't really have any way of knowing how many rapes God DOES prevent in one way or another. 

Yeah, he picks and chooses the rapes he wants to witness. Makes a lot of sense.

To all of you hell believers out there, why would an omnibenevolent god create a hell? Because he loves us so much? Also, you claim that god knows who is going to hell beforehand. What kind of monster are you worshipping? He creates this world with the intention that an innumerable amount of people will be tortured for eternity, because he gave deplorable evidence. We're supposed to believe in the most ridiculous stories, and if we do that, we get to go to heaven. That's quite the intelligent system he set up. So, you need to be lucky enough (luck that is chosen by god supposedly) to be born into the right faith, and you have to remain naive as shit your whole life. Now I get.

[robvalue]

The problem of evil isn't meant to disprove god, it disproves an omniscient, omnipotent omni-benevolent god.

Also, if god is omniscient, we don't have any free will. In fact, neither does he. He knows what he will do before he does it, and he can't choose otherwise.

If god is omni everything, then he knew how everything would play out from the instant he made the Earth. If he wanted any single thing to be any different, he could have made it so. Therefor, we have no free will, and he is completely responsible for everything that happens. We can't choose to do something he didn't pre-determine we would do. He has made all our choices for us already. It is not a real choice if we have only one option. He also knows who is going to "disobey" him, and are going to hell. But they didn't really disobey, he made it so they would do something he didn't like, so he could punish them.

There's too many claims about god here, they can't all be true. And of course there's the problem of how you know anything about god, yet all of science cannot even be told what they are looking for, let alone find it.

Omniscience, or free will. You have to pick one in my opinion, because they are not compatible. I've never heard a convincing argument as to why they are compatible. Also god is a vicious cunt. If you replaced the god character with a human, and that human did all the things god did in the bible, you would condemn him as the most evil person in history. Giving him a free pass because he is really powerful is just might makes right.

To me, this kind of excuse making apologetics sounds exactly like a victim of domestic abuse explaining why they deserve their beatings, and why their spouse really does love them even given copious evidence to the contrary.

[Hatshepsut]

I find the whole business of arguing that God doesn't exist and then blaming him for the needle and the damage done a bit hard to understand. Perhaps God wants us to solve our problems of evil through our own efforts rather than handing goodness to us like John the Baptist's head on a platter. Or, perhaps it's all meant to militate against omnibenevolence as robvalue suggests above. However, I think we can go somewhat further and show that within a context of agency, an omniscient god, benevolent or not, will not create anything:

God would ... not create if he did not want to create.  Therefore ... God does want things.

This, the first actual result on the thread, shows that the fact of a creation implies not only that God wants things, but that he wants things that do not exist until they are created, that is, novel things. Provided God does create to begin with.

But can an omniscient god think up anything novel? Suppose that X is a novel idea, something that has never been thought of before. Now God thinks X. But since God is omniscient, he knew from the beginning of time that he would think X. Therefore, X is not new and novel ideas do not exist for this god. Since novel things don't exist, God cannot want them. (He can only want extant things.) By Pyrrho's result, an omniscient god does not create anything.  

At least within a context of agency, where beings desire things. We might use this result to question the existence of beings who desire things but who can also conceive of benevolence. This would apply to Human as well as God. I don't know how this project would go down. However, Buddhist thinkers have pursued it in various formulations.

Denial of benevolence in Human is old. For instance, nn mAatj "there are no righteous men" (Line 122, Adolf Erman, "Gespräch eines Lebensmüden," JEA 42), in the Egyptian story of the man who was tired of his life, and in Paul's letter-writing, "there is none righteous" (Romans 3:10). So, why should God be benevolent, in the way we understand it? The pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean world was all about obeisance, not virtue. Once the Greeks had elevated the latter, one might credit Greek-speaking Christianity with an early attempt to introduce benevolence into the conception of deity.