The Problem of Evil (XXVII)

[robvalue]

Even if he didn't see it coming, he fucked up and should correct his mistake; like any benevolent being would do. If there's a rule saying he can't, he presumably made this rule too.

Does he makes the rules, or is he constrained by external rules? I don't think it's too much to ask that a theist picks a side here.

[ignoramus]

A theist to pick a side? Fuck No!

[SteveII]

Regarding evil, I posted this a while back in another thread:

Tell me what is wrong with what Augustine thought on the subject:

"Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being?"[1] To this Augustine answered: "Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'"[2]

Augustine observed that evil always injures, and such injury is a deprivation of good. If there were no deprivation, there would be no injury. Since all things were made with goodness, evil must be the privation of goodness: "All which is corrupted is deprived of good."[3]

The diminution of the property of goodness is what's called evil. Good has substantial being; evil does not. It is like a moral hole, a nothingness that results when goodness is removed. Just as a shadow is no more than a "hole" in light, evil is a hole in goodness.

To say that something is evil, then, is a shorthand way of saying it either lacks goodness, or is a lower order of goodness than what ought to have been. But the question remains: "Whence and how crept it in hither?"

Augustine observed that evil could not be chosen because there is no evil thing to choose. One can only turn away from the good, that is from a greater good to a lesser good (in Augustine's hierarchy) since all things are good. "For when the will abandons what is above itself, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil--not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is wicked."[4]

Evil, then, is the act itself of choosing the lesser good. To Augustine the source of evil is in the free will of persons: "And I strained to perceive what I now heard, that free-will was the cause of our doing ill."[5] Evil was a "perversion of the will, turned aside from...God" to lesser things.[6]

from article by Greg Koukl http://www.str.org/articles/-on...waWYfkrJhE

[SteveII]

Evil is that which a benevolent god wishes to prevent or minimize.  
 
An omnipotent god could prevent evil if it wanted to.  An omnibenevolent god would want to.  An omniscient god would know how to.  A tri-omni god--if it existed--would prevent all evil.

Therefore: if evil exists, tri-omni gods do not exist.  

If a tri-omni god existed, there would not be any evil.  

It is logically impossible for a tri-omni god to coexist with any kind of evil.

I prefer the LPoE (logical problem of evil).  Tri-omni gods are logically inconsistent with even the tiniest smidgen of evil.   

I pulled these statements from your post (it seemed to be your theme). Your reasoning is that God would somehow necessarily have to create a word in which there was no (let's use suffering). I don't think you can support that logically because there is no implicit nor explicit reasons that that should be the case. As long as we can conceive of a possible situation where God would have morally sufficient reasons to permit suffering, there is not a contradiction. Rather, I think it crosses over into a probabilistic argument.

[SteveII]

deleted, lost my response.

[Mister Agenda]

What is a natural disaster? There is nothing inherently evil about a continental plate shift or a weather pattern developing. In fact, each of those events probably have positive natural effects for the environment. When humans suffer as a result, you are making a claim of what "ought not be". Additionally, people have the freedom to move in and out of harms way. How is is that God is responsible for human choices of when and where to be?

The claims is 'what ought not to be' IF there is a being perceptive enough to know it is occurring, powerful enough to prevent it, and caring enough to want to protect people. It works just as well as an argument that Superman isn't real. Of course, a powerful enough being could derive whatever good an event provides while mitigating the harm. Superman isn't expected to prevent earthquakes, he is expected to save the people from getting killed.

If God is real, he seems to have chosen to build a planet with very few places that humans can live in complete safety. Can you name a place so free from natural disaster that you can say with confidence that humans would be perfectly safe from them if they lived there?

[Mister Agenda]

So really you are making the claim that God should not permit suffering as a result of natural disaster and it is illogical that an omnibenevolent God would do so. What "ought not be" "ought not be permitted". I am confused on a particular point: do you think God should prevent all natural "disasters", just those that harm people, or miraculously save people during such an event?

It would be trivially easy for a theodic God to construct a world in which natural disasters didn't happen without sacrificing any benefits. We might not even know they were a possibility, but when the problem of evil came up, people could say, 'hey, it seems like all the suffering there is, is what we do to ourselves and each other'. The very notion that an omnipotent being can't construct a planet that is more hospitable or people who are more durable is laughable. To explain the problem of evil for a theodic God requires a justification for allowing pointless suffering, not quips like it's unreasonable to expect such a being to work miracles or take time out of his busy schedule to save us: miracles and time are supposed to be the hallmarks of a theodic God. You can never be too busy or too preoccupied for anything if you're omniscient and omnipotent.

Probability doesn't enter into it, the difficulty is in reconciling the existence of the God of theodicy with a universe that doesn't seem to be the kind of universe a theodic God would be expected to devise. You either have to cut a leg off the tripod of theodicy (God can be omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent; pick two), or there has to be a justification for seemingly pointless suffering that omnibenevolence requires, and omnipotence and omniscience can't get around.

[wiploc]

deleted, lost my response.

I try to remember to copy my entire post to my clipboard just before posting. 

If I lose several posts, I'll start composing in Word and posting here.

[Mister Agenda]

1. Being extremely limited in big picture knowledge, why do you think we can determine both what "ought not be" and what "ought not be permitted? God being omniscient (part of the definition) would see a big picture that we could in no way understand. You would have to prove that God did not have morally sufficient reasons to refrain from a) preventing a natural disaster or b) supernaturally intervening during one.

No one has to prove what a proposed entity doesn't have prior to the proposed entity being shown to exist at all It's your proposed entity, if you don't even know enough to imagine what its motives might be, why consider it omnibenevolent at all, beyond that being what you would prefer it to be? If you work from the observable universe to an awesomely powerful entity, it's just as easy to arrive at something Lovecraftian. It's a matter of taste, not logic. In logic, you do not presuppose undemonstrated attributes.

And for Azathoth, outside the ordered universe ruling all space and time blindly from the center of chaos, evil is not a problem.

[Mister Agenda]

2. Christian doctrine increases probability that God allows human suffering as a result of natural disasters.
 a) The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. A natural disaster may increase that knowledge.
 b) God's knowledge includes the greatest eternal good (the maximum number of people freely choosing salvation from an eternal perspective).
 c) Man's knowledge of God is considered an incommensurable good (and end in itself)

NOTE: some of the bullet points adapted from a debate between William Lane Craig vs. Kai Nielsen

To conclude, I think for the above reasons, it is probable that God and natural evil can co-exist.

A doctrine cannot increase or decrease probability of anything. Things are what they are, regardless of what people are taught to believe.