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Fallible wrote:I think you're getting mixed up. You're talking about God being benevolent, not people, remember? This being the case, people choosing to do good applies to their benevolence, not God's. Their benevolence, I might add, in a world where the concept of evil already exists. Since doing good is a choice, God could choose to just not allow anything harmful or horrible to exist in the first place. He has far less of an excuse than people. God has control over the entire show. God created evil, concept and act. God created disease, parasites, torture, hatred. God created everything that is.

I think you are confusing omnibenevolence, i.e. having good intentions, with an existential and absolute benefaction whereby only good is allowed to exist. The latter would be incompatible with benevolence because it would prevent evil by restricting the freedom of Nature, including humans, to act. That would deprive Nature of its coherency and liberty. It would also mean that "goodness" would not have any meaning or value at all since evil would not exist to be constrasted against.

Before God, these things simply did not exist. Concepts, ideas, actions, meanings, referents - none of it. God could have set things up in any way he wanted. In ways we can't even begin to imagine because we're not God. He could have set things up so that we had freedom of action and no way to inflict misery. He's omnipotent, remember? He has unlimited power. He makes the laws of physics and the rules of logic. He didn't, though. He chose this. That's not benevolence. That's either incompetence or malice aforethought. Oh, and lest we forget, the claim isn't just that God is benevolent. It's that he's omnibenevolent - infinitely good.

I think the passage in Isaiah which you cite is claiming that God is the author of all things, good and bad. If he wasn't the (ultimate) author of suffering, then he wouldn't be omnipotent and omnipresent. It is an attempt to deny a dualistic worldview whereby God is responisble only for all the good things and the Devil is responsible for all of the wickedness. I think it is logically absurd to allow freedom of action and prevent the infliction of misery as a consequence of this freedom.