Posted: Mar 05, 2017 8:48 pm
Thommo wrote:TopCat wrote:Wortfish wrote:A benevolent Creator allows Nature freedom of action, including for misery and suffering to ensue as a consequence. It is as simple as that. There is no problem of evil. Evil is a consequence of natural beings and phenomena exercising their freedom and choice.
It is not as simple as that. You can't handwave the problem of pain away like that.
People having the freedom to inflict misery and suffering on other people, I could just about buy that. But childhood cancer? Tsunamis? Natural disasters of all kinds, where you just need to be unlucky to die?
That's not free will.
Conflating the two in order to concoct an apologetic for this ridiculous deity is pretty evil, though.
This is right. The important thing about this is that the existence of preventable childhood disease also proves that it is possible to have free will without that evil occurring.
Since an omnipotent being can do anything possible, and an omnibenevolent being would do anything possible, the theist position is left with an intractable contradiction.
Not entirely correct. A common apologist response to this is to postulate that God has some grand vision, some great cosmic plan, through which all the suffering in the world not caused by sentient "moral beings", is justified.
For example, the apologist will try to argue, there could be some ultimate level of happiness or goodness that could only be reached through some finite and temporary suffering. In the moral landscape (not the book), there is some maximum peak that can only be reached and is only possible because of a great valley around it. So while God could in principle intervene and prevent gratuitous suffering caused by non-sentient a-moral forces and events, that would mean those who didn't go through this suffering could therefore not achieve this ultimate level of happiness,because the suffering was a necessary precondition for that.
There is no logical contradiction in this argument. The problem is not the conclusion, it's the complete lack of justification for the premise. The claim "it is possible that there is this cosmic plan" is nothing but that a mere claim. A statement that something is possible. But there's no actual evidence that justifies belief in the existence of such a plan. Simply put, the theist has no rational reason for believing in this hypothesis in the first place. It's just an ad-hoc excuse. Even more succinctly, it is also logically possible that there is NO such highest possible peak only reachable through a valley of gratuitous suffering. So since both options are logically possible, why should we believe the apologists preferred version? There is no justification for that.