[quote]Aragorn wrote:
Once again this thread is escaping my limited abilities to keep up with it. I’m interested in the first part and not really the last. For the purposes of this one I think we both can say lets assume God exists. Can you unpack this? I don’t follow the first inescapable conclusion.[/quote]
Sure thing.
The original argument went: in a world governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, evil could not exist. Anything that happens in such a world happens only be the leave of God, who is infinitely powerful and therefore infinitely capable of stopping anything from happening. If God is omnibenevolent, he will not allow evil, or injustice, or “bad” things to happen. (At least to good people) So, if evil exists, then such a God cannot exist.
It would be like a cartoon strip drawn exclusively by a devout Muslim: in the context of the “world” of that cartoon, Muhammad could never be drawn, because the devout Muslim cannot make an image of the prophet. So, if an image of Muhammad showed up in the cartoon “world,” then the other cartoon beings could deduce–they are capable of deduction and thought in this hypothetical–that their creator is not what they thought he was. That is, either not a devout Muslim, or not the sole drawer of the cartoon, or not either of those things.
That was the argument. But, Christians (correctly) made the point that evil is necessary for free will, and free will is “just.”
The problem is that this does not excuse “natural” evil, or “injustice.” A human infant being struck and killed by lightning, for example. Such things have nothing to do with free will, obviously, and they happen all the time. So–how can an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God coexist with natural evil? God knows it will happen, God has the power to stop it, and, being infinitely just, God “wants” to stop it. And yet, He doesn’t stop it.
For me, the inescapable conclusion of this conundrum is that such a God–omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent–does not exist. We all know Jesus. Great dude. It is nonsensical, in my view, to think that He, He of of love and peace, He who asked his father to forgive them, watches infants and small children and innocent women and good men drown, suffocate, burn, and suffer every single day, with the power to intervene (at no inconvenience to Him), without doing anything about it?
In making this point, I draw an analogy. I’ll change it a little here. A man is walking in the woods and he comes upon a human infant at the foot of a muddy hill. Above the infant, and sliding slowly toward it, is an enormous boulder. The man can easily move the child, and it will survive. Instead, he stands there, watching, as the boulder slowly slides down the hill. After a minute, it reaches the infant and crushes it, killing it instantly.
This is exactly what an omniscient and omnipotent being is doing every single time an innocent human life is prematurely lost because of natural evil. I say that this disproves the notion of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God.
Two (probably ultimately related) responses were offered up in refutation of this. The first was essentially, “God works in mysterious ways.” The second was that anything God does is just, so, when an infant has been allowed by God to die by lightning strike, no injustice has been done–because God let it happen, and God is infinitely just and infinitely good.
I am satisfied with neither of these. Each has huge problems, so far as I’m concerned. However, the argument tends to move in circles from there.