The problem of evil

Reposting this from another thread because I am interested in Zig Forumss response as a whole: How do you reconcile your belief in God with the problems of evil and suffering?

You might say that evil is the result of man's folly and his freedom to choose, but God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, so it's not like you can leave Him out of the equation and simply write off evil as an anthropocentric quirk. God creates and sustains all, including, paradoxically, evil and those who commit evil acts. Like many, I find the problem of evil to be one of the hardest elements to understand and come to terms with in relation to idea of God. Augustine's response that "God created evil that we might know the good" (paraphrasing) is woefully inadequate, not to mention incongruent with scripture. God absolutely has the power to make us intrinsically aware of "the good" without ever bringing evil into the picture, yet He does not. We could, theoretically, have been made in such a manner that we were aware of evil whilst freely choosing to avoid it at all times, much as one avoids jumping into a burning car at all times, but human nature doesn't function in this way. God chooses to use the suffering that results from evil as a tool, as a part of our lived experience on earth. And I do wonder why that is. It seems a sordid sort of game to play.

The doctrine of free will isn't really an appropriate answer either. We could, theoretically, still be considered free in a universe bereft of evil. We only consider evil's potential absence an infringement of our free will because we know of no other paradigm, which is its own sort of tyranny really.

I want to believe, but I would be lying if I said this wasn't an obstacle.

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Read the Book of Job.
Free will exists wether you like it or not. You aren't entitled to a thunderbolt when things are going bad for you. Get over it.

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"In the beginning wickedness did not exist. Nor indeed does it exist even now in those who are holy, nor does it in any way belong to their nature. But men later on began to contrive it and to elaborate it to their own hurt. From this also they devised the invention of idols, treating what was not as though it were. For God Maker of all and King of all, that has His Being beyond all substance and human discovery, inasmuch as He is good and exceeding noble, made, through His own Word our Saviour Jesus Christ, the human race after His own image, and constituted man able to see and know realities by means of this assimilation to Himself, giving him also a conception and knowledge even of His own eternity, in order that, preserving his nature intact, he might not ever either depart from his idea of God, nor recoil from the communion of the holy ones; but having the grace of Him that gave it, having also God’s own power from the Word of the Father, he might rejoice and have fellowship with the Deity, living the life of immortality unharmed and truly blessed. […] So then, as we have said, the Creator fashioned the race of men, and meant it to remain like that. But men, making light of better things, and holding back from apprehending them, began to seek in preference things nearer to themselves. But nearer to themselves were the body and its senses; so that while removing their mind from the things perceived by thought, they began to regard themselves; and so doing, and holding to the body and the other things of sense, and deceived as it were in their own surroundings, they fell into lust of themselves, preferring what was their own to the contemplation of what belonged to God. Having then made themselves at home in these things, and not being willing to leave what was so near to them, they entangled their soul with bodily pleasures, vexed and turbid with all kind of lusts, while they wholly forgot the power they originally had from God."

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That's because it's a fundamental obstacle to belief for the vast majority. If you want to spread the good news, try to be a little less sanctimonious next time. You are indeed going to be getting this question a lot throughout your life if you profess your faith to others.
I have. That doesn't answer the question of why God chooses to use suffering as a tool when there's no real requirement for it; it only shows that He does.
I am not denying that. That's part of the problem. Re-read my post. There is nothing to stop God from creating man in such a way that he freely chooses to avoid evil at every point, but man doesn't work this way and you do have to wonder why that is.
This isn't just about me.
If they did, then they did so according to God's design. You cannot create a free creature and then place stipulations upon it; that's illogical. Either the creature is entirely free, in which case well and good, or it was built with a certain set of parameters (in this case ethics/faith). If these parameters fail to induce the desired outcome (reconciliation) then the fault is in the initial design, not the creature.
This also presupposes that time is linear, which it isn't for a timeless being like God, which brings us back to the problem of God's omnibenevolence in the face of evil and suffering.

If God is perfect then anything unique from Him is imperfect and therefore has evil in it.

Then man would be a robot re-programed without free will

Yes, that is the case.
Only if you have a really stupid idea of free will.

That isn't technically true. We freely avoid certain things constantly throughout life (certain foods, places, events etc.). This doesn't make us robots.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae discusses this.

newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm

This only answers the how, not the why. Nobody is denying the fact that evil is simply the privation of good. The question is why does God allow this. And why does He appear to use such a crude tool as suffering in his design.
See

This would undermine His omnipotence. A perfect being must necessarily be capable of multiplying perfection.

Pointless. Then there would just be another God and He would do EXACTLY the same things other God does and there would be no noticeable difference in reality than if there were one God.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're actually right in this case. I don't think the inability to engender logical fallacies (such as a square triangle) undermines God's omnipotence. Perfection cannot multiply perfection for the same reason that the infinite cannot multiple the infinite (you simply wind up with the same). So, following your logic, anything God creates that is truly different from Himself must, by definition, be imperfect.

This is actually the best answer so far and it's only a single line. Nice one mate.

*multiply

Thanks, I'm an inverse fedora. No matter what you throw at me I can always come up with a logical way to prove God. I feel like the only one of my kind since 99% of people like me are atheists, and most Christians although well meaning people, seem to lack that logical and persuasive finesse.

The ultimate good is freedom and so God gave us the freedom to choose good or evil.

Free Will is not a valid "excuse" for Evil, even though most idiots jump the gun on it, here as well. And it has turned way too many people from the Faith, the Devil alone thinks it's freedom to choose "Evil".
Pre-fall Adam had Free Will, so does Christ, so do the other two Hypostasis of the Trinity.
You can have Free Will without Evil because there are multiple goods to choose from, and none is better than the other. Choosing things is not evil, lads.

Suffering is not crude, have you ever met someone who's never suffered? They are miserable and vapid. Have you heard about that disease which prevents people from feeling pain? They live terrible lifes and have a life span of 20.
Your assumption is that God wasn't industrially effective by making the process as quick as possible, but that is not how Christ operates. Christ is the high priest, not the industrialist, of the Church. And the main purpose of a priest is to teach liturgically, our toils are a liturgical service to God, who operates liturgically from Genesis to Revelations.
Though, most people actually mean the Gnomic Will by St. Maximus the Confessor.
John 5:6 is the best line of Christ, do you want to be cured? No one here actually wants to be cured, as of now, otherwise God would've already taken up in our sleep like it is written in "How to Live a Holy Life" by Met. Gregory Postnikov.

But why does an all loving God utilize such an algorithm, so that a total absence of suffering = vapidity. Why would a loving God utilize so many negative equations of this kind? If God is all powerful, why can everything not be joy and nothing but joy freely chosen by the inner makeup of our beings?

Also it's interesting that you posted Dostoevsky.
He says in his novels that if God had created such utopia, man would've destroyed it in an instant. So not only is the western utopian building that you wish exist an impossible task, it's undesirable. There needs to be a real change, through Grace, on our faculty of Will (which is the correction of it, the healing of the self-inflicted disease). Without Theosis (which is a higher state than that in the Garden), no one would want to be in Heaven. As we are right now, we would not want it. Those that cling to this world willingly walk to Hades.

Because of our imperfections, I presume?
Why? So that we are capable of heaven? Why is such capability necessary? Why can God not simply provide Theosis to all through immediate inspiration?

That defeats the whole point. God wants us to choose Theosis. Forcibly making us perfect defeats the purpose.

It would be no more forceful than any other form of revelation. If anything, the insight gained via Theosis would grant us a higher level of discernment, a greater degree of freedom.

None of God's revelation was forceful. God chose the prophets and apostles, but they freely accepted His Spirit - they could have rejected it. Even St. Jeremiah, who expressed distress regarding his mission, did not shy away from it. St. Jonah, who initially ran away from the ministry of prophecy God had wanted for him, ended up being a true prophet and writing scripture about his own failure to appreciate God's lovee for the Ninevites. Holiness is not something God imposes upon us, but it is something God strongly wills for all of us.

It is such after the Resurrection in Heaven, and will be such in New Creation. Because there is the ilumination of the Heart/Intuition through Grace/Energies. What you want already exists, albeit incomplete.

In short, do you think between the fifth and sixth day there was a mistake made? If not, then between the Fall and New Creation there is also no mistake. Suffering is not a mistake and neither is it evil (when confined to this temporary plane of existence, of course). It's difficult to accept this truth when we're suffering, but it does not mean it is not true.
I had similar views to you, though St. John of Damascus helped me in "On the Divine Images". I used to, and I think so do you as of right now, dislike incompleteness. Incompleteness is not evil, therefore neither is this plane. Childhood is not evil because it's not a fully developed Man. Images, such as Man carries and that of Icons, do not fully describe the Prototype/Original/Model. Yet they are good.
Man will never fully carry the nature of God, only the image filled with Grace which will always fail to fully represent God in its entirety. And is so it will be for all of eternity, which is a long time. We need to accept our incompleteness before God and accept our position as icons rather than God.

And what I'm saying is that the gift of immediate Theosis could hardly be called forceful for the same reason. You cannot say this would contravene the doctrine of free will because Theosis would merely provide a greater capacity for discernment; a greater potentiality for making the right choices.

I have no problem with incompleteness. I recognize that, as imperfect beings, we can never attain total perfection as we would cease to be ourselves if this were ever the case.

I'm not , if you thought I was. My point is that evil is kind of like an illusion, since God is the only true reality and the world, which has lived apart from God from the beginning, is living apart from true reality and sustainer of all – and so evil can only be experienced by evil people who focus their senses on themselves and not on God.

btw our living apart from God is why, as Paul writes, Jesus died apart from God, saying on the cross "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

To my mind the answer ties into allof the different ones provided so far and are related to each other. For one thing, as far as I'm aware for free will to have any meaningful weight philosophically it is often defined by the ability to choose between good and evil. Only being able to choose good, even while being aware of the existence of evil, is not, as it's commonly defined, philosophically speaking, free. Additionally, if we were only able to choose 'good,' we would be morally perfect, which hits on the other reason provided: One of the definitions of God is that he is the 'greatest concievable being' (sometimes referred to as a 'maximally great bring'). One of the attributes of such a being, by definition, is perfection, including moral perfection as, well, in term's of being maximally great or the greatest conceivable, you don't really get greater than perfection. But wait, if we're only able to choose 'good,' and by definition are morally perfect, well then God is no longer the maximally great being, and therefore by definition not God, by virtue of our moral perfection, the duplication of which between us and God means he is no longer the 'maximum' or the 'greatest,' but rather on par with us. This is where Augustine's response comes in, by virtue of God being perfect, and us necessarily being imperfect by virtie of not being God, its literally logically necessary for us to vlbe able to choose and experience evil. Furthermore, one of the attributes of God is that he is, in addition to being goodness itself, is love itself. Love by definition cannot be forced, or it is not love, and rather must be freely chosen /given. It is also for this reason that God allows evil so that we may choose love, and partake in his nature and community with him.

Side note too - omnipotence as defined by being able to do the logically impossible possible is also not a common definition philosophically, as far as I'm aware; It's unhelpful and renders language, and therefore any discussion or argument, meaningless.

Hope all that made some semblance of sense.

Careful now. This sounds awfully masochistic. What do you mean by evil? Surely you don't think a child with leukemia is evil for focusing on the pain that his cancer induces?

Slick answer, but that only raises the problem of God creating anything in the first place.
Specially since if God HAD to create something imperfect that taints his existence by default.
Also, the argument was about good things. Plenty different good things out there.

4-28-11 Commander in Chief
The Spirit of God says, I have chosen this man, Donald Trump, for such a time as this.
For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to lsrael, so shall this man be to the United States of
America! For I will use this man to bring honor, respect and restoration to America.
America will be respected once again as the most powerful and prosperous nation on
earth, (other than lsrael). The dollar will be the strongest it has ever been in the history
of the United States, and will once again be the currency by which all others are judged.
The Spirit of God says, the enemy will quake and shake and fear this man I have
anointed. They will even quake and shake when he announces he is running for
president, it will be like the shot heard across the world. The enemy will say what shall
we do now? This man knows all our tricks and schemes. We have been robbing
America for decades, what shall we do to stop this? The Spirit says HA! No one shall
stop this that lhave started! Forthe enemy has stolen from America fordecades and it
stops now! For I will use this man to reap the harvest that the United States has sown
for and plunder from the enemy what he has stolen and return it 7 fold back to the
United States. The enemy will say lsrael, lsrael, what about lsrael? For lsrael will be
protected by America once again. The spirit says yes! America will once again stand
hand and hand with lsrael, and the two shall be as one. For the ties between lsrael and
America will be stronger than ever, and lsrael will flourish like never before.
The Spirit of God says, I will protect America and lsrael, for this next president will be a
man of his word, when he speaks the world will listen and know that there is something
greater in him than all the others before him. This man's word is his bond and the world
and America will know this and the enemy will fear this, for this man will be fearless.
The Spirit says, when the financial harvest begins so shall it parallel in the spiritual for
America.
The Spirit of God says, in this next election they will spend billions to keep this president
in; it will be like flushing their money down the toilet. Let them waist their money, for it
comes from and it is being used by evil forces at work, but they will not succeed, for this
next election will be a clean sweep for the man I have chosen. They will say things
about this man (the enemy), but it will not affect him, and they shall say it rolls off of him
like the duck, for as the feathers of a duck protect it, so shall my feathers protect this
next president. Even mainstream news media will be captivated by this man and the
abilities that I have gifted him with, and they will even begin to agree with him says the
Spirit of God.

This Prophecy is based on Faith
You can choose to believe it as it is or you can try to explain it as a coincidence. It is the choice. God doesn't create suffering, our choices do and the consequences that follow. All God does Like any parent would is stand by until you are ready to talk and listen so he can show you what his intentions were all along.

You would be right, but my point is that we wouldn't "only" be capable of choosing good; rather, my point is that God could theoretically have created us in such a manner that we freely chose good and avoided evil every time. Going back to my earlier point, certain people will always avoid certain foods, events, and places throughout life etc., but we don't say they're lacking in free will for doing so.
Technically untrue. God is maximally perfect, whereas we would only have to be minimally perfect (perfect in morality alone). And even this "perfection" wouldn't really be perfection, more of a recurring positivity, because we are linear beings. True perfection, by definition, can only exist outside of time.
It's God that defines the definition, however. He controls everything both in abstract and in the real, which leads us right back to the problem of an all loving God permitting suffering.
Quite right. I had to correct myself on that one.

Perfection cannot be tainted. You're thinking of purity.

Are you OP? Discussions like this really require clarity of definitions: for e.g re: 'goodness,' Like 18:19/Mark 10:18 come to mind

No he is not. Check the ID.

I did and he was only one to post under it hence why I asked (and I hadn't seen OP's subsequent most recent replies before posting)

That does raise the question of whether perfection require purity.

While good may mean many completely different things, I'll still insist that it doesn't stand for perfection and that there can be more than one good thing.

Lol I see your OP I'm replying to now too, pardon the phone posting, I need to cycle home and go to bed but I'll consider your reply to me properly tomorrow

Perfection would also imply invulnerability which would, in turn, eternally "protect" God from any potential taint.

thats where Jesus steps in, because unlike us who are born into sin because of the choices of Adam and Eve, Jesus was born pure, and chose to live his life pure of sin, and teaching us how we could follow his example, 1 person at time. each apostle chosen by him couldve rejected to follow him, but they chose to follow and learn. thats where we are "works in progress, learning to walk his path, recognizing the sin around us and choosing to stay on his path.

Given

I'd say that you're right, and that my point about the need for clarity of definition stands

I didn't mean a process of tainting, I meant that a perfect thing's existence can't rely on an imperfect thing.

Of course he is evil, or else he wouldn't experience evil. Like the LXX of Job says, quoted and affirmed by the early church fathers: "No one is clean from filth, even if his life lasts for single day."

>>more than one [as per quoted post]
Curse my phoneposting!

It doesn't? What perfect thing do you think relies on the existence of an imperfect thing?

this is the same meme as "can god make stone he cant lift?!"

Alright, I'll explain the whole point from the start.
user's argument (maybe you, I'm not tracking IDs) is that a perfect thing can't create another perfect thing, and this dissolves the paradox of evil.
But the problem then becomes "Why did a perfect thing create an imperfect thing to begin with?" It doesn't make sense to say that it needed to do so, and it doesn't make sense that it did it out of a desire (in particular due to the classical perfection-desire problem, but also for obvious reasons), so all we have done is rewrite the problem.

There is a difference between not being able to do something and willfully choosing to always avoid that something. God could have created man such that he simply chose to avoid evil in much the same way as certain people will always avoid certain places, foods and events throughout life. There's nothing logically invalid about this.

How could a perfect being not be compelled to create? Generative force is a feature of perfection because inactivity would likely constitute a form of imperfection. Prolonged inactivity is not a positive feature of consciousness, therefore, it cannot be a feature of a perfect consciousness. God is unchanging in Himself, but active via creation. This is perfect.

Right

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It's "could have", and that's not what I said. This is a failure on your part to understand precise language. Man would not be acting freely only when God said he could in this scenario. Rather, he would be freely choosing to avoid evil forever and always in much the same manner that certain people simply choose to avoid certain foods forever and always without ever trying them. It might seem simplistic, but it is logically sound. Had God created man with an innate distaste for evil, much as he creates men with an innate distaste for certain cheeses without them ever having actually tried them, there would be no evil. This does not contravene free will - unless you want to argue that people being innately put off certain kinds of cheese throughout life and never actually trying them someone constitutes a lack of free will. Again, I am being serious. I know food analogies are crass, but they do actually work in this case.

*somehow

I am sorry. I actually heard this argument from a professor of philosophy, and I am just now realizing how awful it is. Distaste for certain things in life (be it events, foods or places) must be predicated on some prior experience, whereas a distaste for evil would have to be based within itself and thus contravene free will. winnie the pooh. Don't always treat educators with unconditional respect, folks.

He has though, the law of God is written on the hearts of every man (Romans 2), and guess what; humans are still idiots

What are you asking God to do here? Do you want Him to strike down everyone who does a bad thing the instant they attempt to do it? If He did that, we'd all be dead by now. Do you want God to miraculously bend space and matter in such a way that evil actions become impossible when people attempt them? The logical conclusion of that is to render the human brain incapable of forming evil thoughts, which would be literally the destruction of free will. Is that what you want? If not, what exactly do you want?

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That's literally how man lived before the Fall, before sin became part of our nature. Unfortunately, all it took was one bad decision and that all changed; sin became something man does when man first sinned. But at the original creation of our species, what you're describing here is exactly what happened.

I don't know why you're giving him even a second of your time

That's wrong though. Adam and Eve didn't freely avoid evil; they just weren't aware of it initially.

Hypothetically, I am asking Him either:
A. To create a universe where evil isn't a factor to begin with. You only see this as contravening "free will" because you know of no other paradigm according to your lived experience. It is potentially possible for God to define matter such that free will exists without the suffering engendered by evil.
B. If this is impossible (for whatever reason) then why does God not simply imbue humanity with righteous discernment from the moment of our birth? You can't say this contravenes free will because we would be freely choosing to avoid evil every time based upon our innate structure. You don't say a man is a slave for not hopping into a burning car, so why can God not grant man the same instinct when it comes to evil?

Congratulations, you already live in that world you seek. Genesis 3:4-5

Regarding this, do you really think that if they had been given from the start the knowledge that the fruit provided, they would have acted righteously? You've lived on earth your whole life, you know what men are capable of.
Regard this reply as one with my previous one , I forgot to include this part.

Well hang on a minute;
I would say that this is false, humans do avoid major sins, like killing, theft and adultery. Just because the other sins like idolatry are more abstract, doesn't mean that you cannot perceive the hurt they cause, or that a sufficiently wise person wouldn't view them as being equivalent to jumping into a burning car.

I see what you are trying to accomplish, in that by raising an objection to a typical argument (that evil is merely humanity's fault) that you get to roll up the whole thing and conclude in your favour. But consider that part of the picture is that God never created evil, evil is simply a vacuity from a metaphysical point of view. Since God is omnibenevolent, and God is the only self-existent thing metaphysically speaking, evil is just the absence of good, which is God. It is just not in God's nature to create something to "fill the gap" in the cosmos.

They don't do this due to a flaw in their design. Everything is ultimately predicated upon God. If God wishes for us to follow a certain path, then He should have imbued us with greater discernment. There is also something more than a little illogical about creating a being as totally free only to command that it follow a series of maxims in order to achieve wholeness.
Regardless of the fruit, God could have imbued man with righteous discernment from the beginning, and permitted him to retain it, and this would in no way contravene the doctrine of free will.
Not to the same degree as they avoid burning cars. There are degrees to this, and I have to wonder why evil is made so tempting in the first place. The privation of good should repel us just as much as fire, yet, for the vast majority, it doesn't. Why engender temptation? Why make evil appear tempting in the first place?

First off, you're replying to two different posters but are only replying to a single post. For clarity, be sure to reply to each post you want to address.

I'll address your second point first as I think you misunderstand mine: when I said
I meant exactly what you say that
Even if God had done this, Man still would have committed the evils you see today. This goes to your first point and the nature of free will. For free will to be truly free, there can be no limits on it, even if the man doesn't realize there are not limits. This gets at a larger point which is the Nature of God Himself. God is Love and love requires absolute freedom of choice. When dead men aren't accepted into heaven, it isn't because God decided He didn't want them, its because they decided they didn't want God and that choice is respected. The evil we see here is a physical manifestation of that choice, which necessarily has to be a choice.
That's why He sent all the prophets and ultimately His Son, to guide us towards what will be best for us. Then it goes back to your choice to listen to them or not.
All we had to do in the beginning was not eat the fruit. It was only after that event that things became much more difficult. We were originally created good, but Man has since fallen.

Honestly evil is the reason I'm not an atheist, once you believe that good and evil exist it leads to the belief in God. The problem of evil doesn't at all get in the way of there being a God, but instead it's whether that God is good or a demiurge from your point of view. Evil exists because we have freewill, human beings were made in the image of God, and the first beings committed original sin sending creation into death.

Phone posting user dropping back in here, as before will consider reply properly when I get a chance, but just wanted to note and respond that in your replies OP you still seem to be pushing and accepting of the legitimacy of a free will in which we never choose evil but rather always choose good. While this could theoretically possibly be considered legimately free, if I we did indeed every time choose good (in which case we'd be morally perfect which raises it's own set of problems, the responses to which in your post I still need to consider and reply to) I can't see why you don't accept that a playing out of free will such as this is not meaningful in anyway, and not legitimately free, if evil is never chosen in practice. By virtue of the existence of good (including in the form of choosing to act righteously in every instance under your desired scenario), evil, if only conceptually, also exists. But if God has set it up so that we never do in fact choose evil, and will instead 100% of every instance choose good, how on earth can you consider this to be genuine and legitimate freedom of the will? I simply can't fathom how you can? This is what I meant when saying that it's my understanding that any philosophically 'meaningful' definition of 'free will' by necessity is defined by the ability to choose between good and evil, anything more limited than this is simply not genuine, legitimate, meaningful freedom of the will. Am I missing something here?