Which is one of the many reasons “traditional Christianity”* is evil itself. The existence of Hell is gratuitous in itself, much less any suffering in it; it can have no other purpose than pure cruelty.
But of course, if the argument presupposes that the existence of Hell (or a hypothetical Hell-world) is gratuitous, then Christianity must reject the premise or admit it is self-contradictory. This is the logical problem of evil, as distinguished from the evidential problem of evil I was responding to.
~Max
I am employing all three arguments: personal growth (Irenaean theodicy), free will defense (Plantinga), and mysterious ways (skeptical theism). The way I see it, personal growth and free will defense are a subset of the mysterious ways defense. The explanations given (personal growth or necessary for free will) take some of the mystery out, but not all of it, because the explanations only work to a certain level of detail.
Take your child leukemia example. We know now that some forms of leukemia are hereditory diseases. We don’t know the exact mechanism which causes leukemia. There are likely multiple mechanisms which lead to the same defect.
You ask which argument justifies the existence of childhood leukemia from God’s perspective. Since we don’t have God’s perspective, we can only speculate on an explanation more specific than “mysterious ways.” That’s not satisfying. Christians acknowledge that it is not satisfying. That does not mean it is irrational to believe in Christianity.
If we do speculate on more specific theological explanations for childhood leukemia, we have to recognize our epistemic humility. It may be that the suffering provides an opportunity for spiritual growth, for the child. It may be that the suffering is necessary for someone else’s spiritual growth. It may be that the mechanical cause of the disease was a necessary effect of the exercise of someone else’s free will. It may be that the mechanical cause of the disease was a necessary effect of the mechanical structure of the world (e.g. genetic mutations due to sunlight exposure or ‘random’ transcription errors). It may be a combination of some or all of these explanations. These are unfalsifiable propositions. They aren’t satisfying. No explanation will be.
I specified: “bad, in a teleological sense.” That is, it is not always wrong for God to allow people to suffer because God’s maximally benevolent purpose requires some people to suffer; the divine telos is not to maximize human pleasure or minimize human suffering. It is good that God allows suffering with instrumental value, and bad if God allows gratuitous suffering. Suffering in itself is neither good nor bad because that would require a utilitarian, human-centric worldview which classical Christianity explicitly rejects in favor of a teleological framework with glory of God as the ultimate end.
No major Christian denomination rejects the glory of God as the ultimate telos in favor of a utilitarian, human-centric framework.
~Max
No, it’s not any of those as they are incompatible with both omnipotence and omnibenevolence. There is no “necessary” anything with such a being.
How do you know?
~Max
Because there’s no wiggle room with absolutes like omnipotence and omnipresence. There’s no need for growth or physical processes why such a being could just make a person in the desired perfected state, or make the world act exactly as they desired. And there’s no need for any form of suffering when such a being could simply will it not to happen.
“Need” and “necessity” aren’t concepts that make sense in such a context, they imply limits.
Hmm. Do you admit even an omnipotent God could not make square circles? That light could not exist without darkness? And that a world with free will is not only conceptually coherent but could be better than a world without free will?
~Max
Mathematical square circles are a logical contradiction, although an omnipotent could probably make a physical one by playing with quantum superposition to make something both at once. Light can definitely exist without darkness.
And no, free will is an incoherent concept. As well, free choice of any sort as has already been said a moot point in a universe made by an omnipotent and omniscient god; in such a world everything that has ever happened, occurred because that god wanted to happen and for no other reason. No one but the creator has any moral responsibility in such a world, they are just the god’s finger puppets.
“Why did Hitler kill six million Jews” is answered “because God made him to do so” in such a world.
Well, if your starting point is that free will is an incoherent concept and the only moral actor in a universe with an omnipotent and omniscient God is said God, then yes, you should rationally conclude either God is evil or there must be no suffering.
It goes without saying this provides no persuasive force for the evidentiary argument of evil when put to a believer in Christianity. The Bible itself contains an episode where God “hardens” Pharoah’s heart, and Pharoah orders his soldiers to pursue Hebrew refugees. Christians disagree on why God did this. The classical view is that God is the prime mover who continually sustains the universe, even when we exercise free will, so we should not be surprised that God harden’s Pharoah’s heart any more than God causing an arrow to fall to the ground. The Armenian view is that Pharoah chose first and God sealed Pharoah’s choice, no different than any other chain of events following a choice. Calvanists believe in predestination and argue the resulting suffering is necessary for the ultimate glory of God (Romans 9). If you deny that Pharoah was exercising free will, and conclude the only moral actor in that situation was God, and deny that suffering serves a necessary purpose, then yes… God is evil.
~Max
Yeah, but the traditional Christian answer to the problem evil is “Shut up or God will smite you,” followed by “Heretic, I will smite you.*”
There’s no logical debate over the problem of evil - “it’s not evil when God does it” and “God works in mysterious ways” and “All suffering must be necessary because God is good and God allows it,” are not logical arguments.
That’s not even an acceptable answer to modern theologians. Christians are all prepared to reinterpret everything to defend that God is only God, omnibenevolent. They will say that descriptions of Hell are antiquated descriptions from long ago blah blah blah and Hell isn’t so much an actual place as it is “separation from God” - not being in his presence and rejecting his love. So yes, they are not innocent, but also Hell is not eternal torment and torture, either. Except that then they will say being separate from God is torture.
It’s all a big, ideological shell game to defend their predetermined conclusion that God exists and that God is loving and God is only good.
Talk about square circles.
Respectfully, I believe you are attacking a strawman. I defined “necessity” not just in the abstract but as a descriptor of the best compossible world, in a cosmic sense. I stated the premises and showed how my conclusions must follow as a matter of logic. I have cited theologians (both historical and modern) which overwhelmingly adopt the positions I put forward. I provided the mainstream theological bases for the most common responses Christians actually use to rationalize extreme suffering. I admitted theism may not provide satisfying explanatory power, but pointed out that absurdism doesn’t either. I remind you that the problem of evil is, by design, a challenge for believers to defend their existing belief in God and not a tool for proselytization. This is not a debate to prove the existence of God.
~Max
And the blatant, objectively true fact is that no, we are nowhere near the best possible world in any sense.
You basically keep describing an evil god and declaring it to be good by fiat.
Two of these three defences could be used to defend any claim about anything.
Both “mysterious ways” and “set of all universes” logic could be used to support the idea that clowns are hyper advanced aliens from venus.
This is the level of desperation involved in trying to solve this problem.
And yet…
This concedes the whole debate. The debate is about the problem of evil, and whether it has a satisfying (or better: demonstrable) solution. You’re acknowledging it doesn’t, and that it’s trivial to find problematic examples. “But that doesn’t mean it is irrational to believe in Christianity” – if you say so, but that’s off-topic. I’ll be happy to start a thread on the plausibility of Christianity if you like; I’m aware of enough biblical contradictions, evil actions of God, scientific falsehoods etc (let alone that the default position should be to require evidence before believing in a claim) that that will likely be a tougher topic for believers than this one.
So not even a ‘I’m gonna get to this later’ 
? I guess the only surprising thing is that I still keep being surprised. Whenever I make one of those posts, at least a part of me honestly expects that this time, I’ve made things sufficiently clear that we can at minimum identify where the disconnect lies, because surely even a vague gesture in the direction of honest debate would require a good-faith attempt at working through the arguments on the table. But nothing.
You speak of desperation, but your only move is to ignore what conflicts with your position, and pretend it isn’t there.
What “conflict”? What are you talking about?
My position has only been that the “set of universes” argument is wholly unconvincing when it comes to the evidential problem of evil, given that it requires us to suspend the very notions of inductive logic, circumstantial evidence and doubt by which we all navigate the world every day.
In a technical sense, sure, it’s possible that even a world of maximal suffering is also the universe of minimal suffering. Such that even a world where god peels off our skin while laughing maniacly could be the best possible creation of a perfectly loving god.
There are infinite things that are technically not impossible. Nobody should find this line of logic remotely convincing though.
What’s the “conflict”?
The conflict is that your position, that any amount of evil yields grounds to doubt the existence of God, leads straightforwardly to a logical contradiction, which is that you need to posit both zero and non-zero amounts of expected evil given that God exists.
There is no ‘sets of universes’ argument. Possible worlds are a common tool to assess the validity of modal arguments, i.e. arguments involving notions of ‘possibility’ or ‘necessity’. However, the underlying logic has no commitment to that particular notion. All you need to accept is that you can only either expect a zero or a non-zero amount of evil if God exists.
Then again, tell me why you think that any formulation of the problem of evil as it is actually found in the literature isn’t ‘any evil makes the existence of God less likely’, but rather, ‘evil exceeding a certain amount (‘gratuitous’ evil) makes the existence of God less likely’.
I note that, again, there is no attempt at engaging with the argument made, beyond a spurious and ill-informed attempt at a blanket dismissal. I have given the premises of the argument and its logical structure in great detail. None of that depends on ‘sets of universes’. If you have any valid grounds for disagreement, it must be found either in the premises, or in the logical form; so it should be trivial to you to point out where, exactly, you think the reasoning goes wrong.
So I’m gonna make my own evidential argument here: the more @Mijin tries to deflect from the argument rather than engaging with it, the more reasonable the judgment becomes that he actually hasn’t got anything to resist it, but can’t bring himself to accept that.
That’s debatable, and I’ve read your reasons, but I freely admit once you determine this is not the best compossible world it becomes a contradiction to believe in a tri-omni God. This is the logical, not evidentiary problem of evil, and a rejection of the free will defense. (While we’re wildly off-topic, I will note that the premise of this thread assumes the existence of free will.)
~Max
Not until you acknowledge the premise that my position contradicts. (And frustrating as my defenses are, they are dogmatic Christian faith–backed by a lot of historical authority and lived human experience. I’m not making any of this up in bad faith.) I never tried to persuade you that theism is superior, though I have defended it as internally consistent; I have argued that your position is incomplete and you have not disabused me of that assessment.
Even an argument ad absurdum requires a contradiction. Appealing to “common sense” and “human intuition” are not enough; you should take that final step and articulate the point of disagreement.
Here is my most recent statement of premises; what is missing?
~Max
Could you spell out the premises please, because I am not following it from the post that you’ve cited.
AFAICT you are alluding to the idea that “traditional” Christians might not see the problem of evil as a problem, because they don’t define omnibenevolence as seeking a world without suffering.
If that’s a correct summary, then I’d say this:
Firstly “traditional” Christians seem very rare in the modern world, IME. Because a lot of Christians do struggle with the problem of evil, and all the solutions that I’ve seen on Christian media do implicitly accept that a loving God wouldn’t want there to be any suffering.
Do you have any examples in the modern world of Christian teachers saying that suffering is a good in itself?
Secondly, this line of argument is of course pointless to pose to anyone that does struggle with this problem. e.g. Imagine the OP is Christian. The “solution” being put to him would be to just tell him he’s not a true christian.
Finally, as we’ve seen this line of logic fails when encountering the real world. I gave the example of a child diagnosed with leukemia and immediately you had to jump to “mysterious ways”.
They seem pretty well marked in the post, but in the meantime, here’s a couple of premises you also seem to keep missing:
These are, of course, both trivialities. Taken together, they straightforwardly entail that in the case of the PoE, either God and evil are logically incompatible or only evil above a certain threshold disconfirms God’s existence—which is well in line with the fact that any actual formulation of the evidential problem appeals to gratuitous evil.
This is sad at this point, so let’s cut to the chase: either you can find something wrong with the above, or you’re mistaken in claiming that any evil at all is evidence against God’s existence. If you had just said where you disagree with this, I would have moved on. But you can’t budge an inch, in this, or any other debate.