Could you please tell me how to stop earthquakes from killing innocent children?
Christian science? Also, how does this position explain something like natural disasters?
What people allowed the suffering from earthquakes and hurricanes and other natural disasters? Do these people know they don’t have to allow it? I hope somebody told them!
The best answer I was ever able to come up with was: All the best stories involve serious suffering.
I’m sure all the people in the world surviving the aftermath of Sandy right now will be happy to hear that their suffering is their fault.
ETA: Eh, made a point several people made. It’s just that obvious.
If God is all knowing and all powerful and cares about human beings, and he or she permits the sort of shit that goes down on Earth every fucking day, he or she is a waste of omnipotence and deserves no respect whatsoever. If whatever you think of as God is NOT all powerful and all knowing, then he or she is just another class of being, an alien, and more to be coped with than worshiped.
Much more likely is that God does not exist … this hypothesis fits the facts as we find them beautifully. The religious hypothesis has all sorts of logical problems (ignoring them is “faith”) and is clearly just an example of wishful thinking.
Like a mighty king, but with comic-book superpowers?
That’s for the religious to say. Somehow, I doubt they will put it in those terms. But … if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …
I occasionally wonder if the reason why this world was created was to produce some good stories.
I’ll try not to repeat what others have said.
There are three solutions to this problem
- God is evil, and thus has no problem doing evil to us
- God doesn’t give a shit, and so has no problem creating a world where evil happens
- God does not exist. Nature doesn’t care who lives on the flood plain. This is clearly the cleanest solution.
People already have distinguished natural evil from the evil done by people, which is justified by free will. But even the free will argument doesn’t work very well. Humans do not have perfect free will. Many people have psychological maladies limiting their freedom of action. Most of us probably couldn’t be mass murderers even if we had the chance - we’re not wired that way. (That is why the military has to work very hard at getting people ready to kill when needed.) If God just arranged everyone to be wired to not be a mass murder, their free will would not be reduced anymore than it is for most of us.
For natural evil, the only remotely plausible explanation I’ve heard is that it is all for the best. The world is better for each person killed by a falling tree, or each baby drowned in a tsunami. This is, to put it mildly, hard to swallow. Believers who actually buy into this theory should be celebrating each natural disaster as something leading to a better world.
The ancient gods made no bones about not being omnibenevolent, and so don’t have this problem. Christians seemed to set up their god to be overly loving as a marketing gimmick, but it kind of crashes when runs into reality, like these things so often do.
Yeah, thought of that after I posted but was heading out the door for work. The whole natural evil - hurricanes, posionous monkeys, dogs who when they bark they shoot bees at you, I think that all ties to getting booted out of the Garden of Eden (the point being God didn’t create those things originally, but as punishment for for us - which kind of indicates that he’s a bit of a dick himself, but that’s another topic). So, put that fucking apple down.
As to free will of good versus evil, I don’t necessarily agree. As in the real world (that is, the one without God) we all have free will (at least most agree on this) and evil exists. And it’s not because physics favors the free will of evil over good, it’s just that evil is the consequence of free will, c’est la vie.
I remember someone saying that a bigger theological problem as to why bad things happen to good people is why do good things happen to bad people?
The Bible explains that, in the case of wicked kings who die happily in their beds at a ripe old age. God punishes their righteous children. Bit of a dick, as mentioned.
You expect a timeless god to get around to punishing the right person in time?
The only explanation I have heard that I thought was reasonable involved the idea that, given free will, we may be living in the best possible reality. Meaning that if things were any better in our past, the future would be worst, making this an reality containing optimum “good” given the starting conditions of the universe and free will.
[QUOTE=Nickles]
I heard upon his dry dung heap
That man cry out, who cannot sleep:
If God is God, He is not Good,
If God is Good, He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd.
I would not sleep here if I could
Except for the little green leaves in the wood
And the wind on the water.
[/quote]
Assuming the existence of a solely benevolent and omnipotent deity then I don’t see how evil could exist except as a source of trials meant to burn away our human dross. But I reject that hypothesis as too cruel to be the offspring of goodness itself.
To me, any suggestion that this reality is optimal is laughable; even in the sense of it being supposedly en route to some glorious state.
It’s trivial to imagine changes to this reality that would on the face of it make life more enjoyable, more varied, more fair and with faster progress to an even better future.
And my imagination is severely limited by having to live out the “20/21st century guy” program my whole life.
Of course we could say that my “on the face of it” assessment is flawed, and god knows better. But again that just means we’ve fallen back to “god works in mysterious ways” again.
A related question that I, at least, find interesting to wrestle with: How much suffering should a loving, merciful God allow?
In my own life, some of the suffering I’ve experienced, I don’t find at all problematic or incompatible with a loving God. For example, a few weeks ago, I stubbed my toe. It certainly hurt at the time, and the pain lingered for at least a day or two afterward, but I wasn’t saying “How could a loving God allow me to feel this pain?” and before too long I had almost completely forgotten about it.
That’s admittedly a trivial example, barely worth calling “suffering.” I’ve certainly suffered worse evils, emotional as well as physical; and other people have suffered way worse things than I have. But when I look back on my life from my current perspective, some—some—of the (physical or emotional) pain or suffering I have experienced seems to me now to be not that big a deal, or to have resulted in something of value, or to be an essential part of being alive, and in any case doesn’t prevent me from being happy today.
And I wonder if it’s possible that all such suffering could look that way from the perspective of eternity. I really hesitate to say yes, because that seems to trivialize some very profound and horrible human suffering, and because I can’t imagine how it would work—but that may well just be a failure of my imagination. And there are Bible verses that suggest such an answer.
[QUOTE=John 16:21-22]
A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Romans 8:18]
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
[/QUOTE]
That’s a really reasonable question - I guess it just has to do with my upbringing. I started at a traditional belief and moved to a narrative that makes sense to me.
I mean, it’s all moot. I have no idea who or what God is. I believe that there is a God but I also believe that he/she/it is essentially unknowable. Religion is just our way of grasping at straws in a feeble attempt to understand something that can never be quantified or proven or understood. We’re all just creating our own sets of filters and biases to jive with our own personal needs.
Well, no one is saying that there should be zero suffering - only minimal suffering. Pain is no problem since we need pain to protect ourselves, and you used your free will to stub your toe. However painful cancer is another matter entirely.
That we’ve evolved the ability to forget pain doesn’t excuse the pain in the first place. Clearly if tragedies made us give up, we wouldn’t have made it as a species. Compared to other animals, our uniqueness is in remembering tragedy, not dealing with it or forgetting it.
The quote from John is a bit odd, considering that God gave painful childbirth to women as a specific punishment for Eve’s actions in Eden.
It might be true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger - but trees falling on you doesn’t make you stronger, and there have been plenty of cases where the reaction to tragedy has lasted a long time.
None of the free will options work because there is no such thing as free will. Cite.