The standard schtick:
[ul]
[li]God is either indifferent to our suffering or unable to redress it[/li][li]God perceives suffering differently than we do[/li][li]“Mysterious ways”[/li][/ul]
…The rest is just squabbling over details and rationalizing.
As a compatibilist, I’d dispute that.
But yeah, the kind of free will that many religions require, where all kinds of shit can go down on earth and omnimax god can claim no responsibility at all…doesn’t make sense.
I disagree. We have plenty of “clues”; there are plenty of obvious solutions to the “Problem of Evil”, many of which have been mentioned in this thread. People just don’t want to believe those solutions, because all the good ones violate their religious dogma. The POE goes away if you sufficiently reduce any of the three “omnis” from God; a god that is too weak, uncaring or doesn’t know we exist has no POE. A god that has to contend with other gods and can’t just do what it wants gets out of the POE too. So does a god that doesn’t exist.
The POE is a self inflicted problem for people who insist on a God that has characteristics that don’t match the real world and are logically contradictory. If they were willing to let the facts and logic drive their conclusions instead of the other way around, the “problem” wouldn’t exist.
The website Christian Answers addresses something similar to the OP’s question:
Why does God allow innocent people to suffer? - ChristianAnswers.Net “Why does God allow innocent people to suffer?”
The website says that nobody is completely innocent and that we are all sinners, among other things.
I’m not sure if I agree with much of the stuff on that website in general, but it’s something to think about.
To me, compatabalist free will is basically a game of definitions. I deny that what you guys call free will is free will as understood by 99% of people and so you need your own name for it 
But that’s for another thread and we’re in total agreement here.
roflmao @ how ridiculous the first few paragraphs are in that argument. It’s clearly designed to satisfy those who desparately want to cling on to their faith; it could never come within a million miles of convincing an objective person.
Because he is testing us to see if we are worthy or that without pain etc or how would we ever recognize god’s love when we see him in the next life. Prick.
From the link
As Obi-wan said, from a certain point of view. So, any science that doesn’t support their view isn’t true. I’m sure they are creationists, every one.
For the rest it makes me think of the wife beater who does it not because he hates his spouse, but because she did wrong. If this God existed, he should be locked up for the rest of his life.
They also do the “god is right by definition” bit. So if you think God orders you to kill your children, you go right ahead, correct?
Hitchens on the subject:
In the same vein, but in much richer detail:
Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins discussing the nature and origin of morality.
was raised religious, struggled with it all in college, have come to some conclusions i feel comfortable with.
God, whatever that is, has been ill-defined by religion. er. wrongly defined as “the thing that wants things to go the way we think things should go.” obedience to this thing will make you get more things how you want them in life.
“evil” is, ostensibly, just another poor/ill-defined term for “things we don’t like.” sort of the opposite of 1–
If there’s a God, It cannot be concerned too greatly about what “we want.”
without being too verbose–i starting having a big issue with the concept of prayer a while back. as in “God, i want this thing–GIVIT.” it can be that you want a new job; a loved one to get well from being ill; to find your car-keys; for your team to win the ball game.
the problem i have is clearly we cannot just be granted some cosmic asylum from all bad things, or from things we just don’t want, or for our cosmic christmas list to be granted. the biggest issue with that is we are kind of stupid and self serving. when i was younger i would literally beg God for some things to come to pass (or not,) only to learn as time went on that if i HAD been granted my prayers, it would have ultimately sucked so, so hard for me.
thank GOD i didn’t get my prayers answered. what a nightmare life could be.
going a step forward, if i pray my team wins–guess what, the other team loses. if god plays favorites, how can there be any justice in this reality? if i get the job and so-and-so does not, how is that fair? i think things like “fair” or “just” have to be absent.
so i kind of look at evil the same way.
does evil even actually exist? most people see the cruelty of nature as evil. that poor, sweet innocent gazelle baby who is eaten by cheetahs. or that tree that fell on uncle sam and killed him.
i’m not so sure these things are evil…they just suck for the person they suck for, but are either good or ambivalent for the other side.
this gets trickier when i think about random acts of violence.
i think people are capable of just incomprehensibly unpleasant things, but i don’t see them as action in defiance of God or some kind of biblical proof of evil. Hitler had rationalized his actions in his mind as some facet of a greater good. and, i guess had his brain eaten away by syphilis and had some absurd brushes with death that lead him to think he was some kind of special in the mind of God.
it seems fairly easy to see detriment to your species for personal gain as evil. i used to think that the universal benchmark for good was just trying to keep each other alive and well. but then, war…sometimes you gotta war. sometimes it really is what is best for you. but that means it’s terrible for someone else; what’s best for them is for YOU to die.
attributing what is best for you as proof there’s a God and He loves you is self-serving. really the only way things can work is for “whatever God is” to be utterly indifferent to what happens. partial treatment to any one person nearly always infringes on another. often people consider that infringement “evil.”
i saw a deal on snowy owls that really signifies what i mean. the mating pair had 5 chicks, so the male had to go hunt lemmings. when the winter was harsh and it was hard to find and catch lemmings, the family suffered. the narrator was heartbroken for their struggle–“if only there were more lemmings!” TO BE CAPTURED AND KILLED AND EATEN. the nature story from the aspect of the lemming’s family is nothing but reoccurring tragedy, but it’s triumph and goodness for the owls.
that’s life. it’s bleak by design.
God could have prevented evil, but it seems he wanted it to exist, so I think the Abrahamic God is not Good, kind, fair,loving,all knowing, etc. as the Biblical God is portrayed, the actions attributed to it is contradictory. Any Supreme Being would have to be more caring, loving, than me, and I wouldn’t have a child I knew ahead of time that would harm my other children nor allow a monster I created then allowed to harm them, Nor would I have contests with evil, that I knew the good would prevail, like the tests of Abraham. and Job. God knew the out come, and so should have Satan. Of course these are stories made up by humans, so of course they are flawed. No one can say in truth they know anything about God. Just their belief in what they were taught or think!
Because its a load of deliberately confusing bullshit designed to control, scare, suppress and divide humanity.
I like Peter Griffin’s take in it:
God is like Rod Serling - a dispassionate observer. He knows you’re going to break your glasses, or its a shadow man from another bed, or it was Earth all along. But he’s not going to help you.
Rather, it is the other way around.
Only good stories have the meme power to get told on and on. Good stories have to have good and bad in them, that is just how the human story processing brain functions. So we see the world in those terms. The question why God allows good and bad, and even the question if God is good or bad, and even more fundamentally, the whole idea of good and bad, all stem from that kind of thinking.
Animals (aside from primates and dolphins etc) may suffer from natural violence or from the violence of other animals (same species or not) but I doubt they apply the idea of good or evil. They just lost the fight and move on. They just got wounded or their food ran out and they cope. No need for good or bad concepts.
Buddhism sees this, I think.
Schopenhauer said this too. He said that life was even bleaker then that, because the joy the lion had in eating the gazelle was so much less then the suffering of the gazelle being eaten.
But Schopenhaer forgets the many, many, many win-win situations that exist in nature. Bees and flowers mutually benefitting. fungae and bacteria thriving on the remains of things that dies naturally. Us enjoying the flight of birds and the beauty of flowers. Animals just doing nothing but enjoying life as other animals walk by.
OP, you might enjoy Martin Gardner’s Book, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. From his chapter “Evil: Why?”:
Gardner himself was a philosophical theist. He believed in a personal god and afterlife. Yet, at the same freely admitted that from a logical perspective the atheist camp clearly “wins” the debate. For him it ultimately came down to that dirty F-word - faith.
Bertrand Russell got this long before that. I can’t watch the video, so I don’t know if they refer to him.
As a Christian, I think this is exactly right. This is the particular way that God is unknowable (rather than unknowable like at what time a specific nucleus will decay). God is contradictory according to the logic of our universe because God is not of this universe.
Thus, someone trying to understand God using logic or science is going to fail. Belief in God must be based on faith. If there were proof that God exists, then faith would be superfluous. But the self-contradictions in God’s attributes necessarily thwart any attempt at proof. There cannot be any logical proof.
Do not fall into the fallacy of the excluded middle. While God may be unknowable in his entirety, that does not mean that all parts of God are unknowable. And divine revelation comes into play–God can choose to reveal himself.
Heh, I hadn’t read the second page when I wrote the above part of my post, but it’s interesting to see that I agree with Martin Gardner. He was a great influence on me when I was young, terms of how I approach mathematics, science and programming. And very friendly to young readers–I wrote several letters to him and he replied more than once (too bad I’ve since misplaced them).