We’ve learned to cure so much; sure we’ve got much more to learn, but we’re getting there.
Surely, if you put yourself at risk, then you have to accept that risk? If you live on a volcano, then you accept the risk that it might erupt. If you live in an area susceptible to hurricanes, then you build your houses to resist them.
And a god - even a pretty pathetic god - could have fixed it all thousands of years ago.
Plenty of people die in natural disasters without putting them at risk. And a supposedly inferior human who stood by and did nothing while someone died in a disaster would be considered scum.
It’s interesting how much lower a moral standard people are willing to apply to a supposedly morally superior god. A god that sits backs in Heaven doing the divine equivalent of drinking some beers while he watches children drown is “morally superior” to us mere mortals.
If this were true in moderation, I might agree. Skinned knees are nature’s way of teaching kids to be careful. A broken heart makes later romance more profound.
But the horrors of this world abound in vast excess of any moderation. The trenches of Ypres; the gas chambers of Auschwitz; starvation in eastern Africa; Pol Pot’s predation.
That isn’t “imperfection that makes the beauty greater,” that’s a hellish perversion of life, and cannot be justified in terms of aesthetics.
Maybe that’s our job?
Indeed.
An omnipotent god doesn’t need to give anyone “jobs”, and a benevolent one wouldn’t let generation upon generation of people suffer. Most of whom could not possibly have solved the problems we are talking about.
And then there’s the suffering of animals; are hedgehogs supposed to develop their own cancer cure? Are wolves supposed to figure out how to grow meat in vats so they don’t need to eat deer?
So god is a good spirit for giving us goals to achieve, and any suffering is just part of his plan to make us strive harder? Is that how you justify the agony of those with the misfortune to get sick before man figures out god’s little puzzle?
I think the classical response is Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds”-argument: out of all logically possible worlds, God chose the one with the least evil; doesn’t mean that it has to be zero, or even a particularly small amount.
For those who think that’s not enough, there’s Plantinga’s free will defense: basically, the assertion of the problem of evil is that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with the claimed attributes of God. Plantinga refutes this by exhibiting an explicit set of circumstances where, under an additional assumption (the existence and valuability of free will), these are compatible, after all, thus proving that there never was any incompatibility in the first place. Note that in order for this argument to work, there need not actually be free will!
Perhaps more explicitly, the problem of evil is the assertion that there is a contradiction between the four propositions:
The contradiction is (apparently) straight forward: an omnibenevolent God would want to eradicate all evil, an omniscient God knows whenever there is evil, and an omnipotent God can perform the necessary actions to abolish all evil. Thus, if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, there is no evil. But there is evil, hence, God is not omni-etc.
Plantinga now includes another proposition: roughly that, all else being equal, a world in which there are free beings is more morally valuable than a world in which there aren’t. Thus, if there were free will, then the conclusion above does not follow. But then, the conclusion does not follow at all, regardless of there actually being free will, since there exists a logically consistent set of circumstances in which it is false, and thus, 1, 2, and 3 do not entail not-4.
This works just as well for the problem of natural evil, if one imagins there to be superpowerful beings (“demons”) capable of producing natural desasters, who are also more morally valuable if they are free (and thus, free to do evil). The philosophical consensus, as far as I’m aware, is that this is a completely satisfying rejoinder to the problem of evil.
Of course, I’m an atheist anyway, so I don’t have any problem of evil in the first place. 
That is demonstrably not true for a tri-omni god; if this is the best world an omnipotent could create, then by definition we’d never have been able to improve it in any way.
Another false argument. A tri-omni god would simply create a world where everyone freely chooses good. Not to mention that it could create a world where it was less physically possible or outright impossible to suffer or commit evil. And it ignores that all things are not equal, and that the existence of irrational and compulsive behavior means that we are not “free willed”; not that “free will” is even a coherent concept in the first place. And it ignores the suffering of animals.
And it ignores the existence of coercion; the instant one being coerces another, this entire idea that never violating “free will” is so important that it’s better to have millions of years of massive suffering rather than intervene even slightly goes out the window. Because if it’s that bad, then it’s just as bad for the world when humans do it; which completely eliminates the supposed point of God sitting back and watching the world burn.
It is again another attempt to excuse God behaving in a way than in anyone else would be called amoral or evil.
No; it just redefines evil as good. I can call a dog a cat, but it’s still a dog.
The point is the Bible, like any other Book is the work of humans, and their ideas of what God( or a god) should be, or do. It was humans who decided what God was supposed to have said or done, therefore. it is a certain human we choose to believe in Not A or God! Humans have a good imagination and choose what they wish things to be!
The Universe is just that, it is in existence just as we are, if there are other universes no one knows, and since we will never get to another should there be one, it would have to be the atoms etc, of which we are all composed!
No one knows what is God’s will. Even jesus didn’t, He is quoted as saying;" Father “IF” it is your will let this chalice pass from me", IF means uncertainty. So people hear what is the will of God from other people, who make claim to know it, and people can and are often wrong!
Venice is a thing of earth, not something one cannot observe. I have been there and rode the Gondola’s etc. have pictures of myself in one, and at St Mark’s square. Any one can do the same, but no one can in truth say or prove anything of God except from the word of another human, and they cannot prove it, take anyone there, show it to anyone it is strickly belief, if it helps them to be a better person to believe, then it is a good thing, if they use it( like too many do ) to force others to do as they do then it is wrong. Like a tool, belief can be used for good or harm.
Most Christians believe Jesus came and died for their sins, but according to the quote from Jesus, he told the woman who needed help for her child,“I came only for the lost sheep of Israel.” That would indicate to me that he had no intentions of saving the whole world!
An all knowing Supreme Being would know ahead of time that his created one’s would do as they did, so a poor ignorant human with out any experience being punished, would make it like punishing a baby for soiling it’s diaper, then punishing all it’s decendents!
Perhaps god is more concerned with the development of the human race than individual humans?
Perhaps, but that would be contrary to just about everything Jesus preached in the gospels.
I mean ‘world’ as in ‘entirety of space and time’.
You missed the point of the argument. It need not be true that we are free, or that there is freedom at all; it only needs to be true that there exists some additional proposition (the moral value of free will, in Plantinga’s example) such that if it held, then 1.-3. do not imply not-4. Because then, it’s simply not the case that a tri-omni God and the existence of evil are contradictory. It’s a purely logical argument, which does not carry any metaphysical, ontological or moral commitments.
There’s also always a problem with people asserting what an omnipotent being could do. Most would agree that even omnipotent beings are limited to the laws of logic; but it’s entirely possible that there are just very few, or maybe only one, logically possible world (if for instance there were just one theory of everything, one set of natural laws, one possible initial condition, and from there on, everything evolves deterministically). Again, I’m not saying that’s the case – I don’t believe it is – but if it were so, then again, the existence of a tri-omni God again would be consistent with the presence of evil in this world.
I like the George Burns as God line from the old movie when he was asked why he allowed so much suffering.
“Why do YOU allow it?”
Maybe we all volunteered to come here,
That violates omnibenevolence. Again; there is no Problem Of Evil in the first place if you throw out one of the “omnis”.
And? So did I.
Since it’s an argument about morality, it automatically carries moral commitments. And again, I don’t think it holds up. It’s just an attempt to redefine evil as good; just a slightly more sophisticated version of “if God does something, it’s right because God says so”.
No, it wouldn’t. An omnipotent God means that the laws of physics are mostly irrelevant; if it wants, it can just make the substance of the universe act as it wills by constant application of that omnipotence. Or just create a universe in simulation; we know simulations aren’t restricted to being copies of the real world. And an omnipotent god wouldn’t have to bother with anything “evolving deterministically”; it could just create the desired end state, or let things evolve and intervene on a regular basis.
And if you want to argue that a god can’t intervene like that; at that point we are again talking about not having a Problem Of Evil in the first place because the god in question isn’t omnipotent, or even close to it if it can’t affect the world. A god that is weaker than we are isn’t much of a god.
And of course, the god in question has the option of simply doing nothing; of not creating the universe at all if it can’t do the job right.
And the response is “we don’t”. We are not omnipotent; there is an immense amount of suffering that we cannot stop. The closest we could come would be to try to exterminate all higher life on the planet so that there’s nothing left to suffer; and we aren’t powerful enough to pull that off yet.
We didn’t. I certainly didn’t. And no; some “spirit” that existed outside of this world and entered it but whom I don’t recall anything about isn’t me. It’s some other entity. Memory is a central component of identity, and I have no such memories.
Then why say God does not make his appearance for this reason? As for Jesus returning, I don’t think that is a wild interpretation of scripture. Which parts do you actually accept?
Misapplication of the rules is different from the rules being wrong. Mistakes in mathematical proofs do not mean that the concept of a proof is faulty. Ditto false postulates. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are valid - based on the expressed postulates. Testing confirms or denies the postulates, not the reasoning or the method of reasoning.
God Aristotle you mean. It is true that if they were not useful we wouldn’t use them, but rules of logic are not experimentally or experientially derived.
It is kind of hard to use any kind of logic on a universe where logic does not apply. But you should easily be able to derive contradictory properties of this universe, which would invalidate its existence (assuming logic can be used.) Far different from an argument from ignorance.
So the N different conclusions people draw are all equally valid? And I assume that no one should do anything that affects anyone but himself based on religion, because he has no way of verifying his interpretation is correct? I can buy that, but it makes religion kind of useless except as a social club.
They will say it is done by reference to God, but if you don’t know what God wants without a Godless filter of the supposedly God-derived input, it cannot actually be done with reference to God.
This has nothing to do with God’s existence. It appears that even if a God or Gods do exist, human religions have no clue about him or what he wants.