Svt4Him, speaking as a friend, if you got that from somewhere else you should’ve cited it and only quoted a little bit. Just a heads-up.
Regarding the OP: If there was a simple, elegant answer that everyone could accept, then people probably wouldn’t be seriously arguing over this. I can give you my (Christian) perspective, though.
Basically, in this mortal life God values free will over cessation of suffering. As paraphrased from C. S. Lewis, pain and suffering tell us that something’s wrong. In addition to that, trials can make us stronger, sorta “no pain, no gain”.
“But Super Gnat, why doesn’t God just make us stronger?” IMHO, that’s because God wants us to be able to exercise our free will. Yes, God is omnipotent, but that doesn’t mean that He will do everything. I have the power to jump on my bed right now, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll do it. What God values in humans in this life is a willingness to follow Him no matter what trials and sufferings we face. And as we (Christians) go through trials, our faith in Him increases.
But there’s the rub. Without a shock, we would have no way of knowing that licking power lines is a bad thing.
I guess I should now add in an anecdote that I heard from my doctor.
Many people say that, without pain, the world would be a better place. After all, pain is bad, they say. What’s the problem? There are some people that have a rare condition that makes them completely impervious to pain. They simply cannot feel it. Sounds like a good deal, right?
Wrong.
Many of these people have suffered more broken bones than you can think of. Ailments that go untreated fester inside, undetected. They are unable to assess their own problems. The people cannot, in a manner of speaking, “tell the doctor where it hurts.” It is a cruel life.
Pain helps people know what is bad. To use your example. robertliguori, the best way for us to know that licking powerlines is a Bad Thing is for us to get a shock. People don’t drive nails through their hands. Partially because of the risk of infection, the loss of blood, and so on, but mostly because it freakin’ hurts!
Why did God create a world that has Random Acts of Pain, such as natural disasters? I have no clue.
Thanks, although all stuff is non-copyright, and Ray Comfort actually encourages people to use his stuff. I have posted a link in the past, but will gladly do it again HERE. Thanks for the warning though.
I never understood why god had to be omnibenevolent… it seems to me that the words revenge and wrath don’t exactly coincide with an all-good being. I understand the arguement that god causes pain for our benefit… but that doesn’t pan out in my head. if you are trying to teach a dog right from wrong isn’t it always better to reward him for acceptable behavior? you don’t beat the dog for doing something wrong… well… maybe god would.
There will never be a resolution to this argument since everyone’s beliefs are based on faith, not facts, and therefore no one side can be proven right. For that we need facts.
BUT…
All these arguments about how God has to allow us free will so that we can love and such…complete BS. This is GOD we’re talking about here, all powerful, all knowing. Couldn’t he simply create a universe where we had free will but not really, could love but not hurt, and so on? After all, logic does not apply to all powerful beings, just us lowly humans in this crappy existence.
Good God. If you can’t post something original, Svt4Him, don’t post anything at all. Or at least let us know it’s not original before we waste our time…
No it doesn’t.
As to the OP, this problem is called “theodicy” in theology. I haven’t really heard a good answer using traditional western concepts of an authoritarian God. You basically just get “we deserve it” or “mysterious ways,” the former of which is not really defensible if God is asserted as being compassionate and the latter of which is not even an answer but a shrug.
Eastern philosophy often addresses the problem of unjust suffering by stating that it’s all just an illusion. Life is kind of like a dream. It seems real but when you “wake up” you realize that none of it really happened. There is also the Vedantic spin that the universe = God. There is nothing that is not God and everything that seems evil is just God doing stuff to God (I’m over-simplifying here but it would take twenty pages to really give a decent overview of Vedantic Hinduism).
I have seem Libertarian apply something like this to a Christian perspective (sans the non-dualism) in which he proposes that the material universe is simply an illusory mise-en-scene, a kind of theater for teaching and directing souls towards God. As far as I know, though, Lib is fairly unique in his adoption of what is basically the Buddhist concept of Maya (or Hindu “Grand Illusion”) into Christian theology.
Exactly. Or consider all those who suffer day in and day out, year after year, with real physical pain, repeated hospital visits, needles, surgeries, and so on. Many of them would not be interested in hearing about their eternal bliss; they’d rather hear about getting relief right now.
God has no body; only a capacity for manipulating energy in various forms, and a desire to know every possible experience that energy in all its myriad manifestations can undergo.
So it created the universe. It “salted” the physical universe with concsiousnesses that, being tied to material bodies, have the ability to take in and respond to the experiences they undergo.
When the consciousnesses are no longer attached to physical bodies, God can “download” all of the experiences and the responses they elicited. This includes all of the suffering.
God doesn’t consider suffering to be “bad”. It considers it to be data.
Who made that rule? Who made “power lines” dangerous?
On the natural evil front: Who made earthquakes dangerous?
On the human evil front: Who created humanity with more than just free will but also with a propensity for evil actions?
The answers are obvious.
Regarding the second point on human evil: Why couldn’t humanity have been created with full free will and yet all good? After all, God is has free will and is all good. Moreover, He is powerful enough and knowledgeable enough to create us that way, and His omnibenevolent nature would seem to morally obligate Him to do so.
Free will does not predict the existence of evil, unless you are willing to say either that God has no free will since He does no evil or that God does evil since He has free will.
Since neither of those possibilities is acceptable for any believer, the discussion once again shows that faith is more than logic, or at least is somewhat outside of logic. Since rigorous logic alone cannot bring one to belief in God, arguments which rely on logic alone will never prove or disprove God. Belief in God is inherently irrational (in the non-pejorative sense of that word), but just because an idea is irrational because it is outside the realm of logic doesn’t make that idea inappropriate to believe for any one person. It may still be a quite useful idea in day-to-day life in this universe, and indeed, it may be more than useful–it may be true as believed by the believer.
Being able to tell the doctor where it hurts is only important in a world in which physical evil inherently exists, which brings us back to the question of the responsibility of the Omnibenevolent Creator.
My point is: the Problem of Pain/Evil has no logical answer (thus the neverending arguments) if you assume the existence of an omnibenevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God. Philosophers and theologians have argued about it for centuries. Many believers think they have answered it globally, but they have not answered it with globally applicable logic, they have only answered it locally with applicable faith–they have answered it for themselves. But who are we to gainsay their local happiness in that regard? At the same time, who are they to project their local answers upon others. Religion is a matter of conscience and not subject to police enforcement precisely because it is unprovable.
Richard Harries posited a convincing argument to explain this. He said that (and I can’t find the book so I’m heavily paraphrasing here) natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions aren’t necessarily bad. They’re bad from our point of view because they’re deadly but ours is not the only point of view.
A volcanic eruption for example is simply a natural part of the earths cooling process and if the earth didn’t have a cooling process then we would never have existed in the first place. God couldn’t just step in and halt the earths cooling process without making his presence known to us one way or another. He can’t do that because that would impinge on our free will.
Harries phrased it much better than I did but that’s the basic gist of his argument.
Who chose to create the Universe to operate according to the particular laws of physics which provide for that natural cooling process? Who created the conditions which led to earth being in a hot state needing to cool? Obviously, God did (assuming for a second) and He could have chosen to do otherwise, correct?
You don’t think God had the power or the knowhow to create the Earth without needing a cooling process? Is the god of which you speak an omnipotent god? Sounds like he is not.
Please explain how that would impinge on our free will.
Are you implying that “free will” requires “lack of knowledge,” and that if we have better knowledge of reality (including of God’s existence and divine will), we have less free will? I don’t see that. Please explain.
You see the problem with that, don’t you? If I murder someone, I can’t just say to the victim’s friends and family, “You know, your point of view isn’t the only point of view. From my point of view, things aren’t as bad as they look. In fact, they are down right good.” I can’t say that, can I?
If I caused an earthquake intentionally or knowingly, and if I did so unnecessarily, leading to a hundred thousand of deaths of men, women, children and unborn, would my actions be sinful? Of course they would–there is no other point of view if you value human life and the 5th Commandment.
All natural deaths are unnecessary, since God could have designed the world a bit better if He’d wanted to – Remember, He is all-powerful so He could do it; He is all-knowing so He would know how to do it; and He is all-good, so He would do it assuming the protection of Human life is morally correct and assuming “good” means the same thing for God as it does for mankind).