As many of you probably already know, I am an atheist. Now I know we were debating God's existence in the "Religion=Bad or Good?" thread. Interestingly enough, however, no one brought up the problem of evil during the debate.
When I first became atheist, I generally didn't give much of a crap about the problem of evil. I just rejected the idea of God from the standpoint that he was logically unnecessary. However, lately, reading up on some arguments for the existence of God, I have come to the conclusion that, though not the only proof against God's existence, the problem of evil is probably the strongest argument for atheism we have.
For those of you not familiar with it, here's how the argument goes:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is omnibenevolent.
3. Evil exists in the world.
4. If God is willing to end evil but unable to do it, then he's not omnipotent.
5. If God is able to end evil but unwilling to do it, then he's not omnibenevolent.
6. Therefore one of the first two premises is false.
Now, the usual Christian rebuttal is to say that God gives humans the gift of free will. He did this because he wanted something to love, and you can't love puppets. Thus, evil is caused by the bad decisions of humans caused by their possession of free will.
However, I believe this argument is flawed. First of all, if God really wanted to avoid evil he could have made humans a lot less inclined toward it. He could have created humans so that they instinctively hate evil and like good. But that would violate free will, you say. Not really. After all, people in general do possess certain preferences and inclinations. All mentally sound humans hate pain, for example. According to a conservative Christian worldview, humans possess a definite inclination towards evil (Original Sin). Why would God incline them towards evil?
Also, we have to keep in mind that this is God we're talking about. God
created the rules of logic. Therefore, he could have easily created a different form of logic than the one we use, i.e. one that would both allow free will and not allow evil. But he didn't.
Also, by saying God gave humans free will, one is implying that God did not create everything, in which case he would not be God. After all, humans, given free will, created the concept of evil. Anotherwords:
1. God created everything.
2. Evil is a thing.
3. Therefore, God created evil, or else premise #1 is false.
The problem of evil is actually sometimes stated in this alternate way.
So, any of the theists on the board have a response to this?
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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: IcyMonkey on 2002-11-08 14:35 ]</font>