I saw this today:



What are your thoughts on good and evil?

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InterfaithForums.com-Where your ideas and beliefs count.

This is certainly something I've thought about for a long time, and it's one of the primary reasons for my lack of belief in anything like the God of the Abrahamic religions. David Hume wrote a good precis of the problem in "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion," in which he hearkens back to Epicurus (who seems to have thought of it first).

I have read much in the way of apologetics, and many arguments that seek to put this paradox to rest, but I must truthfully say that they all leave me unsatisfied. Nobody (that I can discover) has ever answered the question to my satisfaction.

(Of course, who's to say that God cares about my satisfaction? )

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evangelicalhumanist: Greek "eu"=good and "angelos"=messenger. Spreading the good news of Humanism.

If one is polytheistic, good and evil may be quite easy to explain-- good things happen when the good deities are in charge and bad things happen when the bad deities have their way. But good and evil with monotheism becomes more of a challenge.

From a monotheistic viewpoint, God made both good and evil when He made good. IOW, "evil" is created when "good" is created. Then what becomes necessarily is "free will", because if one believes in predestination, then one has to believe that God made some people to be evil, which would be illogical if God demands goodness. Therefore, free will allows people to choose between good and evil.

But there's still a problem: if God made all and is viewed to be omniscient, how could He make all and not be responsible for all the actions of everyone even if there is supposedly "free will"? IOW, how could God's creation operate by chance if He's omniscient and He made everything?

To me, it creates a dilemma that I cannot answer with any certainty of being correct.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

In my opinion, to solve the Epicurian problem of evil and retain a good deity, all you really have to do is postulate a deity who is not omnipotent. If a god does not have 100% of the power, it can't be held responsible for 100% of the goings-on in the universe.

Tossing out the omnipotence factor also goes a long way towards resolving the free-will problem... Assuming that free will is not just an illusion, that is.

Exactly what is the problem with God choosing to make a world in which chance is an operative vector?

Who determines what the good deities are and the bad deities?

.........OR, evil cannot exist.

Because if God is viewed as being both omniscient and omnipotent, where's there room for "chance"? Either God made everything and would know exactly what would happen or He didn't. But if we eliminate either of those qualities as being attributes of God, then there's a logical possibility for chance. Essentially what I've done here is to give you just part of both Spinoza's and Einstein's arguments.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Good point, especially if we hypothetically look at it from the deitys' points of view. IOW, the "evil" deity would think he is doing "good" by doing what he's doing.

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Surely the logic lies in God's choice? Spinoza and Einstein seem to be suggesting that God is bound by some of his attributes in contradistinction to other attributes. As if his will, his love, and his freedom were not also relevant attributes. Why would his attributes of omnipotence and/or omniscience override his will to create a universe in which some events/choices happen randomly or by the free choice of other agents? Why would a being who could foresee (and therefore not be surprised by) every event that could happen, be deemed less omniscient than one who foresaw everything that would happen?

It seems to me that arguing as they do from omnipotence/omniscience turns God into a slave of his own creation instead of an active agent in creation. IOW it actually demeans God by taking away his sovereignty.