arthurfish
what kind of life is that? not to be loved?
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To preface, I am NOT a Christian, I am NOT a theologian, and I am NOT a philosopher by any means. This is merely a passion project of sorts 
This is also my first ever attempt at a high-effort thread, so please forgive any suboptimal formatting.
@OrbitMax the thread I told you I was working on.
@AbnormalAfrican @Exodus71 thought you two might find this to be an interesting read.
If God is perfectly good, then why is there evil?
According to Christianity, sin (evil) was introduced into this world after the Fall. The Fall, as we all know, was caused by Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The choice to eat of the Tree was made with man's free will. I.e., we introduced evil into the world-- not God.
"But then why would God put the Tree there in the first place?"
Because to love God is to choose God + the choice for disobeying must be present in order for free will to exist. If God placed the Fruit in an unreachable tree, then humanity would never have the option to rebel. Technically it's there, but it's unobtainable. We must choose God on our own free volition. We cannot be forced into it.
Before proceeding further, I'd like to first define and establish some things.
God is maximally knowledgeable, meaning that God knows everything that is logically and metaphysically possible to know.
God is maximally powerful, meaning that He cannot create a stone so heavy He can't lift it.
God is maximally good, meaning that His goodness can still allow for punishment, trials, eternal damnation, etc.
In short, God is perfect in all His attributes.
For simplicity's sake, we'll be referring to these attributes as: omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.
As put by Anselm of Canterbury, God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.
What is evil? Evil is defined by Saint Thomas Aquinas as the privation of good. That is, evil is the lack of goodness; it is not something of its own.
What is hell? Hell is the total disconnect from God; the source of all goodness.
With those definitions established, I'd like to get into some of the problems and objections.
If God is all-powerful and all-good, why doesn't He just end these evils?
The typical argument goes like this: "He either can't (not all-powerful), doesn't know how (not all-knowing) or doesn't want to (not all-good). However, the trap lies in the lattermost assertion. God not wanting to end all these evils does not necessitate Him to not be all-good. There are a variety of reasons God might not want to end these evils (for now), with one of the main ones being free will. If God intervened every time someone was about to commit an evil (say, murder), free will would effectively become obsolete.
Another reason God might not end evil (immediately) is the butterfly effect. God is all-knowing, which means He knows the past, present, and future. What seems like senseless, gratuitous evil to our limited minds can very well be a necessary event that prevents a much worse evil, or brings about a massive good, later down the line. Take going to the dentist as a kid for example. As a child, you likely thought that it was nothing more than needless discomfort and pain being inflicted upon you. You didn't understand why your parents, who supposedly loved you, would take you to such an awful place. Now, as you have matured, you can see why your parents allowed you to go through that temporary discomfort, and perhaps now you're even thankful to them. God, according to many Christian theologians, works in much the same way. What looks like senseless suffering to our limited minds may be a necessary piece of a much larger puzzle that we are blind to.
Natural Evil(s)
This is perhaps one of the stronger and more difficult-to-answer versions of this argument, so I'll be approaching this from a few different angles. The first one being that suffering is not necessarily evil. As Richard Swinburne puts it, "Pains and sufferings are bad states of affairs, but it is odd to call them evil." Allow me to elaborate on what he means by this. Take working out for example. Working out causes discomfort, pain, and suffering. However, one would not claim that therefore working out is evil. We're much more likely to call it conducive, healthy, good, etc. It is instrumental. If we are to accept that suffering under certain circumstances isn't always bad or evil, but rather instrumental, then we must acknowledge that it is not necessarily or intrinsically evil for God to let suffering occur. It may very well be conducive to something greater.
"Well, what about things like tornadoes?"
Firstly and obviously, tornadoes are not evil as they are not moral agents. Rather, we might call tornadoes evil because of what they leave in their wake (destruction, death, torn communities, etc). I, along with many other philosophers, would say that tornadoes are the consequence of living in a predictable universe governed by physics, and though any death they cause is tragic, it is not "evil" per se. It is bad, but not evil. And, as we've established earlier, badness does not equal evil. An inevitable tornado resulting in human death might serve the greater purpose of bringing communities together, getting people to help and love one another, to support each other, etc. In other words, God may have permitted for a tornado to take lives if it served to bring about a much greater virtue.
God, as author of all life, holds the right to take it and allow for it to be taken as He sees fit according to His infinite wisdom. We should not, however, mistakenly conflate God allowing for something to happen and that being His will. God allowing for a tornado to take lives does not mean He willed it, it means He permitted it within this much more elaborate physical world. Take His own death in Christ Jesus for example. Though His death was a great tragedy, it ultimately served the highest possible good of bridging the gap between man and God.
Another objection I'd like to raise is to the wording of it. I don't believe "natural evil" is the best phrasing to describe this. A storm on Saturn isn't evil, smallpox being observed in a lab is not evil. In my opinion, this is better described as chaos. Chaos causing suffering which would not have been present in Eden. We are experiencing a disordered, flawed, chaotic world outside of Eden because of our decision to abandon God's plan. One might object by saying that they were only born into this world and that they had no say in what Adam and Eve chose. We did not all decide to make Adam and Eve the representatives of the human race. This, however, doesn't matter. Or at least not in the way you might think it does. God knows, in his perfect wisdom, who can best represent us, and if God knew that all of us would have acted in the same way, then He does no wrong in choosing one person to represent us all. You, too, would have eaten from the Tree.
On animal suffering, a continuation of natural evil(s)
Unfortunately, the answer to this is really simple. It doesn't matter. Animal suffering does not matter; it lacks moral value. Saint Thomas Aquinas would say that, because animals only possess a sensitive soul (I.e., mortal, non-rational), their suffering carries no eternal or moral weight the same way human suffering does. Aquinas would argue that animals exist primarily for human use, which is why it is morally permissible to eat animal meats, slaughter, etc.
"Would that then mean that inflicting needless pain on animals is not objectively morally reprehensible?"
Short answer, yes. That is the case. However, the more elaborate answer is as follows: Aquinas thought animal cruelty was worrisome because of what it indicated about the individual inflicting that cruelty. He thought that animal cruelty shouldn't be exercised because it hardens people and makes them more likely to act cruelly to humans and because it can drive people away from pity and tenderness that is to be shown to your fellow man. In other words, animal cruelty was concerning to Aquinas because of what it does to the human soul, not because animals have any inherent worth. It is my personal opinion that if Aquinas were alive today with the information we have about people who inflict needless cruelty to animals, he would be more ready to condemn the action. He would not, however, suddenly grant animals intrinsic moral rights or rational souls equivalent to humans.
If God is all-loving and perfectly just, how can He condemn people to eternal damnation?
I'd like to offer two responses to this objection, with the first being magnitude and due punishment. Imagine this, for instance. Say you punch a stranger on the street. Obviously this'll land you in trouble (fines, a night in jail, a misdemeanor record, etc) but it is generally not viewed as sufficient for a heftier sentence. Now imagine you punch the police officer who's arresting you. Well now you just assaulted law enforcement, which is objectively worse than assaulting a civilian. Having assaulted someone with a higher level of authority, your punishment now grows as well. Now say, while you're in court, you assault the judge. Well now you've really fucked up, because that's magnitudes of times worse. What I'm saying is that your punishment increases with the higher level of authority of the people you're assaulting. Now let's take this all the way up to God; an eternal, perfectly just, perfectly loving being. You have assaulted this infinite being, thus your punishment must also be infinite in nature.
The second argument is an argument from free will. As you may recall earlier in the definitions, I defined hell as the total disconnect from God; goodness itself. If you are damned to hell, God technically did nothing other than respect your free will decision to be separate from Him. In the Christian view, rejecting God is essentially the same thing as choosing hell. God cannot force us into something we, as agents of free will, didn't want. You might think that what makes hell torturous is the fire, the darkness, the weeping, etc., but that isn't entirely the case. Hell is a place totally devoid of any of God's attributes. Though premarital sex is a sin, the act feels good because it is a corruption of something good. However, in hell, even sex wouldn't feel good because the experience of goodness is from God, and in hell, nothing of God is present.
What makes you think you don't deserve all the evils, punishments, and trials you face?
According to the Christian worldview, you are far from flawless. In fact, you are so flawed, God in Jesus had to be tortured to death for you. Every misfortune, pain, ache, or evil you have experienced, is fully justified, as you have sinned against an infinite, almighty, all-good God. The pains you receive now are nowhere near what you actually deserve for all you have done wrong. According to the Christian view, you belong in the deepest pits of hell at once. Even the most holy of saints deserved hell, so what makes you think you're exempt? You didn't 'not deserve it,' you didn't 'not do anything,' you have trespassed against goodness itself. Ultimately, the fact that the earth beneath you hasn't opened up and swallowed you whole is a testament to God's love, compassion, and patience.
The absurdity of Christianity, a final hope
Though we do deserve the highest possible punishment, that is not the end of the story. At its core, the Gospels are a love story about how God loved humanity so, that He took the punishment upon Himself and died on a cross for us. All humans, to some extent, desire to be loved. It is why we seem so captivated by love stories, movies, and books. It is why we do things to be more lovable and why we yearn for our own special person. To non-Christian critics, God having to die for us may seem absurd. "God had to die because of rules He established." However, they are making this criticism from a purely rational perspective. They are not accounting for love. To a purely rational AI, love may seem strange, irrational, or otherwise suboptimal.
As the saying goes, "Love makes you do crazy things." Oftentimes, falling in love is the least pragmatic thing we can do, yet we cannot help it. Love makes you dedicate time, energy, resources, and mental space. Love makes you dependent and vulnerable. When we are drunk with love, we often cannot explain why we do the things that we do. We cannot explain why we spend money and time trying to impress the woman who is special to us. When we are outside of that love story, we might scoff at it, call it stupid or silly, but when we are in it, nothing has ever felt more right and you act in ways you never thought you would.
Christianity, in a sense, is the ultimate love story. The ultimate love story about how the creator of the universe took all your punishment upon Himself because He couldn't imagine an afterlife without you in it. And perhaps this is the reason Christianity has prevailed even through the darkest periods in history, through persecution and when all hope seemed lost.
This is also my first ever attempt at a high-effort thread, so please forgive any suboptimal formatting.@OrbitMax the thread I told you I was working on.
@AbnormalAfrican @Exodus71 thought you two might find this to be an interesting read.
If God is perfectly good, then why is there evil?
According to Christianity, sin (evil) was introduced into this world after the Fall. The Fall, as we all know, was caused by Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. The choice to eat of the Tree was made with man's free will. I.e., we introduced evil into the world-- not God.
"But then why would God put the Tree there in the first place?"
Because to love God is to choose God + the choice for disobeying must be present in order for free will to exist. If God placed the Fruit in an unreachable tree, then humanity would never have the option to rebel. Technically it's there, but it's unobtainable. We must choose God on our own free volition. We cannot be forced into it.
Before proceeding further, I'd like to first define and establish some things.
God is maximally knowledgeable, meaning that God knows everything that is logically and metaphysically possible to know.
God is maximally powerful, meaning that He cannot create a stone so heavy He can't lift it.
God is maximally good, meaning that His goodness can still allow for punishment, trials, eternal damnation, etc.
In short, God is perfect in all His attributes.
For simplicity's sake, we'll be referring to these attributes as: omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.
As put by Anselm of Canterbury, God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.
What is evil? Evil is defined by Saint Thomas Aquinas as the privation of good. That is, evil is the lack of goodness; it is not something of its own.
What is hell? Hell is the total disconnect from God; the source of all goodness.
With those definitions established, I'd like to get into some of the problems and objections.
If God is all-powerful and all-good, why doesn't He just end these evils?
The typical argument goes like this: "He either can't (not all-powerful), doesn't know how (not all-knowing) or doesn't want to (not all-good). However, the trap lies in the lattermost assertion. God not wanting to end all these evils does not necessitate Him to not be all-good. There are a variety of reasons God might not want to end these evils (for now), with one of the main ones being free will. If God intervened every time someone was about to commit an evil (say, murder), free will would effectively become obsolete.
Another reason God might not end evil (immediately) is the butterfly effect. God is all-knowing, which means He knows the past, present, and future. What seems like senseless, gratuitous evil to our limited minds can very well be a necessary event that prevents a much worse evil, or brings about a massive good, later down the line. Take going to the dentist as a kid for example. As a child, you likely thought that it was nothing more than needless discomfort and pain being inflicted upon you. You didn't understand why your parents, who supposedly loved you, would take you to such an awful place. Now, as you have matured, you can see why your parents allowed you to go through that temporary discomfort, and perhaps now you're even thankful to them. God, according to many Christian theologians, works in much the same way. What looks like senseless suffering to our limited minds may be a necessary piece of a much larger puzzle that we are blind to.
Natural Evil(s)
This is perhaps one of the stronger and more difficult-to-answer versions of this argument, so I'll be approaching this from a few different angles. The first one being that suffering is not necessarily evil. As Richard Swinburne puts it, "Pains and sufferings are bad states of affairs, but it is odd to call them evil." Allow me to elaborate on what he means by this. Take working out for example. Working out causes discomfort, pain, and suffering. However, one would not claim that therefore working out is evil. We're much more likely to call it conducive, healthy, good, etc. It is instrumental. If we are to accept that suffering under certain circumstances isn't always bad or evil, but rather instrumental, then we must acknowledge that it is not necessarily or intrinsically evil for God to let suffering occur. It may very well be conducive to something greater.
"Well, what about things like tornadoes?"
Firstly and obviously, tornadoes are not evil as they are not moral agents. Rather, we might call tornadoes evil because of what they leave in their wake (destruction, death, torn communities, etc). I, along with many other philosophers, would say that tornadoes are the consequence of living in a predictable universe governed by physics, and though any death they cause is tragic, it is not "evil" per se. It is bad, but not evil. And, as we've established earlier, badness does not equal evil. An inevitable tornado resulting in human death might serve the greater purpose of bringing communities together, getting people to help and love one another, to support each other, etc. In other words, God may have permitted for a tornado to take lives if it served to bring about a much greater virtue.
God, as author of all life, holds the right to take it and allow for it to be taken as He sees fit according to His infinite wisdom. We should not, however, mistakenly conflate God allowing for something to happen and that being His will. God allowing for a tornado to take lives does not mean He willed it, it means He permitted it within this much more elaborate physical world. Take His own death in Christ Jesus for example. Though His death was a great tragedy, it ultimately served the highest possible good of bridging the gap between man and God.
Another objection I'd like to raise is to the wording of it. I don't believe "natural evil" is the best phrasing to describe this. A storm on Saturn isn't evil, smallpox being observed in a lab is not evil. In my opinion, this is better described as chaos. Chaos causing suffering which would not have been present in Eden. We are experiencing a disordered, flawed, chaotic world outside of Eden because of our decision to abandon God's plan. One might object by saying that they were only born into this world and that they had no say in what Adam and Eve chose. We did not all decide to make Adam and Eve the representatives of the human race. This, however, doesn't matter. Or at least not in the way you might think it does. God knows, in his perfect wisdom, who can best represent us, and if God knew that all of us would have acted in the same way, then He does no wrong in choosing one person to represent us all. You, too, would have eaten from the Tree.
On animal suffering, a continuation of natural evil(s)
Unfortunately, the answer to this is really simple. It doesn't matter. Animal suffering does not matter; it lacks moral value. Saint Thomas Aquinas would say that, because animals only possess a sensitive soul (I.e., mortal, non-rational), their suffering carries no eternal or moral weight the same way human suffering does. Aquinas would argue that animals exist primarily for human use, which is why it is morally permissible to eat animal meats, slaughter, etc.
"Would that then mean that inflicting needless pain on animals is not objectively morally reprehensible?"
Short answer, yes. That is the case. However, the more elaborate answer is as follows: Aquinas thought animal cruelty was worrisome because of what it indicated about the individual inflicting that cruelty. He thought that animal cruelty shouldn't be exercised because it hardens people and makes them more likely to act cruelly to humans and because it can drive people away from pity and tenderness that is to be shown to your fellow man. In other words, animal cruelty was concerning to Aquinas because of what it does to the human soul, not because animals have any inherent worth. It is my personal opinion that if Aquinas were alive today with the information we have about people who inflict needless cruelty to animals, he would be more ready to condemn the action. He would not, however, suddenly grant animals intrinsic moral rights or rational souls equivalent to humans.
If God is all-loving and perfectly just, how can He condemn people to eternal damnation?
I'd like to offer two responses to this objection, with the first being magnitude and due punishment. Imagine this, for instance. Say you punch a stranger on the street. Obviously this'll land you in trouble (fines, a night in jail, a misdemeanor record, etc) but it is generally not viewed as sufficient for a heftier sentence. Now imagine you punch the police officer who's arresting you. Well now you just assaulted law enforcement, which is objectively worse than assaulting a civilian. Having assaulted someone with a higher level of authority, your punishment now grows as well. Now say, while you're in court, you assault the judge. Well now you've really fucked up, because that's magnitudes of times worse. What I'm saying is that your punishment increases with the higher level of authority of the people you're assaulting. Now let's take this all the way up to God; an eternal, perfectly just, perfectly loving being. You have assaulted this infinite being, thus your punishment must also be infinite in nature.
The second argument is an argument from free will. As you may recall earlier in the definitions, I defined hell as the total disconnect from God; goodness itself. If you are damned to hell, God technically did nothing other than respect your free will decision to be separate from Him. In the Christian view, rejecting God is essentially the same thing as choosing hell. God cannot force us into something we, as agents of free will, didn't want. You might think that what makes hell torturous is the fire, the darkness, the weeping, etc., but that isn't entirely the case. Hell is a place totally devoid of any of God's attributes. Though premarital sex is a sin, the act feels good because it is a corruption of something good. However, in hell, even sex wouldn't feel good because the experience of goodness is from God, and in hell, nothing of God is present.
What makes you think you don't deserve all the evils, punishments, and trials you face?
According to the Christian worldview, you are far from flawless. In fact, you are so flawed, God in Jesus had to be tortured to death for you. Every misfortune, pain, ache, or evil you have experienced, is fully justified, as you have sinned against an infinite, almighty, all-good God. The pains you receive now are nowhere near what you actually deserve for all you have done wrong. According to the Christian view, you belong in the deepest pits of hell at once. Even the most holy of saints deserved hell, so what makes you think you're exempt? You didn't 'not deserve it,' you didn't 'not do anything,' you have trespassed against goodness itself. Ultimately, the fact that the earth beneath you hasn't opened up and swallowed you whole is a testament to God's love, compassion, and patience.
The absurdity of Christianity, a final hope
Though we do deserve the highest possible punishment, that is not the end of the story. At its core, the Gospels are a love story about how God loved humanity so, that He took the punishment upon Himself and died on a cross for us. All humans, to some extent, desire to be loved. It is why we seem so captivated by love stories, movies, and books. It is why we do things to be more lovable and why we yearn for our own special person. To non-Christian critics, God having to die for us may seem absurd. "God had to die because of rules He established." However, they are making this criticism from a purely rational perspective. They are not accounting for love. To a purely rational AI, love may seem strange, irrational, or otherwise suboptimal.
As the saying goes, "Love makes you do crazy things." Oftentimes, falling in love is the least pragmatic thing we can do, yet we cannot help it. Love makes you dedicate time, energy, resources, and mental space. Love makes you dependent and vulnerable. When we are drunk with love, we often cannot explain why we do the things that we do. We cannot explain why we spend money and time trying to impress the woman who is special to us. When we are outside of that love story, we might scoff at it, call it stupid or silly, but when we are in it, nothing has ever felt more right and you act in ways you never thought you would.
Christianity, in a sense, is the ultimate love story. The ultimate love story about how the creator of the universe took all your punishment upon Himself because He couldn't imagine an afterlife without you in it. And perhaps this is the reason Christianity has prevailed even through the darkest periods in history, through persecution and when all hope seemed lost.
