If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, then why is there unnecessary evil—so much unnecessary pain and suffering? Reason and commitment to intellectual integrity demand that we confront this challenging question.
An interesting thought although I think we make the mistake of assuming that our concept of good and evil is the same as the way God thinks of it. Maybe God doesn’t make such a distinction between good and evil like we do, in part because they actually see everything whereas we don’t. While I’m agnostic as to the existence of God, I have given a fair amount of thought to their existence. It’s perhaps hubristic of us to think we can know the mind of God.
Perhaps God is all good and has a reason why they allow the devil to do the things that they do. We just don’t know what it is. Doesn’t mean we’re powerless to do anything and shouldn’t try to stop evil from coming about.
Thanks for the read and comment! For clarification, my post isn't claiming God doesn't exist. I'm just relaxing a classic problem within philosophy do religion. But the solution can't be that God is incomprehensible. If God were not knowable then we'd have no cause for believing God exists let alone coming up with reasons God might permit evil despite being perfectly good. A truly unknowable God becomes about the same as no God. But if God does exist and if the God is good by the most elementary notion of goodness, then we do indeed have a problem as believing theologians have long recognized. After all an omnipotent God could easily overcome any ordinary hurdles to producing a utopia. All that would be a limit upon their ability is logical possibility (what is unimaginable like a four-sided triangle, which is by definition three-sided).
Oh I know you weren’t saying God doesn’t exist. I was more putting forward my own view as I can imagine some people might interpret my assertions as that of a religious person’s defence of God.
I wasn’t necessarily saying that God is unknowable. Only that in the same way you and I can’t read the minds of other human beings, we shouldn’t think that we can read the mind of God. Which doesn’t necessarily assert that God is unknowable, only that we may be applying our own beliefs onto God in the same way that we do things like project a human’s views of the world onto dogs.
One of my favourite examples of this is the show Lucifer, which is about the devil deciding that he doesn’t want to rule hell anymore because it’s part of God’s plan. But what he comes to understand that even his quitting hell was part of God’s plan all along, as was his original rebellion that created hell in the first place. Lucifer thought that he could defy God but defiance is what God wants or is planned for by God.
So we may not understand why God allows for the existence of the devil or evil but it might not be because he’s not all good or all powerful. He may be both of those things. It’s just that our limited understanding of why he allows these things to happen restricts our ability to understand. Not because we can’t know him, but because we’re only able to see small parts of it. Which doesn’t mean that our small part isn’t a valid understanding of what God thinks. It’s just incomplete.
An interesting thought although I think we make the mistake of assuming that our concept of good and evil is the same as the way God thinks of it. Maybe God doesn’t make such a distinction between good and evil like we do, in part because they actually see everything whereas we don’t. While I’m agnostic as to the existence of God, I have given a fair amount of thought to their existence. It’s perhaps hubristic of us to think we can know the mind of God.
Perhaps God is all good and has a reason why they allow the devil to do the things that they do. We just don’t know what it is. Doesn’t mean we’re powerless to do anything and shouldn’t try to stop evil from coming about.
Thanks for the read and comment! For clarification, my post isn't claiming God doesn't exist. I'm just relaxing a classic problem within philosophy do religion. But the solution can't be that God is incomprehensible. If God were not knowable then we'd have no cause for believing God exists let alone coming up with reasons God might permit evil despite being perfectly good. A truly unknowable God becomes about the same as no God. But if God does exist and if the God is good by the most elementary notion of goodness, then we do indeed have a problem as believing theologians have long recognized. After all an omnipotent God could easily overcome any ordinary hurdles to producing a utopia. All that would be a limit upon their ability is logical possibility (what is unimaginable like a four-sided triangle, which is by definition three-sided).
Oh I know you weren’t saying God doesn’t exist. I was more putting forward my own view as I can imagine some people might interpret my assertions as that of a religious person’s defence of God.
I wasn’t necessarily saying that God is unknowable. Only that in the same way you and I can’t read the minds of other human beings, we shouldn’t think that we can read the mind of God. Which doesn’t necessarily assert that God is unknowable, only that we may be applying our own beliefs onto God in the same way that we do things like project a human’s views of the world onto dogs.
One of my favourite examples of this is the show Lucifer, which is about the devil deciding that he doesn’t want to rule hell anymore because it’s part of God’s plan. But what he comes to understand that even his quitting hell was part of God’s plan all along, as was his original rebellion that created hell in the first place. Lucifer thought that he could defy God but defiance is what God wants or is planned for by God.
So we may not understand why God allows for the existence of the devil or evil but it might not be because he’s not all good or all powerful. He may be both of those things. It’s just that our limited understanding of why he allows these things to happen restricts our ability to understand. Not because we can’t know him, but because we’re only able to see small parts of it. Which doesn’t mean that our small part isn’t a valid understanding of what God thinks. It’s just incomplete.