The Problem of Evil (2015)

If you can get to the understanding that all of the outcomes in human thought and behavior are based on inputs of some level, be they genetic, or nurture, or through interaction with others or impacts from the natural environment, then it seem truly odd to believe in a concept like evil.

Just wanted to chime in here with a book suggestion : &quot;The Problem if Pain&quot; by C.S. Lewis.<p>Tackles this problem from a christian apologista perspective. Its about as intellectual an analysis as you are going to get on this subject matter. I personally don&#x27;t agree with 100% of it, but Lewis always presents arguments I never would have considered otherwise. Worth a read.<p>Also, listening to scientists and engineers discuss issues of morality (e.g. this comments section) is always a painful experience. The analytical mind is not often applied appropriately to matters of philosophy. At least thats my impression.

Just relative to the world that we live in now, I&#x27;m much less interested in traditional concepts of &#x27;good and evil&#x27; and much more interested in fanaticism. While there are certainly genuinely evil human beings out there, in my (maybe totally naive, I dunno) view, they are generally not very effective- more like low-level street criminals. Psychopathy is a real thing, but I think most of them lack the foresight and patience to achieve real positions of power.<p>On the other hand, fanaticism where the fanatic believes they&#x27;re good and their (political, racial&#x2F;ethnic or religious) opponents are evil seems like approximately one billion times more of a problem in modern human society. These are the people who hold actual positions of power at every level, in every country

It seems kind of presumptuous to think that God&#x27;s conception of morality would bear any similarity with ours. Presumably God created what It considers to be the perfect world and therefore everything that happens in it is good according to God&#x27;s own definition of goodness, including torturing babies (if and when it happens -- and when it doesn&#x27;t happen, then it is good that it doesn&#x27;t). Perhaps God never had any intention of telling any of Its creatures about the true nature of good and evil (what would be the point of that), so we&#x27;re just completely off base, with no way of knowing besides the evidence that evil can&#x27;t be what we think it is, because if it was, it wouldn&#x27;t exist.

&gt; How would one go about establishing via a purely deductive argument that a deer’s suffering a slow and painful death because of a forest fire, or a child’s undergo lingering suffering and eventual death due to cancer, is not logically necessary either to achieve a greater good or to avoid a greater evil?<p>Gods can&#x27;t make a square circle, even if they&#x27;re omnipotent? They could rewrite our brains to just make the words mean the same. Logic problem solved.<p>The more complex a situation, the more opportunity for this supposed omnipotent being.

Something that I find extremely disturbing about this entire discussion is the implicit assumption that there is only one god. Some religions assume that there are many gods, e.g. Hinduism and most African religions. Other religions do not really assume the existence of gods, e.g. Buddhism or Taoism. Of course all atheists believe that there are no gods at all.

This is how I see it. I’m actually open to a creator of our simulation or our reality simply because it’s the best explanation we have right now. Existence coming out of nothing is ridiculous. We really have no clue how we even got here. Maybe our existence could be proven scientifically down the line, but right now creation is actually the most feasible to my mind, strange enough.<p>So with that the problem of evil comes up and I gotta give it up to the late great Epicurus. And I quote:<p>“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”<p>The other stance you can have are God’s plan is unknowable to us. His mystical plan is not for us to know and grasp. Which is a huge leap of faith and so wishy washy I can’t bring myself to adopt it.

Yes but if Santa Claus exists, how can you explain the Easter bunny?