That’s a phrase that I heard recently, and I think that it’s from some famous philosopher, but uhm…
I don’t know how to debunk it.
I’m doing my best to believe without thinking too much about that.
Some days it gets hard tho, so I’d like to hear you guys’ take on it.
There’s no devil causing evil. There’s only us, flawed as we are.
And what God can do and what God will do are not the same.
What about all those non-human evils like earthquakes, tornadoes, droughts, tsunamis, wildfires, parasites and disease? They cause immense suffering and death, even of innocents such as the newly-born.
If god can stop these, why won’t he?
(Edit: misspelling)
If he can and doesn’t he’s evil; if he can’t he’s not all powerful. Lucky for you he doesn’t exist.
Sad things, tragedy, and death are not the same as evil.
Without answering the question here, just wanted to point out that it’s a different question, so don’t try to apply the answers to one question to the other question.
You’re talking about ‘the problem of suffering’ not ‘the problem of evil’
yeah it’s not even a Christianity point to make. Who are we to condemn the happenings of Earth and it’s inhabitants just because it can harm humans? We are not above our planet.
Agreed.
Evil is a moral judgement describing a motive or agent (in the sense of something with agency, something that causes something to happen). Sad things, tragedy and death are not in and of themselves evil, they are the result of evil.
When a person does things that directly cause immense suffering on purpose, we can say the evil came from a human.
Now on to god. God is normally ascribed the properties of omniscience, omnipotence and all omnibenevolence. In addition God caused the universe to come into being.
As he is omniscient he knew the world he created would cause untold suffering and so either he is not omnipotent (i e. Could not create a world without suffering) or omnibenevolent (i.e. is fine with a world where the innocent suffers. (The comments have several versions of this argument done better than I could).
If we argue that it’s impossible to create a world without suffering, then what is heaven?
No, I’m highlighting the real problem of evil - that it seems inherent to the world that an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent created.
Ah, now we’re shifting into the ancient Greek idea of “evil”: what is harmful, rather than what is immoral.
But to actually answer your question, I don’t remember anything in the Bible about God being omnibenevolent. That seems to have been added to Christian doctrine by later religious philosophers.
That said, I just don’t know. And I’m alright with not knowing, because it’s that or be tortured by something outside my control.
These properties were indeed added but it was by the church fathers very early in church history when christianity was very different in belief and form compared with today.
At this time the early church interacted with greek and roman ideas to create a new religion to differentiate it from Judaism from which it was born - you can see some of this debate in the new testament between the traditional jewish pov (such as in Matthew in the sermon on the mount) and different laws for non-jews such as circumcision not being needed in Paul’s letters.
In exactly the same way, it’s impossible to find the doctrine of the trinity in the bible. And yet the trinity is declared in the nicene creed and is the keystone to christian identity
Funnily enough, I’m also a unitarian. Unitarianism (the denomination) was pretty popular until the middle of the last century when it was mostly absorbed into Unitarian Universalism, and other denominations (eg. Jehovah’s Witness) are still unitarian, so I wouldn’t call it a “keystone”.
Following the example of Christ is a keystone. True repentance is a keystone. Professing the Gospel is a keystone.
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