There is Too Much Evil and Suffering For God to Exist?
The atheists' logical argument
What
I have found is that atheists like to say that their arguments against
God's existence specifically exclude the God of the Bible as a God who
could exist.
However, in reality, atheists produce generic arguments
against a generic God whose characteristics and creation do not match
those that are described in the Bible.
Atheists may not accept what the
Bible says, but they cannot say the God of the Bible cannot logically
exist and then ignore what the Bible has to say about the
characteristics of God.
If the atheist states that the God of the Bible
is logically impossible, he cannot pick and choose which arguments from
the Bible to accept in order to "prove" his point.
Let's formalize the
atheist's arguments:
God is all-powerful, loving, and perfect.
A perfect, loving God would create a universe that was perfect (e.g., no evil and suffering).
The universe is not perfect but contains evil and suffering.Therefore, God does not exist.
The argument is better phrased in a probabilistic way:
ReplyDeleteGod is omnipotent and therefore capable of preventing suffering.
There exists massive gratuitous suffering, not required to support free will, such as early childhood cancer.
It is evil to allow gratuitous suffering if one has the power to prevent it.
Therefore, from what we know, it is more reasonable to assume that a good God does not exist.
To defeat the second last premise, you could say it is not for humans to decide what is evil and not, and that allowing gratuitous suffering is not necessarily bad. However, you would have to introduce embarrassingly contrived reasons like God has a reason to give children cancer, but wilfully hides these reasons from us. If a human were to do this - allow gratuitous suffering without revealing why, but possibly having a hidden justification - we would assume that person was behaving wickedly until we were provided that answer. Granting God that license would betray a logical bias.