War, what is it good for?

[Jamiet99uk]

Out of curiosity, would you prefer to live in a universe where there was no suffering and no evil, if it meant that nothing you ever did would have any consequence and love and joy were mere shadows of what now exists?

Yes.

Ah, then we have identified the chief reason for our disagreement. What you find preferable I find abhorrent and repulsive to the extent that I would willingly die to prevent it. This has been quite enlightening, but does suggest a zero chance of us ever coming close to agreement

You would willingly die to ensure the promotion of suffering in the universe. Got it.

[Jamiet99uk]

Out of curiosity, would you prefer to live in a universe where there was no suffering and no evil, if it meant that nothing you ever did would have any consequence and love and joy were mere shadows of what now exists?

Yes.

It wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't provide God opportunity to show love in the same way that a creation where choices have consequences does.

You don't get it, do you?

I don't think God is real, so your words mean nothing to me.

[Octavious]

Yes.

Ah, then we have identified the chief reason for our disagreement. What you find preferable I find abhorrent and repulsive to the extent that I would willingly die to prevent it. This has been quite enlightening, but does suggest a zero chance of us ever coming close to agreement

You would willingly die to ensure the promotion of suffering in the universe. Got it.

Nope, you really don't get it at all. That you have made very clear

[Jamiet99uk]

Ah, then we have identified the chief reason for our disagreement. What you find preferable I find abhorrent and repulsive to the extent that I would willingly die to prevent it. This has been quite enlightening, but does suggest a zero chance of us ever coming close to agreement

You would willingly die to ensure the promotion of suffering in the universe. Got it.

Nope, you really don't get it at all. That you have made very clear

You literally said you would willingly die to prevent the existence of a universe where there was no suffering and no evil.

I've had a chat with my mate Satan about this, and he thinks you're a weirdo.

[Octavious]

Nope, I literally said I would willingly die to prevent your nightmare vision of humanity constrained by cosmic straightjackets

[Jamiet99uk]

Nope, I literally said I would willingly die to prevent your nightmare vision of humanity constrained by cosmic straightjackets

You think it is very important that children should catch diseases. You think a world in which children did not suffer disease would be nightmarish.

[Jamiet99uk]

Our difference, as I see it, is that I would choose* to minimise human suffering, even if this limits the extent of human pleasure, whereas you would like to maximise the possibility for pleasure, even if this also maximises the amount of suffering.

What a hedonist you are.


*Not that I can actually effect this choice - this is all a thought experiment.

[Octavious]

Our difference, as I see it, is that I would choose* to minimise human suffering, even if this limits the extent of human pleasure, whereas you would like to maximise the possibility for pleasure, even if this also maximises the amount of suffering.

What a hedonist you are.


*Not that I can actually effect this choice - this is all a thought experiment.

No, you're failing to understand completely. The only reason you are motivated to end suffering, which may well be a crucial part of what makes you you, is because suffering exists. Suffering is required if you wish to live in a universe that contains people who sacrifice their own pleasures to help others. Without suffering the best of you doesn't exist. Without suffering you are a far lesser man.

[CaptainFritz28]

Jamie, what he's asking is essentially this (if I understand correctly):
Would you rather:

A) Live in a universe in which nothing means anything and any "good" choices you make are neither good nor choices, meaning that there is no point to anything, and you cannot do good nor love nor have purpose.

Or

B) Live in a universe in which you have the choice to do good or evil, and when you do choose, your actions actually mean something. Thus, good and love exist, and can be done and felt by us. As a necessary consequence, evil is also possible, but any evil perpetrated will be brought to justice.

Basically, would you rather be nothing and have no purpose, and lack the ability to even comprehend the ideas of goodness and love, or be able to choose to do good or evil, and thus have meaning to your existence and the ability to do good and to love?

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

Our difference, as I see it, is that I would choose* to minimise human suffering, even if this limits the extent of human pleasure, whereas you would like to maximise the possibility for pleasure, even if this also maximises the amount of suffering.

What a hedonist you are.


*Not that I can actually effect this choice - this is all a thought experiment.

No, you're failing to understand completely. The only reason you are motivated to end suffering, which may well be a crucial part of what makes you you, is because suffering exists. Suffering is required if you wish to live in a universe that contains people who sacrifice their own pleasures to help others. Without suffering the best of you doesn't exist. Without suffering you are a far lesser man.

So in your view suffering has to exist for personal choices, morality, love, etc. to be meaningful. But how much suffering needs to exist for these things to matter? Why couldn't we get by with some smaller amount of suffering? We certainly suffer less today than most people did in the past. Would I be doing at least some good by burning down my neighbour's house, such that he would gain some better appreciation for life? What about by murdering his kids?

Is God actively fine tuning the amount of suffering in the universe to create some greater Good? If so, is the current state of affairs, as guided by God, the best of all possible universal trade-offs between granting human agency and preventing needless suffering?

Is there some level of human horribleness that God would intervene to stop? If a deranged Russian leader intended to suicidally unleash their entire nuclear arsenal on the world, would God intervene then? Is God's conception of allowing human free will so absolute that he/it would allow the moral choice of one person to cause the death of nearly everyone else?

Is some people's suffering (e.g., fatal illness in young children) instrumentally good as a means to allow others to feel more purposeful? If I get to heaven, should I thank Holocaust victims because their suffering demonstrated the power of human agency, made my moral choices feel more meaningful, etc.?

Maybe God refuses to control human actions, but isn't God the default agent for all agentless phenomena? Maybe the suffering caused by the Holocaust is allowed, because granting humans the ability to author this atrocity is essential for the rest of Human moral and spiritual life to be intelligible (I doubt this personally, but it's at least consistent). But then why does God cause all the extra suffering from floods, earthquakes, diseases, droughts, etc.? What about the evil caused by humans acting without free will (e.g., the criminally insane, those compelled to kill in war, bad things done by neglected children, etc.)?

What about all the God-caused harm in the Old Testament? What added good does being instructed by God to kill your son or to genocide your neighbours add to the universe?

Why does God both grant humans free will, but then set up an elaborate system of reward and punishment for their choices (e.g., flooding the entire earth)? Isn't the threat of Hell or promise of Heaven coercive on our free will?

How is the concept of free will even intelligible in a God-created and God-directed world? All my thoughts spring from the brain he designed interacting with the world he created. If I'm *obliged* to go to Five Guys for lunch, it's not my fault when I don't eat a salad. If I'm also told that "you can have pickles if you want, but God will punish you forever for eating them" then I don't feel especially free to add pickles to my burger.

Many things are impossible, so why couldn't God have added splitting atoms to create a bomb to that list, while leaving us some other choices to ponder? Surely God could have let us beat one another to death with sticks, without also creating a universe where weapons of mass destruction were possible.

[CaptainFritz28]

It is not that some amount of suffering must exist, but that the ability to choose evil must exist. It's not a matter of "Well, we didn't meet our yearly quota of suffering, so let's cause a massacre in the Middle East." Rather, it's a matter of the fact that you have the choice, and if you didn't have the choice you wouldn't have the option to do good, meaning good would not exist. It is better that the ability to do evil exist so that we may do good than it would be if neither evil nor good existed.

Oct also makes a good point about the fact that our own suffering allows us to better ourselves and our character, and gives us the ability to sacrifice for others and show them love.

Sometimes God does intervene to end suffering, referred to as providence. I don't know why God does some things and not others, but He has a reason for doing it. I'm not God, and neither are you, so why should we critize that which we don't understand, as if we were all-knowing and able to see the future?

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

It is not that some amount of suffering must exist, but that the ability to choose evil must exist. It's not a matter of "Well, we didn't meet our yearly quota of suffering, so let's cause a massacre in the Middle East." Rather, it's a matter of the fact that you have the choice, and if you didn't have the choice you wouldn't have the option to do good, meaning good would not exist. It is better that the ability to do evil exist so that we may do good than it would be if neither evil nor good existed.

Sometimes God does intervene to end suffering, referred to as providence. I don't know why God does some things and not others, but He has a reason for doing it. I'm not God, and neither are you, so why should we critize that which we don't understand, as if we were all-knowing and able to see the future?

I'm glad the conversation got to the point it always does when discussing the Problem of Evil: some suffering/evil is necessary in the name of choice, but we can't know how much, so believing Christians just needs to presume that God is doing a good job balancing choice and suffering in a way that's too complex for us to understand.

I would accept that as a plausible answer, but it's certainly a weak one in my opinion.

[CaptainFritz28]

Yes.

It wouldn't be the same. It wouldn't provide God opportunity to show love in the same way that a creation where choices have consequences does.

You don't get it, do you?

I don't think God is real, so your words mean nothing to me.

You also haven't given a reason not to believe in God, nor have you tried to explain your logic for it. You've claimed that God would be cruel, and thus He doesn't exist, but even if it were true that wouldn't be logical. You claim that God is not consistent with the universe, and yet you have not shown any reason why that would be. If God exists, and He created the universe, then He doesn't have to abide by its laws.

Put simply, you've made a bunch of claims without backing, and it makes me question what reason you have to claim that God doesn't exist. Your claims mean nothing because you have made them mean nothing, and thus I'll remain on the side that at least provides a purpose for our existence and an explanation of morality.

[CaptainFritz28]

It is not that some amount of suffering must exist, but that the ability to choose evil must exist. It's not a matter of "Well, we didn't meet our yearly quota of suffering, so let's cause a massacre in the Middle East." Rather, it's a matter of the fact that you have the choice, and if you didn't have the choice you wouldn't have the option to do good, meaning good would not exist. It is better that the ability to do evil exist so that we may do good than it would be if neither evil nor good existed.

Sometimes God does intervene to end suffering, referred to as providence. I don't know why God does some things and not others, but He has a reason for doing it. I'm not God, and neither are you, so why should we critize that which we don't understand, as if we were all-knowing and able to see the future?

I'm glad the conversation got to the point it always does when discussing the Problem of Evil: some suffering/evil is necessary in the name of choice, but we can't know how much, so believing Christians just needs to presume that God is doing a good job balancing choice and suffering in a way that's too complex for us to understand.

I would accept that as a plausible answer, but it's certainly a weak one in my opinion.

That would be a fairly weak answer.

I'm saying it has nothing to do with "how much."
If everyone chose to do good, but had the ability to choose evil, then there would be no suffering and good would still exist because we would still have the option. However, because we have free will, and because we naturally tend to want to disobey God, due to the fall, people choose to do evil.
It's not a numbers game or a balancing act. It's an individual's choice.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

It is not that some amount of suffering must exist, but that the ability to choose evil must exist. It's not a matter of "Well, we didn't meet our yearly quota of suffering, so let's cause a massacre in the Middle East." Rather, it's a matter of the fact that you have the choice, and if you didn't have the choice you wouldn't have the option to do good, meaning good would not exist. It is better that the ability to do evil exist so that we may do good than it would be if neither evil nor good existed.

Sometimes God does intervene to end suffering, referred to as providence. I don't know why God does some things and not others, but He has a reason for doing it. I'm not God, and neither are you, so why should we critize that which we don't understand, as if we were all-knowing and able to see the future?

I'm glad the conversation got to the point it always does when discussing the Problem of Evil: some suffering/evil is necessary in the name of choice, but we can't know how much, so believing Christians just needs to presume that God is doing a good job balancing choice and suffering in a way that's too complex for us to understand.

I would accept that as a plausible answer, but it's certainly a weak one in my opinion.

That would be a fairly weak answer.

I'm saying it has nothing to do with "how much."
If everyone chose to do good, but had the ability to choose evil, then there would be no suffering and good would still exist because we would still have the option. However, because we have free will, and because we naturally tend to want to disobey God, due to the fall, people choose to do evil.
It's not a numbers game or a balancing act. It's an individual's choice.

It's unfortunate you're not engaging with many of the points I wrote above that try to tease this out further. I'll try to restate below:

Some conceivable evil is impossible. God didn't make our punches as strong as nuclear bombs. So why didn't God also make some other types of existing evil impossible? Wouldn't we have enough choices whether or not to murder without, for example, also granting a very small subset of people the moral choice of whether or not to use an atomic weapon?

The answer is there is no answer. We can't know why God would do such a thing, unless it served some use in a broad plan we can't understand. Which is *an* answer, but not an especially good one.

[Octavious]

So in your view suffering has to exist for personal choices, morality, love, etc. to be meaningful. But how much suffering needs to exist for these things to matter? Why couldn't we get by with some smaller amount of suffering? We certainly suffer less today than most people did in the past. Would I be doing at least some good by burning down my neighbour's house, such that he would gain some better appreciation for life? What about by murdering his kids?

No. In my view suffering is an inevitable consequence of people having the capacity for personal choice, love etc. How much suffering exists depends upon the choices we make. So, to spell it out simply in some kind of logical order. God creates a universe in which we have the gift of personal choice. An inevitable consequence of this gift is the existence of suffering. Our actions impact the degree of suffering that people experience, and every one of us instinctively knows that it is right to try and minimise suffering. Therefore burning down houses and murdering kids would, fairly obviously, make you a twat of the highest order.

Is God actively fine tuning the amount of suffering in the universe to create some greater Good? If so, is the current state of affairs, as guided by God, the best of all possible universal trade-offs between granting human agency and preventing needless suffering?

Haven't the foggiest. My gut tells me that God tends to be largely hands off, with the chief method of influence being lending strength and encouragement to people in need of it.

Is there some level of human horribleness that God would intervene to stop? If a deranged Russian leader intended to suicidally unleash their entire nuclear arsenal on the world, would God intervene then? Is God's conception of allowing human free will so absolute that he/it would allow the moral choice of one person to cause the death of nearly everyone else?

Quite possibly. What does seem clear is that this is something we can happily discuss until the cows come home, but should never know. Which makes a lot of sense, as if people were confident there was a safety net before the bottom of the cliff they're far more likely to jump.

Maybe God refuses to control human actions, but isn't God the default agent for all agentless phenomena? Maybe the suffering caused by the Holocaust is allowed, because granting humans the ability to author this atrocity is essential for the rest of Human moral and spiritual life to be intelligible (I doubt this personally, but it's at least consistent). But then why does God cause all the extra suffering from floods, earthquakes, diseases, droughts, etc.? What about the evil caused by humans acting without free will (e.g., the criminally insane, those compelled to kill in war, bad things done by neglected children, etc.)?

There's nothing inherently evil about a flood. God has created a universe that works, that is full of wonders, and that can inspire. He has not created a universe that is safe.

What about all the God-caused harm in the Old Testament? What added go

The Old Testament are a collection of stories not unlike (and in many cases pretty much identical to) the ancient Greek myths. Treating them as a literal history of the actions of God won't get you anywhere. The Bible is a tool we have to navigate the mystery of existence, but by far the most important tool we have is our God given brain, and indeed God's communication to us (whatever form that happens to take)

Why does God both grant humans free will, but then set up an elaborate system of reward and punishment for their choices (e.g., flooding the entire earth)? Isn't the threat of Hell or promise of Heaven coercive on our free will?

There's no such elaborate system. Neither is there any obligation to believe in heaven or hell.

How is the concept of free will even intelligible in a God-created and God-directed world? All my thoughts spring from the brain he designed interacting with the world he created. If I'm *obliged* to go to Five Guys for lunch, it's not my fault when I don't eat a salad. If I'm also told that "you can have pickles if you want, but God will punish you forever for eating them" then I don't feel especially free to add pickles to my burger.

God's direction is to give us free will. God knows what the painting will look like, but we are the artists. Whether or not you eat salad is not God's doing, it is yours. You have a God given brain which will help you determine whether or not eating pickles is sinful and worthy of punishment. I suspect that even those of us most suspicious of pickles will not believe them to be evil.

Many things are impossible, so why couldn't God have added splitting atoms to create a bomb to that list, while leaving us some other choices to ponder? Surely God could have let us beat one another to death with sticks, without also creating a universe where weapons of mass destruction were possible.

I struggle to imagine any conceivable universe in which scientific advancement is possible where weapons of mass destruction aren't. Ultimately any form of intelligent life that can create space travel has the ability to wipe out life on a planet. A car is both means of transport and deadly weapon. The difference between a life saving drug and a deadly poison is merely a question of dosage.

[CaptainFritz28]

I'm glad the conversation got to the point it always does when discussing the Problem of Evil: some suffering/evil is necessary in the name of choice, but we can't know how much, so believing Christians just needs to presume that God is doing a good job balancing choice and suffering in a way that's too complex for us to understand.

I would accept that as a plausible answer, but it's certainly a weak one in my opinion.

That would be a fairly weak answer.

I'm saying it has nothing to do with "how much."
If everyone chose to do good, but had the ability to choose evil, then there would be no suffering and good would still exist because we would still have the option. However, because we have free will, and because we naturally tend to want to disobey God, due to the fall, people choose to do evil.
It's not a numbers game or a balancing act. It's an individual's choice.

It's unfortunate you're not engaging with many of the points I wrote above that try to tease this out further. I'll try to restate below:

Some conceivable evil is impossible. God didn't make our punches as strong as nuclear bombs. So why didn't God also make some other types of existing evil impossible? Wouldn't we have enough choices whether or not to murder without, for example, also granting a very small subset of people the moral choice of whether or not to use an atomic weapon?

The answer is there is no answer. We can't know why God would do such a thing, unless it served some use in a broad plan we can't understand. Which is *an* answer, but not an especially good one.

As I said in the other thread, I only have time for shorter responses, so I only responded to what I thought was the crux of your argument and your main point. I'm sorry if it seems I'm avoiding engaging with your other points.

In a way you are right - I don't know why God intervenes at some times and not others. As I already said, I'm not God, so I don't know the implications of each decision or actions on every individual at all times like God does. I stand by my assertion that it has nothing to do with a suffering-to-good ratio or a "how much" question, which would be a silly way of looking at it, but yes, we don't know the whole plan.

I'm sorry that my lack of omniscience is not a satisfying enough answer for you, I'll try to work on that. But this doesn't really serve as an argument against the existence of God or the truth of the Bible. Sure, we don't know why all suffering takes place. So? We know it will be brought to justice, and we know it serves a purpose. We know that there is a being that does know what that purpose is which is the same being which desires our good and sacrificed Himself to give us a path to eternal life. That's better than any other worldview gives us, at least from what I've seen.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

So in your view suffering has to exist for personal choices, morality, love, etc. to be meaningful. But how much suffering needs to exist for these things to matter? Why couldn't we get by with some smaller amount of suffering? We certainly suffer less today than most people did in the past. Would I be doing at least some good by burning down my neighbour's house, such that he would gain some better appreciation for life? What about by murdering his kids?

No. In my view suffering is an inevitable consequence of people having the capacity for personal choice, love etc. How much suffering exists depends upon the choices we make. So, to spell it out simply in some kind of logical order. God creates a universe in which we have the gift of personal choice. An inevitable consequence of this gift is the existence of suffering. Our actions impact the degree of suffering that people experience, and every one of us instinctively knows that it is right to try and minimise suffering. Therefore burning down houses and murdering kids would, fairly obviously, make you a twat of the highest order.

Is God actively fine tuning the amount of suffering in the universe to create some greater Good? If so, is the current state of affairs, as guided by God, the best of all possible universal trade-offs between granting human agency and preventing needless suffering?

Haven't the foggiest. My gut tells me that God tends to be largely hands off, with the chief method of influence being lending strength and encouragement to people in need of it.

Is there some level of human horribleness that God would intervene to stop? If a deranged Russian leader intended to suicidally unleash their entire nuclear arsenal on the world, would God intervene then? Is God's conception of allowing human free will so absolute that he/it would allow the moral choice of one person to cause the death of nearly everyone else?

Quite possibly. What does seem clear is that this is something we can happily discuss until the cows come home, but should never know. Which makes a lot of sense, as if people were confident there was a safety net before the bottom of the cliff they're far more likely to jump.

Maybe God refuses to control human actions, but isn't God the default agent for all agentless phenomena? Maybe the suffering caused by the Holocaust is allowed, because granting humans the ability to author this atrocity is essential for the rest of Human moral and spiritual life to be intelligible (I doubt this personally, but it's at least consistent). But then why does God cause all the extra suffering from floods, earthquakes, diseases, droughts, etc.? What about the evil caused by humans acting without free will (e.g., the criminally insane, those compelled to kill in war, bad things done by neglected children, etc.)?

There's nothing inherently evil about a flood. God has created a universe that works, that is full of wonders, and that can inspire. He has not created a universe that is safe.

What about all the God-caused harm in the Old Testament? What added go

The Old Testament are a collection of stories not unlike (and in many cases pretty much identical to) the ancient Greek myths. Treating them as a literal history of the actions of God won't get you anywhere. The Bible is a tool we have to navigate the mystery of existence, but by far the most important tool we have is our God given brain, and indeed God's communication to us (whatever form that happens to take)

Why does God both grant humans free will, but then set up an elaborate system of reward and punishment for their choices (e.g., flooding the entire earth)? Isn't the threat of Hell or promise of Heaven coercive on our free will?

There's no such elaborate system. Neither is there any obligation to believe in heaven or hell.

How is the concept of free will even intelligible in a God-created and God-directed world? All my thoughts spring from the brain he designed interacting with the world he created. If I'm *obliged* to go to Five Guys for lunch, it's not my fault when I don't eat a salad. If I'm also told that "you can have pickles if you want, but God will punish you forever for eating them" then I don't feel especially free to add pickles to my burger.

God's direction is to give us free will. God knows what the painting will look like, but we are the artists. Whether or not you eat salad is not God's doing, it is yours. You have a God given brain which will help you determine whether or not eating pickles is sinful and worthy of punishment. I suspect that even those of us most suspicious of pickles will not believe them to be evil.

Many things are impossible, so why couldn't God have added splitting atoms to create a bomb to that list, while leaving us some other choices to ponder? Surely God could have let us beat one another to death with sticks, without also creating a universe where weapons of mass destruction were possible.

I struggle to imagine any conceivable universe in which scientific advancement is possible where weapons of mass destruction aren't. Ultimately any form of intelligent life that can create space travel has the ability to wipe out life on a planet. A car is both means of transport and deadly weapon. The difference between a life saving drug and a deadly poison is merely a question of dosage.

Thanks for taking to the time to respond to each point, I found this insightful even though there's not much here I agree with.

I'm still hung up on the idea that God gave us choice, but then, by necessity, also constrains our choices by deciding what is possible. I have the moral choice to murder or not because I have a body and brain that are able to murder. But why didn't God give me fewer degrees of freedom (e.g., a body that can severely harm, but has a hard time killing), or more degrees of freedom (e.g., the ability to kill people with lasers from my eyes)? The first would reduce suffering, the second would increase moral choice, but here I sit with only somewhat murderous fists.

Put another way, I disagreed when you said "Whether or not you eat salad is not God's doing" in response to my metaphor about Five Guys. If God authored the menu and I can only eat at His divine restaurant, then I really don't get to pick something not on offer (i.e., to do something God has made impossible).

If God's domain is infinite, why couldn't it be the case that every weapon up to weapons of mass destruction is possible, but weapons of mass destruction are not. It seems profoundly strange and unfair that the right of very very very few humans to the moral choice of whether or not to use an atomic bomb has very little moral value for the rest of us.

I think the victims of a flood would disagree with you. A flood isn't inherently evil, but needless death and destruction seem to be. Maybe such events give us some gumption to live life to the fullest or whatever, but they don't give that benefit to the children they kill. And are floods, earthquakes, etc. really the best or only way to texture the world such that humans face meaningful choices / reflect on their morality?

I'm glad to hear you're happy to discard much of the Old Testament, the concepts of heaven and hell, and that you prioritize human reasoning re: morality. I suspect other Christians in these threads would disagree, but this version of Christianity seems a lot less problematic to an outside observer.

[Esquire Bertissimmo]

That would be a fairly weak answer.

I'm saying it has nothing to do with "how much."
If everyone chose to do good, but had the ability to choose evil, then there would be no suffering and good would still exist because we would still have the option. However, because we have free will, and because we naturally tend to want to disobey God, due to the fall, people choose to do evil.
It's not a numbers game or a balancing act. It's an individual's choice.

It's unfortunate you're not engaging with many of the points I wrote above that try to tease this out further. I'll try to restate below:

Some conceivable evil is impossible. God didn't make our punches as strong as nuclear bombs. So why didn't God also make some other types of existing evil impossible? Wouldn't we have enough choices whether or not to murder without, for example, also granting a very small subset of people the moral choice of whether or not to use an atomic weapon?

The answer is there is no answer. We can't know why God would do such a thing, unless it served some use in a broad plan we can't understand. Which is *an* answer, but not an especially good one.

As I said in the other thread, I only have time for shorter responses, so I only responded to what I thought was the crux of your argument and your main point. I'm sorry if it seems I'm avoiding engaging with your other points.

In a way you are right - I don't know why God intervenes at some times and not others. As I already said, I'm not God, so I don't know the implications of each decision or actions on every individual at all times like God does. I stand by my assertion that it has nothing to do with a suffering-to-good ratio or a "how much" question, which would be a silly way of looking at it, but yes, we don't know the whole plan.

I'm sorry that my lack of omniscience is not a satisfying enough answer for you, I'll try to work on that. But this doesn't really serve as an argument against the existence of God or the truth of the Bible. Sure, we don't know why all suffering takes place. So? We know it will be brought to justice, and we know it serves a purpose. We know that there is a being that does know what that purpose is which is the same being which desires our good and sacrificed Himself to give us a path to eternal life. That's better than any other worldview gives us, at least from what I've seen.

I'm never trying to reason you out of your belief in God Fritz. I bring up inconvenient things about your faith in these threads because I think they matter + I find them interesting. These types of debates should help you to clarify your own beliefs and give you practice making arguments that at least might be convincing to people outside your faith tradition.

None of this debate about the Problem of Evil is strong evidence for or against God, although I personally share Jamie's intuition that some hard-to-explain evil really does make it harder to believe in a God that is both benevolent and all-powerful, because I don't have a strong faith-based inclination to assume the bad in the world (both natural disasters for whom I think God would have to be considered the author, and that evil caused by humans, but enabled and permitted by God) is part of His divine order.

I don't need you to be omniscient before I'll think you have a good answer. But you must be able to see why, if your response boils down to "free will begets some amount of suffering and evil, and that's part of God's plan", then a skeptic is going to have a whole bunch of difficult but reasonable questions about how God balances freedom and suffering that are unanswerable.

[Octavious]

If God's domain is infinite, why couldn't it be the case that every weapon up to weapons of mass destruction is possible, but weapons of mass destruction are not. It seems profoundly strange and unfair that the right of very very very few humans to the moral choice of whether or not to use an atomic bomb has very little moral value for the rest of us.

Infinite does not mean everything. If you take the number 2 and halve it every second for an infinite amount of time you would get an infinite string of numbers, but none of them will be negative and none of them will be over 2. Just because God's domain is infinite doesn't mean that a universe in which there's a magical barrier against weapons of mass destruction is a viable concept

I think the victims of a flood would disagree with you. A flood isn't inherently evil, but needless death and destruction seem to be. Maybe such events give us some gumption to live life to the fullest or whatever, but they don't give that benefit to the children they kill. And are floods, earthquakes, etc. really the best or only way to texture the world such that humans face meaningful choices / reflect on their morality?

One imagines it is far more preferable for God to create a real and consistent universe and correct any injustice, such as the untimely death of a child, in the next realm (or life or afterlife or whatever you wish to call it) than it is to create an inconsistent fantasy universe that needs constant meddling in order to make it fair. I don't know any of this for certain, obviously, but the former strikes me as the more elegant solution.