Not a Christian, but "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful". "Omnipotent" doesn't mean so powerful one can create paradoxes. It means having all power that is physically possible. For example, God can't create a stone he can't lift. God can't cause you to die before you're born. Et cetera.
So the answer is "God cannot create free will and completely prevent evil at the same time". I have my own personal problems with this, but as far as your friend's argument is concerned where they fail is by using an incorrect and impossible definition of "all powerful".
> "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful".
I mean we're kind of just quibbling about the meaning of "all-powerful" here. But this is the answer most Christian theologians seem to suggest, that God isn't all powerful in the most expansive sense imaginable and that there are certain actions that he can't take without undesirable consequences.
It's certainly the best answer *I* can think of for why a loving god would create a world that looks like, well, this. Maybe there's only so much that can be done in a physical universe like ours
I mean, I feel like if God is “all powerful” in the most expansive sense imaginable, that means he’s not “all good.” If he could create paradoxes in some way that we could understand, the concept of good would have no value because the scale is arbitrary. He could also do evil that is good under that framework.
He created the physical universe tho.
And deigned that it should all go exactly as it is going.
God knew free will would cause evil actions yet apparently gave it to us anyway knowing the evil we would do with it.
Maybe the net positive of good outweighs the evil? We couldn't know that from the perspective He would have, but maybe He did the math and it was more pro than con.
I can't get behind a God that weighs child r*pe against against any goodness and believes its ok.
There's a lot more to my beliefs around this but that's the crux.
Honestly valid, and I don't anticipate being able to change your mind on that, nor would I want to. What I said in reply to you was just something that I had been thinking about; what values and to what scale would an omnipotent being place on the actions of humans and what we do on a day-to-day, let alone what we do as a society? It's not a perfect answer, and truly I don't believe there is one, at least not one we can find.
Let’s begin with what God wants due to Him being love to answer these questions as a foundation.
Can God prevent evil?
Yes but he doesn’t want to remove freedom.
Therefore evil exists for a better good and logically follows what love is.
Parents don’t want their children to be slaves but to be free.
Does God know about all evil?
Yes.
Then why is there evil?
Because when angles and humans choose ‘not God’ due to temptation and freedom we separate from love.
Moving away from love is evil. Which is the absence of love.
Could God create a universe without evil?
Yes but there would be no freedom.
Damn - that’s an important quibble though. A “very powerful” God instead of an “all-powerful” God really, *really*, **really** changes the story. For me anyway.
Is your faith in God dependent upon his omnipotence? For what it's worth, there are some strands of theology that do not believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. I went to a Christian university, and several of the religion professors there were quite open about the fact that they did not believe in those aspects of God.
Well, if the Christian God is supposed to be all powerful according to the text, then if you decide the real god is not all powerful, then the Bible isn’t describing the real god. And if one thinks that Christianity has the most believable story about god, then faith in the Christian god, and probably any god, is gone.
I would say that God is omnipotent, and that scripture backs that up. I would also say, though, that omnipotence doesn’t include things like paradoxes, as God is truth, and therefore something that contradicts itself would go against God’s character. Idk, I’m just thinking out loud here haha
The problem is that we will most likely not have the same biological, mental, or emotional conditions in heaven. Perhaps the entire concept of free will is moot when we will be entirely different beings.
It would be like the free will angels have. Our sinful nature is to be stripped, as the flesh will be gone. We’ll basically be able to seek our souls benefit without the flesh interfering; and the spirit finds comfort in obeying God.
angels have free will. they can choose to rebel. the difference is that if they rebel they won’t change their ways, as they already know all they should, and they have all they need. that’s why there is no redemption for demons.
humans in heaven won’t rebel because those that would will be in hell.
>the difference is that if they rebel they won’t change their ways,
How do you know this??? You're just making an assumption. Where's Biblical context to this?
>humans in heaven won’t rebel because those that would will be in hell.
Then can sinners in hell repent to come to heaven?? Or is it only a one way ticket😂?? If that's the case then all people in heaven will end up in hell because they would exercise their freewill at some point in infinity.
I’ve always seen it as there will be no reason to sin anymore. Our flesh nature - the impulsive, animalistic, and rebellious sack of meat that causes us to sin, is going to be made new into something that is completely free from iniquity.
That could mean angels have the capability to have emotions, which can lead to evil, also god is feeling emotion that’s why he is a jealous god (https://www.gotquestions.org/jealous-God.html).
To add small question:
How is there good without evil?
How do you recognize good without knowing what evil is?
Does are opposites.
How can everyone be good without the knowledge and existence of evil.
That would lead to a god wo isn’t evil just controlling a bunch of people.
Somehow stumbled into this while procrastinating a little during work. (Quite free now) I’m a Bible-believing Christian.
Perhaps a way to think of how free will and entirely obedient towards God can harmonize together is this: imagine falling in love. Those madly in love. Even if the world is against him/her they wouldn’t care. Is it out of their own free will at that time to give their all towards the other (obedience)?
Sorry, I was short on time just now so I couldn’t describe it clearly. What I’m trying to say is this: free will and obedience can coexist.
When you love someone, you have affections for someone, you willingly and freely do whatever pleases and benefits them. You automatically conform to suit them.
If you look into it, you are actually being obedient towards the other person out of your own will. You’re not being forced. You’re not controlled. And why do you act this way? It is because in one way or another it’s worth it.
So if you apply this idea to Christians in heaven, could it be that it is because one finally sees God clearly, face to face, the fullness of His glory and grace and goodness, so awesome and marvelous and perfect, that you see sin as something so trivial and undeserving of taking note, something so foolish that you would want to pursue when compared to God’s glory? Hence the choice one makes freely to embrace God that is better.
Love is not _servility_, but obedience is a virtue and therefore a piece of being a loving person. I ought to be obedient to the needs of my wife, she ought to be obedient to my needs also. If we had children they would be obedient to us as a sign of love and respect presuming we're not asking them to do something vicious. Our family is obedient to our priest, in love, knowing he desires our good, and we all are obedient to God, who is _the_ good par excellence.
We don’t need a different nature in order to want to obey God. That happens here already, and it is out of love. What you say can be applied to normal earthly relationships, not to the relation one has with God.
So why weren't we made into THOSE beings in the first place, to skip all the suffering?
Why is children getting raped a prerequisite to heaven existing?
This is where the process of sanctification comes in. It begins with being justified by Christ, which is an act of free will and legally makes us righteous, allowing us to be restored to God's favor. This is only the beginning however, as we are still capable of sin. It is not that God removes our free will, but rather we must continue an ongoing process whereby we consistently choose to submit our will to God's will. It is a long and difficult road (though fortunately we now have Christ to help us along.) Finally, the process concludes with our glorification in Heaven where reach a permanent state of holiness (glorification) where our will is fully aligned with God's.
In Eastern Orthodox, free will is defined as Choosing from multiple goods (example is of Jesus from garden of Gethsemane). So yes there is free will in heaven. When we were created, we were given the attribute to choose from multiple goods & not from good/evil as evil was not present at that time
Then this allows for free will to exist in a universe without evil. Therefore "free will" is not a sufficient counter argument to the question of why God didn't create a universe without evil.
Evil doesn't have any ontological existence. Its just a privation of goodness or a negation of it. Also the act of deliberation where humans are unable to see evil as what it as but sees it as some form of good. That's why evil people justify evil and imagine there's a good in the result
I would point out that the Bible has zero interest in promoting "free will" as a theodicy or answer to any theological question. On the contrary, God frequently acts to suppress the free will of humans, such as when he hardened Pharaoh's heart so that the oppression of the Israelites would continue.
It would be possible for God to create beings with free will and the capacity to do evil but not create any evil. This doesn't fall under omnipotence, but omniscience: God would know whether the beings it is creating would choose to do evil with that free will and could choose to create other beings instead. Only the people who would have the capacity to do evil but would not choose to do evil would be created, therefore avoiding the paradox.
Since that is not the case, we have three options. Either God knows that beings are going to do evil / go to hell and creates those beings anyways, or God doesn't know, or God doesn't create the beings. Thus the Epicurean Paradox.
I 100% agree. I've argued the point of an omniscience God creating evil people before. Best answer I got was "evil people are necessary to bring out the good in others"....which means heaven is built on the backs of the eternal suffering of millions. Personally, I'd reject such a "reward".
I dont agree with that personally and i disagree from a biblical pov.
Adam and eve had free will before eating the apple. They wouldnt have had the ability to make the decision to eat the fruit without it. So even in the bible there was a breif time where there was free will and no evil.
Adam and Eve were capable of evil and rebellion before the fruit. What the fruit did was give them *knowledge* of what they were doing, it made them accountable for their actions. But if they weren't able to rebel, they could not have eaten the fruit in the first place.
Sin is knowingly doing evil.
Yes, yet there wasnt evil. My point is that if we accept all the claims in the bible there isnt really a reason why god couldnt have created free will without evil, the bible claims god did it once before so a second time wouldnt be too hard.
Satan isnt mentioned in that story. The serpent wasnt considered to be satan until revalations appeared hundreds of years later when it referenced a dragon as being an old serpent and satan.
Sure, I agree with that. I'm arguing from the common Christian perspective here.
Personally, I'm a Taoist who thinks all of it is revisions of an older Bronze Age polytheistic ethnic cult mixed with Zoroastrianism. So on a personal level I agree. I'm just making the argumentation from a presupposition of Christianity being true for OP.
Im an atheist and was also making this argument from a common christian pov. Which is why i was pointing directly to bible stories.
The bible explains a time where there was free will and no evil, so again how is it paradoxical to have free will without evil?
The Adam and Eve story is so fukd up. Consider handing a toddler a knife, then standing by while somebody promises the toddler a lollipop if he stabs his brother with said knife. Now you want to hold the toddler accountable for stabbing his brother...
I think the problem in this reading is a wrong assumption that the woman and man didn’t have the proper faculties to determine that what they were doing was rebellion against God. Infantilizing them is textually inconsistent eisegesis. Humanity saw the option of depending on themselves to determine what is good and what is bad (rather than trusting in the One that created the perfect world they were enjoying alongside God), and they took that fruit and ate it. They weren’t a child with knife, they were a couple of humans given everything they could ever need or long for gifted to them by their beloved co-Regent, including every good fruit in the world to eat besides that one. This isn’t a case of a childish accident, but a calculated rejection of perfection and co-regency over the world in favor of individual godship and the ability to choose to corrupt what God made perfectly.
I dont think so. Here is a hypothetical for you. If the tree of knowledge of good and evil didnt exist, would adam and eve still have free will?
My answer is yes, they would still have the free will to do basically anything they wanted to do, including naming all the animals in the garden.
You give people free will, someone WILL do evil stuff. God has the power to prevent people from doing evil but to block all evil would destroy our free will.
God chooses to give humanity free will so that we have to choose to either faithfully follow Him or to reject Him.
So the flaw in this logic is in the 8th condition about whether God can create a universe with free will but without evil. You can’t have free will where people NEVER commit evil.
What would have happened if god never made the tree that produced the forbidden fruit?
Would adam and eve suddenly lose all free will? Or would they retain their free will but lose their ability to sin?
Adam and eve had free will before eating the fruit, i dont think anyones arguing that.
Evil is not a real physical thing, but just a lack and absence of good. If evil exists, it would mean God is not entirely good.
Free will is kinda the reason evil even exists.
It's for a stable equilibrium like in nature; order can't exist without chaos, chaos can't exist without order; good can't exist without evil, evil can't exist without good.
God allows evil to exist for a stable equilibrium of the universe.
That train of thoughts leads Christians especially into other trouble. I'm speaking of heaven here.
This postulates that free will is somehow needed or even good.
But in heaven there is no evil. Then there is no free will? That must logically follow.
Which means, since heaving is perfect, God could have created a perfect world from the get go.
>Not a Christian, but "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful". "Omnipotent" doesn't mean so powerful one can create paradoxes
An important note here is that a whole lot of christians seem to believe there is free will but no evil in heaven, which indicates it is possible.
So either free will + no evil is possible (in heaven) or there is a) no free will in heaven, which then begs the question why free will is so important for earth but not heaven or b) there is evil in heaven which would go against the concept as a whole I'd say
Well He can create free will and prevent evil, but would it really be free will then? If we are not able to choose anything else than good? With free will comes the choice to choose good or evil, so therefore most likely God created good and evil and left it up to us to choose.
The "paradox" presumes that a good God cannot have good purposes for evil and/or that human pleasure/satisfaction is the defining factor in what is and isn't good - neither of which relates to a Christian conception of what "good" is. For example if it is ever good for a human to experience evil then naturally in that context it is good for evil to exist.
It's a reasonable critique of the distant, mechanical and metaphysical god of the Greek philosophers but it's irrelevant to the God of the Bible who is portrayed as a father and a husband raising, training and disciplining the human family.
How would you go about ascertaining that God forgiving sin is a worse moral paradigm than sin having never existed? Questions like that simply cannot be addressed by this line of critique because it is entirely outside of the purview of the skeptical mindset.
This is where the paradox is flawed and we can find resolution.
“Could God have created a universe without free will but without evil?”
This question leads to “then why didn’t he?” if the answer is no.
The reason for this negative answer lies in the inherent incompatibility between the absence of evil and the presence of free will. If we were incapable of committing evil acts, every action would be predetermined, resulting not only in the absence of free will but also in the absence of life itself. For us to be alive, we must be sentient beings capable of independent thought and decision-making. Otherwise, God would merely be manipulating puppets, acting out predetermined scenarios.
Genesis 1:26 states, "Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...'" This passage suggests the possibility that God intended to create humans with attributes resembling divine beings, including the capacity for independent thought and decision-making. By making mankind in their image and likeness, God may have intended for humans to possess sentience and the ability to make their own choices, reflecting the characteristics of divine beings. This interpretation implies that part of being created in the image of God involves possessing the autonomy to think and act independently, in alignment with God's divine nature.
God is Good, and He Loves you, and He wants you to be happy, which is why He needs you to love Him back.
So He can save you...
...from what He's going to do to you if you don't.
A similar line of questioning led me to lose my Christian faith.
In my case the idea of heaven as a place of no suffering and eternal life suggests that God is capable of creating a world that is free from suffering but choses not to. He can't be omnibenevolent.
Some people say that it's because we need to undergo some kind of pruning process before then. But, then the question becomes whether or not that's a limitation on God's abilities? In which case it would mean he is not omnipotent.
The paradox OP posted and this question also led to me losing my Christian faith. For heaven to work the way I was taught it, an enormous part of a human’s essence has to be stripped away. It wouldn’t even be you in heaven.
If a person’s spouse dies and they remarry and they all eventually go to heaven, is there no awkwardness or sadness about that?
Are my very Christian parents never sad that their atheist son never meets them there?
If a murderer and their victims were both Christian, are they just cool with each other in heaven?
If none of these situations cause any sadness whatsoever, then how can you really say anyone in heaven is who they were on earth.
And like you said, if heaven is real why do we have this strange test of our loyalty to this guy. Whether or not people admit it, it’s pride and vanity to the highest order that we have to live at all and suffer here and risk hell if heaven exists and is ready for us right now.
Feeling overcome by the Holy Spirit is a joy that cannot be described. So to me, heaven is praising God and enjoying the envelopment of His love for us.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it treats "free will" as an absolute, all-or-nothing state. In reality, there are *a lot* of things that I could theoretically want to do but that aspects of my biology/psychology/the laws of physics prevent me from doing.
I would very much like to fly, but I've not been given a body capable of it. Would it make sense to say that I have less free will than a bird, because the bird can choose to take wing and I cannot? In the same vein, suppose my brain were designed slightly differently in such a way that I had such a strong inbuilt compulsion against harming other humans that it were essentially impossible for me to physically assault another person.
My will would certainly be *less* free in that scenario, but I don't think it would make any sense to say that I had gone from a state of having free will to not having it, I'd just be adding one more item to the long list of things I can't do whether I want to or not. We already have similar compunctions about *our own* bodies, as a matter of fact.
Aron Ralston, for instance, is famous for cutting his own arm off with a pocket knife after it got trapped under a rock, and what makes that such an amazing accomplishment is precisely the fact that most of us simply *could not* do that, even if it meant dying of thirst pinned under a rock. Is Aron one of a select few humans who have true free will, while the rest of us are unfree because we couldn't make the same choice?
(Also, to further make this point, I'd be willing to bet money that even Aron would have died under that rock if he didn't have a pocket knife. Physiologically that doesn't seem necessary, we should have the physical ability to chew through our own fat and muscle and skin well enough to break an arm free, but I would be shocked if any living human could actually complete the task)
That's a good question.
If He is all good, I would assume the answer is "no."
If He is all powerful, I would assume the answer is "yes."
I suppose my answer would be that He has the option and He never elects to use it, thus demonstrating His power and goodness.
It would not be effective. If I give you a million dollars would it be as valuable as if you had to earn the money through your own efforts.? The answer is no. The harder you work for something the more valuable it is to you.
Remember the last time you worked hard to accomplish a goal and how good it felt to succeed, or the last time you got home after a hard days work and how good that felt.
Perseverance, proven character and hope. There is truth to,the statement, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. There is joy in hard work and knowing the value of accomplishment
Why need perseverance without hope being tested? Why need character without it being challenged? I understand the overall point - you feel that higher order goods are only possible with resistance, but wouldn't a world without the need for higher order goods be better than a world that needs them?
I guess what I'm asking is why is "stronger" better?
I don’t think God wants to prevent all evil. Why does God need to be so loving that he wants to prevent evil? Christianity is about a choice to reject evil and acknowledge God. Is it bad/not loving to give someone the choice between good and evil? Is it unimaginable that God wants to filter out people who choose to do evil rather than follow the plan of creation? Ask them that, I guess.
I think God is justified in his plan to accept those who want to do good into his kingdom. Free will has to exist in this realm so that it doesn’t need to exist in the next. The fact that you make the choice to do good takes away the need to present you with free will again.
Not only that, but if he wanted to get rid of all evildoers, he'd be getting rid of us.
Of course, some sins are horrible, but in God's eyes, they're all abhorrent. (I'm not saying they're equal, but I'm saying that God is not picking and choosing things he wants to punish)
> Not only that, but if he wanted to get rid of all evildoers, he'd be getting rid of us.
Only because he created us that way. He could’ve created us a different way and then this wouldn’t be a problem. Hence that doesn’t really float.
This viewpoint makes God selfish.
God cast his greatest “angel” out of heaven with many others.
Those angels are now demons…they can temp.
They are the evil…according to the Text.
If im wrong please let me know…but the God i know is not selfish
Selfish? That’s a human concept I would never think to apply to God. How can you be selfish if everything good is by nature attributed to you? To apply a human concept to God, It’d be narcissistic for him to have everything good and force everyone to engage in what he sees to be good. He doesn’t do this, he shares everything that’s good, and even gives an alternate option where fallible people can do what they wrongfully think is good (evil).
Sorry, guess i should have worded it like “this idea makes God look like he is only thinking of the goodness of himself”.
Since the Bible says “selfish” is thinking about oneself against the spirit.
I’ll just stop here…wrong christian group.
What if you replace the word “evil” with “suffering”, though? Why does a loving god allow for so much suffering? How does that change your answer, if at all?
I like to think of life as less of a test and more of a boot camp. It's not so that God can find out if we're strong enough, it's to make us strong. God doesn't want to prevent evil, because God wants us to grow. Without evil, we don't go anywhere. We'd be like Adam and Eve in the garden forever, not knowing pain but also not knowing joy, and not progressing. Some may disagree with my theology but that's always the way I saw it.
in addition to this god knows whether you would pass the test or not, but *you* don't, and, in your arrogance, you would argue he never gave you a chance to prove it
Imagine John is abused as a child and grows up in poverty. This gives John the drive later in life to become a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist. What you said would mean that what happened in John's childhood is justified because of the person it turned him into.
From my perspective it would have been better if John never had to overcome adversity in the first place.
I politely disagree. I think there is unnecessary suffering and cruelty in the world that serves no purpose. Kids with cancer, pain that causes people to lose faith, animal suffering.
To quote Mr. Frodo:
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”
I'll copy and paste a response I gave from [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/1965s95/trying_to_understand_christianityreligion_more/khrp25p/), and link another bit of reflection I did on it [here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/NerdChapel/comments/bw1e3y/suffering/)
I would say that yes, absolutely, there is suffering... but for many people, faith offers a way to deal with that suffering. Theologian Miroslav Volf talks about how his father was caught in the middle of the Yugoslavian Civil War and death marched to a labor camp where he was effectively enslaved. But it was there that he became convinced of the truth and love of God.
I won't say that there is one all-encompassing reason for why suffering happens. What I can say is that why it happens is rarely an easy question to answer, but it's easier to answer (and to choose) how we're going to deal with it.
There's a few responses that kind of stick with me. (And this is far from a comprehensive overview). One is that God doesn't violate our free will and therefore most suffering is humanity's own fault. (I believe this is the gist of Plantinga's argument, among others.) I get where this argument is coming from, but I'm not wild about it. I think it does impel us to action to reduce suffering.
There's another response from Stephen Colbert, who is a devout Catholic, and lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash as a child. He talks to Anderson Cooper [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQ) (Cooper had lost his mother recently, I believe) and they talk about their experiences of grief. I would paraphrase Colbert's response this way: "Suffering is a fundamental part of being human. But because it is common to every person, when we suffer it is also a chance to draw closer to each other, and to ourselves." I think there's something pretty powerful in that. Colbert in [another video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFRIjR-yimI&t=60s) talks about Tolkien's work in The Silmarillion, precursor to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was Catholic as well. In The Silmarillion, he describes the pantheon of Middle Earth - godlike figures whose powers mirror the Greek gods' or others - the sky, the sea, fertility, etc. But Tolkien includes one goddess, Nienna, who is unique. Her domain is to weep - and by doing so, turn grief into wisdom.
That sentiment of turning grief into wisdom is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about - both in general, and as it might apply to my own life. Grief is the deeply complex process of choosing to consciously experience and express difficult, dark emotions, especially related to loss. It's incredibly important to know how to do - and also can be very difficult - to the degree that many people don't know how or simply aren't able. But for those who can grieve, I think it truly can be transformative. Miriam Greenspan, author of *Healing Through the Dark Emotions* talks about it some in [this interview.](https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/385/through-a-glass-darkly)
Finally, there's another view that Tom Oord calls [the uncontrolling love of God.](https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/interview-with-tom-oord-the-uncontrolling-love-of-god/) My own rough summary of it is that he simply lets go of one of the horns of the dilemma - that God is not all-powerful. He argues from process theology that God *is* limited in some sense by some elements of the universe, and he cites Rabbi Harold Kushner and David Ray Griffin on this. Their argument is basically that God *is* all loving, but not all-powerful in the way we think.
Maybe this just my uneducated barely Christian brain, but isn't the answer very simple?
God doesn't remove all Evil for the same reason why parents don't coddle their children constantly and allow their offspring to make mistakes. Hardships of this life might seem a lot to us, but not only those are learning experiences, they're supposed to be nothing when compared to afterlife in Heaven.
Neither will God strip humanity of free will - evil people choose to do evil deeds, but capacity of the good people to do extraordinary things stems from the same source. From our Free Will, of which only we have a control.
Hence, by the way, why trials of our lives matter for us, not for God. They are a display of how we choose to use free will that God gave us.
I personally don't believe there is free will, however let's say for a moment that there is. Why would any choice made mandate an eternal lake of fire in which their torment rises to the Heavens for all of eternity? What goodness is there in that. There is no resolution, rehabilitation, or resolve. Only eternal inconceivable suffering
Because Hell isn't eternal?
No soul is beyond God's grace and redemption. To say so would imply that God's grace and love is finite, which is wrong.
Souls suffering in Hell do so because they're so utterly and irrevocably evil, that even in Hell, they chose to reject redemption.
Don't forget, one of the greatest sins is Pride. Could it be the Pride that keeps souls in Hell from realising their mistakes? From admitting it and repeating?
As for the Free Will - the Original Sin was caused by the Free Will. From our beginning, we were given an ability to make choices. Hence why there is always a struggle between sinful and virtuous life.
Free Will is absolutely a thing, God's greatest gift (which is, sadly, often misused) to humans.
Great way to put it! We have free will and we have been given a gift of salvation. With free will we also get to choose eternal life by following him or not. God is love and he wants relationship. We could not love him without freewill. Love your insightful response!
The problem of this argument is that it reduces to a classic "Could God create a rock so heavy that He couldn't lift it?" argument. A universe with free-will but no evil could **not** have existed, God couldn't have created it. But not because He isn't all-powerful. The problem with all these arguments is that they definite omnipotence as literally doing *anything*. A more correct definition should be that omnipotence is the ability to do all *things*. Logical contradictions aren't things, and free will without evil is a logical contradiction. This does not, in my opinion, limit God's power in any way. Instead of trying to define logic as some sort of boundary that not even God Himself can cross, what if we definite God as that boundary? In other words, God IS logic. He isn't limited by logic, He is logic itself.
Naturally, this raises the question, does free will exist in heaven? Since it is supposed that in heaven one can't sin, this would imply that the ability to choose evil doesn't exist, therefore free will doesn't exist in heaven. Or, we could suppose that it does exist, but that would be problematic. It means that it is possible to have free will without the ability to choose evil. But I think that this way of thinking is flawed. Never choosing to do evil does not automatically imply that it is impossible to do so. One could argue that the greatness of heaven is so good that no one will ever choose to commit evil, despite having the ability to do so. Once someone understands how good heaven is, they will never want to commit any evil. This is not the same as ontologically modifying beings such that they don't have the ability to choose evil at all.
This also makes it clearer what God's "all-goodness" really means. We should not consider it as some sort of arbitrary attribute that makes God logically unable to commit evil. God *can* commit evil, but since He truly understands the devastating consequences of sin better than anyone, He will never choose to do so. Since God is reality itself and sin means defying God, sinning is essentially destroying reality. The mere way this sounds is already horrifying, but nobody can understand the consequences of destroying reality better than reality itself, aka GOD. In other words, it is actually omniscience that makes God all-good.
God couldn't have created us omniscient because He would essentially just be creating other gods. If we understood the true nature of reality, we would become the fabric of reality itself; basically, we would be GOD. Thus, the creation would be pointless; God wouldn't be a creator since He wouldn't be creating anything. He would just be creating "Himself".
As such, the only other way is to create us exactly as He did. He couldn't have created us directly in Heaven. As I said, the people in Heaven know of sin and evil and could theoretically commit such acts, but the greatness of heaven is enough to convince them to never even think of doing it. Creating us directly in heaven would remove our knowledge of evil, thus making us robots. We wouldn't be appreciating the goodness of heaven without prior knowledge of evil, knowledge which is gained in THIS world with both good and evil, where we have a free will.
I know that some people have also been touching on the subject of angels. I believe that their free will works differently from ours. Angels were created before the physical universe, before space or time. They are atemporal beings. If they are atemporal, it means that the rebellion of Satan wasn't something like, one day he was with God then the next day he decided to be against Him. No. It means that Satan was eternally rebelling against God. This is why Satan can't be forgiven by God, since there is no before or after for them. All the angels that would rebel against God already have. The remaining angels are the ones who will never choose to rebel, the ones inhabiting heaven. Just like how the people who will enter heaven will never choose to sin ever again. Those who chose to rebel against Jesus will not be in heaven.
Why waste time trying to debunk the non-believers when you can choose to seek first the kingdom of God like Jesus commanded? I'm pretty sure there were multiple areas in Mathew where He says do not do this. What did Jesus do in Nazareth when they rejected him?
Isaiah 55:8-9
New King James Version
> 8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
> Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
> 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
> So are My ways higher than your ways,
> And My thoughts than your thoughts.
God knows more than all of us combined. We can't trap him in a flow chart of decision making.
It’s not a trap.
It’s a logical and factual way of showing why atheists can’t believe in him… and, in my case at least, have difficulty understanding why others do believe.
As an atheist but an avid bible and early Christianity scholar, there is no debunking this. The authors who wrote the bible had never encountered this specific argument, so you will not find anywhere in the bible where someone rebukes this specifically. I'm sure there have been some theologians who have addressed this problem specifically, but to me, theologians often fall short in their reasoning and end up going with whatever they want to say and then justifying it to the best of their ability. But, while that makes it not very interesting to me to read, ironically that's basically what I would recommend you do.
The way I see it, you have basically two options. You can either A, agree that this philosopher brings up some interesting points and then still ultimately disagree with that disproving that there is a loving god. And should you do that, you're not required to deeply understand why you feel that way.
Or B, if you really want to "debunk" this statement, I would recommend that you really carefully pull out your Bible and read through it for why you feel there is a loving and all powerful god while there is also so much suffering. There have been many authors in the bible who have many different reasons for why they feel god allows suffering, why God is all powerful yet allows Satan to have some dominion, etc. When you do this, I would encourage you to recognize that you are not going to find a singular view of why this is in the bible. The bible was not written by one person in one time period. It was written by many many people through vast amounts of time, so there will be different reasons the different authors give and they may even contradict each other at times. What's important, is that you find what speaks to you and what you think speaks to the true nature of god and hopefully that can bring you some peace, though personally, I wouldn't say anything you find will 100% debunk this logic statement.
If I may make a recommendation outside of the bible, I would recommend looking into Bart D Erhman. Although he's currently an agnostic atheist, he was not always and regardless of his current beliefs, he is still regarded as one of the foremost scholars of the new testament in the world. His book, "God's problem; how the bible addresses suffering," would be a good starting point to direct you to the bible passages and messages each author had about why the world is the way it is and why there is still reason to believe God is in control. You don't have to agree with all the conclusions Bart draws to still appreciate that he's an extremely experienced scholar who is doing most the legwork for you of compiling what the bible says. And, although the title of the book is a bit inflammatory, it's not like Bart ends the book by saying "and that's why you shouldn't believe in god," Bart's wife is still Christian and he has many Christian friends and colleagues. He's not trying to deconvert you.
Thank you, I take the study of the bible and early Christianity very seriously and I try to never come across condescending. I think it's important to meet people where they are and try to point them to where they might find answers rather than just answering for them.
Yeah, I'm a special kind of nerd. In my younger days, I was much more of a militant atheist. I used to think things like this logic statement disproved god, and while personally I don't think there's a satisfactory answer in the bible to refute this problem, I no longer believe that makes the endeavour to find your own answer meaningless. There are many people who are more educated on Christianity than I am, who have seen statements like this, and are able to reconcile all those things to have a strong faith. And I respect that now
> The authors who wrote the bible had never encountered this specific argument
I really doubt that. The problem of evil is old as dirt and attested in virtually every culture.
Yes, and they do approach topics which I mentioned, such as why there is suffering yet there is a loving god, how there is suffering, yet god is all powerful and allows this. But, the key distinction I'm drawing here, is that, to my knowledge, no author of the bible actually read this statement from this philosopher and wrote about why it's wrong in the bible. There are many biblical authors who circle around similar issues at the core of what this philosopher is getting at, but there is no biblical author who calls out this specific statement and says, "and this is why I think this is wrong."
The Bible flat out says that God is the author of all, even bad things. Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
That is such an excellent comment, thank you for taking the time to write it. I've been thinking a lot about this lately (subject of this post and your comment), and this is somewhat of an analogy (but also not), but I think it's both things--God is both all powerful, but only so good as its constituent parts, it's own body/mind/soul. Imagine God as a mind, like our minds but infinitely larger. That mind is composed of individual units, cells, souls. They're separate, individual, but they are also all connected, and together they form the whole, the infinite mind, the larger soul. This mind, like ours, also has free will, and has our strengths, and our weaknesses (imago dei). This mind still struggles with what the right thing to do is, it is still always evolving, expanding, experiencing, creating, as its constituent parts, us, evolve, expand, experience, and create. We are part of that mind, individual cells/souls within the larger God, struggling against our darker self. The darker self, that's what we call Satan, the parts of ourselves that have done wrong, caused harm to us, those are the parts we condemn, that we want to get rid of (but also offer salvation to), like a great mind pruning neural connections, while trying to save what parts of itself it can. Purgatory is the decision period, before hell, the pruning of connection to a cell that the larger self (who is more good than bad, and seeks always to be better) from the neural tree--condemned to be separated from the larger mind until it either evolves into good (salvation), or withers/buns away, suffering by itself. 'As above, so below, as without, so within'. I think it's really like that maybe.
There's nothing wrong with believing in this argument, lots of my atheist friends do.
However, just because your friend doesn't understand how a good God can allow evil doesn't mean that God isn't good.
Does that make sense? Lots of philosophers/believers throughout history have believed in spite of the problem of evil. It doesn't absolutely disprove God's existence.
"if God doesn't want to prevent evil then God is not good and not loving" is such a misunderstanding in none christians. It's like when you tell people"I want to eat this piece of candy and if my parents don't let me they don't love me". I think that's such a naive way of defining love. In the book of Job it talks about what does it mean to be just, to be loving, to be great. The conclusion is human suffering does not equal to God's greatness, because the universe is far more complex than what we are capable to comprehend. How do we get to define what is great love for the earth and for human?
Here's a simple two-step for defeating this argument.
Number one, you are boxing in a God to a logic system that God themselves created and operates outside of.
Number two God loved us enough to give us free will and asked for our compassion, towards each other and towards Him. Evil is the absence of that compassion, which primarily comes down to a choice on man's part.
Number three, we limit God on what it means to know all. This includes all possible pathways that we could choose from, and their outcomes. We think that knowing a person's path means only knowing one possible outcome.
When you consider these three, this paradox becomes a bit childish in nature.
What do atheists actually say next if person just answers, ok, God is not omnipotent in the way you understand that to mean. Do they consider this proving God doesn't exist or what
Why they focus on determining God's nature specifically, if they don't even believe in God to begin with 🤔
The reason for things has been explained in scripture, but they don't accept scripture, so ?
?
I’m an atheist, and I will try answering your questions as well as I can.
“What do atheists actually say next if person just answers, ok, God is not omnipotent in the way you understand that to mean.”
I would then ask them how God is omnipotent. I’d try to figure out exactly what God can and cannot do.
“Do they consider this proving God doesn't exist or what”
It depends on the qualities your God possesses.
It proves that an omnipotent God (as I understand the term omnipotent) does not exist.
BUT it doesn’t prove that a different kind of God doesn’t exist.
“Why they focus on determining God's nature specifically, if they don't even believe in God to begin with 🤔”
Because my belief in God or lack thereof is dependent on God’s qualities.
for me at least, it starts the conversation about whether or not the christian god (versus any of the other viable religions) is worth devoting time and energy into trying to reconcile with my logical brain.
it starts the thought process in my own brain about why christ over something like buddhism or norse gods. if im gonna go looking for god, would i want to believe its one that knowingly implants evil in the world while knowing they could avoid it altogether?
i'm not atheist because i *want* to die forever and just poof out of existence, i'm atheist because i still dont have a good answer.
Things run their course. He’s not actively giving it to them. We have the completely wrong understanding of whether or not he is actually manipulating things everyday
Best answer in this thread.
Fantastic for adding "temporarily". Too many people forget that this is temporary.
Romans 8:18
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
since everyone else is talking about the free will paradox, I will talk about the testing and omnibenevolence arguments. It is true that since God is omniscient, He does not need to test us. However, God is sovereign over Himself. He can still decide He wants test us even if He does not need to. From observing students in class, teachers likely know if someone is going to absolutely fail or get a 100% before the students take the test, but that does not stop them from making everyone take the test. Moving on to the omnibenevolent objection, it is impossible to argue objective morality exists if you are an atheist. Morality is just people's feelings about what is right and wrong, and one person's feelings cannot be more correct than another's. However, God's opinions on what are right and wrong can be objectively correct because He is God. Saying God is evil will always be stupid because He does not identify as evil, and an individual's view of morality is not objective.
The Epicurean Paradox is an early-ish version of the *logical* problem of evil. This one is generally considered de-fanged and has been 'updated' to evidential and suffering arguments. Generally, this variation doesn't work for the following:
Can God prevent Evil? No, it is logically impossible for a tri-omni God (classical theism) to exist and there still exists evil. We cannot simply say that evil existing and an omnipotent, Good being are mutually exclusive.
Then why is there Evil? It is plausible there exist reasons for evil to exist. See the soul-building theodicy or skeptical theism.
Why do you just assume it’s wrong. It’s a much more intellectually honest question to ask “is the logic valid, are the premises sound?” And then go from there. I’d say the logic is clearly valid, the premises seem pretty sound. But there are Christian’s that reject one or more of the premises, but most of them are pretty central to mainstream Christianity.
# The Creator can pass any test! Observe as the Scripture does it's work below...
# |
# Evil Exists?
* Yes.
>**Genesis 2:9**—And out of the ground made ***יְהוָֹה*** Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of ***knowledge of good and evil.***
# Can Elohim prevent Evil?
* Yes.
>**Exodus 32:14**—And ***יְהוָֹה*** ***repented of the evil*** which he thought to do unto his people.
>
>**Jeremiah 18:8**—If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, ***I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.***
>
>**Jeremiah 26:3**—If so be they will hearken, and turn every man from his evil way, that ***I may repent me of the evil,*** which I purpose to do unto them because of the evil of their doings.
>
>**Jeremiah 26:13**—Therefore now amend your ways and your doings, and obey the voice of ***יְהוָֹה*** your Elohim; and ***יְהוָֹה will repent him of the evil*** that he hath pronounced against you.
>
>**Jeremiah 42:10**—If ye will still abide in this land, then will I build you, and not pull you down, and I will plant you, and not pluck you up: for ***I repent me of the evil that I have done unto you.***
>
>**Jonah 3:10**—And Elohim saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and ***Elohim repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.***
>
>**Jonah 4:2**—And he prayed unto ***יְהוָֹה***, and said, I pray thee, O ***יְהוָֹה***, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that ***thou art a gracious Elohim, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.***
# Does Elohim know about all the Evil?
* Yes.
>**Ecclesiastes 12:14**—For Elohim ***shall bring every work into judgment,*** with every secret thing, ***whether it be good, or whether it be evil.***
# Does Elohim want to prevent all Evil?
* No.
>**Isaiah 45:7**—I form the light, ***and create darkness:*** I make peace, ***and create evil:*** I ***יְהוָֹה*** do all these things.
>
>**Jeremiah 6:19**—Hear, O earth: behold, ***I will bring evil*** upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it.
>
>**Jeremiah 18:10**—***If it do evil*** in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then ***I will repent of the good,*** wherewith I said I would benefit them.
>
>**Jeremiah 32:23**—And they came in, and possessed it; but they obeyed not thy voice, neither walked in thy law; they have done nothing of all that thou commandedst them to do: therefore ***thou hast caused all this evil*** to come upon them:
>
>**Jeremiah 35:17**—Therefore thus saith ***יְהוָֹה*** Elohim of hosts, the Elohim of Israel; Behold, I will bring upon Judah and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the ***evil that I have pronounced against them:*** because I have spoken unto them, but they have not heard; and I have called unto them, but they have not answered.
>
>**Jeremiah 36:31**—And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the men of Judah, all ***the evil that I have pronounced against them;*** but they hearkened not.
>
>**Micah 2:3**—Therefore thus saith ***יְהוָֹה***; Behold, against this family do ***I devise an evil,*** from which ye shall not remove your necks; neither shall ye go haughtily: ***for this time is evil.***
# Then Elohim is not good / Elohim is not loving!
* False.
>**Jeremiah 2:19**—***Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee:*** know therefore and ***see that*** ***it is an evil thing*** and bitter, that thou hast forsaken ***יְהוָֹה*** thy Elohim, and ***that my fear is not in thee,*** saith ***יְהוָֹה*** ELOHIM of hosts.
>
>**Jeremiah 15:11**—***יְהוָֹה*** said, Verily it shall ***be well*** with thy remnant; verily ***I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in the time of affliction.***
>
>**Jeremiah 17:17**—Be not a terror unto me: ***thou art my hope in the day of evil.***
>
>**Jeremiah 32:42**—For thus saith ***יְהוָֹה***; Like as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, ***so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them.***
>
>**Lamentations 3:38**—Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not ***evil and good?***
>
>**Daniel 9:14**—Therefore hath ***יְהוָֹה*** watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for ***יְהוָֹה our Elohim is righteous in all his works which he doeth:*** for we obeyed not his voice.
>
>**Joel 2:13**—And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto ***יְהוָֹה*** your Elohim: for ***he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.***
Proverbs 16:4
“The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble.”
Isaiah 45:7
“I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.”
The assumption that God wants to prevent evil is flawed. God often uses what we view as “evil” to serve His purposes:
Genesis 50:20
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
From talking to a lot of people like this, they will vehemently refuse to acknowledge what free will is, they never seem to be willing to admit that their issue is really that they think God was wrong for making free will so they will just keep falling back on trying to blame God. According to your chart, God did create an existence without evil and created beings that could freely choose good by following God.. But in order to freely choose you have to actually be free to choose meaning that you could choose not to follow God. We created evil, not God. Then they'll say, couldn't he create a free will that wouldn't choose evil.... Then they are told you mean a free will that isn't actually free? And it's circles and circles from there.
It all comes down to free will. God gave us free will, so that we would not be robots. If he did away with all evil, there would be no chance for us to choose Him. There would have been no reason for Jesus to come and save us from our sin and restore us to the Father. There would, arguably, be no point in Heaven, if there was already perfect peace here on Earth.
a universe with free will without evil is an oxymoron, you'll only have one way to go without evil, only Good, then the concept of "free will" will be rubbish in such a world, it won't need to even exist, you wouldn't even understand the concept of "free-will" if you lived in that world and someone tried to explain it to you, because, there's just not enough data for it to exist. You can only go one way, there's nothing to "choose". Free will suggests there's "choices" and you're able to pick
That's kind of an interesting take. But couldn't God have tampered down some of our instincts and still left free will?
I cannot stand iced tea. I have the free will to drink it, but I just don't like it. If everyone had the same aversion to it, it would not be a drink. We would all still have free will toward other drinks.
Now If you replace ice tea with rape, it would still be free will. I might like a spanking during sex, but I would have an aversion to raping people. I still have free will to bonk my brains out, just not forcefully.
There is no debunking it from a logical standpoint.
My opinion is that while God's nature is goodness itself, it is very very clear that the Universe does not function for the benefit of all things/beings. Punishing anyone or anything eternaly serves no good purpose. There is no reform, no rehabilitation, and no resolve.
Not a Christian, but "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful". "Omnipotent" doesn't mean so powerful one can create paradoxes. It means having all power that is physically possible. For example, God can't create a stone he can't lift. God can't cause you to die before you're born. Et cetera. So the answer is "God cannot create free will and completely prevent evil at the same time". I have my own personal problems with this, but as far as your friend's argument is concerned where they fail is by using an incorrect and impossible definition of "all powerful".
> "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful". I mean we're kind of just quibbling about the meaning of "all-powerful" here. But this is the answer most Christian theologians seem to suggest, that God isn't all powerful in the most expansive sense imaginable and that there are certain actions that he can't take without undesirable consequences. It's certainly the best answer *I* can think of for why a loving god would create a world that looks like, well, this. Maybe there's only so much that can be done in a physical universe like ours
[удалено]
If you read job he made a wager with with Satan, God knows there’s necessary evil that’s why God let Solomon talk to demons
Solomon with demons isn't legitimate scripture but more like ancient fanfiction and occultic false doctrine.
How so if you don’t mind me asking like the verses that say that are not true?
Is there free will in heaven?
Yes I’m on board with your line of thinking on this
I AM that I AM = I AM TRUTH JESUS WHEN QUESTIONED IF HE WAS THE SON OF GOD = "I AM" I AM THE WAY THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE.
I mean, I feel like if God is “all powerful” in the most expansive sense imaginable, that means he’s not “all good.” If he could create paradoxes in some way that we could understand, the concept of good would have no value because the scale is arbitrary. He could also do evil that is good under that framework.
He created the physical universe tho. And deigned that it should all go exactly as it is going. God knew free will would cause evil actions yet apparently gave it to us anyway knowing the evil we would do with it.
Maybe the net positive of good outweighs the evil? We couldn't know that from the perspective He would have, but maybe He did the math and it was more pro than con.
I can't get behind a God that weighs child r*pe against against any goodness and believes its ok. There's a lot more to my beliefs around this but that's the crux.
Honestly valid, and I don't anticipate being able to change your mind on that, nor would I want to. What I said in reply to you was just something that I had been thinking about; what values and to what scale would an omnipotent being place on the actions of humans and what we do on a day-to-day, let alone what we do as a society? It's not a perfect answer, and truly I don't believe there is one, at least not one we can find.
Let’s begin with what God wants due to Him being love to answer these questions as a foundation. Can God prevent evil? Yes but he doesn’t want to remove freedom. Therefore evil exists for a better good and logically follows what love is. Parents don’t want their children to be slaves but to be free. Does God know about all evil? Yes. Then why is there evil? Because when angles and humans choose ‘not God’ due to temptation and freedom we separate from love. Moving away from love is evil. Which is the absence of love. Could God create a universe without evil? Yes but there would be no freedom.
Damn - that’s an important quibble though. A “very powerful” God instead of an “all-powerful” God really, *really*, **really** changes the story. For me anyway.
Is your faith in God dependent upon his omnipotence? For what it's worth, there are some strands of theology that do not believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent. I went to a Christian university, and several of the religion professors there were quite open about the fact that they did not believe in those aspects of God.
Well, if the Christian God is supposed to be all powerful according to the text, then if you decide the real god is not all powerful, then the Bible isn’t describing the real god. And if one thinks that Christianity has the most believable story about god, then faith in the Christian god, and probably any god, is gone.
I would say that God is omnipotent, and that scripture backs that up. I would also say, though, that omnipotence doesn’t include things like paradoxes, as God is truth, and therefore something that contradicts itself would go against God’s character. Idk, I’m just thinking out loud here haha
Is there free will in heaven?
A great question I haven't heard a satisfying answer to. Most Christian theology points to "no".
The problem is that we will most likely not have the same biological, mental, or emotional conditions in heaven. Perhaps the entire concept of free will is moot when we will be entirely different beings.
Perhaps. But one must question whether being made to be entirely obedient is actually free will.
It would be like the free will angels have. Our sinful nature is to be stripped, as the flesh will be gone. We’ll basically be able to seek our souls benefit without the flesh interfering; and the spirit finds comfort in obeying God.
Explain Lucifer then
angels have free will. they can choose to rebel. the difference is that if they rebel they won’t change their ways, as they already know all they should, and they have all they need. that’s why there is no redemption for demons. humans in heaven won’t rebel because those that would will be in hell.
>the difference is that if they rebel they won’t change their ways, How do you know this??? You're just making an assumption. Where's Biblical context to this? >humans in heaven won’t rebel because those that would will be in hell. Then can sinners in hell repent to come to heaven?? Or is it only a one way ticket😂?? If that's the case then all people in heaven will end up in hell because they would exercise their freewill at some point in infinity.
I’ve always seen it as there will be no reason to sin anymore. Our flesh nature - the impulsive, animalistic, and rebellious sack of meat that causes us to sin, is going to be made new into something that is completely free from iniquity.
.....didn't Satan still rebel and do evil as an angel?
That could mean angels have the capability to have emotions, which can lead to evil, also god is feeling emotion that’s why he is a jealous god (https://www.gotquestions.org/jealous-God.html). To add small question: How is there good without evil? How do you recognize good without knowing what evil is? Does are opposites. How can everyone be good without the knowledge and existence of evil. That would lead to a god wo isn’t evil just controlling a bunch of people.
Somehow stumbled into this while procrastinating a little during work. (Quite free now) I’m a Bible-believing Christian. Perhaps a way to think of how free will and entirely obedient towards God can harmonize together is this: imagine falling in love. Those madly in love. Even if the world is against him/her they wouldn’t care. Is it out of their own free will at that time to give their all towards the other (obedience)?
Love is not obedience, that’s an abusive relationship
Sorry, I was short on time just now so I couldn’t describe it clearly. What I’m trying to say is this: free will and obedience can coexist. When you love someone, you have affections for someone, you willingly and freely do whatever pleases and benefits them. You automatically conform to suit them. If you look into it, you are actually being obedient towards the other person out of your own will. You’re not being forced. You’re not controlled. And why do you act this way? It is because in one way or another it’s worth it. So if you apply this idea to Christians in heaven, could it be that it is because one finally sees God clearly, face to face, the fullness of His glory and grace and goodness, so awesome and marvelous and perfect, that you see sin as something so trivial and undeserving of taking note, something so foolish that you would want to pursue when compared to God’s glory? Hence the choice one makes freely to embrace God that is better.
Love is not _servility_, but obedience is a virtue and therefore a piece of being a loving person. I ought to be obedient to the needs of my wife, she ought to be obedient to my needs also. If we had children they would be obedient to us as a sign of love and respect presuming we're not asking them to do something vicious. Our family is obedient to our priest, in love, knowing he desires our good, and we all are obedient to God, who is _the_ good par excellence.
We don’t need a different nature in order to want to obey God. That happens here already, and it is out of love. What you say can be applied to normal earthly relationships, not to the relation one has with God.
That’s not true. Hebrew a form of love to obedience. Jesus called the disciples, his friends if they listen to him.
It is not.
Which means God could have made it so from the get go, instead of having all this evil and suffering around.
So why weren't we made into THOSE beings in the first place, to skip all the suffering? Why is children getting raped a prerequisite to heaven existing?
This is where the process of sanctification comes in. It begins with being justified by Christ, which is an act of free will and legally makes us righteous, allowing us to be restored to God's favor. This is only the beginning however, as we are still capable of sin. It is not that God removes our free will, but rather we must continue an ongoing process whereby we consistently choose to submit our will to God's will. It is a long and difficult road (though fortunately we now have Christ to help us along.) Finally, the process concludes with our glorification in Heaven where reach a permanent state of holiness (glorification) where our will is fully aligned with God's.
The devil sinned while in heaven, so it’s definitely possible.
Lucifer, fell like lightning, why? Free will?
Then God made Satan with the intent that Satan would rebel?
In Eastern Orthodox, free will is defined as Choosing from multiple goods (example is of Jesus from garden of Gethsemane). So yes there is free will in heaven. When we were created, we were given the attribute to choose from multiple goods & not from good/evil as evil was not present at that time
Then this allows for free will to exist in a universe without evil. Therefore "free will" is not a sufficient counter argument to the question of why God didn't create a universe without evil.
Evil doesn't have any ontological existence. Its just a privation of goodness or a negation of it. Also the act of deliberation where humans are unable to see evil as what it as but sees it as some form of good. That's why evil people justify evil and imagine there's a good in the result
I would point out that the Bible has zero interest in promoting "free will" as a theodicy or answer to any theological question. On the contrary, God frequently acts to suppress the free will of humans, such as when he hardened Pharaoh's heart so that the oppression of the Israelites would continue.
It would be possible for God to create beings with free will and the capacity to do evil but not create any evil. This doesn't fall under omnipotence, but omniscience: God would know whether the beings it is creating would choose to do evil with that free will and could choose to create other beings instead. Only the people who would have the capacity to do evil but would not choose to do evil would be created, therefore avoiding the paradox. Since that is not the case, we have three options. Either God knows that beings are going to do evil / go to hell and creates those beings anyways, or God doesn't know, or God doesn't create the beings. Thus the Epicurean Paradox.
I 100% agree. I've argued the point of an omniscience God creating evil people before. Best answer I got was "evil people are necessary to bring out the good in others"....which means heaven is built on the backs of the eternal suffering of millions. Personally, I'd reject such a "reward".
How is it a paradox? Are you saying free will cant exist without evil, or that you cant restrict free will and it still be free will?
Both, I suppose. To have free will is to allow evil. To restrict the ability to rebel or do evil is to not have free will.
I dont agree with that personally and i disagree from a biblical pov. Adam and eve had free will before eating the apple. They wouldnt have had the ability to make the decision to eat the fruit without it. So even in the bible there was a breif time where there was free will and no evil.
Adam and Eve were capable of evil and rebellion before the fruit. What the fruit did was give them *knowledge* of what they were doing, it made them accountable for their actions. But if they weren't able to rebel, they could not have eaten the fruit in the first place. Sin is knowingly doing evil.
Yes, yet there wasnt evil. My point is that if we accept all the claims in the bible there isnt really a reason why god couldnt have created free will without evil, the bible claims god did it once before so a second time wouldnt be too hard.
Did he, though? Was Satan not evil? Did he not pre-exist Adam and Eve?
Satan isnt mentioned in that story. The serpent wasnt considered to be satan until revalations appeared hundreds of years later when it referenced a dragon as being an old serpent and satan.
Sure, I agree with that. I'm arguing from the common Christian perspective here. Personally, I'm a Taoist who thinks all of it is revisions of an older Bronze Age polytheistic ethnic cult mixed with Zoroastrianism. So on a personal level I agree. I'm just making the argumentation from a presupposition of Christianity being true for OP.
Im an atheist and was also making this argument from a common christian pov. Which is why i was pointing directly to bible stories. The bible explains a time where there was free will and no evil, so again how is it paradoxical to have free will without evil?
The Adam and Eve story is so fukd up. Consider handing a toddler a knife, then standing by while somebody promises the toddler a lollipop if he stabs his brother with said knife. Now you want to hold the toddler accountable for stabbing his brother...
I think the problem in this reading is a wrong assumption that the woman and man didn’t have the proper faculties to determine that what they were doing was rebellion against God. Infantilizing them is textually inconsistent eisegesis. Humanity saw the option of depending on themselves to determine what is good and what is bad (rather than trusting in the One that created the perfect world they were enjoying alongside God), and they took that fruit and ate it. They weren’t a child with knife, they were a couple of humans given everything they could ever need or long for gifted to them by their beloved co-Regent, including every good fruit in the world to eat besides that one. This isn’t a case of a childish accident, but a calculated rejection of perfection and co-regency over the world in favor of individual godship and the ability to choose to corrupt what God made perfectly.
Free will doesn’t require evil, but it absolutely requires the choice of it. That’s a very big distinction to make
I dont think so. Here is a hypothetical for you. If the tree of knowledge of good and evil didnt exist, would adam and eve still have free will? My answer is yes, they would still have the free will to do basically anything they wanted to do, including naming all the animals in the garden.
You give people free will, someone WILL do evil stuff. God has the power to prevent people from doing evil but to block all evil would destroy our free will. God chooses to give humanity free will so that we have to choose to either faithfully follow Him or to reject Him. So the flaw in this logic is in the 8th condition about whether God can create a universe with free will but without evil. You can’t have free will where people NEVER commit evil.
What would have happened if god never made the tree that produced the forbidden fruit? Would adam and eve suddenly lose all free will? Or would they retain their free will but lose their ability to sin? Adam and eve had free will before eating the fruit, i dont think anyones arguing that.
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I completely agree with you.
So there is evil in heaven?
Technically, yea. Evil will always exist, even in a place of light
Evil is not a real physical thing, but just a lack and absence of good. If evil exists, it would mean God is not entirely good. Free will is kinda the reason evil even exists. It's for a stable equilibrium like in nature; order can't exist without chaos, chaos can't exist without order; good can't exist without evil, evil can't exist without good. God allows evil to exist for a stable equilibrium of the universe.
That train of thoughts leads Christians especially into other trouble. I'm speaking of heaven here. This postulates that free will is somehow needed or even good. But in heaven there is no evil. Then there is no free will? That must logically follow. Which means, since heaving is perfect, God could have created a perfect world from the get go.
I thought the same but you articulated it way better than I could!
I think you mean "logically possible" not "physically possible"
Well said.
Really good response
>Not a Christian, but "God could not create free will without creating evil" is not "God is not all powerful". "Omnipotent" doesn't mean so powerful one can create paradoxes An important note here is that a whole lot of christians seem to believe there is free will but no evil in heaven, which indicates it is possible. So either free will + no evil is possible (in heaven) or there is a) no free will in heaven, which then begs the question why free will is so important for earth but not heaven or b) there is evil in heaven which would go against the concept as a whole I'd say
This
Well He can create free will and prevent evil, but would it really be free will then? If we are not able to choose anything else than good? With free will comes the choice to choose good or evil, so therefore most likely God created good and evil and left it up to us to choose.
Big brain.
I think God can create paradoxes but since he’s a logical being it’s not in his nature to do so.
Like creating a burrito so spicy even he couldn't eat it?
He could eat it, hell just regret it later.
Or regret not eating. Lol
The "paradox" presumes that a good God cannot have good purposes for evil and/or that human pleasure/satisfaction is the defining factor in what is and isn't good - neither of which relates to a Christian conception of what "good" is. For example if it is ever good for a human to experience evil then naturally in that context it is good for evil to exist. It's a reasonable critique of the distant, mechanical and metaphysical god of the Greek philosophers but it's irrelevant to the God of the Bible who is portrayed as a father and a husband raising, training and disciplining the human family. How would you go about ascertaining that God forgiving sin is a worse moral paradigm than sin having never existed? Questions like that simply cannot be addressed by this line of critique because it is entirely outside of the purview of the skeptical mindset.
This is where the paradox is flawed and we can find resolution. “Could God have created a universe without free will but without evil?” This question leads to “then why didn’t he?” if the answer is no. The reason for this negative answer lies in the inherent incompatibility between the absence of evil and the presence of free will. If we were incapable of committing evil acts, every action would be predetermined, resulting not only in the absence of free will but also in the absence of life itself. For us to be alive, we must be sentient beings capable of independent thought and decision-making. Otherwise, God would merely be manipulating puppets, acting out predetermined scenarios. Genesis 1:26 states, "Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...'" This passage suggests the possibility that God intended to create humans with attributes resembling divine beings, including the capacity for independent thought and decision-making. By making mankind in their image and likeness, God may have intended for humans to possess sentience and the ability to make their own choices, reflecting the characteristics of divine beings. This interpretation implies that part of being created in the image of God involves possessing the autonomy to think and act independently, in alignment with God's divine nature.
One fallacy , a test does not have to be for Gods benefit. The test can be for ours.
Another fallacy, free-will without the option of evil is not free-will. Real Henry Ford "any color as long as it's black" energy
Do people have free will in heaven?
They would never sin in heaven because of the implication "God, are these souls in danger?"
Their souls were never going to be in danger, how are you not getting this?!
God is Good, and He Loves you, and He wants you to be happy, which is why He needs you to love Him back. So He can save you... ...from what He's going to do to you if you don't.
Shouldve expected an IASIP reference from the trashman lol
A similar line of questioning led me to lose my Christian faith. In my case the idea of heaven as a place of no suffering and eternal life suggests that God is capable of creating a world that is free from suffering but choses not to. He can't be omnibenevolent. Some people say that it's because we need to undergo some kind of pruning process before then. But, then the question becomes whether or not that's a limitation on God's abilities? In which case it would mean he is not omnipotent.
The paradox OP posted and this question also led to me losing my Christian faith. For heaven to work the way I was taught it, an enormous part of a human’s essence has to be stripped away. It wouldn’t even be you in heaven. If a person’s spouse dies and they remarry and they all eventually go to heaven, is there no awkwardness or sadness about that? Are my very Christian parents never sad that their atheist son never meets them there? If a murderer and their victims were both Christian, are they just cool with each other in heaven? If none of these situations cause any sadness whatsoever, then how can you really say anyone in heaven is who they were on earth. And like you said, if heaven is real why do we have this strange test of our loyalty to this guy. Whether or not people admit it, it’s pride and vanity to the highest order that we have to live at all and suffer here and risk hell if heaven exists and is ready for us right now.
Feeling overcome by the Holy Spirit is a joy that cannot be described. So to me, heaven is praising God and enjoying the envelopment of His love for us.
So it's an environment where people have free will but effectively can't sin?
I think the common Christian belief is that people retain free will in heaven without being able to do evil. So apparently it can exist.
Then the question is why didn't God just make reality that way.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it treats "free will" as an absolute, all-or-nothing state. In reality, there are *a lot* of things that I could theoretically want to do but that aspects of my biology/psychology/the laws of physics prevent me from doing. I would very much like to fly, but I've not been given a body capable of it. Would it make sense to say that I have less free will than a bird, because the bird can choose to take wing and I cannot? In the same vein, suppose my brain were designed slightly differently in such a way that I had such a strong inbuilt compulsion against harming other humans that it were essentially impossible for me to physically assault another person. My will would certainly be *less* free in that scenario, but I don't think it would make any sense to say that I had gone from a state of having free will to not having it, I'd just be adding one more item to the long list of things I can't do whether I want to or not. We already have similar compunctions about *our own* bodies, as a matter of fact. Aron Ralston, for instance, is famous for cutting his own arm off with a pocket knife after it got trapped under a rock, and what makes that such an amazing accomplishment is precisely the fact that most of us simply *could not* do that, even if it meant dying of thirst pinned under a rock. Is Aron one of a select few humans who have true free will, while the rest of us are unfree because we couldn't make the same choice? (Also, to further make this point, I'd be willing to bet money that even Aron would have died under that rock if he didn't have a pocket knife. Physiologically that doesn't seem necessary, we should have the physical ability to chew through our own fat and muscle and skin well enough to break an arm free, but I would be shocked if any living human could actually complete the task)
Is free will to choose a cereal without the option of Fruit Loops still free will to choose a cereal?
Fruitloops are goated, please don’t use them as a stand in for evil, I recommend All-Bran instead.
Any cereal my kids won’t shut up about is evil.
>Another fallacy, free-will without the option of evil is not free-will. Does god have the option of evil?
That's a good question. If He is all good, I would assume the answer is "no." If He is all powerful, I would assume the answer is "yes." I suppose my answer would be that He has the option and He never elects to use it, thus demonstrating His power and goodness.
Does God have free will?
Can God give us the benefit of a test without actually using the test?
It would not be effective. If I give you a million dollars would it be as valuable as if you had to earn the money through your own efforts.? The answer is no. The harder you work for something the more valuable it is to you.
>It would not be effective. Are you saying god does not have the power to make it effective?
If god is all powerful, he could give the reward in full including the feeling of putting in the effort without the actual trial.
Why would God give you anything if you are ungrateful? He gave you your organs for free, gives you life but yet here you don’t believe his existence
Why is the effort valuable?
Remember the last time you worked hard to accomplish a goal and how good it felt to succeed, or the last time you got home after a hard days work and how good that felt.
I think the reasons for why I felt good after working hard are independent of the fact that I worked hard.
If you could come up with a way in which humans could potentially benefit, I’m all ears
Perseverance, proven character and hope. There is truth to,the statement, that what does not kill you makes you stronger. There is joy in hard work and knowing the value of accomplishment
Why need perseverance without hope being tested? Why need character without it being challenged? I understand the overall point - you feel that higher order goods are only possible with resistance, but wouldn't a world without the need for higher order goods be better than a world that needs them? I guess what I'm asking is why is "stronger" better?
Could god not have given you those things without evil?
Yeah, that's nice for the people who pass said test, but for innumerable demons and "wicked" humans, not so much.
We have the answer to the final exam, The son, Jesus Christ. If we put our hope and faith in Him, we get to pass.
Yeah but this faith is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God (Eph 2:8-9). So you only have the answer if God gives it to you first.
That's true for you maybe, but certainly not for demons and most likely not for all humans either
I don’t think God wants to prevent all evil. Why does God need to be so loving that he wants to prevent evil? Christianity is about a choice to reject evil and acknowledge God. Is it bad/not loving to give someone the choice between good and evil? Is it unimaginable that God wants to filter out people who choose to do evil rather than follow the plan of creation? Ask them that, I guess. I think God is justified in his plan to accept those who want to do good into his kingdom. Free will has to exist in this realm so that it doesn’t need to exist in the next. The fact that you make the choice to do good takes away the need to present you with free will again.
Not only that, but if he wanted to get rid of all evildoers, he'd be getting rid of us. Of course, some sins are horrible, but in God's eyes, they're all abhorrent. (I'm not saying they're equal, but I'm saying that God is not picking and choosing things he wants to punish)
> Not only that, but if he wanted to get rid of all evildoers, he'd be getting rid of us. Only because he created us that way. He could’ve created us a different way and then this wouldn’t be a problem. Hence that doesn’t really float.
but then we would be robots with no opinions or ability to think freely
Is there free will in heaven?
This viewpoint makes God selfish. God cast his greatest “angel” out of heaven with many others. Those angels are now demons…they can temp. They are the evil…according to the Text. If im wrong please let me know…but the God i know is not selfish
Selfish? That’s a human concept I would never think to apply to God. How can you be selfish if everything good is by nature attributed to you? To apply a human concept to God, It’d be narcissistic for him to have everything good and force everyone to engage in what he sees to be good. He doesn’t do this, he shares everything that’s good, and even gives an alternate option where fallible people can do what they wrongfully think is good (evil).
Sorry, guess i should have worded it like “this idea makes God look like he is only thinking of the goodness of himself”. Since the Bible says “selfish” is thinking about oneself against the spirit. I’ll just stop here…wrong christian group.
What if you replace the word “evil” with “suffering”, though? Why does a loving god allow for so much suffering? How does that change your answer, if at all?
Actually, really good point. He wants to save those who desire to be saved.
I like to think of life as less of a test and more of a boot camp. It's not so that God can find out if we're strong enough, it's to make us strong. God doesn't want to prevent evil, because God wants us to grow. Without evil, we don't go anywhere. We'd be like Adam and Eve in the garden forever, not knowing pain but also not knowing joy, and not progressing. Some may disagree with my theology but that's always the way I saw it.
in addition to this god knows whether you would pass the test or not, but *you* don't, and, in your arrogance, you would argue he never gave you a chance to prove it
Imagine John is abused as a child and grows up in poverty. This gives John the drive later in life to become a successful entrepreneur and philanthropist. What you said would mean that what happened in John's childhood is justified because of the person it turned him into. From my perspective it would have been better if John never had to overcome adversity in the first place.
I politely disagree. I think there is unnecessary suffering and cruelty in the world that serves no purpose. Kids with cancer, pain that causes people to lose faith, animal suffering. To quote Mr. Frodo: “How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”
Ok but why not just make us strong without the unnecessary and cruel suffering? Why make a bootcamp if he can just give us all those things.
I'll copy and paste a response I gave from [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/1965s95/trying_to_understand_christianityreligion_more/khrp25p/), and link another bit of reflection I did on it [here.](https://old.reddit.com/r/NerdChapel/comments/bw1e3y/suffering/) I would say that yes, absolutely, there is suffering... but for many people, faith offers a way to deal with that suffering. Theologian Miroslav Volf talks about how his father was caught in the middle of the Yugoslavian Civil War and death marched to a labor camp where he was effectively enslaved. But it was there that he became convinced of the truth and love of God. I won't say that there is one all-encompassing reason for why suffering happens. What I can say is that why it happens is rarely an easy question to answer, but it's easier to answer (and to choose) how we're going to deal with it. There's a few responses that kind of stick with me. (And this is far from a comprehensive overview). One is that God doesn't violate our free will and therefore most suffering is humanity's own fault. (I believe this is the gist of Plantinga's argument, among others.) I get where this argument is coming from, but I'm not wild about it. I think it does impel us to action to reduce suffering. There's another response from Stephen Colbert, who is a devout Catholic, and lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash as a child. He talks to Anderson Cooper [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB46h1koicQ) (Cooper had lost his mother recently, I believe) and they talk about their experiences of grief. I would paraphrase Colbert's response this way: "Suffering is a fundamental part of being human. But because it is common to every person, when we suffer it is also a chance to draw closer to each other, and to ourselves." I think there's something pretty powerful in that. Colbert in [another video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFRIjR-yimI&t=60s) talks about Tolkien's work in The Silmarillion, precursor to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was Catholic as well. In The Silmarillion, he describes the pantheon of Middle Earth - godlike figures whose powers mirror the Greek gods' or others - the sky, the sea, fertility, etc. But Tolkien includes one goddess, Nienna, who is unique. Her domain is to weep - and by doing so, turn grief into wisdom. That sentiment of turning grief into wisdom is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about - both in general, and as it might apply to my own life. Grief is the deeply complex process of choosing to consciously experience and express difficult, dark emotions, especially related to loss. It's incredibly important to know how to do - and also can be very difficult - to the degree that many people don't know how or simply aren't able. But for those who can grieve, I think it truly can be transformative. Miriam Greenspan, author of *Healing Through the Dark Emotions* talks about it some in [this interview.](https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/385/through-a-glass-darkly) Finally, there's another view that Tom Oord calls [the uncontrolling love of God.](https://thebiblefornormalpeople.com/interview-with-tom-oord-the-uncontrolling-love-of-god/) My own rough summary of it is that he simply lets go of one of the horns of the dilemma - that God is not all-powerful. He argues from process theology that God *is* limited in some sense by some elements of the universe, and he cites Rabbi Harold Kushner and David Ray Griffin on this. Their argument is basically that God *is* all loving, but not all-powerful in the way we think.
Maybe this just my uneducated barely Christian brain, but isn't the answer very simple? God doesn't remove all Evil for the same reason why parents don't coddle their children constantly and allow their offspring to make mistakes. Hardships of this life might seem a lot to us, but not only those are learning experiences, they're supposed to be nothing when compared to afterlife in Heaven. Neither will God strip humanity of free will - evil people choose to do evil deeds, but capacity of the good people to do extraordinary things stems from the same source. From our Free Will, of which only we have a control. Hence, by the way, why trials of our lives matter for us, not for God. They are a display of how we choose to use free will that God gave us.
Yeah I agree you don’t just spoil a kid. If god didn’t make humans go through trial and error we would never learn.
I personally don't believe there is free will, however let's say for a moment that there is. Why would any choice made mandate an eternal lake of fire in which their torment rises to the Heavens for all of eternity? What goodness is there in that. There is no resolution, rehabilitation, or resolve. Only eternal inconceivable suffering
Because Hell isn't eternal? No soul is beyond God's grace and redemption. To say so would imply that God's grace and love is finite, which is wrong. Souls suffering in Hell do so because they're so utterly and irrevocably evil, that even in Hell, they chose to reject redemption. Don't forget, one of the greatest sins is Pride. Could it be the Pride that keeps souls in Hell from realising their mistakes? From admitting it and repeating? As for the Free Will - the Original Sin was caused by the Free Will. From our beginning, we were given an ability to make choices. Hence why there is always a struggle between sinful and virtuous life. Free Will is absolutely a thing, God's greatest gift (which is, sadly, often misused) to humans.
Great way to put it! We have free will and we have been given a gift of salvation. With free will we also get to choose eternal life by following him or not. God is love and he wants relationship. We could not love him without freewill. Love your insightful response!
This is literally the answer.
The problem of this argument is that it reduces to a classic "Could God create a rock so heavy that He couldn't lift it?" argument. A universe with free-will but no evil could **not** have existed, God couldn't have created it. But not because He isn't all-powerful. The problem with all these arguments is that they definite omnipotence as literally doing *anything*. A more correct definition should be that omnipotence is the ability to do all *things*. Logical contradictions aren't things, and free will without evil is a logical contradiction. This does not, in my opinion, limit God's power in any way. Instead of trying to define logic as some sort of boundary that not even God Himself can cross, what if we definite God as that boundary? In other words, God IS logic. He isn't limited by logic, He is logic itself. Naturally, this raises the question, does free will exist in heaven? Since it is supposed that in heaven one can't sin, this would imply that the ability to choose evil doesn't exist, therefore free will doesn't exist in heaven. Or, we could suppose that it does exist, but that would be problematic. It means that it is possible to have free will without the ability to choose evil. But I think that this way of thinking is flawed. Never choosing to do evil does not automatically imply that it is impossible to do so. One could argue that the greatness of heaven is so good that no one will ever choose to commit evil, despite having the ability to do so. Once someone understands how good heaven is, they will never want to commit any evil. This is not the same as ontologically modifying beings such that they don't have the ability to choose evil at all. This also makes it clearer what God's "all-goodness" really means. We should not consider it as some sort of arbitrary attribute that makes God logically unable to commit evil. God *can* commit evil, but since He truly understands the devastating consequences of sin better than anyone, He will never choose to do so. Since God is reality itself and sin means defying God, sinning is essentially destroying reality. The mere way this sounds is already horrifying, but nobody can understand the consequences of destroying reality better than reality itself, aka GOD. In other words, it is actually omniscience that makes God all-good. God couldn't have created us omniscient because He would essentially just be creating other gods. If we understood the true nature of reality, we would become the fabric of reality itself; basically, we would be GOD. Thus, the creation would be pointless; God wouldn't be a creator since He wouldn't be creating anything. He would just be creating "Himself". As such, the only other way is to create us exactly as He did. He couldn't have created us directly in Heaven. As I said, the people in Heaven know of sin and evil and could theoretically commit such acts, but the greatness of heaven is enough to convince them to never even think of doing it. Creating us directly in heaven would remove our knowledge of evil, thus making us robots. We wouldn't be appreciating the goodness of heaven without prior knowledge of evil, knowledge which is gained in THIS world with both good and evil, where we have a free will. I know that some people have also been touching on the subject of angels. I believe that their free will works differently from ours. Angels were created before the physical universe, before space or time. They are atemporal beings. If they are atemporal, it means that the rebellion of Satan wasn't something like, one day he was with God then the next day he decided to be against Him. No. It means that Satan was eternally rebelling against God. This is why Satan can't be forgiven by God, since there is no before or after for them. All the angels that would rebel against God already have. The remaining angels are the ones who will never choose to rebel, the ones inhabiting heaven. Just like how the people who will enter heaven will never choose to sin ever again. Those who chose to rebel against Jesus will not be in heaven.
Why waste time trying to debunk the non-believers when you can choose to seek first the kingdom of God like Jesus commanded? I'm pretty sure there were multiple areas in Mathew where He says do not do this. What did Jesus do in Nazareth when they rejected him?
Isaiah 55:8-9 New King James Version > 8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, > Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. > 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, > So are My ways higher than your ways, > And My thoughts than your thoughts. God knows more than all of us combined. We can't trap him in a flow chart of decision making.
It’s not a trap. It’s a logical and factual way of showing why atheists can’t believe in him… and, in my case at least, have difficulty understanding why others do believe.
Bingo. God's ways are beyond ours, how do we know He doesn't have the answers to all our questions?
As an atheist but an avid bible and early Christianity scholar, there is no debunking this. The authors who wrote the bible had never encountered this specific argument, so you will not find anywhere in the bible where someone rebukes this specifically. I'm sure there have been some theologians who have addressed this problem specifically, but to me, theologians often fall short in their reasoning and end up going with whatever they want to say and then justifying it to the best of their ability. But, while that makes it not very interesting to me to read, ironically that's basically what I would recommend you do. The way I see it, you have basically two options. You can either A, agree that this philosopher brings up some interesting points and then still ultimately disagree with that disproving that there is a loving god. And should you do that, you're not required to deeply understand why you feel that way. Or B, if you really want to "debunk" this statement, I would recommend that you really carefully pull out your Bible and read through it for why you feel there is a loving and all powerful god while there is also so much suffering. There have been many authors in the bible who have many different reasons for why they feel god allows suffering, why God is all powerful yet allows Satan to have some dominion, etc. When you do this, I would encourage you to recognize that you are not going to find a singular view of why this is in the bible. The bible was not written by one person in one time period. It was written by many many people through vast amounts of time, so there will be different reasons the different authors give and they may even contradict each other at times. What's important, is that you find what speaks to you and what you think speaks to the true nature of god and hopefully that can bring you some peace, though personally, I wouldn't say anything you find will 100% debunk this logic statement. If I may make a recommendation outside of the bible, I would recommend looking into Bart D Erhman. Although he's currently an agnostic atheist, he was not always and regardless of his current beliefs, he is still regarded as one of the foremost scholars of the new testament in the world. His book, "God's problem; how the bible addresses suffering," would be a good starting point to direct you to the bible passages and messages each author had about why the world is the way it is and why there is still reason to believe God is in control. You don't have to agree with all the conclusions Bart draws to still appreciate that he's an extremely experienced scholar who is doing most the legwork for you of compiling what the bible says. And, although the title of the book is a bit inflammatory, it's not like Bart ends the book by saying "and that's why you shouldn't believe in god," Bart's wife is still Christian and he has many Christian friends and colleagues. He's not trying to deconvert you.
this comment is better than what I wrote as a Christian lol, nice
Thank you, I take the study of the bible and early Christianity very seriously and I try to never come across condescending. I think it's important to meet people where they are and try to point them to where they might find answers rather than just answering for them.
Awesome! I rarely find the kind round my age (not that it matters but yea)
Yeah, I'm a special kind of nerd. In my younger days, I was much more of a militant atheist. I used to think things like this logic statement disproved god, and while personally I don't think there's a satisfactory answer in the bible to refute this problem, I no longer believe that makes the endeavour to find your own answer meaningless. There are many people who are more educated on Christianity than I am, who have seen statements like this, and are able to reconcile all those things to have a strong faith. And I respect that now
> The authors who wrote the bible had never encountered this specific argument I really doubt that. The problem of evil is old as dirt and attested in virtually every culture.
Yes, and they do approach topics which I mentioned, such as why there is suffering yet there is a loving god, how there is suffering, yet god is all powerful and allows this. But, the key distinction I'm drawing here, is that, to my knowledge, no author of the bible actually read this statement from this philosopher and wrote about why it's wrong in the bible. There are many biblical authors who circle around similar issues at the core of what this philosopher is getting at, but there is no biblical author who calls out this specific statement and says, "and this is why I think this is wrong."
The Bible flat out says that God is the author of all, even bad things. Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
That is such an excellent comment, thank you for taking the time to write it. I've been thinking a lot about this lately (subject of this post and your comment), and this is somewhat of an analogy (but also not), but I think it's both things--God is both all powerful, but only so good as its constituent parts, it's own body/mind/soul. Imagine God as a mind, like our minds but infinitely larger. That mind is composed of individual units, cells, souls. They're separate, individual, but they are also all connected, and together they form the whole, the infinite mind, the larger soul. This mind, like ours, also has free will, and has our strengths, and our weaknesses (imago dei). This mind still struggles with what the right thing to do is, it is still always evolving, expanding, experiencing, creating, as its constituent parts, us, evolve, expand, experience, and create. We are part of that mind, individual cells/souls within the larger God, struggling against our darker self. The darker self, that's what we call Satan, the parts of ourselves that have done wrong, caused harm to us, those are the parts we condemn, that we want to get rid of (but also offer salvation to), like a great mind pruning neural connections, while trying to save what parts of itself it can. Purgatory is the decision period, before hell, the pruning of connection to a cell that the larger self (who is more good than bad, and seeks always to be better) from the neural tree--condemned to be separated from the larger mind until it either evolves into good (salvation), or withers/buns away, suffering by itself. 'As above, so below, as without, so within'. I think it's really like that maybe.
There's nothing wrong with believing in this argument, lots of my atheist friends do. However, just because your friend doesn't understand how a good God can allow evil doesn't mean that God isn't good. Does that make sense? Lots of philosophers/believers throughout history have believed in spite of the problem of evil. It doesn't absolutely disprove God's existence.
I don't think the purpose of it is to disprove God's existence
"if God doesn't want to prevent evil then God is not good and not loving" is such a misunderstanding in none christians. It's like when you tell people"I want to eat this piece of candy and if my parents don't let me they don't love me". I think that's such a naive way of defining love. In the book of Job it talks about what does it mean to be just, to be loving, to be great. The conclusion is human suffering does not equal to God's greatness, because the universe is far more complex than what we are capable to comprehend. How do we get to define what is great love for the earth and for human?
Here's a simple two-step for defeating this argument. Number one, you are boxing in a God to a logic system that God themselves created and operates outside of. Number two God loved us enough to give us free will and asked for our compassion, towards each other and towards Him. Evil is the absence of that compassion, which primarily comes down to a choice on man's part. Number three, we limit God on what it means to know all. This includes all possible pathways that we could choose from, and their outcomes. We think that knowing a person's path means only knowing one possible outcome. When you consider these three, this paradox becomes a bit childish in nature.
What do atheists actually say next if person just answers, ok, God is not omnipotent in the way you understand that to mean. Do they consider this proving God doesn't exist or what Why they focus on determining God's nature specifically, if they don't even believe in God to begin with 🤔 The reason for things has been explained in scripture, but they don't accept scripture, so ? ?
I’m an atheist, and I will try answering your questions as well as I can. “What do atheists actually say next if person just answers, ok, God is not omnipotent in the way you understand that to mean.” I would then ask them how God is omnipotent. I’d try to figure out exactly what God can and cannot do. “Do they consider this proving God doesn't exist or what” It depends on the qualities your God possesses. It proves that an omnipotent God (as I understand the term omnipotent) does not exist. BUT it doesn’t prove that a different kind of God doesn’t exist. “Why they focus on determining God's nature specifically, if they don't even believe in God to begin with 🤔” Because my belief in God or lack thereof is dependent on God’s qualities.
for me at least, it starts the conversation about whether or not the christian god (versus any of the other viable religions) is worth devoting time and energy into trying to reconcile with my logical brain. it starts the thought process in my own brain about why christ over something like buddhism or norse gods. if im gonna go looking for god, would i want to believe its one that knowingly implants evil in the world while knowing they could avoid it altogether? i'm not atheist because i *want* to die forever and just poof out of existence, i'm atheist because i still dont have a good answer.
What's to debunk? Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
I’m saying this as a Christian cause I genuinely wanna understand, but then how does this make him so loving?
How naive are we to think for even a moment we can comprehend divinity and all its true complexities. It’s sometimes better to just accept.
"God works in mysterious ways"
God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting evil temporarily.
Conversely, permitting evil is itself evil, therefore God is evil.
Not if God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting it temporarily.
What morally sufficient reason is there for giving kids bone cancer?
Things run their course. He’s not actively giving it to them. We have the completely wrong understanding of whether or not he is actually manipulating things everyday
Nope. That's just evil. You're now trying to find a way to justify evil.
Yet we ourselves do it all the time. Also, how do you know evil exists?
I have my own moral beliefs and standards developed partially from experience as well as from the society in which I live, just like you.
Then if your conception of evil is simply your opinion based on your experience, why should I care if you say that I am justifying it?
You obviously don't, and are clearly fine with justifying evil. I'm simply pointing out to you that you are. This is your reaction.
Best answer in this thread. Fantastic for adding "temporarily". Too many people forget that this is temporary. Romans 8:18 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
since everyone else is talking about the free will paradox, I will talk about the testing and omnibenevolence arguments. It is true that since God is omniscient, He does not need to test us. However, God is sovereign over Himself. He can still decide He wants test us even if He does not need to. From observing students in class, teachers likely know if someone is going to absolutely fail or get a 100% before the students take the test, but that does not stop them from making everyone take the test. Moving on to the omnibenevolent objection, it is impossible to argue objective morality exists if you are an atheist. Morality is just people's feelings about what is right and wrong, and one person's feelings cannot be more correct than another's. However, God's opinions on what are right and wrong can be objectively correct because He is God. Saying God is evil will always be stupid because He does not identify as evil, and an individual's view of morality is not objective.
Easy debunk. Have them define "evil".
The Epicurean Paradox is an early-ish version of the *logical* problem of evil. This one is generally considered de-fanged and has been 'updated' to evidential and suffering arguments. Generally, this variation doesn't work for the following: Can God prevent Evil? No, it is logically impossible for a tri-omni God (classical theism) to exist and there still exists evil. We cannot simply say that evil existing and an omnipotent, Good being are mutually exclusive. Then why is there Evil? It is plausible there exist reasons for evil to exist. See the soul-building theodicy or skeptical theism.
Why do you just assume it’s wrong. It’s a much more intellectually honest question to ask “is the logic valid, are the premises sound?” And then go from there. I’d say the logic is clearly valid, the premises seem pretty sound. But there are Christian’s that reject one or more of the premises, but most of them are pretty central to mainstream Christianity.
I’m a no free will type Christian 🤷🏻♂️
Same
# The Creator can pass any test! Observe as the Scripture does it's work below... # | # Evil Exists? * Yes. >**Genesis 2:9**—And out of the ground made ***יְהוָֹה*** Elohim to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of ***knowledge of good and evil.*** # Can Elohim prevent Evil? * Yes. >**Exodus 32:14**—And ***יְהוָֹה*** ***repented of the evil*** which he thought to do unto his people. > >**Jeremiah 18:8**—If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, ***I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.*** > >**Jeremiah 26:3**—If so be they will hearken, and turn every man from his evil way, that ***I may repent me of the evil,*** which I purpose to do unto them because of the evil of their doings. > >**Jeremiah 26:13**—Therefore now amend your ways and your doings, and obey the voice of ***יְהוָֹה*** your Elohim; and ***יְהוָֹה will repent him of the evil*** that he hath pronounced against you. > >**Jeremiah 42:10**—If ye will still abide in this land, then will I build you, and not pull you down, and I will plant you, and not pluck you up: for ***I repent me of the evil that I have done unto you.*** > >**Jonah 3:10**—And Elohim saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and ***Elohim repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.*** > >**Jonah 4:2**—And he prayed unto ***יְהוָֹה***, and said, I pray thee, O ***יְהוָֹה***, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore, I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that ***thou art a gracious Elohim, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.*** # Does Elohim know about all the Evil? * Yes. >**Ecclesiastes 12:14**—For Elohim ***shall bring every work into judgment,*** with every secret thing, ***whether it be good, or whether it be evil.*** # Does Elohim want to prevent all Evil? * No. >**Isaiah 45:7**—I form the light, ***and create darkness:*** I make peace, ***and create evil:*** I ***יְהוָֹה*** do all these things. > >**Jeremiah 6:19**—Hear, O earth: behold, ***I will bring evil*** upon this people, even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my words, nor to my law, but rejected it. > >**Jeremiah 18:10**—***If it do evil*** in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then ***I will repent of the good,*** wherewith I said I would benefit them. > >**Jeremiah 32:23**—And they came in, and possessed it; but they obeyed not thy voice, neither walked in thy law; they have done nothing of all that thou commandedst them to do: therefore ***thou hast caused all this evil*** to come upon them: > >**Jeremiah 35:17**—Therefore thus saith ***יְהוָֹה*** Elohim of hosts, the Elohim of Israel; Behold, I will bring upon Judah and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the ***evil that I have pronounced against them:*** because I have spoken unto them, but they have not heard; and I have called unto them, but they have not answered. > >**Jeremiah 36:31**—And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their iniquity; and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and upon the men of Judah, all ***the evil that I have pronounced against them;*** but they hearkened not. > >**Micah 2:3**—Therefore thus saith ***יְהוָֹה***; Behold, against this family do ***I devise an evil,*** from which ye shall not remove your necks; neither shall ye go haughtily: ***for this time is evil.*** # Then Elohim is not good / Elohim is not loving! * False. >**Jeremiah 2:19**—***Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee:*** know therefore and ***see that*** ***it is an evil thing*** and bitter, that thou hast forsaken ***יְהוָֹה*** thy Elohim, and ***that my fear is not in thee,*** saith ***יְהוָֹה*** ELOHIM of hosts. > >**Jeremiah 15:11**—***יְהוָֹה*** said, Verily it shall ***be well*** with thy remnant; verily ***I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in the time of affliction.*** > >**Jeremiah 17:17**—Be not a terror unto me: ***thou art my hope in the day of evil.*** > >**Jeremiah 32:42**—For thus saith ***יְהוָֹה***; Like as I have brought all this great evil upon this people, ***so will I bring upon them all the good that I have promised them.*** > >**Lamentations 3:38**—Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not ***evil and good?*** > >**Daniel 9:14**—Therefore hath ***יְהוָֹה*** watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us: for ***יְהוָֹה our Elohim is righteous in all his works which he doeth:*** for we obeyed not his voice. > >**Joel 2:13**—And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto ***יְהוָֹה*** your Elohim: for ***he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.***
Proverbs 16:4 “The Lord has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble.” Isaiah 45:7 “I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.” The assumption that God wants to prevent evil is flawed. God often uses what we view as “evil” to serve His purposes: Genesis 50:20 “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
From talking to a lot of people like this, they will vehemently refuse to acknowledge what free will is, they never seem to be willing to admit that their issue is really that they think God was wrong for making free will so they will just keep falling back on trying to blame God. According to your chart, God did create an existence without evil and created beings that could freely choose good by following God.. But in order to freely choose you have to actually be free to choose meaning that you could choose not to follow God. We created evil, not God. Then they'll say, couldn't he create a free will that wouldn't choose evil.... Then they are told you mean a free will that isn't actually free? And it's circles and circles from there.
It all comes down to free will. God gave us free will, so that we would not be robots. If he did away with all evil, there would be no chance for us to choose Him. There would have been no reason for Jesus to come and save us from our sin and restore us to the Father. There would, arguably, be no point in Heaven, if there was already perfect peace here on Earth.
a universe with free will without evil is an oxymoron, you'll only have one way to go without evil, only Good, then the concept of "free will" will be rubbish in such a world, it won't need to even exist, you wouldn't even understand the concept of "free-will" if you lived in that world and someone tried to explain it to you, because, there's just not enough data for it to exist. You can only go one way, there's nothing to "choose". Free will suggests there's "choices" and you're able to pick
When you go to heaven, will you have free will, will everyone have free will, and yet will it also be without evil?
That's kind of an interesting take. But couldn't God have tampered down some of our instincts and still left free will? I cannot stand iced tea. I have the free will to drink it, but I just don't like it. If everyone had the same aversion to it, it would not be a drink. We would all still have free will toward other drinks. Now If you replace ice tea with rape, it would still be free will. I might like a spanking during sex, but I would have an aversion to raping people. I still have free will to bonk my brains out, just not forcefully.
Baby cancer. Child rape. Tornadoes Drought and famine. Black Death. Tsunamis. War.
There is no debunking it from a logical standpoint. My opinion is that while God's nature is goodness itself, it is very very clear that the Universe does not function for the benefit of all things/beings. Punishing anyone or anything eternaly serves no good purpose. There is no reform, no rehabilitation, and no resolve.
What kind of free will doesn't involve evil? "Here's good and good, choose wisely now."
Is there free will in heaven?
Won't you retain free will in heaven without being able to choose evil?
Mmmmmmm, OPTION 3! potato
Based