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It is perhaps that hardest objection to overcome. St. Thomas Aquinas gave a good crack at it IMO ( http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm http://www.newadvent.
by cjjuice 10y ago
It is perhaps that hardest objection to overcome. St. Thomas Aquinas gave a good crack at it IMO ( http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1049.htm )
Something I find insightful is he argues that, like cold is an absence of heat, evil is simply an absence of good (God, grace, ect.)
- jules 10y agoThat doesn't solve the problem since heat and cold don't choose to be present or absent while God does.
- cjjuice 10y agoI am not saying it "solves" it. I don't believe it can be "solved". We can only postulate ideas, choose what pleases you.
- zbyte64 10y agoMore accurate to say that the hot & cold analogy does not fit. St. Thomas Aquina efforts were sabotaged by the lack of scientific understanding of his time.
- humanrebar 10y agoWhat have scientists (I'm not a fan of personifying science itself) discovered about the nature of good and evil?
- humanrebar 10y agoThe analogy is that good is like enthalpy, so evil would be vacuum or even particles at absolute zero. If God created moved all of the particles in a space elsewhere, did he just create a vacuum? Or did He just move some particles? If God decides to let individuals or populations live with the consequences of their choices, is He creating evil? Or is He letting things run their course? Giving unbelieving people a taste of the godless universe they prefer? Anyway, at some point we're having a semantic argument about what definitions of words mean. And the objection about God and evil becomes more banal than controversial.
- jules 10y agoThere is a lot of suffering that does not come from people's own choices, such as natural disasters. Even for the evil that does come from people's choices that position is rather questionable. If a person saw somebody about to kill a baby and that person didn't try to stop it then we would criticise the morality of that person. Apparently we hold God to a lower standard than an ordinary person.
- humanrebar 10y agoIf some citizens renounces their citizenship and move to an island, is it a moral obligation of the home country to save the emigrants from an approaching hurricane? What if the emigrants never asked for help?
- jules 10y agoThat comparison is not valid. God is supposedly omnipresent, so when a baby is being killed somewhere he sees it and is able to stop it with no effort yet he lets it happen. Just imagine being in a situation where you see a baby being killed and you could save it at less effort than snapping your fingers. The mother is begging you (i.e. praying) that you save the baby. When a person doesn't save the baby in that situation we call them evil. You haven't said anything about natural disasters either. Most of the time this "benevolent" Lord also threatens you with eternal torture if you don't worship the Great Leader. It's a Soviet style dictatorship with a 24/7 spy line directly into your thoughts. Religions are ancient cults that were successful in capturing a significant portion of the world's population in a time of scientific ignorance. It's as silly as believing in Zeus. Actually the Greeks knew that Zeus isn't benevolent, so that's less silly.