Among the reason we doubt the traditional concept of an all-good, all-powerful God is the presence of Evil in nature (disasters, sickness).
But some believers think that God allows natural evil to occur because it’s His only tool to see how strong our faith is.
However, being Omnipotent and Omniscient, can’t He read our mind to see the degree of faith?
Posted: September 5th 2010
SmartLX www
Regardless of its flaws, it’s one “theodicy” of many coming from a single religion (two others being Satan and free will), which goes to show that even those who are supposed to know about this sort of thing have no idea.
This overabundance, rather than lack, of answers is why the Problem of Evil ended up challenging my faith so strongly early on. It exposed the church’s lack of even theological authority, let alone intellectual or moral. Of course I didn’t think about it like that at the time; they just looked clueless.
Posted: September 20th 2010
Mike the Infidel www
It’s a meaningless dodge. All theodicies fail for a simple, fundamental reason: God put us on earth at all and gave us free will, rather than just creating us as perfect heavenly beings. He’s the one who introduces the option for us to sin, and set up the world in such a way that disasters can happen. It undermines the idea of him being morally just or perfect.
Posted: September 13th 2010
bitbutter www
You already mentioned what strikes me as the clearest problem with this theodicy: an all-knowing god would know in advance whether we have faith in him, he wouldn’t need to test us with ordeals.
Even if we did allow this explanation, other problems remain. For instance, why is an all-powerful and all-loving god interested in sorting humanity into 'those to be punished’, and 'those to be rewarded’ in the first place?
If the answer to this question depends in any way on the myth of original sin, that’s a good moment to pose another one:
Why did an all-powerful and all-loving god allow Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge in the first place? The reply will likely appeal to some version of the free will defense.
Creatures who are significantly free cannot be causally determined to do only what is right.
But this doesn’t get the theist in the clear either. A mere mortal can successfully prevent his child from running into the road and being hit by a car by physically restraining him. If this is a limitation of the child’s 'free will’, then it turns out that we believe that the ability of those in our care to act on 'free will’ should be limited in certain situations.
Why then, was it beyond the capability of an all-powerful and all-loving god to prevent humanity from 'falling’ from grace in the first place?
Posted: September 13th 2010
logicel
If a version of the disgraceful apologetic of god testing our faith through evil was used in the court of law by a parent who claimed that his/her child was not stopped from walking into an open fireplace because the child did not believe faithfully in the parent’s admonition of staying clear of the fire, the court would throw the parent behind bars. Yet when this same crime plays on the supernatural plane, we are supposed to turn a blind eye to this tremendous criminal injustice.
With religion, anything is permitted.
Keep in mind, that theodicy may lead a person into doubting god, but atheism is usually based on lack of evidence for an theistic god(s). Your last sentence encapsulates in part why the Christian god is not logically possible per Paula Kirby’s answer in the above link.
Posted: September 13th 2010
Eric_PK
I think all of these arguments are a waste of time, as christian apologetics has never been about rational arguments.
Religious faith – in the “belief in things not seen” sense – is widely asserted to be a good thing, but without any objective justification as to why it is a good thing.
The simple truth is that faith is advocated by religion because it keeps people following the “right people” in the church, and doing what they want them to do. It leads to very strange arguments.
For example, I have been told by theists that I should believe in god, and reply that I don’t have enough evidence to believe. They say that I should have faith, and I reply that an all-knowing god would certainly know what it would take for me to believe. The ball is in god’s court.
At this point the theists typically slink away.
What the theists are missing is that there is a difference in believe and worship – I could believe that the christian god existed without worshipping him/them. But they typically have believed that “faith is good” for so long that they don’t understand why they believe it.
To get back to your original question, my personal opinion is that any entity that would give people cancer or give kids birth defects just to test their belief in it could only be labelled as “barbaric”.
Posted: September 13th 2010