http://aristophrenium.com/?p=
The problem is simple: If God is all-powerful, loving and good, that means he can do what he wants and will do what is morally right. But surely this means that he would not allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly (as he could easily prevent it). Yet he does. Much infant suffering is the result of human action, but much is also due to natural causes such as disease, flood or famine. In both cases, God could stop it. Yet he does not.
The author's comment is:
It is sheer irony that TPM would be found committing such a basic question-begging fallacy. In reality there is no tension at all between my answers. Notwithstanding my agreement that there exists a God with the above described attributes, I had agreed that it is morally reprehensible to “allow an innocent child to suffer needlessly when one could easily prevent it.” Notice that emphasized word, for it is critically important. If there exists a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent then there cannot exist gratuitous evil or suffering, for the two are mutually exclusive in the same way that an Irresistible Force and an Immovable Object are. One can posit that my two answers are incompatible only by begging the question (fallacy) that some humans suffer needlessly; to assert that gratuitous evil or suffering exists shoulders an enormous burden of proof in a critical evaluation of the God of Christianity.
The commenter made the comment:
It's the omni-point and gratituous evil stuff that is sick. Ryft forgets there is a fall and thus there is gratuitous evil. His convenient enthymematic premiss is that God ordained the fall, an admission which would have atheists rejecting Christianity outright.
I reply:
The problem is in the construction of the assertion. They set up a 'god' to fail (the almost ever-present but non-existent 'god' of the philosophers). The Creator God is not fully described in relationship to his creation as per the first element of the syllogism. As you say, it ignores the fall, the doctrine of creation where we are the stewards of the created order ( and therefore responsible). He has done something about it.
Without adopting a calvinist definition, I prefer to adopt a more biblical description of God as being sovereign: this in relation to the creation, of course, but 'soverign' is a relational term, and starts to open the discussion as to what this entails, whereas technical terms such as the 'omni's' seem to ignore the system of relationships which God has entered by his creation, modified by the fall (where his life giving ness was rejected), and changed again in redemption.
Why do Christians keep accepting their opponent's definitions, instead of rejecting them from the outset as unbiblical and thus just 'made up'?
