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Struggles by Non-Christians
Is god willing to prevent evil but not able to?
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<blockquote data-quote="contango" data-source="post: 55491399" data-attributes="member: 265412"><p>God gave us free will, which means we are free to bless God or to curse God, to do as God commands or to ignore God and do as we will.</p><p></p><p>Let's say I have a big stick and decide to hit you with it. That's an evil thing, and as a result of my evil you will suffer. So we might ask why God allows evil, why God allows suffering. From your perspective the evil and suffering are very real.</p><p></p><p>But the only way God can prevent that suffering is to deny my freedom to use the big stick in the first place. If we expect God to override our free will to make sure we never make the wrong decision, of what value is that free will in the first place? We weren't made as some kind of automated being that simply follow whatever the programming tells us, we were made as sentient beings with the freedom to choose.</p><p></p><p>We could also argue that perhaps God should intervene to prevent the greatest evils, and it's easy to make an emotional argument that God should prevent rape, genocide and the like. But that only raises the question of how much evil God should permit - if all of the most heinous crimes were eliminated because God prevented them we'd just be up in arms expecting God to prevent the things that just been moved up to the top of the "evil list". And before long we'd be right back with nobody having free will in case we did anything a little bit nasty to someone else.</p><p></p><p>So ultimately it comes back to us. We can choose to do good, or we can choose to do evil, and either decision has consequences.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="contango, post: 55491399, member: 265412"] God gave us free will, which means we are free to bless God or to curse God, to do as God commands or to ignore God and do as we will. Let's say I have a big stick and decide to hit you with it. That's an evil thing, and as a result of my evil you will suffer. So we might ask why God allows evil, why God allows suffering. From your perspective the evil and suffering are very real. But the only way God can prevent that suffering is to deny my freedom to use the big stick in the first place. If we expect God to override our free will to make sure we never make the wrong decision, of what value is that free will in the first place? We weren't made as some kind of automated being that simply follow whatever the programming tells us, we were made as sentient beings with the freedom to choose. We could also argue that perhaps God should intervene to prevent the greatest evils, and it's easy to make an emotional argument that God should prevent rape, genocide and the like. But that only raises the question of how much evil God should permit - if all of the most heinous crimes were eliminated because God prevented them we'd just be up in arms expecting God to prevent the things that just been moved up to the top of the "evil list". And before long we'd be right back with nobody having free will in case we did anything a little bit nasty to someone else. So ultimately it comes back to us. We can choose to do good, or we can choose to do evil, and either decision has consequences. [/QUOTE]
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Struggles by Non-Christians
Is god willing to prevent evil but not able to?
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