It doesn't take duplicity to point out the contradictions in people's religious thinking.
I agree.
If God is the ultimate authority then shouldn't he bear ultimate responsibility? He has omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience. There is no course of action for which he cannot foresee the outcome, and there is no obstacle that can prevent him from acting to forestall particular outcomes or to engineer an entirely different set of options. When you make up a deity like that it's difficult to argue that this deity somehow bears no responsibility for anything, except for that which is good. Yet this is what religious folk often claim: if it's good, then it's a "blessing" and let's praise God for his goodness. If it's an evil, then it's either Satan or man's sinful nature or "God works in mysterious ways."
I already stated plainly that it is my position that God created beings with the capacity to love or hate, to heal or to harm, to do good or to do evil. If God had not created beings with this capacity then we would not be discussing this issue because we would not exist to discuss it.
So let us agree that if God exists, then He is the one responsible for creating beings capable of love and hate, good and evil.
Moving away from this and to your argument. You believe that if God really did exist, then we would expect to see a very different world than what we currently see. We would expect to see no evil, no pain, no suffering, no murder, no rape, and none of these things you see as "evil".
Now, you have yet to show how an act can be objectively "evil" in the absence of God, but let us not focus on that now.
Let us focus on the argument you have tried to mount.
There are different versions of the intellectual problem of evil.
The logical version tries to show that God and evil are logically incompatible with each other.
The problem is that there is no explicit contradiction between the propositions:
1. God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent
and
2 Evil exists.
Now since the two propositions are not explicitly contradictory, there must be at least one hidden assumption that you are making that would show them to be implicitly contradictory. It seems you are making two.
3. If God is omnipotent, then he can create any world that he desires.
and
4. If God is omnibenevolent , then he prefers a world without evil over a world with evil.
You reason that since God is omnipotent, he could create a world containing free creatures who always freely choose to do the right thing. Such a world would be a sinless world, free of all human, moral evils. By the same token, being omnipotent, God could as well create a world in which no natural evils ever occurred. It would be a world free of evil, pain and suffering.
You are not saying that people would be mere puppets in such a world. Rather, you are saying that there is a possible world in which everyone always freely makes the right decision. Such a world must be possible, for if it were not, that would imply that sin is necessary, which the Christian cannot admit.
David Hume summarized the logical version of the internal problem of evil nicely when he asked concerning God, Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. with an introduction by Norman Kemp Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), part 10, p. 198.
This is your argument summed up nicely by Hume.
Now I will utilize Plantinga's Free Will defense to show that the two underlying assumptions you have made are not necessarily true, which is what they must be for your argument to go through.
Addressing the first assumption as noted in (3), if libertarian free will is possible, it is not necessarily true that an omnipotent God can create just any possible world that he desires.
Gods being omnipotent does not imply that he can do logical impossibilities, such as make a round square or make someone freely choose to do something. For if one causes a person to make a specific choice, then the choice is no longer free in the libertarian sense. Thus, if God grants people genuine freedom to choose as they like, then it is impossible for him to guarantee what their choices will be. All he can do is create the circumstances in which a person is able to make a free choice and then, so to speak, stand back and let the person make that choice.
Now this implies that there are worlds which are possible in and of themselves, but which God is incapable of creating. Thus it is possible that every world feasible for God which contains free creatures is a world with sin and evil.
So the first assumption you made, namely, that an omnipotent God can create any world that he desires, is just not necessarily true. Therefore, your argument on this ground alone is invalid.
But what about the second assumption?
It too fails.
Such an assumption is not necessarily true. The fact is that in many cases we allow pain and suffering to occur in a persons life in order to bring about some greater good or because we have some sufficient reason for allowing it. Every parent knows this fact. Trips to the dentist office or hospital emergency room come to mind. There comes a point at which a parent can no longer protect a child from every mishap ; and there are other times when discipline must be inflicted on the child in order to teach him to become a mature, responsible adult. Similarly, God may permit suffering in our lives in order to build us or to test us, or to build and test others, or to achieve some other overriding end.
Thus, even though God is omnibenevolent, he might well have morally sufficient reasons for permitting pain and suffering in the world. Consequently , the second assumption you made, namely that an omnibenevolent God prefers a world with no evil over a world with evil, is also not necessarily true. The argument is thus doubly invalid.
This is a very juvenile argument: "Unless you believe in God you have no standard by which to judge God's actions. Haha! Checkmate atheists!"
Such an argument is a bad argument. That is why I have never used it.
One does not have to believe in God to be able to judge the actions of the God of the Bible. One can use whatever standard they wish. Most atheists use as a standard, their own particular set of moral values and duties they choose to live by.
My argument is that if moral statements are nothing more than expressions of individual preference and opinion, and are thus totally subjective and relative with no objective referrent, then nothing obligates me to choose your particular set of moral values over my own. Nothing obligates me to love my neighbor instead of hate them. Nothing obligates me to refrain from having unprotected sex with women even when I know I have a AIDS. etc. etc. Since there is no objective standard we are obligated to live by in a world without God, and since there is no immortality, as it has been written, all things are permitted.
Now if you cannot understand how this is different than saying one has to believe in God to be moral, (something I have never stated), then you should spend less time trying to argue and more time learning and researching.
