Good and Evil

God does not need anybody to protect Him.

But a young virgin girl "might". So, if there is a law that a rapist must pay to marry his victim, this can help encourage family members to take care of their young female virgins.

And . . . "of course" . . . if a guy knows he will be required to pay and marry someone he rapes . . . this might help him think about it.

And with this law is the requirement that the father has authority to decide if he accepts the man.

So, it is an incorrect representation to only say that law requires that a woman be bought by the rapist; because, with this law is the stipulation that the father may refuse to let the man marry the virgin but the man has to pay.

But Deuteronomy 22:28-29 does not mention this > but this scripture includes how the man never will be allowed to divorce her.

And it would be understood, in a culture of godly people, that the man is expected by God to love his wife fully, and do all he can to encourage her and be good to her. If he is young, possibly he can mature and do better. So, I can see this command is meant to be used with hope for a wrong man to change and do better. This can help feed us to see the redemption that God has for all of us in Christ Jesus . . . how every one of us has violated people, somehow, in our sinning including how our bad example has violated children; but God has hope for each of us . . . through Jesus.

But if he is an evil person not going to change, it is likely he will later do some other sex crime, but then as a married man he will be executed if he gets with any woman other than his wife.

Marriage, then, was protected by the death penalty. Also engagement was > Deuteronomy 22:25-27 < raping another man's fiancée is a death penalty offense. Notice how this regulation to marry a rape victim is only for raping an unengaged virgin; raping a fiancée would get the death penalty.

So, if you or anyone don't like this, then don't do the crime!!

Exodus 22:16-17 shows how the father of the virgin victim has say about if the rapist marries his daughter. And - - whether he accepts the man or not . . . still the rapist must pay the bride price. So . . . again . . . ones knew this law; and this alone could prevent rape.

And people knew each other personally, then. They lived in tents near each other, often enough. There was personal and family culture. If you were godly and knew this law, you "might" keep an eye on your virgin family members. So, the law could help to encourage people to watch out for each other and keep track of who was around their family people.

So, this was not meant for a culture where girls are allowed to run free, like in the United States.

This law was meant to be used in a culture where people knew God and knew how to love in marriage and they knew one another as a community. So, if someone did rape a virgin, everyone then could make the guy a "project", to help him become a real man. If he stubbornly kept on being irresponsible, there was a death penalty for that, too >

Deuteronomy 18:18-21

But this was meant mainly to expose any thoughts and feelings which might take a man to commit rape, so he could see that stuff is sin; but also to encourage hope for a rapist to be redeemed and learn how to love. And God is able to redeem us and change us into really loving persons . . . as family . . . not in isolation in our own egos' free wills. All these death penalty rules were meant to encourage people to stay alive, by living in love . . . not only to make it in their own selfish ways.

Sin does bring death . . . death of loving. And the awfulness of this, I have experienced, is worse than dying.

"'Say to them: "As I live," says the Lord God, "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die, O house of Israel?"'" (Ezekiel 33:11)

Only the death of Jesus can make up for our sins. Our own dying with or without suicide can not be enough; execution can not make up for the wrongs people do; and unforgiveness can be very destructive, in the ones desiring revenge and ones who would not forgive a rapist. So, really, our selfish selves needs to die, so then we become love-living personalities. The old person needs to be passed away, and replaced by how Jesus in us has us becoming, while He in us is sharing with us how He relates with our Father and loves any and all people > Galatians 4:19.

He died for us, with hope for any person, at all; and - - knowing where people can go if they refuse God . . . Jesus considered it to be worthwhile for Him to suffer like that and die like He did, in order to keep us from going there.

quatona said:

Still waiting for Jeremy to substantiate his assertion that without the freedom to rape I don´t have the freedom to love.
He started a half-hearted attempt of a scripted sequence of leading questions, but left me hanging already after one of my first answers.

Click to expand...

The existence of free agents is necessary for there to exist free agents who have the freedom to choose to love their neighbor.

The freedom to choose to love one's neighbor entails the freedom to choose to rape one's neighbor.

Obviously the Old Testament punishments are not meant to be applied today. In the Old Testament, if a man raped a girl, his "punishment" was that he had to marry her.

Don't think that would apply today, but during a time when a woman was dependent on a man for protection, you understand what the law was intending to accomplish.

Jeremy E Walker said:

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".

Click to expand...

If a good God existed, with the qualities usually ascribed to him, then yes, we would expect to observe a radically different world to the one we inhabit. Whether a good God exists or not, his ultimate authority renders him responsible regardless.

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.

Click to expand...

You've yet to show that a God is necessary for that at all.

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, &#8220;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?&#8221; 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.

God&#8217;s 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.

Click to expand...

Are you are saying that it is inconceivable for an omnipotent being to create a world that does not contain evil? Are you saying that God is, therefore, powerless against evil? The promise of an afterlife without evil - Heaven - is therefore a lie?

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 person&#8217;s 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.

Click to expand...

This is essentially the "God works in mysterious ways" canard. There are no other means an almighty deity has at his disposal "to build us or to test us" apart from needless suffering, and even more grotesquely, the threat of eternal suffering?

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.

Click to expand...

I see no reason to assume that, without God, there are no moral obligations, noting also the two-horned problem of divine morality.

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.

Click to expand...

Having already argued this point ad nauseam on this forum I think I've done sufficient learning and researching, hence the succinctness of my responses.

Yeah, I'd say that God is, in a sense, powerless against evil. But power, here, refers to a full sway over things as they're created to be. Human freedom isn't created to be anything; that's what makes it freedom. So it's not quite true to say that human freedom precipitating in evil means God isn't omnipotent over this aspect of creation.

Jeremy E Walker said:

The existence of free agents is necessary for there to exist free agents[...]

Click to expand...

The freedom to choose to love one's neighbor entails the freedom to choose to rape one's neighbor.

Click to expand...

I didn´t ask you to restate your assertion, I asked you to substantiate it.

Received said:

Yeah, I'd say that God is, in a sense, powerless against evil. But power, here, refers to a full sway over things as they're created to be. Human freedom isn't created to be anything; that's what makes it freedom. So it's not quite true to say that human freedom precipitating in evil means God isn't omnipotent over this aspect of creation.

Click to expand...

I think there's a misunderstanding of what "powerless" means... just because God grants us free will, it doesn't mean He's powerless. This is just the structure of the world He has created.

Feldon said:

I think there's a misunderstanding of what "powerless" means... just because God grants us free will, it doesn't mean He's powerless. This is just the structure of the world He has created.

Click to expand...

It says "God resists the proud," in James 4:6 and also in 1 Peter 5:5. So, even if proud people have free will, God is resisting them.

And we see how God turned evil for His good purpose, in the case of Joseph whose brothers sold him into slavery > Genesis 37-50. Even though those brothers used their "free wills" to do what they did to Joseph, God was using it for the good of many people.

And Joseph said to them, "'But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive. Now therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones.' And he comforted them and spoke kindly to them." (Genesis 50:20-21) So, God used the evil of those brothers for God's good purpose, even for saving many people's lives. Plus, Joseph used that situation to help his brothers and to show kindness to them . . . even though at that time Joseph had power to use Egypt's resources to do whatsoever he pleased to get back at his brothers.

So . . . we with God can use even other people's wrongs against us, for our advantage and for the good of others . . . not only for ourselves, but in an all-loving way, like God did with Joseph.

So, with God we also are not limited by evil. "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)

But there are ones who would rather accuse God, than take advantage of Him as our resource!

Another thing > I notice how there are things evil, which the book of Revelation says will happen. In this book, God is telling us about things which will happen in the future. The only way I think He can know this is if He is in control of what will happen . . . and how it will come out. It will not come out the way evil boasts!!

Evil is now being processed to where it is going > to the flaming sewer which burns with fire and brimstone. If you wonder why there is fire in hell . . . consider that predatory animals and stubborn elephants may not be willing to just do what you want and say, but fire can make them be reasonable. I can see that because of how Satan is so stubborn, fire will be a practical way of managing him . . . and his who are stubborn.

"rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God" (1 Peter 3:4)

com7fy8 said:

God does not need anybody to protect Him.

But a young virgin girl "might". So, if there is a law that a rapist must pay to marry his victim, this can help encourage family members to take care of their young female virgins.

And . . . "of course" . . . if a guy knows he will be required to pay and marry someone he rapes . . . this might help him think about it.

Click to expand...

This is some of the most warped thinking I've seen. Being required to purchase your rape victim does not dissuade rape, it encourages men to rape the young lady they most want. It bases marriage and a woman's entire future on being raped. What woman in their right mind wants to be bought by their rapist??? And what sick and twisted deity would ever proscribe that rape victims can be purchased by their attackers?????

And with this law is the requirement that the father has authority to decide if he accepts the man.

So, it is an incorrect representation to only say that law requires that a woman be bought by the rapist; because, with this law is the stipulation that the father may refuse to let the man marry the virgin but the man has to pay.

But Deuteronomy 22:28-29 does not mention this > but this scripture includes how the man never will be allowed to divorce her.

Click to expand...

Ladies, if you ever needed proof that you are property to be purchased based on the value of your vagina, the bible will affirm it for you. You're a step above cattle.

Feldon said:

Obviously the Old Testament punishments are not meant to be applied today. In the Old Testament, if a man raped a girl, his "punishment" was that he had to marry her.

Don't think that would apply today, but during a time when a woman was dependent on a man for protection, you understand what the law was intending to accomplish.

Click to expand...

Yes. It was meant to say that you're only economically valuable as a virgin, you are property, and if somebody rapes you then your dad's not losing his cash based on your hymen.

BlueLightningTN said:

Yes. It was meant to say that you're only economically valuable as a virgin, you are property, and if somebody rapes you then your dad's not losing his cash based on your hymen.

Click to expand...

"You break it, you bought it."

What a terrible way to view women and a stupid understanding of human worth. What's sad is this kind of idiocy still exists in the Middle East.

BlueLightningTN said:

Ladies, if you ever needed proof that you are property to be purchased based on the value of your vagina, the bible will affirm it for you. You're a step above cattle.

Click to expand...

Technically they are less than cattle, because women have a one-shot value, followed by no value, whereas you want to breed your prize cows and they maintain value after procreation.

Also, it's probably illegal to eat a woman, whereas you can eat a cow.

Why women follow religions based on hatred of women mystifies me, I assume they just pretend because who wants to be irrationally beaten?

BlueLightningTN said:

What a terrible way to view women and a stupid understanding of human worth. What's sad is this kind of idiocy still exists in the Middle East.

Click to expand...

I spent 12 years in the middle east and I can confirm that the idiocy against women is massively widespread. And not just against middle eastern women. I saw two Irish girls who dared show their long hair in public get it spray painted green on the streets of Al-Khobar.

GoldenBoy89 said:

And I thank you for that. I only want to discuss topics. I'm not here to change anybody's mind.

I don't know. First off, I don't believe in the concepts of "good" and "evil". They are meaningless because what you might find as good, I might consider evil. What I might think is good, you might call it evil. Rather useless terms if you ask me.

Second, things can and are a-moral. That means they are neither good NOR bad. My pencil is amoral. Words are amoral. Actions can be amoral like writing a paper has no morality attached to it. But actions can also be moral or immoral like plotting to kill someone or actually committing to that and going through with it or planning on helping the hungry or poor. These are examples of moral and immoral actions.

Your god can be a totally moral being if all he ever did was only good and we could ever establish an objective moral truth to judge his actions by. But alas, no such objective truth exists nor do we all agree that he only acts good. Plus, you ascribe to him the ultimate source of everything. Well, in my book that also includes all that is bad.


You're getting closer to my truth.

Evil does not exist. Good does not exist. These terms are meaningless because what one finds good, another might find as evil.

Do you think it was good for God to flood the earth and only spare an old man, his family and a handful of animals?

You say that evil is the absence of good. So is my pencil evil or is it good? Think carefully, this is not a stupid question. I want to know if you look at things as either/or or if you have some kind of scale you use where one end, everything is all bad, the other, everything is all good and everything the middle is neither good nor bad.

Click to expand...

Evil is a byproduct of good through free will. Morality is a byproduct of our understanding of these things. Morals are based off of emotions and are subjective. Your pencil is good but it is also amoral. It is my stance that God is good and everything He created is good. God cannot operate outside of Himself. Free will alone has allowed creation to pervert good. God is the source of everything created but the creation is responsible for the privation. We can lie because the truth exists, we can murder because life exists and we can hate because love exists. Everything is good until it is perverted and even then good will remain in it until it is destroyed. The original good has been perverted over time and accepted in different forms by various cultures. However, it is evident that cultural moral overlap exists.

Noah. Justness operates inside of good, unjustness is a perversion. The flood was just. Before the flood the world had grown wicked past the point of reconciliation. Had the world been sinless then the flood would have been unjust.

Archaeopteryx said:

Are you are saying that it is inconceivable for an omnipotent being to create a world that does not contain evil?

Click to expand...

Of course not. We can very well conceive of a world in which there is no evil. For example, a world just like ours sans free moral agents. In such a world, there would be no free moral agents capable of committing evil and thus no evil.

Archaeopteryx said:

Are you saying that God is, therefore, powerless against evil?

Click to expand...

I have shown that logical argument from evil fails in two ways. The first is because neither of the implicit assumptions is necessarily true and secondly by demonstrating that if it is only possible that God has sufficient moral reasons for permitting evil, then the existence of evil and the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God are not logically incompatible.

Archaeopteryx said:

The promise of an afterlife without evil - Heaven - is therefore a lie?

Click to expand...

Does not follow from anything you have stated thus far.

Archaeopteryx said:

There are no other means an almighty deity has at his disposal "to build us or to test us" apart from needless suffering, and even more grotesquely, the threat of eternal suffering?

Click to expand...

There is no way you can show that the suffering we endure is needless. From our perspective much of what we suffer may indeed seem needless. Not unlike a child might perceive the suffering that they endure at the hands of a caring and loving doctor who resets a broken bone to be "needless". I have endured such pain and suffering as a youngster and I guarantee you, if it were up to me, I would NOT have chosen to endure the pain or suffering in order to have my broken bone reset. But those who knew better, subjected me to momentary discomfort and pain in order to achieve a greater good.

The truth is is that we cannot know God's whole purpose in an instance. We cannot see and understand all the angles the way God could if He existed and if He so ordered things to bring about a greater good.

Archaeopteryx said:

I see no reason to assume that, without God, there are no moral obligations, noting also the two-horned problem of divine morality.

Click to expand...

Ok. Answer this:

What obligates me to refrain from cheating on a final exam in college when I know I could do so and not only get away with it, but get the 4.0 GPA I need in order to qualify for that particular job I have always wanted?

What or who obligates me to not do what I feel is in my best interest?

quatona said:

I didn´t ask you to restate your assertion, I asked you to substantiate it.

Click to expand...

If I am free to love and respect and to honor the women I encounter in my day to day life, I am also free to hate them, disrespect them and dishonor them.

In what sense would I be free if I did not have a choice in how I treated the women I encountered, but like a robot, automatically treated women a certain way without the possibility of doing otherwise?

I would not be a free moral agent in such a scenario, but an automaton.

Jeremy E Walker said:

If I am free to love and respect and to honor the women I encounter in my day to day life, I am also free to hate them, disrespect them and dishonor them.

In what sense would I be free if I did not have a choice in how I treated the women I encountered, but like a robot, automatically treated women a certain way without the possibility of doing otherwise?

I would not be a free moral agent in such a scenario, but an automaton.

Click to expand...

Well, you didn´t say that for having the freedom to love you would have have to have the freedom to *not love* (which indeed makes sense, and is undisputed), you explicitly made it dependent on your freedom to rape them.
Without the freedom to rape them there would still be plenty of space for you to not love them, to hate them, to disrespect them and to dishonor them to your heart´s desire.

Jeremy E Walker said:

Of course not. We can very well conceive of a world in which there is no evil. For example, a world just like ours sans free moral agents. In such a world, there would be no free moral agents capable of committing evil and thus no evil.

Click to expand...

Or a world just like our sans the option of doing evil. You can still have free agents who have other options that do not include the option of doing evil. We can even conceive of a world just like ours where there is evil, but it is immediately and unambiguously punished by God, thus making his moral code crystal clear to all free agents.

I have shown that logical argument from evil fails in two ways. The first is because neither of the implicit assumptions is necessarily true and secondly by demonstrating that if it is only possible that God has sufficient moral reasons for permitting evil, then the existence of evil and the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God are not logically incompatible.

Click to expand...

You've yet to elucidate what those moral reasons are and what makes them sufficient. This just reads like apologetic hand-waving: "God might have very good reasons for allowing genocides to occur." He might? He also might not.

Does not follow from anything you have stated thus far.

Click to expand...

It follows quite well. If God is incapable of creating a world without evil in which persons are still free agents then Heaven becomes impossible, or rather, Heaven becomes a place where it is impossible to be free.

There is no way you can show that the suffering we endure is needless. From our perspective much of what we suffer may indeed seem needless. Not unlike a child might perceive the suffering that they endure at the hands of a caring and loving doctor who resets a broken bone to be "needless". I have endured such pain and suffering as a youngster and I guarantee you, if it were up to me, I would NOT have chosen to endure the pain or suffering in order to have my broken bone reset. But those who knew better, subjected me to momentary discomfort and pain in order to achieve a greater good.

Click to expand...

As I said before, this is the same worn out "God works in mysterious ways" canard. We can imagine a different situation to the one you've just outlined. Suppose that a youngster, not unlike yourself in the above story, was held hostage for years by a mysterious man who he does not know. Everyday he would receive painful electric shocks. There was no apparent association between the shocks and his behaviour; he was shocked regardless of what he did. Finally, that boy was rescued by the police. Years later, as he wondered why his torturer did the things that he did, how much comfort would it give him to hear that his torturer simply "works in mysterious ways"? Perhaps it was not needless, perhaps he was doing it for some "greater good" that the boy could not see?

Ok. Answer this:

What obligates me to refrain from cheating on a final exam in college when I know I could do so and not only get away with it, but get the 4.0 GPA I need in order to qualify for that particular job I have always wanted?

What or who obligates me to not do what I feel is in my best interest?

Click to expand...

Well, obviously... God. Duh.

But seriously, you can think of no reason other than God for why you should not cheat on an exam? If that represents the limits of your moral imagination then you do indeed need religion to be good. Many other people do not. In this particular situation, I would reason that it is wrong to cheat on the exam because it is dishonest and sets a behavioural precedent for further dishonesty, which can lead to harm being done to others. In the more immediate term, it can cause harm to your peers by undeservingly elevating your grade above theirs, thus giving you an unfair advantage. Presumably you would not appreciate others having an unfair advantage over you. Those are just some examples of why it would be wrong to cheat to the exam. There are various other ways in which one might reason through this situation ethically that do not involve appealing to a deity.

Archaeopteryx said:

Or a world just like our sans the option of doing evil.

Click to expand...

A world in which there is no option to commit evil is not a world like ours, for such a world would be void of free moral agents capable of committing evil.

Such a world you envision would not contain human beings.

Archaeopteryx said:

You can still have free agents who have other options that do not include the option of doing evil.

Click to expand...

It seems to me that you are arguing that there is a world in which free moral agents exist and do not have the option of committing evil. But how would these agents be "free" if they were not free to choose to commit evil?

Do not mistake what I am saying. I am not saying that free moral agents have no other option but to commit evil as if being free implies some sort of determinism to do evil.

One does have other options besides committing evil, namely, doing good.

Archaeopteryx said:

We can even conceive of a world just like ours where there is evil, but it is immediately and unambiguously punished by God, thus making his moral code crystal clear to all free agents.

Click to expand...

I can indeed conceive of such a world where you are immediately and unambiguously punished by God when you commit an evil act.

But how would that look?

Imagine a world in which the moment two homosexuals begin to act on their desire to lay with one another they immediately combust and burst into flames and this happens whenever homosexuals try to be intimate with one another.

Imagine a world in which you look at a woman or man and lust after them in your own heart, and are immediately struck by large stones falling from the heavens and this happens whenever someone lusts in their heart.

Imagine a world where whenever people put something before God thus making it an idol, they have a stroke and are paralyzed for the rest of their life.

Imagine a world wherein when anyone takes the name of God in vain their tongue falls out.

Now I will be charitable and even agree with you that these things would make God's moral code crystal clear to everyone. What follows?

How many of us would be alive if we were struck dead everytime we did something evil?

How many of us would be able to function if we were paralyzed or incapacitated every time we did something evil?

The world you conceive of is conceivable, but I have no reason whatsoever to think that God would prefer such a world to the one He created.

Archaeopteryx said:

You've yet to elucidate what those moral reasons are and what makes them sufficient. This just reads like apologetic hand-waving: "God might have very good reasons for allowing genocides to occur." He might? He also might not.

Click to expand...

I do not have to elucidate what they are. As long as it is possible that He has morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil, then it does not follow that the existence of evil and the existence of an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God is logically incompatible.

In fact, I do not have to even make the argument I made. All I had to do was to show that one of your assumptions was not necessarily true and I have not only done that, but shown that both fail to be necessarily true, thus rendering it doubly invalid.

Archaeopteryx said:

It follows quite well. If God is incapable of creating a world without evil in which persons are still free agents then Heaven becomes impossible, or rather, Heaven becomes a place where it is impossible to be free.

Click to expand...

How does that follow?

Archaeopteryx said:

Suppose that a youngster, not unlike yourself in the above story, was held hostage for years by a mysterious man who he does not know. Everyday he would receive painful electric shocks. There was no apparent association between the shocks and his behaviour; he was shocked regardless of what he did. Finally, that boy was rescued by the police. Years later, as he wondered why his torturer did the things that he did, how much comfort would it give him to hear that his torturer simply "works in mysterious ways"? Perhaps it was not needless, perhaps he was doing it for some "greater good" that the boy could not see?

Click to expand...

I doubt it would be comforting at all.

But I have never argued that the free will defense against the logical version of the argument from evil is something that is comforting.

And besides, are you not more concerned with what the truth is? If the truth is disconcerting to you, then that is something you have to deal with.

I do not claim that the answers are comforting or easy. Evil according to the Christian is real and has real consequences and hurts. But the Christian also claims that God has not stood idly by, but has entered into history and shared in our sufferings so that we might have hope that one day, evil will be vanquished finally and totally.

Archaeopteryx said:

In this particular situation, I would reason that it is wrong to cheat on the exam because it is dishonest and sets a behavioural precedent for further dishonesty, which can lead to harm being done to others. In the more immediate term, it can cause harm to your peers by undeservingly elevating your grade above theirs, thus giving you an unfair advantage. Presumably you would not appreciate others having an unfair advantage over you. Those are just some examples of why it would be wrong to cheat to the exam. There are various other ways in which one might reason through this situation ethically that do not involve appealing to a deity.

Click to expand...

Well now, it seems you have just pushed the matter one step further back by saying:

"It is wrong because it is dishonest and can lead to others being harmed."

But my question still remains sir:

What or who obligates me to be honest and concerned about the well being of others?"

Jeremy E Walker said:

A world in which there is no option to commit evil is not a world like ours, for such a world would be void of free moral agents capable of committing evil.

Click to expand...

And that would be bad... how? Do you prefer a world where people can rape and kill over one where they can't? Is that something you would want to create if you were the one in total control of creation?

Such a world you envision would not contain human beings.

Click to expand...

If there's something I can imagine that God cannot do, then that would be a pretty limited God in my opinion. If I can imagine a world where people don't kill and rape and steal from each other, why couldn't God make it so? The answer is, he chose not to.

Or he doesn't exist. I lean more towards the latter.

It seems to me that you are arguing that there is a world in which free moral agents exist and do not have the option of committing evil. But how would these agents be "free" if they were not free to choose to commit evil?

Click to expand...

You can still be free to choose things like, a blue shirt over a green one. Or choose to be a doctor instead of a lawyer without having the freedom to shoot somebody in the face. You can still be quite free to live your life how you see fit while being unable to choose to rape a woman.

Really, I don't know why anyone would ever need that freedom. Why create a world with suffering when you have at your disposal, infinite power, knowledge, and resources to make whatever kind of world you want? Why on earth would you settle for such a bad design when you could have done much better?

Maybe God was pressed for time trying to fit the creation of a universe into 6 days and he overlooked somethings....

Or maybe he just doesn't exist.