Quote from: Sebby Michelango on March 04, 2016, 02:31:55 PM
Why are there evilness and pain in the world?
The Christian answer to that is God gave humans free will so humans are responsible for the pain, suffering, and evil in the world.
However, that begs the question of what about all the pain and suffering that is caused by forces outside of human agency. This particularly applies to all those people killed or maimed in natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and tsunamis. None of these have anything at all to do with human free will and yet they cause untold plain and suffering. If an omnipotent and omniscient God did exist then by definition he knows about these far in advance and has the power to make them not happen. But they do happen so this omnipotent and omniscient God allows them to happen and simply watches idly as people suffer and die.
The Christian responds that God created a perfect creation but it was corrupted by humans in the Garden of Eden when humans disobeyed God and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So it is our fault after all.
Now this argument looks patently absurd upon casual inspection. However, assuming it is true, how is that action of sentencing the human race to suffer endlessly for one disobedience reconciled with the idea of a God who is "all loving"? In my mind they cannot be reconciled. The action and the idea of love are mutually exclusive. Either the Judeo Christian stories are myths, which is most likely, or the God they portray is not a loving God but rather an evil one. In either case, the reasons for believing in and worshiping him are invalidated.
So why is there evil and suffering in the world? I don't have a definitive answer but the one place not to look for an answer is in a religious book.