The Problem of Evil

Although I was raised as a Christian, I was never really a part of the faith, and as I went though my teens, it was the Problem of Evil more than anything else that persuaded me the Christianity is wrong, so this is an interesting and important issue for me.

Definitions

Here is how I understand some terms.

All-loving: Love could be (perhaps inadequately) described as a strong positive emotion of regard and affection. If you love someone, you want the best for him or her, you care for and respect that person. From Wiki we also see this:

Agape: In the New Testament, agape is charitable, selfless, altruistic, and unconditional. It is parental love, seen as creating goodness in the world; it is the way God is seen to love humanity, and it is seen as the kind of love that Christians aspire to have for one another.

John said (1 John 4:16):

God is Love

This gives us some idea of the degree of love that God supposedly feels for all his children.

All-knowing: God knows all that is and all that every has been and all that will ever be. As an aside I see no incompatibility here with free will. If I had a time machine and went into the future to see what happened to you in the next ten years, and then came back to now, would that mean you had no free will? I think not, as why should God knowing what we will do mean we did not choose it freely?

All-powerful: Can God do evil? Can God break the laws of nature? Can God do the logically impossible (eg create a square circle)? For the basis on my argument, I am going to say (in order) yes (but being perfectly good, he would never actually choose to do so), yes (as he exists outside the universe, and created those laws; this is what a miracle is) and no.
Of course you may disagree with these definitions, but I think they represent mainstream Christian thought fairly well.

The Problem

The Problem of Evil can be simply summed up as; why does God allow suffering? However, I think it would be better to put this on a more formal basis. I see no reason we cannot apply  scientific methodology here: A hypothesis is proposed, it is assumed to be true, and from that inferences about the real world are deduced. If those inferences are actually observed, this supports the hypothesis. If the inferences are not observed, the hypothesis is rejected.

The hypothesis under discussion is the existence of a being (God) who is all-loving (with regards to humanity at least), all-powerful and all-knowing. If we assume this hypothesis is true, then it seems reasonable to also assume that there is an objective evil.

An all-loving God would not want humanity to suffer, an all-powerful God would be able to stop that suffering, and an all-knowing God would know how to do it. And yet, we observe suffering for humanity.

Suffering for humanity would seem to therefore be incompatible with this concept of God.

Free Will

One way around this is to invoke free-will - a lot of suffering is caused by man, not by God, because God gave us free will. I find this unconvincing because plenty of suffering is not caused by man (eg earthquakes and polio). Furthermore, God chose to curse us with free will for his own purposes, so that would seem to make him culpable here too.

It is interesting to ponder whether there is free will in heaven. If there is, then why is there none of the suffering we see on Earth? The only conclusion is that free will does not necessarily lead to suffering. On the other hand, if there is no free will in heaven, where people will have a blissful eternity, why claim that free will is important to us or to God?

The Fall

Another rationalisation involves the Fall. This is the idea that two people disobeying God thousands of years ago in some way makes it reasonable for God to inflict suffering on six billion people today. Sure, this fits with the Bible (Gen 3), but is this really compatibly with an all-loving God?

Exactly why is it that what Adam and Eve did should determine that people would suffer today? Who set up the system to make it so? God. If you follow this rationale, then God chose to create a universe such that disobedience by Adam and Eve - something he knew would happen when he set up the system - would lead to suffering for billions of people.

Is that compatibility with an all-loving God? No.

The Big Plan

An alternative explanation is that this is part of God's big plan. Sure, people suffer on Earth, but this is so they are tested/purified/whatever ready for heaven. But why do they have to suffer? Who decided that people are born in the fallen state?

Ultimately it comes down to this: God chose to set up the system such that we are all already sinful when we are born.

God is supposedly all-powerful. If he wanted to, he could have chosen to set up a system where people did not suffer for what Adam and Eve did (or however you want to rationalise it). There is nothing God cannot do. He chose to set it up so people suffer.

Getting Souls Into Heaven

God wants us to get to heaven apparently, but the evidence suggests that the majority of people will fail to get there. Sure, in Revelations 7 it say the number of people in heaven will be uncountable, but that could be just 1% of the population. Six million people would be uncountable. So when Revelations say those in heaven will be uncountable, that merely gives us a lower limit somewhere below a million, and not much to go on besides that. All the text says is this will be a big number; no more than that.

Compare to Matthew 7:

13 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

Is this God's great plan, then? Most of his beloved children ending up in hell to suffer for eternity, cast aside like so much rubbish?

The Parenting Analogy

I have children, so I appreciate that sometimes you "have to be cruel to be kind". I take them to the dentist, I take them for vaccinations, I punishment if they are naughty. I cause them suffering because I understand that in the long term they will be better for it - even if they do not understand that. However, the analogy is not that good, because I am not omnipotent. If I was omnipotent, I would certainly not take them to the dentist; I would ensure they just had perfect teeth. No need for painful injections, I could just make them immune. No need to punish them, I just make them understand what they did was wrong, so they do not want to be naughty next time, or I remove the temptation to be naughty.

Sadly,  I do not have that choice. But God does. He could choose to have us born free of sin, and to live in a place where we are happy all the time. Adam and Eve were born sin-free, so we know he can do the first part, and God created heaven, so no problem with the second half either. It would seem that God chose to set up a system in which people suffered, despite being capable of setting up a system in which people do not suffer.

Am I Angry With God?

Discussing this n internet fora usually results in someone sayong I am angry with God for letting bad things happen. This is just a dodge - it completely fails to address the issue - however, I will say this:

I am no more angry with God than I might be with Father Christmas when I find out he does not exist. My point in this thread is that the contradiction between the Christian claims of an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God are inconsistent with what we observe in the world.

I am not telling God what I think he should be doing; there is no point, he does not exist. Rather I am approaching the claim that an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God exists. The way this is done in science is to assume the hypothesis is correct, to draw predictions from that assumption and test thoise assumptions against what we observe. If we assume that an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God exists, what kind of world would we predict? One where everyone is happy, where everyone is safe. Like heaven, but all-inclusive.

Not like this world.