The problem of natural evil - not a problem in Eden?

[ryanbouma]

Paul. As I said in my second post. Let the atheist ask you: why did God create a world where pain and suffering occurs by natural causes. Even simpler, why did God make things tough sometime. Why does a child starve during a famine. Why does cancer happen. How are you going to answer the atheist who asks that, honestly. Especially when our Lord is all knowing all powerful and all good.

[PaulSacramento]

Paul. As I said in my second post. Let the atheist ask you: why did God create a world where pain and suffering occurs by natural causes. Even simpler, why did God make things tough sometime. Why does a child starve during a famine. Why does cancer happen. How are you going to answer the atheist who asks that, honestly. Especially when our Lord is all knowing all powerful and all good.

I've had this debate with atheists many a times and the issue remains that same, it is not WHY does God allow it, the issue is that the Atheists view/definition of God is incorrect.
God doesn't make a child starve, we do. God doesn't make hurricanes or direct them to kill people, God doesn't make earthquakes and tell people to build homes near faults.
God didn't create viruses and bacteria that kill people, people die from virus and bateria that they should never have been exposed to.
The atheists says that a "good" God will intervene and would not ALLOW bad things to happen to "good people" or "innocent children", yet the only issues that an atheist can have about those things is IF he believes that those things should NOT happen to begin with and in that regard, the Atheist has no leg to stand on because he has no belief system to state that it is wrong for "bad things to happen to good people".
BUT, put all that aside, the issue is that God ALLOWS for bad things to happen and IF God is GOOD, then why does He allow that?
Well, the simple and concrete answer, whether you like it or agree with it or not, is that Good comes out of suffering, good does come out of Bad and since a greater good happens when we suffer then God is good to allow for suffering.
An all knowing God KNOWS that a greater good will arise from suffering.
An all powerful God will allow it because He has already made previsions for it.
AN all good God accepts that a greater good will come from suffering.

[Jac3510]

Paul. As I said in my second post. Let the atheist ask you: why did God create a world where pain and suffering occurs by natural causes. Even simpler, why did God make things tough sometime. Why does a child starve during a famine. Why does cancer happen. How are you going to answer the atheist who asks that, honestly. Especially when our Lord is all knowing all powerful and all good.

I've had this debate with atheists many a times and the issue remains that same, it is not WHY does God allow it, the issue is that the Atheists view/definition of God is incorrect.
God doesn't make a child starve, we do. God doesn't make hurricanes or direct them to kill people, God doesn't make earthquakes and tell people to build homes near faults.
God didn't create viruses and bacteria that kill people, people die from virus and bateria that they should never have been exposed to.
The atheists says that a "good" God will intervene and would not ALLOW bad things to happen to "good people" or "innocent children", yet the only issues that an atheist can have about those things is IF he believes that those things should NOT happen to begin with and in that regard, the Atheist has no leg to stand on because he has no belief system to state that it is wrong for "bad things to happen to good people".
BUT, put all that aside, the issue is that God ALLOWS for bad things to happen and IF God is GOOD, then why does He allow that?
Well, the simple and concrete answer, whether you like it or agree with it or not, is that Good comes out of suffering, good does come out of Bad and since a greater good happens when we suffer then God is good to allow for suffering.
An all knowing God KNOWS that a greater good will arise from suffering.
An all powerful God will allow it because He has already made previsions for it.
AN all good God accepts that a greater good will come from suffering.

And I'm rather confident, Paul, that no atheist has ever been impressed by your argument, and rightly so, because you aren't taking their argument seriously. What you are really doing is attacking a straw man. Atheists don't say that "those things should NOT happen to begin with," and since that is what you attack, that's why you miss their point--you're just destroying an argument of your own making.

Atheists are asking a question about the logical consistency of the doctrine of God. There are two ways they can approach this. Employing the logical argument of evil (with which we are all familiar), they argue that the entire concept of God is self-refuting. Employing the evidential argument of evil (with which we all should be familiar, but many are not), they argue that God is so tremendously unlikely to exist given how He has been described so that we are best to regard Him as non-existent. The key issue with natural evil is the fact that there are some instances of suffering that cannot be explained by appeal to free will. So look at part of your response above:

• God doesn't make a child starve, we do. God doesn't make hurricanes or direct them to kill people, God doesn't make earthquakes and tell people to build homes near faults.
  God didn't create viruses and bacteria that kill people, people die from virus and bateria that they should never have been exposed to.

In all of these cases, you are putting the "blame" for suffering on human choice. If only we acted the right way, children wouldn't starve. If only we built homes in the right places, they wouldn't be destroyed by tornadoes or earthquakes. If only we did or did not do this or that, we wouldn't be exposed to this virus. But there are clearly instances of "bad things" happening to people that are not a result of anyone's poor choices. What about a baby born with severe birth defects? What about a person's car who breaks down for no apparent reason--none that could have been predicted--and causing a wreck, hurting and maiming others? What about when I stub my toe or get a sinus headache or a migraine?

Such things cannot be explained on the basis of choice, so your argument to explain them doesn't work. And you can't say to the atheist, "Well you don't have the right to say that kind of thing SHOULDN'T happen!" because they can just reply, "No, and I don't. But I do say that, on your worldview, they should not happen. But since they do happen, I can conclude that your worldview is incorrect." They're just employing a perfectly legitimate modus tollens.

What we have to do is show that, on theism, such evils are allowed. You can do that by holding fast that there can be no unexplainable evils and therefore just denying that such gratuitous evil (which is what the term for what we are discussing in much of the literature) even exists--that is to say, that birth defects, migraines, and death and maiming by accident are not evil in the first place, and therefore we have no reason to expect God to stop it; or you can argue that gratuitous evils do exist, and that God either does nor or chooses not to stop them for some reason that is consistent with everything else we know about God.

I say the first approach, which is very common among theists these days, is just abhorrent, because such things are evil. And since they are evil, and the atheist knows that intuitively, then when you argue that they aren't evil, you look to him in denying basic reality just as he looks to you when he wants to argue that there are no such things as objective morals. You think, rightly so, he's just irrational, and you see that his view is actually immoral. And just so, when you refuse to call evil what is evil--when you say something is not evil that really is--then he sees you, rightly so, as being irrational, and recognizes that your view is actually immoral. Granted he isn't consistent enough to follow through with his own argument and see how it ultimately proves God exists given the reality of moral objectivity he himself is relying on; but his inconsistency does not relieve you of the obligation to provide a correct answer to his own argument.

So we should adopt the second approach and give the answer I provided.

Lastly, I will say that you absolutely should stop appealing to the greater good defense. That's been a long held view, and it's really one we should stop using. It's awful, both in terms of logical consistency and moral outworkings. In short, the greater good defense--God lets bad things happen so that He can bring a greater good out of them--says that the end justifies the means. But that in itself is an immoral principle, so your the greater good defense is intrinsically immoral. It's also indefensible on both on multiple levels. How, for instance, do you show that the good that comes out of any given evil is greater than the evil itself? You can't, because you will never have enough proof because we can never know ALL of the consequences of any given event. Further, such an argument begs the question because you have to assume on the strength of the premise that the good really is greater than the evil. But according to whom? And in all of that, the atheist can ask if there was not another way to bring about that same good. Take Gen 50:20.God certainly used the sins of Joseph's brothers to bring about their own salvation--that's as good an example of "greater good" as anyone could offer--but it's equally clear that there were myriads of other ways God could have done so. Heck, he could have just prevented the famine!

The bottom line, Paul, is that natural evil really does exist, and you do Christianity no service by offering the arguments to atheists that you have given here. You are attacking straw men, not taking the actual argument seriously, and employing morally questionable arguments on pretty much all fronts by refusing to call evil what is evil and suggesting (implicitly) that the ends justify the means.

Much better to follow C. S. Lewis with the regular world defense. There are other arguments, too, but they get into the stuff I touched on earlier. You have to understand the nature of evil--all evil--is that it is a privation of the good. Then you have to understand that "good" is not a moral term but an ontological term, so evil is actually a deficiency of being. Then you learn that deficiencies of being can manifest themselves in differing realms. To be overly simplistic, one realm is moral, and another realm is physical, but it's the same across the board. Then you go on to ask questions about what it means for something to have a deficiency in its being, what it is lacking, and all that gets you into what is called final causation. In the end, you find out that Good and Being are synonymous terms, which explains why God is perfect in every way, and why He is both the cause and end of all things. You then discover that in a fallen world, when God withdraws Himself to some degree--that is, when there is a degree of separation imposed by God between Him and the world--there will, by necessity, be some "holes" in that world, and those "holes" are privations, which is to say, they are evil. So any fallen world is a world in which there will be some privations of good, and that necessarily.

THAT to me is an interesting discussion, but it goes way beyond what most atheists can understand, and from a pragmatic perspective, it goes way beyond what you need to give them. Lewis' argument is relatively simple, takes their objection very seriously and at face value, and in doing so, provides a good response to the PoE. Yours, I'm afraid, doesn't do that at all.

[Philip]

And only God knows the END results of and purposes behind all events - and, ultimately, is it not the END results that God is concerned with. It comes down to trust - do we trust that God loves and desires the best for those who embrace and accept Him or not. Do we believe that God has good purposes in whatever He allows into the lives of believers and future believers, or not?

[Jac3510]

I don't believe that there is a specific purpose for allowing every individual event in our lives, Philip, and I know of no passage of Scripture that teaches as much. The oft quoted Rom 8:28 doesn't say that God causes everything in our life to happen so that He can bring good things out of them. It says that if we love God, we can rest assured that God will take everything in our lives--whether good or evil--and use it in some way for our ultimate benefit. If we don't love God (even if we are saved) then we have no such promise, and in any case, the verse doesn't say God brings bad things so that good can come. Just the opposite, it seems that Paul is speaking about bad things that God did not bring into our lives (the kinds of things Ryan was talking about), but promising in His grace and sovereignty to use even that for good.

So that gives us comfort -- even this terrible thing, God will somehow use it for my benefit. But let's not turn that into a greater good defense, because that does not justify what the bad happened in the first place or why God would allow it. Again, the moment we say He allowed the bad to happen SO THAT He could bring about a good, you have said that the end justifies the means, and that is immoral; and you've made a broadly indefensible argument anyway for the reasons I have already mentioned above.

[jlay]

Jac,

Can you provide a link that contains Lewis' position?

This is all quite interesting and I am loving the discussion.

[PaulSacramento]

It doesn't matter that the skeptic is impressed or even agrees with the argument, the point is that THEIR argument is based on a belief that a Good God can't allow suffering that he can prevent.
The argument is invalid the moment a reason for suffering can be found.
To suggest that God could h ave done it differently or whatnot is paramount to saying that IF my grandmother had balls she would be my grandfather.
That God allows for suffering means that God allows for suffering.
The issue is that WE are looking to find a reason WE can agree on as to WHY.
That is the 300lbs elephant in the room.

We are trying to fathom the reasoning of a being that, by OUR own definition is far beyond our ability to understand and as silly as that sounds, its perfectly human to do so but that doesn't mean we will find a satisfactory answer that WE will agree with.

The only time we can blame God for ANYTHING that happens is if we believe that GOD DIRECTLY caused it.
The only time we can blame God for ALLOWING something bad to happen is if we believe GOD's "job" is to PREVENT suffering.
The only time nature is "evil" is if a natural even causes harm and suffering ON PURPOSE, which means nature had a choice.

Sorry, guys, you have not convinced me that natural evil exists.

[PaulSacramento]

Much better to follow C. S. Lewis with the regular world defense. There are other arguments, too, but they get into the stuff I touched on earlier. You have to understand the nature of evil--all evil--is that it is a privation of the good. Then you have to understand that "good" is not a moral term but an ontological term, so evil is actually a deficiency of being. Then you learn that deficiencies of being can manifest themselves in differing realms. To be overly simplistic, one realm is moral, and another realm is physical, but it's the same across the board. Then you go on to ask questions about what it means for something to have a deficiency in its being, what it is lacking, and all that gets you into what is called final causation. In the end, you find out that Good and Being are synonymous terms, which explains why God is perfect in every way, and why He is both the cause and end of all things. You then discover that in a fallen world, when God withdraws Himself to some degree--that is, when there is a degree of separation imposed by God between Him and the world--there will, by necessity, be some "holes" in that world, and those "holes" are privations, which is to say, they are evil. So any fallen world is a world in which there will be some privations of good, and that necessarily.

I heard that defense in an argument with an atheist on another website.
The atheist counter was clear:
God withdrew from a fallen world, a world he ALLOWED to fall and then, cowardly back away and caused all this mess, a mess that he knew was gonna happen.
That God withdrew makes him not good and certainly not omnipotent, hence, not God.

[Jac3510]

Jac,

Can you provide a link that contains Lewis' position?

This is all quite interesting and I am loving the discussion.

Lewis discusses this in great detail in The Problem of Pain, especially in chapter two. I found this -- it appears that the entire book is available there. If not, that's the relevant page. Start from the words "The inexorable 'laws of Nature'" and just continue until you get bored with it. Here, though, is one section I find particularly helpful, in that it provides a good illustration of the point he's been making--that I've been making and stealing from him:

• We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to it's logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse it's task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him - if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking - then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limit's within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life it'self.

It's a really great book, from start to finish. Definitely one of his more difficult reads, but then again, it's a difficult subject. Thankfully, this part is fairly clear, and I think really gets to the heart of the matter.

------------------------------------

It doesn't matter that the skeptic is impressed or even agrees with the argument, the point is that THEIR argument is based on a belief that a Good God can't allow suffering that he can prevent.
The argument is invalid the moment a reason for suffering can be found.
To suggest that God could h ave done it differently or whatnot is paramount to saying that IF my grandmother had balls she would be my grandfather.
That God allows for suffering means that God allows for suffering.
The issue is that WE are looking to find a reason WE can agree on as to WHY.
That is the 300lbs elephant in the room.

We are trying to fathom the reasoning of a being that, by OUR own definition is far beyond our ability to understand and as silly as that sounds, its perfectly human to do so but that doesn't mean we will find a satisfactory answer that WE will agree with.

The only time we can blame God for ANYTHING that happens is if we believe that GOD DIRECTLY caused it.
The only time we can blame God for ALLOWING something bad to happen is if we believe GOD's "job" is to PREVENT suffering.
The only time nature is "evil" is if a natural even causes harm and suffering ON PURPOSE, which means nature had a choice.

Sorry, guys, you have not convinced me that natural evil exists.

That's fine, but you are wrong. As you say, it doesn't matter if you accept it or not. You have neither understood nor answered their objection, and your arguments against their view are just really cringe-worthy. I, as a Christian, wish you would stop with them, because they are, frankly, embarrassing.

I'm not trying to be harsh. I'm trying to made a point very clear. Look at the part I underlined above. THAT is your problem. You just ASSUME that there is some mysterious reason that we don't know about that God allows suffering. That may be true in individual cases, but you can't make the argument in the universal. In other words, you are just begging the question. They are saying, "There is no conceivable reason that God would allow suffering, and by YOUR definition of God, that would REQUIRE Him to NOT allow it without a reason." When you say, "Yeah, I don't know the reason, but I know one must be there!" you just ignore their whole argument, not answer it. They are content with the fact that you have blind faith, and you leave them with all of their reasons for denying God.

That is why that Christians have worked so long and hard to answer the question. Some answers are VERY good (e.g., Lewis' regular world defense). Some are VERY bad (e.g., your greater good defense, and the common "God's ways are too mysterious for us to know!" approach). We need to stay away from the bad answers and give them good ones. I'm asking you, as a Christian and apologist, stop using the arguments you have been. They are bad. They are unpersuasive. Worse, because they are wrong, they are solidifying people in their unbelief. Remember Job 42:7.

I heard that defense in an argument with an atheist on another website.
The atheist counter was clear:
God withdrew from a fallen world, a world he ALLOWED to fall and then, cowardly back away and caused all this mess, a mess that he knew was gonna happen.
That God withdrew makes him not good and certainly not omnipotent, hence, not God.

Which is why I said you shouldn't bother with that argument with atheists. That response completely misrepresents the who argument, but that is to be expected, since the argument is based on a very detailed metaphysical analysis of good, evil, being, and God. I only know about it and understand it because I spend two years studying divine simplicity and really trying to get a handle on Aristotle an Aquinas. That's not to pat me on the back. It is to say that Lewis' arguments are better for pragmatic reasons, but in the end, if you--as a Christian--want a full and detailed answer, you had better be willing to do some seriously hard work in the area of ontology. Why? Because, in the end, the question of suffering is an ontological question. It raises theological questions, yes, but the solution is ontological. And that's a hard area.

You don't have to go into that. You can accept Lewis' arguments as sufficient enough for you to move on. You can just claim that God's ways are mysterious and just trust Him. That's fine. I wouldn't hold either against you. But neither gives you a detailed understanding of the problem at an elemental level. So it's just a question of how deep you want to go. If your only goal is just to be happy Christian, mere faith is sufficient. If your goal is to be an apologist, you need Lewis. If your goal is to have a formal understanding of your faith in the deepest sense, you need Aquinas. And then, you need to understand what you can do with each level of knowledge. The first is enough to bring basic comfort and nothing else. The second is enough to answer questions from skeptics. And the third is enough to understand and perceive that skeptics' questions are really rooted in very deep misunderstandings about the nature of reality itself.

[PaulSacramento]

Actually, I already made it clear before that I agree there is a reason for God to allow suffering and not that "He does allow and we don't know why".
MY point is that we are looking for a reason WE AGREE WITH and that,m since we are fallen and finite creatures, we MAY not be able to "find it".
I have noticed that many a skeptic creates an argument that he KNOWS he will NOT accept an answer too.
I am not saying that I KNOW a reason, I am saying that IF there is a reason, we MAY not be able to comprehend it AND I am saying that the reason I BELIEVE God allows suffering ( to breed compassion) is a valid one, a very valid one IMO.
You are not being harsh my friend
No worries.
AT the same time, allow me to state once again that I have NOT heard a valid argument to make me believe/agree that "natural evil" exists.

In you view the "greater good" defense is not a good one and, IMO, the "regular world" one isn't a good one.

Allow me to state why I believe in the "greater good" argument, or what I call the "Compassion Argument".

IME, after serving as a peacekeeper and travelling the world in my youth, the one thing that always brought people together, even enemies at times, was the suffering of others.
Never have I seen humans more "in God's image' then when a tragedy struck and people put aside their differences and worked to save each other or put aside their hate to save those they didn't like.
I have seen an earthquake unite people that were separated by religion, I have seen floods unite people separated by tribalisim, I have seen people that hate each other united to stop the suffering of innocents at the hands of an enemy that they were fighting separately.
Compassion means to "suffer with others" and, IMO, is the greatest expression of Love we have and the only thing that brings it out in humans is: Suffering.

My 2. cents on the matter.

[PaulSacramento]

By the way,
CL Lewis on "natural evil" in animals:
http://bilbos1.blogspot.ca/2011/05/cs-l ... -evil.html

"It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general "explanation of evil": it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will not admit to be an evil. The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, to the Satanic corruption of man. For one result of man's fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birth-rate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the death-rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought of it as a response to carnivorousness -- a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture. It it offends less, you may say that the 'life-force' is corrupted, where I say that living creatures were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatised abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. Let us not forget that Our Lord, on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God's wrath, nor to nature, but quite explicitly to Satan. [Luke 18:16]
If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether man, at his first coming into the world, had not already a redemptive function to perform. Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extant now hardly imaginable."

[Jac3510]

Actually, I already made it clear before that I agree there is a reason for God to allow suffering and not that "He does allow and we don't know why".
MY point is that we are looking for a reason WE AGREE WITH and that,m since we are fallen and finite creatures, we MAY not be able to "find it".
I have noticed that many a skeptic creates an argument that he KNOWS he will NOT accept an answer too.
I am not saying that I KNOW a reason, I am saying that IF there is a reason, we MAY not be able to comprehend it AND I am saying that the reason I BELIEVE God allows suffering ( to breed compassion) is a valid one, a very valid one IMO.
You are not being harsh my friend
No worries.
AT the same time, allow me to state once again that I have NOT heard a valid argument to make me believe/agree that "natural evil" exists.

In you view the "greater good" defense is not a good one and, IMO, the "regular world" one isn't a good one.

Allow me to state why I believe in the "greater good" argument, or what I call the "Compassion Argument".

IME, after serving as a peacekeeper and travelling the world in my youth, the one thing that always brought people together, even enemies at times, was the suffering of others.
Never have I seen humans more "in God's image' then when a tragedy struck and people put aside their differences and worked to save each other or put aside their hate to save those they didn't like.
I have seen an earthquake unite people that were separated by religion, I have seen floods unite people separated by tribalisim, I have seen people that hate each other united to stop the suffering of innocents at the hands of an enemy that they were fighting separately.
Compassion means to "suffer with others" and, IMO, is the greatest expression of Love we have and the only thing that brings it out in humans is: Suffering.

My 2. cents on the matter.

I'm not going to presume to tell you what you believe. I leave my comments about the veracity of your arguments to those that I've quoted and referred to explicitly. Beyond that, I'll only say that your "Compassion Argument" is no less flawed and is an example of one that should immediately be retired. It fails for one of two reasons:

1. If taken to mean that God allows or causes natural disasters so that He might bring out unity in people, then it is here explicitly stated that the intended end of that action on God's part was the bringing about of a good. But one can never intend an evil act for the purpose of bringing about a good. That is just another example of the end justifying the means, and so the argument is intrinsically immoral.

2. If taken to mean that God allows natural disasters to occur and in His grace opts to use that disaster to bring about some good, then the argument fails because it does not explain or justify the original suffering. It is, then, simply a red herring as far as the Problem of Evil is concerned.

As to Lewis' regular world argument, you are, of course, free to reject it. I simply find it the most compelling because it is based on logical necessity. In syllogistic form, it runs as follows:

• 1. No world is conducive to the free will of multiple beings unless it is orderly and predictable
  2. All orderly and predictable worlds will, at times, behave in ways that are detrimental to some of its inhabitants
  3. Our world is conducive to the free will of multiple beings
  4. Therefore, our world, at times, behaves in ways that are detrimental to some of its inhabitants

That which is detrimental to a person causes pain and suffering, and for reasons I have only briefly sketched out above, pain and suffering is evil (natural evil). Therefore, if God wants to create a world that allows for our free will, He has to allow for the possibility of pain and suffering, that is to say, of natural evil. That doesn't mean He has to like it. That doesn't mean that there cannot be a future "patch" to fix that problem (that's what the New Creation is all about, after all). It only means that the atheist has no argument against the coherence of theism with reference to natural evil in the face of Lewis' response. They would have to deny either (1), (2), or the necessity of (3). I think all of those premises are air-tight, and so I find the argument extremely compelling.

As to your quote from Lewis on animals, I tend to agree with a lot of what he said. I would note that he does regard their suffering as evil, so to fallaciously appeal to both authority and votes, I'll put him in my column on this one.

[PaulSacramento]

1. If taken to mean that God allows or causes natural disasters so that He might bring out unity in people, then it is here explicitly stated that the intended end of that action on God's part was the bringing about of a good. But one can never intend an evil act for the purpose of bringing about a good. That is just another example of the end justifying the means, and so the argument is intrinsically immoral.

If the argument is immoral then so is ANY argument that accepts that God CAN end suffering but doesn't.

2. If taken to mean that God allows natural disasters to occur and in His grace opts to use that disaster to bring about some good, then the argument fails because it does not explain or justify the original suffering. It is, then, simply a red herring as far as the Problem of Evil is concerned.

God does NOT "allow" for natural disasters to occur, a natural disaster is what we call it when a natural event that must occur,causes damage and suffering.
A hurricane is only a natural disaster IF it effects people in a "bad" way, the hurricane in of itself is not bad or evil and the event, if it effects no one, is not a disaster, so a natural disaster is a subjective term that defines the consequences of a natural act. That God has made us in a way that we CAN use it for the greater good is just an example of his amazing creative process.
We are certainly better suited to deal with suffering then any other living creature on this planet ( most either run or die but none overcome it's aftereffects, they just "accept it").

I think the issue may be one of "creation".
Do we think that the world is as God created ( earthquakes, hurricanes, and so forth) or do we think that the world CAME TO BE this way?
IF they world was created as such then there are two ways to see it:
1) Creation is NOT perfect, but is a continuously evolving process sustained BUT not controlled by God to the very tiniest detail ( God does NOT make hurricanes or volcanoes erupt, they do so when it is "their time" to do so).
2) The world is the way it is because it can be no other way and God made us to work withing the system and we must adapt.
In these two views suffering exists because it is a natural process of life leading to a desired outcome know only to the creator.

Now, if God created the world perfect, with no death and no natural events that are dangerous to living creatures, then that means that somewhere along the lines, God MADE those things and in this view, God truly does have some "explaining" to do.

As someone that believes in an "evolving universe" I believe that these events are such because that is the way the universe was made to work, even before we came along, and as such we must live WITHING God's creation and that he has given us the tools by which to do so and that includes being able to make the "best of" every situation, including suffering.

I am not asking for agreement and the fact that theologians and philosophers have been dealing with this question for 1000's of years makes it clear that there is no "one size fits all answer", what I am simply stating is my opinion based on not only what I have read, but what I have experienced and how I AM able to reconcile it with what I know of God.

[Jac3510]

If the argument is immoral then so is ANY argument that accepts that God CAN end suffering but doesn't.

Not true. The Greater Good argument is immoral because it rests on the premise that the ends justify the means. God allows evil [means] so that He can bring about a good [end]. Lewis' regular world argument isn't so predicated. As noted above, it says that because it is logically necessary that worlds that allow for free moral choices to be made must by nature be normal and predictable, it is therefore logically necessary that -- shy of divine intervention -- then at times that nature will act in a way that some of its inhabitants find disastrous. There are no means or ends here. The principle underlying this argument is called the principle of double effect, and it is the same one medical personnel employ every day when making end of life type decisions. For instance, suppose I have a debilitating, terminal disease that puts me in great pain. Suppose I can take this particular medication that will reduce the pain to a manageable level, but a known side effect is that it will hasten the spread of the disease. The question is, is it ethically permissible to administer the medication? On the principle of double effect, we say yes, because while it is certainly bad to hasten death, that is not the intended consequence. It is foreseen and unavoidable, but it is not intended. The intended goal is the reduction of pain. An important caveat here is that if there is another medication that can be effectively used to reduce the pain too, and that medicine does NOT hasten my death, then it would be unethical to administer the first drug.

So giving man free choice presents God with a double effect. The goal is not to create a world that causes pain. It is to create a world in which multiple people can make free moral choices. God knows and foresees that it is logically unavoidable that such a world will result in unintended pain and suffering -- that is to say, natural evil -- but this is not an instance of the ends justifying the means, because the pain and suffering are not a means of producing free will. If it were, then the argument would be immoral.

Again, then, when you appeal to the greater good defense, you are saying that suffering is the MEANS of producing an END, and that end is good. But it is intrinsically immoral to intend a negative means to produce a positive end. For something to be morally acceptable, BOTH the means AND the end must be good. In your argument, the end is good, but the means are evil, and therefore, the entire argument is immoral.

God does NOT "allow" for natural disasters to occur, a natural disaster is what we call it when a natural event that must occur,causes damage and suffering.
A hurricane is only a natural disaster IF it effects people in a "bad" way, the hurricane in of itself is not bad or evil and the event, if it effects no one, is not a disaster, so a natural disaster is a subjective term that defines the consequences of a natural act. That God has made us in a way that we CAN use it for the greater good is just an example of his amazing creative process.
We are certainly better suited to deal with suffering then any other living creature on this planet ( most either run or die but none overcome it's aftereffects, they just "accept it").

You are misusing the term "subjective." Something is classified a natural disaster if it has results that are undesirable, but that, in principle, means that it is so classified based on the desirability of the outcome. But surely you can see that desirability presupposes the reality of interests, and only living things have interests. We don't call a tornado a "natural disaster" if it uproots a rock, because the rock has no interests. We do if it uproots a home, not because the home has interests, but because the person who lives in it does.

That doesn't make the disaster "subjective" in the sense of rooted in opinion (e.g., chocolate vs. vanilla). It makes it "subjective" in the trivial sense of "happening to a subject." Your use of the term "subjective" here sounds very much like you are employing it in the same way we do when we talk about the moral argument, but in that case, you're just equivocating on the term, which is another logical fallacy.

I think the issue may be one of "creation".
Do we think that the world is as God created ( earthquakes, hurricanes, and so forth) or do we think that the world CAME TO BE this way?
IF they world was created as such then there are two ways to see it:
1) Creation is NOT perfect, but is a continuously evolving process sustained BUT not controlled by God to the very tiniest detail ( God does NOT make hurricanes or volcanoes erupt, they do so when it is "their time" to do so).
2) The world is the way it is because it can be no other way and God made us to work withing the system and we must adapt.
In these two views suffering exists because it is a natural process of life leading to a desired outcome know only to the creator.

Now, if God created the world perfect, with no death and no natural events that are dangerous to living creatures, then that means that somewhere along the lines, God MADE those things and in this view, God truly does have some "explaining" to do.

As someone that believes in an "evolving universe" I believe that these events are such because that is the way the universe was made to work, even before we came along, and as such we must live WITHING God's creation and that he has given us the tools by which to do so and that includes being able to make the "best of" every situation, including suffering.

I am not asking for agreement and the fact that theologians and philosophers have been dealing with this question for 1000's of years makes it clear that there is no "one size fits all answer", what I am simply stating is my opinion based on not only what I have read, but what I have experienced and how I AM able to reconcile it with what I know of God.

And this concerns me, because reading this makes me think that you are attempting to answer the PoE from a distinctly OEC perspective -- that is, that you are reading your theological position regarding the origin of the universe and how Gen 1-3 should be interpreted into the question.

I certainly agree that the YEC/OEC debate has implications for this whole issue, but we need to make sure that we let the data speak for itself. And at this point, we are firmly in the third level I talked about earlier (with reference to simple trust, Lewis, and Aquinas). Frankly, I don't know that either of the possibilities you laid out have that big of an impact on things. They have more to do with the theology of the Fall. Whether or not suffering is evil and existed prior to man . . . that has no bearing on the PoE itself. *shrug*

[PaulSacramento]

I think you are missing my point, the means can't be "evil" because natural "evil" doesn't exist.
You keep saying that my view is an "ends justifies the means" type of thing, well, if that is so, then every view in which God ALLOWS for something is that.
Your view that "end is good but the means are evil" makes something immoral is correct, IF what nature does can be viewed as evil and I don't think that it can.
A hurricane is either evil or not, it can't be evil when it causes suffering and not-evil when the very same thing just happens to NOT cause any.
My whole point is that a natural event can be viewed as evil simply because it MAY cause suffering.
I think we are putting "human" qualities on nature.
You seem to be stating that OUR Interests and OUR suffering is what defines evil ( where you said, " We don't call a tornado a "natural disaster" if it uproots a rock, because the rock has no interests. We do if it uproots a home, not because the home has interests, but because the person who lives in it does") and I am staing that evil's nature ( doing what is wrong KNOWING it is wrong) is what makes it evil.
That is why I don't agree that there is natural evil unless you can prove to me malicious intent or knowledge on the part of the natural event.