Forgive me if I'm repeating something someone has already said (I
haven't kept up...) but there's also the vale-of-soul-making theodicy.
Irenaeus and others, I think theorized that we are here to perfect our
souls. And the difficulties help us do that. But you have to wonder
why some of us get off so easy and others not. None of the theodicies
seem to get God off the hook. By coincidence I was teaching the Book of
Job last night. Read them a bit of Archibald MacLeish's J.B. for good
measure.
Ursula
Eric wrote:
Naive me, not knowing the texts, but isn't the issue here the apparent paradox between God's never willing evil and God's creating human beings with free will and, thus, introducing the possibility of evil into Creation?
One of the premises is that if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and all good, then God has a desire to eliminate all the evil from the world.
Christians seem to argue that the possibility of evil (free will choosing evil) is necessary for all the good things that come from free will (and which morally outweigh them), such as salvation and redemption. Therefore, it is not true that a God would want to eliminate all evil from the world.
The roundabout nature of this claim made me call it a narrative evasion.It also made me wonder about the way evil could be quantified. How much evil is necessary? If God allows evil to produce the ultimate good, can God allow TOO MUCH evil? And what would constitute TOO MUCH?
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