AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

One of my favourite discussions of the problem of evil is the chapter below. It's a discussion between two brothers regarding God and suffering in the world if the end result is eternal paradise. TW: child abuse, suffering and death. Children are used in the argument specifically because they don't deserve suffering, they are innocent according to Dostoyevsky (I easily agree).

https://philosophyintrocourse.com/the-course/part-2-does-god-exist-philosophy-of-religion/dostoyevskys-rebellion-chapter-from-the-brothers-karamazov/

It's heavy but worth the read imo, and not unnecessarily graphic.

What god and satan was Epicurus talking about here? Just curious what idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving god existed about 300 BC. My little Roman mythology knowledge has their gods closer to Greek gods: limited in power, easily fooled, and extremely flawed.

Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.

A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be "far from the center of the garden". IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.

The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It's not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?

Maybe it's because free will exists.

Then God shouldn't have given it to us, still his fault, OP still applies

Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.

Then God should have given us the understanding of it so we're not left to question him, OP still applies

Maybe it's a definitional thing, where "evil" to us is always going to be the most-evil existent thing so if existing evils were gone "evil" would still exist but it would consist of aggressive kitten licks or something. So "evil" can't not exist, but it's not because God can't get rid of what we call "evil" now.

Shitty point, we have a clear definition of what these evils are currently and yet nothing is done about them. Maybe if we somehow lived in a world that no longer had the evils we see today you'd have a point but this is just a silly one

What annoying when people who have no grasp of what philosophy about starting saying these statement and expect me to answer them.

Edit: reading the comment is also annoying. When someone mention God, many assume the statement reference their own religion and draw conclusion based on it. I had someone start talking about god doesnt exist because “the proofs” are wrong, but these proofs all driven from his own religion. ( ex christian talking about statement that doesnt make sense in the bible) when I attempt to speak on higher level ( forgot all religions lets talk about god as an entity or thought ) they kept circling around to same points.

Many people dont know how to debate or what they are debating.

You know what they say, the best way to make someone an atheist is to make them actually read the Bible from front to back.

You remind me of my wife.

When we met, she introduced me to lots of short stories that made me reconsider my perspective on things. This was one of them. She still makes me reconsider my convictions whether I want to or not. I sure do love her for that.

No one can convince me that abuse is not evil. Is it common? Banal? Sure. Is it good? No. Never. Causing truama is evil. I don't think there's a valid argument that it isn't.

"Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?"

I don't know though the Americans managed to be super racist while being Christian. They got around that one by just classifying anyone they didn't like as not a real person.

Religion has always been the excuse, it's never been a preventative.