hawkeye10 wrote:thoke wrote:*The Problem of Evil works better reformulated as the Problem of Suffering, since we all agree that there is suffering in the world, and some of it cannot be explained away with reference to the free will of humans (e.g. natural disasters... why would a good God have allowed the tsunami?).
Only if you are willing to totally refine the word, as evil means expressed through man. If you want to make a tsunami "evil" you can only do it by bastardizing the word.
I suggest that you go get another word instead.
That's exactly what I've done... I've chosen the word 'suffering'.
I am not claiming that evil and suffering are the same thing.
There is a famous objection to theism, which is called the Problem of Evil, and I assumed that the intention of the original post in this thread was to try to suggest that The Problem of Evil might be a problem for atheists as well as (or instead of) theists.
One problem with The Problem of Evil is that evil seems to be a religious concept. Some atheists don't believe that evil exists, so they can't use its existence as an objection to theism.
Another problem with The Problem of Evil is that theists have a common response to it which makes it harder for the atheist to argue against theism. The response goes something like this: evil can be explained by the fact that God (who is a perfectly nice guy) blessed us with the freedom to choose to obey or disobey his will.
An alternative objection to theism can be made, which we can call the Problem of Suffering. This is not the same as The Problem of Evil, but the two problems overlap significantly, since suffering is often involved in what we call "evil".
The Problem of Suffering is more successful as an objection to theism, because unlike "evil", "suffering" is not a weird religious concept that any of us want to question. We all agree that there is suffering, and we all need to account for its existence. Theists have a hard time accounting for the existence of suffering, because they usually believe in a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God. And while they could try again to appeal to the supposed "free will" of human beings, this will not explain suffering that is not caused by human beings, such as suffering caused by natural disaster.
Anyway, this is all beside the point of the thread.