"Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent...

What has been alleged is that sympathy for the poor makes something better. Without the poor, God lacks sympathy for the poor. So without the poor, God isn't as good as He could be. Thus, before there were poor, God was not as good as He is now, and thus he was not maximally good previously. How is this sophistry? (I mean, of course, other than the sophistry of claiming that a world with sympathy for the poor is better than a world without poor, but that bit of sophistry was not introduced into the issue by me.)

God left gaps, not for evil, but, yes, evil does occur at times in those gaps. By the same token it is possible to do "good things" in those gaps.





No? What if an omniscient being knew the best way to use it's power for good was to not use it in some instances? This is not possible?


To me, free will does explain evil. Evil occurs whenever someone chooses to do something other than what is right despite the fact

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His desire is for fellowship with people who, while not being forced to loved Him, choose to love Him anyways.

I would love to hear where you get your notion of imperfection. Considering you do no have the blueprints how could you know if something was not created perfectly?


? I guess you lost me with this one. God, while having ultimate authority, chooses not to deploy it over our free will.

Perfection is what we all strive for. God desires us to perform, perform to a certain standard, his standard. Now is it our fault if his creation does not fulfill that standard or his? We would all dearly love to be perfect and to put it bluntly why am I not perfect? It angers me that this invention of a certain god has to be excused so many intangible questions, so many anguished debates to even start to understand his reasoning. If you consider it , anything else so obscure , so unreasonable, so inscrutable would be dismissed as the ramblings of a lunatic. What innate power drives this obsession.

You are, we are, exactly what we are supposed to be in each moment, perfect. Does this mean we should not strive for me? No. I don't know about you but I am compelled to do more....to be more, and I suspect you are too. But in any given moment we cannot be more than we are in that moment.
He doesn't have to be excused but if you ask for a reason, one can be given.

Sorry but you are being totally rhetoric , you have not answered the charges I lay at your gods feet. Your invention is not perfect. I have no god but my mission is the same as yours, so how does your god become involved in my imperfection. He so could so easily have created me perfect, perfect is perfect.

How can I point out that you are all that you can be in any given moment without being rhetoric?
You exist in such a way, as to say, that if you were not the way you are, we would not have the best possible world.
Whether you would personally define that as perfect I don't know.

I dont define humanity as any way near perfect do you? We may strive to improve ourselves but then we may not. So Ill ask you again why are we as humans made imperfect? would you really say we have reached perfection?

If life is an experience that we must endure, dont say its gods reasoning, tell me the reason . This strange invention and then the weirdest of reasoning to attempt at explaining the invention. I want to be perfect but i will fail, so perfection is not the goal...:perplexed:

I don't think we're perfect. But I don't think that says anything about God. We are contributing, through our imperfection, to the creation of the best possible world.
We are perfect in that sense.

We do not make up all of creation.

If I have a screw and it fits perfectly into a particular hole is the screw any less perfect because it cannot cook me pancakes?

What you are asking is a contradiction in the same way blaming God because a man cannot be a dolphin would be a contradiction. A man by his very nature is not a dolphin. And Gods inability to make a man a dolphin is not a slight on God.

What is claimed is that without sympathy for the poor, the world would not be as good as it is now with sympathy for the poor. ...

So are we considering gods inability or his deviant intentions. We are contributing through our imperfection? ummmm. nice...So you admit we are imperfect...at last..So how do we proceed from imperfection? How does our imperfect contribute to this existance? I can see the value of our imperfection , its all around us, its a disaster. Sorry you are deluding yourself and I think you know it..

You are, we are, exactly what we are supposed to be in each moment, perfect. ...

If that is true, then if I go out tomorrow and break people's kneecaps with a baseball bat, that is EXACTLY what I am supposed to do. Do you really believe that?

I don't think we're perfect. But I don't think that says anything about God. We are contributing, through our imperfection, to the creation of the best possible world.
We are perfect in that sense.

We do not make up all of creation.

If I have a screw and it fits perfectly into a particular hole is the screw any less perfect because it cannot cook me pancakes?

What you are asking is a contradiction in the same way blaming God because a man cannot be a dolphin would be a contradiction. A man by his very nature is not a dolphin. And Gods inability to make a man a dolphin is not a slight on God.

You do think that the invention of a cure for cancer would be an improvement, don't you? If so, unless a cure for cancer is impossible, this is not the best of all possible worlds.

I don't believe that you will therefore it is irrelevant. Do you really believe that you could, through your actions, create a situation so heinous that God could not compensate His duty(create the best world possible)? That is what your asking. The answer is no. It may very well be that the first person who's kneecaps who try to break would thwart your efforts, turn you into the police where the arresting office falls in love you and you two go on to unite the world in peace.

Anyone can throw out a scenario.

Do you seriously believe that that is for the best?

If that is all that is claimed, then it does nothing whatsoever for defeating the problem of evil. No one is suggesting that the best possible world would be one in which there are suffering poor and no sympathy. It would be best to have no suffering at all.

That might be so. I don't know. As I pointed out, the claim is only that Leibniz has shown that there is not logical problem of evil, that the propositions that: God is good, God is omnipotent, and there is evil, do not form an inconsistent triad. Whether it would best to have no suffering at all is another issue.

Who claims that they are inconsistent anyway? Omnibenevolence/all-goodness is needed too.

why do you think it matters what I think?
Do I think it would be an improvement? Sure. But since it doesn't exist yet I can only assume that the time is not right.

For all I know the cure lies in the blood of an indigenous tribe of peace loving pacifists in Sri Lanka and the only way to get it is to kill all of them.

I'm just saying, you can look at anything and say, 'wouldn't we be better with that'.

This doesn't matter because we have no way of knowing the ramifications and in fact(if Leibniz is correct) can only assume they would(at this moment at least) lead to a less than best world.