@Amperage,
Amperage;117601 wrote:my apologies. I will rewrite it.
I will start with I'm going to consider givens.
Given:
God is all powerful
God is all knowing
Since God is all knowing, it's reasonable to assume, He would know when to use and when not to use His power.
That's the end of statement 1
Question
Can an argument be made which would propose that 'evil' is necessary?
Statement 2
Post 81 is an example of such an argument.
Allowing your child to fall during the phase in which they learn to walk could be such an argument.
Conclusion
If the possibility exists that evil is necessary,
Then the possibility exists that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good while still allowing evil
With the case of allowing a child to fall while learning to walk, parents do that because parents are not all powerful and cannot teach the child without allowing it to fall. But that does not explain why God would need to use our methods to teach; presumably, God could simply implant knowledge in people, and simply prefers to let people struggle instead.
If we look at post 81:
kennethamy;116952 wrote:But neither of those is Leibniz's argument. Leibniz's argument is that some evil is needed for some good to exist (not to be 'perceived" and not so that good is appreciated, which would be, I agree, shallow). And, in addition, it that good for which evil is logically necessary, did not exist, the world would be less good than a world in which both the evil necessary for the good and the good, existed. In which case God would have created a less good world than he could have created. Which would be contrary to God's goodness. So, Leibniz's apologetic that any world without evil would be a less good world than a world with evil is not one of the shallow views you mention.
First, one would need to actually show that evil is needed in order for there to be good (which needs a good argument to be reasonably believed), and second (and this is likely to be insurmountable), one must show that absolutely all of the evil in the world is necessary. If only part of it were necessary, then we still would be left with God being responsible for unnecessary evil, which means that God is evil. And if all of the evil that is in the world is necessary, this is likely to lead to very bad consequences for actions, as it will be a bit difficult to come up with a motive to improve things, as the evil things, on this hypothesis, would be necessary. And, indeed,
improvement itself would be impossible on this hypothesis, as the evil is necessary for the greater good, and eliminating part of it would lesson the good! This is so because, on this hypothesis, absolutely all of the evil is necessary for there to be as much good as there is, so that the elimination of any of the evil would reduce the good by more! The bad consequences, of course, do not prove that the idea is false, but it would be unfortunate if it were true.
Additionally, this brings forward the question,
necessary for what? When I say,
it is necessary to eat, I mean, it is necessary if one is going to continue living very long. But if one is not going to live very long, then it is not necessary to eat. But this further leads to the problems mentioned by myself and kennethamy above: Presumably, God does not use means to achieve ends, but rather directly creates the ends themselves. We use means to achieve our goals because we are not omnipotent. A person will butter his or her toast, not generally because of a desire to do that action, but because one wants buttered toast. If one were able to create things from nothing, one would simply say,
let there be buttered toast, and there would be buttered toast. That, of course, is the poetic way of expressing this; there would be no need to say anything, really; one would simply create it. And, of course, even this is remaining too anthropomorphic, as, presumably, God has little use for buttered toast.
If there is a perfect God, who decides to create things, the question immediately suggested is this: Why create anything? God, being perfect, has no need of anything, and any good that requires evil would be lacking in God, as God would exist without evil. So if there were a good that required evil, it must not be a good that is better than it not existing, or it would be something better than God!
