These Arguments Against the God of Christianity Are Valid - 1C.

Right off the bat, let's establish what omnipotence really means. God can be incapable of doing the logically impossible and still be omnipotent. Argument 1A - Why does God allow people to do evil? Usually, "free will" is considered to be a perfectly cromulent answer to the apparent contradiction in the Argument from Evil. My opponent, however, has embiggened this argument by asking me to explain why God would even want us to have free will in the first place. You can sweep this problem under the rug entirely by saying its impossible to psychoanalyze God; you can't exactly sit him down on the couch and ask him about his mother. Nonetheless, I'll present an argument anyway. According to the Christian faith, man was made in God's image. I'm going to expand that to say that God imbibed man with "lite" versions of his divine qualities: where God is all loving, man is loving of his neighbor as long as his neighbor doesn't have a nicer lawn, where god is all knowing, man is capable of unlocking the secrets of the cosmos, but he still thinks that electrolytes are what plants crave, where god is all powerful, man is able to shape the world as he sees fit, but only as far as his frail pink limbs will take him. Nonetheless, compared to the other living denizens of Earth, we're the benevolentest, knowingest, potentest creatures around. Particularly, we'll focus on "the power to do what one wills", something that makes little sense if the being in question doesn't even have a will to begin with. Thus, humans have free will because it is a divine quality of God, and we are made in God's image. I won't touch on "free will with moral perfection", since that's sort of like Henry Ford saying "You can have any color you want, as long as its black". Nor will I attempt to explain WHY God wants us to have been made in his image, but he went through the trouble of doing it so it must have meant something to the guy. Argument 1B - Why does God allow natural disasters? Because mountains have free will too, you know. This doesn't have much to do with the argument from evil, but it is a worthwhile argument, probably more so than the first one. We can rephrase the question as "Why doesn't God intervene more often?" True, God doesn't seem to really interact with the world at a personal level much these days, aside from occasionally helping someone find his car keys, making your team win in the playoffs, or helping an actress win an academy award (assuming the devil isn't too busy to do that himself). Instead, it seems most of the world follows dependable laws that don't appear to require any divine intervention once the pieces are set in motion to begin with. So, why would God want it this way? I believe that the highest criteria in designing a system is "elegance". You'll see that word pop up in science and mathematics circles from time to time, basically it is the power of a system divided by its complexity. An elegant system is thus one that is both powerful and simple. It is certainly within God's ability to personally push each particle around according to his own will, without any overall pattern to their motion. However, this would be micromanagement at the most epic scale. Instead, what God did was to create the "ultimate formula", a law from which all other laws of nature ultimately derive. The most ideal system would not require God to personally intervene much at all. With this in mind, we can ask "Is it logically possible for God to have designed an Earth in which there are no environmental disasters, plagues, or any such other form of suffering?" If you take the stance that he could have, then the argument holds some water. "Okay, so I can't expect God to make every aspect of life perfect for me. But couldn't God at least just stop the worst disasters?" "Worst" is a relative term, of course. Presumably, God gave us the ability to feel pain for a reason, so short of pumping endorphins into our brains 24 hours a day, there would always be room for God to eliminate the "worst" suffering. Let's ask this question though, does the suffering we experience on Earth matter, knowing that for the low, low price of believing in God you can spend eternity in paradise? Eternity is a pretty long time. So long that if you were to spend the entire duration of the known universe with a car battery attached to your genitals, the pain you'd suffer would still be infinitesimal compared to the eternity of joy you'd experience. Argument 2 - Why does God allow non-believers? I'll agree that having us humans believe in God is rather important to him. It must be, considering that according to the Christian religion you can rape clowns for a living and still get into Heaven as long as you make sure to let God into your life at some point before you die (presumably the clown rape stops at that point). Whether is it the most important thing, trumping every other will God has, is not necessarily a given. Let's take the analogy of a teacher. She wants her students to get the highest grade on the test. If this teacher had no limits to her authority, she could simply write "100%" on every student's exam, or give the students the answers, or provide only a single answer choice for each question. Heck, she could even pry into their brains and just implant the memories herself. This would be illogical though, because getting a high grade is merely an indicator of what the teacher actually wants, which is for each student to make the effort to understand the material and demonstrate this ability on the exam. Likewise, believing in God is also an indicator: that despite life being sometimes unbearable, and despite a plethora of temptations surrounding us, that we can nonetheless choose to love God more than anything else. This becomes entirely meaningless if God rearranges every particle in the cosmos to do this for us.