The Problem of Suffering

First to the existence of free will. I do agree that I can"t disprove your justification of suffering by showing that free will doesn"t exist, unless I could somehow prove that it is impossible, which on the basis of our current knowledge isn"t possible. But it is still a good reason to doubt this justification if we see no scientific evidence of or even possibility for the free will you predict with your argument. I think it is rather easy to show that especially the thought of a libertarian free will doesn"t fit the evidence we have. We know that our actions are controlled by our brain and that our brain is build of particle we understand in the way they work. We know how they can be influenced and we know through the research in particle physics that there is nothing left that can influence those particles to the extend needed. This is not to claim that we know the exact workings of the brain, but rather the certainty in particle physics that the only things we have missed do interact so weakly and have such a minor impact that they just don"t accumulate to the impact on the brain needed. This shows that as we know both what allows our actions and understand what the thing that allows them, namely the brain, is made of, we just do not have any space left for a "mind" force to actually impact our actions in a way needed to call it free will. It was well versed by princess Elizabeth of Bohemia in a letter to Rene Descarte as she questions the possibility of an immaterial mind effecting a material body (https://plato.stanford.edu...). Furthermore it can be experienced directly. If you just try to establish in hindsight how you came to think a certain thing. Just ask yourself as some point: Why have I thought that? And then again why you have thought that? And so on. You will see that you will get maybe some steps, but then have no idea. And if you then think honestly whether you have actually in any of those cases actively chosen to think the thing you have you will see that you haven"t, but rather where brought to the thought just by the last one and the influences of your experience. This shows rather well that what we think and do is not a choice some "mind" makes but rather the result from earlier experience and thought. Therefore we see again that there is neither evidence nor possibility for free will which is at least evidence against your argument. Now to gods omniscience. The problem is that it is actually not really compatible to have an omniscient being and a free choice. This also by the way applies to god himself making him not free. If an omniscient being knows that you will do a certain thing in the future you can"t do anything else, because if you would do something else the omniscient being, which by definition knows everything from past to future, would have been wrong. This is impossible for an omniscient being, which is why you can either have an omniscient being or free will which depends on the ability to choose differently, but not both. We come to the morality of suffering. Here you get into a problem. The theistic believe has as one of its main components the assumption that god does not just have the justice in his hand but actually acts as a moral lawgiver which is needed to give a basis for divine command theory. If you say that god has to abide to certain standards that are really right or really wrong one has to ask about what imposes those standards. While on the one hand this again contradicts his omnipotence as he can"t make his moral law to be right, it also shows again that the god concept is actually man-made as the thing you are saying is that god enforces moral rules, but those rules are the ones that human societies have developed over time in the enlightenment. Therefore your god isn"t actually the one deciding what is right or wrong, but just the enforcer of the moral laws we have devised making him nothing more than a court room. Therefore I stand by the analysis that if there is a god and he makes the moral law, which is the basis of the theistic hypothesis, he also can decide whether suffering is right or wrong. Now to turn to your explanation about the angels allowing for god to create a non perfect world that wouldn"t be according to his omnibenevolence, because he so wants to include some angels, is just the attempt to say that "yes, we see no evidence that our fare fetched claims about god are true and we have no way of actually defending them, but we just take some wild story which by definition can"t be refuted and claim that this explains it, while it is actually only an attempt of us not to admit the obvious". But again also this analysis fails. If you have again an omnibenevolent being you can"t square it with him wanting to use some evil angels. If he is omnibenevolent and omnipotent he firstly wouldn"t create them as there is no reason for him as an omniscient being not to know what they will do and not to know that they will act against his own omnibenevolence. Secondly there is no reason for him to actually allow those "bad angels" then to actually create anything with him. Therefore there is no use in just saying that there are some angels to do all the bad, stupid and malicious mistakes for god and quiet honestly I think that the whole discussion of just taking some angels to solve the problem is stupid and rather reflects the thoughts in superstitious people of the dark ages. To sum up I think it is important to remember that searching for the truth in a claim is not about searching for some obscure, untestable and stupid explanation in order to be able to keep your believes but that it needs honest questioning of one"s thoughts and the search for testable and falsifiable hypothesis.