The "Epicurean paradox" disproves the existence of the biblical God.

I have presented the Epicurean paradox which I contend successfully negates the existence of God. My opponent has restated and even clarified the paradox. I will clarify it again through an explanation of the problem of evil by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. 2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil. 3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists. 4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil. 5. Evil exists. 6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil. 7. Therefore, God doesn't exist. [1] My opponent has objections that he says discredit the legitimacy of this paradox. "1. The "Logical" Problem with the Problem of Evil" I have a few objections to the following reasoning - "Now my personal favorite answer the the Problem of Evil is this. 1. If there is no God then there is no absolute morality 2. If there is no absolute morality then morality must be relative 3. If morality is relative then evil is only a stance and thus does not really exist 4. If there is no evil then the entire problem of Evil fails because of the lack of evil which is necessary for points 3-8 in the Problem of Evil Thus the counterargument is that if there is no God there cannot be any absolute morality. If there is no absolute morality then evil is simply when something is what an individual thinks it should be. So then the problem of evil would become. "God doesn't exist becasue the world isn't the way I want it" which of course is absurd. " - You contend that without God, humans would be so morally lost that they wouldn't have a problem with the brutal rape and murder of a seven year old girl. I wonder if you seriously, realistically believe this. What about people who have not accepted God and his rules? What about people who reject him? Do they not know that raping and murdering a little girl is not a good thing to do? - This argument puts the God who is wise, rational, and acts on good reasons in serious question. And without those qualities in God, why do his commands obligate? Commands don't create obligations unless the commander has commanding authority. This commanding authority can't be based on the commands themselves. So, in order for God's commands to obligate, he must gain commanding authority from some source other than his own will. - Lastly - this position puts God's goodness (his perfect goodness, omnibenevolence) in question. If all morality is simply what God wants, what about God's morality? If you say that moral standards are set by divine command, to call God morally good is only to say that he follows his own commands - that he lives up to his own standards. Now, if you are going to quote the bible and "cherry pick" your bible verses, you have to take the others into account as well. It must be stated that there are indeed many "good" (at least by modern and ancient society's standards) moral teachings in the Bible. Take the Ten Commandments for instance – God prohibits murder, adultery, and thievery, among other things. God even encourages the honor of "thy mother and father. " Those are some truly respectable values. God - "Thou shalt not murder. " [2] But. .. . God - Commits genocide by flooding the earth and destroying everybody alive [3] God - Sets a plague upon the Israelites and kills a whopping twenty-four thousand of them because a bunch of them had sex with people who practiced a different religion than them (in this case, Ba'al worshipers). [4] God - Sends two bears to tear forty two children to shreds for calling Elisha a "baldhead. " [5] God - Kills seventy thousand innocent Israelites for David's sin. [6] God - Kills 185,000 sleeping Assyrian soldiers. [7] God - "Girls who are not virgins when they get married must be put to death. " [8] God - "Those who pick up sticks on the Sabbath must be put to death. " [9] God - "Blasphemers must be stoned. " [10] God - "Disobedient teenagers must be put to death. " [11] God - "Prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burnt to death. " [12] And so if God is the sole proprietor of morality, and morality "works" merely because he says it does, he is necessarily a hypocrite as well, doing/commanding all of the above, all the while saying "Though shalt not commit murder. " So your "God = absolute moral standard" stance fails because God is hypocritical, does not follow his own commands, and is immoral (not omnibenevolent, perfectly good, or whichever term you choose) even by his own standards. "2. Free Will Argument" - This argument fails because if God is omnipotent, he should be able to to prevent evil in a way that does not involve limiting free will. For example, one man could walk up to another man with a gun, pull the trigger and try to murder him, only to realize that the gun had not been set up correctly. This is one example of how an omnipotent God should be able to prevent the suffering that befell an innocent man without compromising the free will of the murderer. - Furthermore, this "free will argument" does nothing to take care of babies born with horrible diseases or earthquakes that kill millions of people, like the semi-recent earthquake in Haiti. Whose free will would God have been impeding by preventing the earth quake, or the baby born with Tay-Sachs (disease that causes the deterioration of both mental and physical abilities in infants, usually resulting in death by the age of four or five)? Whose free will would God have been impeding by preventing that? "3. Opposition Argument" In essence this argument states that good cannot exist without evil because otherwise there would be nothing to compare to good. I beg to differ. - First of all - does it really? Says who? Imagine a child born who is born with HIV, beaten by his parents, and who dies at age seven because of starvation. The child never knew good, but without the knowledge of good, did the child not know bad? Is it really true that people with what we deem miserable lives - yes, they exist - don't know their "bad" without the knowledge of "good? " If the bad can exist without the good, you can't say it's impossible to see the good without the bad. - But let's assume that the previous paragraph is nonsense, and we can't know good without knowing bad. In this world, there is much more than only good and evil. There are many steps in between. In fact, rarely is there only good and evil, because most things in this world are neither; They are neutral. Neutral is simply the absence of good. If God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent, or perfectly good, then God should be able to create a world with with no evil, consisting of only good and neutral, and he should want to create that world, yet evil still exists. And at the very least, God should be able to reduce the amount of evil - to create a world with a lesser amount of evil. There could exist just enough evil "accomplish its mission" and no serious evil would ever exist - yet it does. I have maintained that the Epicurean paradox negates the existence of God and have refuted all your objections against it. Epicurus' logic remains rock solid, thousands of years later. Voters - if you are intellectually honest people, you should vote pro. Thank you, and thanks to my opponent for the debate. Sources - [1] . http://plato.stanford.edu... [2] Exodus 20:12 [3] Genesis 6:7 [4] Numbers 25: 1-9 [5] Kings 2, 2: 23 – 24 [6] Samuel 2 24: 10-15 [7] Kings 2, 19:35 [8] Deuteronomy 22:13-21 [9] Exodus 35:2 [10] Leviticus 24:16 [11] Deuteronomy 21:18-21 [12] Leviticus 21:9