The Problem of Evil

If you forfeit any round you lose the debate. No new arguments may be introduced in the last round. (Voters please comply) ARGUMENT FROM EVIL: DEDUCTIVE VERSION 1. If God exists, then He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. 2. If God is omnipotent, then He can do anything that is possible. 3. If God is omniscient, then He knows everything that is true. 4. If God is omnibenevolent , he knew that an evil and unnecessary suffering was about to occur and that he could have prevented it, then He would have prevented it. 5. If God had prevented all evil and unnecessary suffering, then there wouldn't be any. 6. There are evils and unnecessary sufferings that could have been prevented. 7. God does not exist. DEFINING TERMS God : the perfect and all-powerful spirit or being that is worshipped especially by Christians, Jews, and Muslims as the one who created and rules the universe. [a] Omnipotent: Having unlimited or universal power, authority, or force; all-powerful. [b] Omniscient: One having total knowledge. [c] Omnibenevolent: All-loving, or infinitely good. [d] Evil: Morally bad or wrong. [e] Unnecessary: Anything that is extra or not needed. [f] Suffering: To experience pain, illness, or injury. [g] A: Evil and Unnecessary Suffering The argument shows the logical inconsistencies between God, evil and unnecessary suffering. One of the ways to get around the argument is to relax one of the attributes of God, but this leads to a God who is not worthy of worship and denies the God of monotheism. . Another way to get around the argument is to deny that evil and unnecessary suffering exist, but this will be hard to do since it is an empirical fact that evil and unnecessary suffering exist. One example of evil and unnecessary suffering is the Fritzle case: Few will forget the morbid details of Elisabeth Fritzl's tortured life. The 42-year-old Austrian woman was discovered in 2008 after being held captive by her father for 24 years in a dark, subterranean dungeon in Amstetten, Austria. He was sentenced to life in prison after confessing that he raped his daughter more than 3,000 times, fathering seven live children and one stillborn. She delivered all her babies alone, cutting the umbilical cords with a pair of rusty scissors. "I always knew, during those 24 years, that what I was doing was wrong. I must have been mad to do something like that," he told the court during his trial. Fritzl's wife claimed she had no idea what was going on downstairs, even though she raised five of her daughter"s children in the house above the dungeon. [h] Where was God is this horrific event of evil and unnecessary suffering. This of course is only one story among so many that I couldn't possible count. Why didn't God prevent this from happening? The Con will needs to explain why God would allowed this to happen. The second example is The earthquake that generated the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is estimated to have released the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, according to the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS). Giant forces that had been building up deep in the Earth for hundreds of years were released suddenly on December 26, shaking the ground violently and unleashing a series of killer waves that sped across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet airliner. By the end of the day more than 150,000 people were dead or missing and millions more were homeless in 11 countries, making it perhaps the most destructive tsunami in history. [i] What was the purpose behind this unnecessary suffering of millions of people? Did it have a purpose in the grand scheme of God and humanity? B: Heaven without Evil and Unnecessary Suffering God could have made earth without evil and unnecessary suffering. My example of this potential is heaven. If God could make a heaven without these negative proponents, then he could have made earth the same way, or bypassed earth all together. C: Paradoxical Problems The best possible answer to the problem of evil is that God as defined above does not exist, and cannot possibly exist logically. The first problem is with the omnipotence paradox: ". .. if a being can perform any action, then it should be able to create a task which this being is unable to perform; hence, this being cannot perform all actions. Yet, on the other hand, if this being cannot create a task that it is unable to perform, then there exists something it cannot do. " . http://en.wikipedia.org...... If God is all knowing, then he knows the past, present and future. If he knows the future, then he has had fore-knowledge of every disaster, tragedy, murder, rape, death, war, etc. that has ever occurred. Therefore, he always chose not to intervene and prevent these terrible things from happening. This paradox encompasses both omniscience and omnibenevolence. D: What this argument does not prove: This argument does not prove that all other possible gods do not exist, just the God defined by monotheistic religions as stated above in terms defined. I look forward to a stimulating debate! [a]www. merriam-webster. com/dictionary/god [b] [c] [e] www. thefreedictionary. com/omnipotentR06; [d] . http://en.wiktionary.org...... [f] . https://www.vocabulary.com... [g] www. merriam-webster. com/dictionary/sufferR06; [h] . http://www.thedailybeast.com...... [i] news. nationalgeographic. com/news/2004/12/1227_041226_tsunami. htmlR06;