The Problem of Evil

Sorry I did not believe I brought up "so many issues" as I used even less than half of the character count. I will try to keep my arguments to the point. Pro has made one fatal flaw in his last argument. He said, "Here, I'll just point out that it's not relevant to this debate. Neither freedom nor sin are part of my case. You cannot refute the PoE by talking about irrelevant issues." This is why the LPoE fails. It does not take into account free will which easily takes care of the LPoE. Free will may be the most relevant issue to the topic. "If god had the will and the power to prevent all evil, there would be no evil." This clearly does not account for free will which was the biggest part of my first round post. Pro has completly misrepresented me when he said that I said God is not omnipotent or omnibenevolent. I asked, "Why should a theist accept the fact that there are no limits to what an omnipotent being can do?" Pro then goes on to say that I am claiming God is not really omnipotent. However what I said compeletly lines up with his definition given in round 1 for omnipotence. Let's look back at his definition, "For the purposes of this debate, we're talking about punk omnipotence, not true omnipotence. True omnipotence would have god able to contradict logic; he could make square circles. But, for a logical debate, we must assume logic is inviolable. Therefore, the omnipotence under discussion is punk omnipotence: the ability to do anything except violate logic." What I said is completely in agreement with this definition. Like Plantiga has said, we don't know if there is another world in which there are completely free creatures that contains more moral good than this world. This is easy to understand because free will is what gets in the way of a perfect world. It is not up to God to decide if we do good or bad with our free will. That is why it is called free will. Asking God to make free creatures who only choose good is an absurdity. For then that would not be free will. It would be a contradiction. Which is why we have defined omnipotence in such a way for this debate that God cannot do the logically impossible. I have never claimed, nor will ever claim that God is not omnipotent and I'm not sure why pro so strongly suggest this. Furthermore, pro somehow gets the idea that when I said, "It is logically possible that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evils" that somehow implies I think God is not omnibenevolent. The morally sufficient reason could very well be free will which was again my biggest argument in round one and was totally ignored by pro. Look at what C.S Lewis says, "God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying."[1] In order for Pros argument to stand he has to show that free will is not valuable enough to exist over a world with creatures with no free will and no evil. Conclusion: The LPoE is really not a strong argument at all as I have pointed out in both of my arguments. The biggest part of my argument in round one was free will and all pro had to say about it was that it is irrelevant to the debate. For anyone who has actually studied the Problem of Evil, we know that free will is the most crucial aspect of both the Logical Problem of Evil and the Evidential Problem of Evil. Until pro can show that (a) free will actually is irrelevant (Which is actually impossible because it accounts for evil) or (b) God does not have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil (Which again is impossible due to our epistemological limitations) my argument still stands. [1] C.S Lewis, "The Case For Christianity"