Take 2: The existence of unnecessary suffering makes a perfect God impossibole

I’m not going to make any case from any source that suffering ‘is bad’. I argued reference to C. S. Lewis’s ‘Tao’ found in the appendix of one of his books ‘The Abolition of Man’ . http://www.columbia.edu... to make a point against defining good as ‘what is approved of or desired’. And on that point you seem to have conceded my case. That if Merriam Webster’s definition for ‘good’ is what gave your grounds to say suffering is ‘bad’ then you have no adequate grounds to say suffering is bad. All I will personally offer on suffering myself is that Paul would say through the New Testament when you go through suffering to count it all a blessing, and that when he would suffer with a thorn in his side and prayed for God to relive that suffering from him God would let him know his grace is sufficient for thee and that in our weakness he works the strongest through us in our lives. Suffering makes us stronger, suffering makes us grow, suffering makes us better. Of course I don’t have prove that this debate. It’s only been my job to show you haven’t proved your own case that suffering is bad. I suggest something like an appeal C. S. Lewis makes in the Tao is your only chance at doing such. If you explore the link I gave above that contains the appendix of ‘the abolition of man’ where every claim about what is ‘good’ is defended by a variety of belief structures from across the world, including things like Ancient Egyptian writings, Stoic philosophers from Rome, Ancient Chinese, Hebrew Law, Noirs religious writings, and more. Defend that suffering is not only ‘bad’ but bad for a God to allow by quoting various cultural writings and sources in a similar fashion Lewis has to defend ‘the Law of Special Beneficence’. God and Time You did not respond to even one aspect of my argument. I made a distinct case about the state of the future before it occurs, perhaps you would understand better if I spoke about the omniscience by comparing to a common omnipotent’s argument. It does not make God not Omnipotent if he cannot make a square circle or a rock so big he cant movie it. you presuppose square circles can exist by asking him to make one, and you presuppose the events of the future are completely pre-established by asking him to know them in the way you ask. Knowing everything does not mean knowing what isn’t there to be known. You cant know what goes on outside of the universe and heaven and hell if there is no such place beyond the any of these. If your going to prove your time argument, you have to offer a case that proves what the future is like before it happens. I argue if you were outside of time and could see the future you would see the future does not have much definition yet. That if you built a time machine car, drove to the future observed it, changed nothing, came back, then drove to the future again, you could quite possibly be in a very deferent future. That basically if you saw the future you would see multiple futures, and they remain all possible futures until the moment in time that is the present reaches the points were we make the choices that bring us into only certain kinds of those futures. That when God created Man he saw a future where Adam ate from the tree side by side a future where Adam did not eat from it. Perhaps I cant prove that’s the way the future is, but you cannot prove that future is only one way either. And if you cant prove that than you cant prove God would know Man would cause suffering if created, rather than that God would know Man could cause suffering or Man might have trusted God and not brought suffering into the world. And a just God would not condemn us by not creating us for the bad future we would bring in until the moment passes that we actually do bring it in. The Baby argument: I suppose I’m going to have to clarify my case when I say from tornadoes to sore backs are a result of man’s sin. When I say all the suffering in the world today is a cause of that, do not think I mean all at once. I mean it can all be traced back to the original sin, and that had that original sin not occurred surely none of today’s suffering would be here, we would still be the perfect Eden like creation God made. I do not mean you can add together the combined effects of all suffering that ever happens in the world and for all time as the resulting punishment for Adam and Eves sins. That’s an absurd claim to make for anyone on either side of this issue. The immediate and sole effects that would occur to the ‘children’ that they would leave the Garden and have work for themselves for there food and child birth would be painful. There were no droughts that plagued the earth, the air was still pure, they suffered no skin damage from ultraviolet radiation, and oh yeah they understood they needed to were clothes. Speaking of the clothing, another point to keep in mind there ‘moral choices’ they were faced with was smaller and different from ours. It was just the fundamental choice of whether or not they would trust and obey there maker. Everything else was okay, they could even walk around naked. That was not bad until after they chose to be the deciders of good and evil for themselves. And its this fundamental trend, to choose for ourselves what’s right and wrong, that is behind all suffering, the trend that began with the first man and woman. Anyway the future specific suffering like floods, UV rays, life under 200 years, murder, etc… would all be the result of more continued sin from mankind. Baby argument interpretation #2: Unless of course your baby argument is actually not a reference to the hypothesized relative growth of Adam and Eve at the time of the fall, but rather a baby born today. What an infant deserves is irrelevant to this debate resolution as I have said the world they were born in was forged that way by there parents and ancestors, all the bad in it anyway. It occurred to me you might have meant that when I started reading the case about the animals. You would be taking a great stretch to claim animals even deserve anything good to happen to them, much less if they deserve to not suffer, you certainly could not prove it. Free Will: Your concession that it exist does affect your points you have made. All of them. It affects how you look at the character of the creations of the maker. It affects how you can look at there purposes and function, the reason for there creation. If affects how you look at what we would be like without free will. Had we no Free Will from the beginning, life would still be like Eden, but we could not enjoy if for we would have no real souls to love the fruits of the garden. Trainer Red is not happy when when I make him beat the Elite Four or capture a Mewtwo, he is just a program of pixels in a game I completely control. Sure his feelings cant be hurt when people like his Rival say mean things to him, he understand Trainer Blue has no choice in any of this either. Do you think Trainer Red is glad when Professor Oak tells him he is proud of him? Of course not! They are all soulless computer programs incapable of Free Will and true choice. Had God made us without Free Will and so we would love him it would be as if Captain Picard on Star Trek TNG went to the holodeck and programmed a woman to say ‘I love you’ to him. It’s just not the same, and its just not worth creating. The All Good, and All Powerfull God would of course choose to create something with much more potential than a Holodeck creation, and he succeeded at this because he did. And to this day we still have the potential to be everything he created us for. But we have to stop the trend that began with the first Man and quite trying to decide for ourselves just what is right and just what is wrong against what God says it is. Summary: (Do to space the summary had to cut out)