God Can't be All Powerful, Knowing, and Good V. 2

My first premise is that free will is what gives value to human life. Decision making can only be valued at the point where a human has the ability to freely choose between two options, I think we can agree that if someone is forced into making a decision to help another person, the decision loses all value. Keep aware that I'm arguing solely on the value of the decision itself here. Even a forced decision may lead to a good action, I can hold a gun to your head and tell you to donate money to the poor. However, if I do this, the decision in and of itself holds no weight, and it was not decided by you. The ability then, to make free decisions, is what gives importance to human life. It gives us moral importance, in that when we make a free decision, we can then be judged upon that decision. Only when we freely make a decision can we either be praised for the quality of the decision, or blamed for the negative consequences of the decision. Having moral responsibility in this sense, is what elevates humanity above the rest of the creatures on Earth. A dog may maul someone to death, and we declare the act of mauling as evil, but we do not blame the dog for it. Humans reach a higher level of importance because are able to make moral decisions that no other animal can. Imagine a world where humans visibly did not have free will. I could walk up to someone, shoot them, and walk away, and it wouldn't matter because I could not be held accountable for my actions. It would be no different than if an animal attacked someone and killed them. But we can also place this in terms of basic human life. How can you value everyday events if you aren't responsible for the decisions that guide them? Think about marriage as an example. If you were not able to make a free decision to marry someone or not, what meaning would the act of marriage have? It holds value in society because it is an act whereby two humans willingly agree to spend the rest of their lives together, and without that act of willing agreement, what value does it have? Now if we come to agreement that free will is necessary to allow humans to exist as they do today, it is clear why it is logically possible for God to allow evil. God faces the choice between: 1. Eradicate evil and eliminate free will and the meaning of humanity 2. Allow the possibility of evil and allow for human life to have meaning Even God cannot allow free will and remove evil at the same time, so it would be a logical decision to allow for free will and the possibility of evil. The second point I will make is that the existence of evil allows for other goods to exist in the world. The concept of evil is dichotomous. When I say this, I mean that it is impossible for evil to exist without good existing as well. It is necessarily impossible to define something as evil if there is nothing to relate to it. We define causing harm as evil and we define soothing harm as good. If, in the history of the Earth, harm was never once resolved, we would have no notion of good. We have many other binary concepts. Courage and cowardice. Kindness and mean- spiritedness. However, these good qualities that humans possess only exist because evil situations are present. If there was no evil on the Earth, how would someone be courageous? Courage spawns from danger, and danger spawns from evil. If there was no evil, how would someone be kind? Kindness spawns from harm or sadness, and those spawn from evil. So in conclusion: It may be possible to have a world without evil. But such a world would also be devoid of all the positive sides of humanity that we've come to take for granted. Such a world would also be devoid of free will. To be human would be as meaningless as being a machine, and life would be pointless. It is for these reasons, that it is logically possible that God allowed evil. *NOTE* I do not attempt to show that A. God exists -My contention is hypothetical, we are assuming that it is possible for a perfect God to exist and debating the subject. I.E. Don't vote against me because you're an atheist and you read the topic and saw that I was con. B. I'm actually advocating that God *has* allowed evil for these reasons -I'm just attempting to show why it would be *logically possible* for God and evil to coexist, nothing more than that.