The Problem Of Evil Is Sound

I will expound on and clarify what I said in first and second rounds. The base of my argument is that gratuitous does not exist; all "evil" events somehow affect society in a positive way. In addition to that if I were to address all suffering that would include gratuitous. Therefore, I did not miss the mark. Instead, I used the examples of rape and the Holocaust, which you used in the second round, to present a counter argument. My Holocaust argument is not ad hoc, the idea of God having us learn from tragedies can be applied to multiple situations. For example, after the Shirtwaist Factory fire during the Gilded Age, the United States government created regulations to help prevent future fires similar to it. God did not need to step in for future fires similar to it to be prevented. My opponent's HIV analogy is flawed because as a Deist I did not believe God purposely injected evil into the world, just so we could overcome it. I believed evil was an unavoidable by-product of a universe which holds intelligent life. That does not make God any less benevolent or omnipotent. I believed God was creating a perfect and harmonious world through the development of morality and evolution and the world was not finished yet. A corrected version of your HIV analogy would look like this: A child who has HIV participates in studies on HIV and as a result of many studies over many years, a cure is developed. If you are wondering why would God allow HIV to exist, my answer is it was a by-product of evolution. To counter the quote from Quentin Smith on AIDS I will expound on my argument from round two. Dependence on God for healing and morality would prevent civilization from developing. I will list my reasoning: 1. We would not need medicine to heal the sick and as a result of never looking into why people get sick biology's development would be greatly retarded. 2. If poverty and people's wishes for wealth did not exist, alchemy, the pseudo-science predecessor of chemistry would not have developed and the development of chemistry would be retarded. 3. If wars never happened engineering development would be retarded. 4. If crimes never happened law and morality would not develop. 5. Anything that requires problem-solving would be retarded if God were to fix all of our problems for us. Personally, I feel ceasing the development of society would be the worst price to pay for anything. If God were to intervene in everything he saw as a heinous crime, how would we ever develop a field such as morality, which requires us to think about the consequences of good and evil actions? What if God were to say abortion or gay marriage we wrong? Would we who think otherwise not be inclined to rebel aginst Him? Instead, God lets us realize good and evil on our own, through morality. A good analogy of this is a kid who, despite is parents' warnings, tries to climb a tree each day and the kid does not stop until he falls and breaks his leg. As a Deist, I believed God knew that best way for people to develop ideas on what is good or bad would be to have us see the results of immoral actions. My opponent's rape intervention argument does not destroy my argument. If a person was to be kidnapped and dragged too far away for any other human to intervene, we as a society would wonder how could we prevent him or her from getting dragged away in the first place. For example, gas stations are brightly lit to prevent mugging and neighborhoods have street lamps to discourage break-ins and kidnapping. My opponent's counterargument to my assertion that morality cannot exist without suffering simply does not work. Goodness and morality are not the same thing morality is defined as the "principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior" (Oxford Pocket Dictionary on Google). My opponent's counter argument does not actually address morality's dependence on suffering. He actually argued that something good does not have to come out of something bad. I completely agree with this, but I also feel that something good does come out of all bad things. Based on what I have presented, I believe "The Problem of Evil" did not withstand all of my objections; my opponent's resolution is still up for question. Sources: Oxford Pocket Dictionary on Google . https://www.google.com...