The Problem of Evil fails

Thank you Emily77 for agreeing to debate these issues with me. I believe (2) requires the following amendment: Your 2. God is inflicting gratuitous harm ... My 2b. God does not prevent humans from inflicting gratuitous harm on each other ... Why the change? I have never seen God inflict gratuitous harm on anyone. I can't even imagine what this would look like. Does a voice come out of the clouds and say "I will now vaporize Joe", and then "poof", Joe is vaporized? All God has done is give people free will, and humans can harm or help each other with that free will. You say that God is "complicit" when one human harms another. I don't see how this works. Let me explain. If Joe kills Stan, Joe should go to jail, not Frank, who did nothing. If the cops jail Frank, they have done wrong. So, the person who does wrong is blamed, not another person who did not cause the wrong. But God does not cause any wrong that a human does, so why say God is complicit? You may respond: well, God made the human with free will, so God is to blame. This does not follow. Parents make children who have free will, but they do not go to jail if the child commits a crime. You may respond: well, God didn't intervene to prevent the harm, so God is to blame. This does not follow either. The U.S. (and China, and Russia, etc...) fail to intervene to stop harms that others are committing in foreign countries all the time. They are powerful enough to stop it, know about it, and may be good, but they are still not to blame. The person who commits the crime is to blame, not those who fail to prevent them. You may respond: but, it is immoral to sit by while someone harms another, and this is what God is doing. Maybe. I don't know about the ethics of intervention. But, even if it is normally immoral not to intervene, it is only immoral if there isn't a greater purpose behind the "sitting idly by". I claim that the greater purpose is that God gave the world to humans. So, if a murder happens, and God does not intervene, this is because God wants humans to solve this problem. With respect to murder, we have gone some distance in solving that problem. Most countries have laws against it already, and as mass surveillance increases, it will become harder to get away with or contemplate doing. So, while you may say God is complicit in allowing humans to harm each other, I would say humanity is complicit in allowing humans to harm each other. If anyone is to blame (other than the perpetrator), it is humanity. And, we should be blaming ourselves with as much angst as we blame God, then we will actually be a better species. You say that harm takes away free will, so God should have surplus motivation for intervening. I agree that harm takes away some free will. I actually really enjoyed that argument you made. But, harm does not take away all free will. Say someone kills me, taking away my future free will chances. Well, I still had my past years of free will. And, not all harm takes away free will. I can think of examples if you would like. And, according to your logic, wouldn't humans using free will to help others thereby increase over all free will? If so, giving humans free will to help each other also increases the amount of free will those humans have. As for (1), I need not include natural disasters. I only did this to make the atheistic argument stronger. If you do not want to include natural disasters, I wont. As for (2), it is up to humans to cure disease or not to cure diseases. We cannot expect handouts from God, or else this world isn't really ours. So, humans solved a few diseases, and rid the world of some suffering. Humans did a good job there. God does not present a cure to humans because it is up to humans to find it, or not, and we collectively live with the consequences. My argument is that God has taken his hands off, and left it up to humans to ruin their planet and each other, or heal their planet and each other. On my argument, the human species could wipe itself out with a nuclear disaster, and God would not stop it. God would just say: "well, I guess they destroyed themselves, experiment over". We should not blame God for things that are up to us. About (3), my optimism is informed by Ray Kurzweil and other such thinkers. There is evidence that humans are progressing and improving at an exponential rate, and there is reason to think this will continue to occur. But, such an argument is outside the scope of the main issue, so I will be happy to drop it.