Project: Problems of Evil

The arguments go from weakest to strongest, or easiest to argue to hardest.

1) The Problem of Hell: A perfect being is logically incompatible with worst possible evils. The best possible being can't create a worst possible evil.

2) The Problem of Unjustified Evils, Failed Theodicies, and Skeptical Theism.

 

Fifteen Theodicies (add Justin Mooney's and Sam Leben's)

3) The Problem of Unbearable Suffering: A perfect being is logically incompatible with the rejection of consciousness.

 

4) The Ontological Problem of Evil: A perfect being is logically incompatible with any imperfection whatever. Define imperfections as imaginable improvements. There should be no imaginable improvements over the best possible world; everyone should be living their best life imaginable. But what would such a perfect life look like? Plausibly, it will involve creating, building, expanding, and... improving! Making the world better by adding more people to it and by creating beautiful things to be enjoyed by people.

 

So imperfections (as imaginable improvements) are not the problem. An imperfection is something deeper. Something like: an imaginable improvement that is impossible to work toward. Our world is full of imaginable improvements that are impossible to work toward. So, really, you could say imperfections are pessimism-causing evils. The imaginable improvements of the ideal world do not cause pessimism, because we always know that we can work toward them and will eventually succeed. So if God exists, there should be no pessimism. 

 

We might say: Just as a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting itself, a perfect being rules out consciousness rejecting the world it finds itself in. (In fact, doesn't rejection of the world you are in entail a rejection of your consciousness?) 

 

And yet, pessimism is a rejection of our world. (With full pessimism being a full rejection, and mitigated pessimism being a mitigated rejection.) So a perfect being rules out pessimism.

 

A perfect being rules out imperfections (thus, any degree of pessimism) because perfection can only beget perfection. And perhaps a perfect being rules out imperfections (any degree of pessimism) because even the slightest degree of pessimism implies a degree of rejection of the world, and thus a rejection of consciousness, and a perfect being is incompatible with a rejection of consciousness.

5) Bonus: The Nightmare God of Love

An analysis of love reveals a contradiction in the Nightmare God of Love: God regards members of the nightmare world as wellsprings of value and also regards members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value. If this God fails to accurately regard members of the nightmare world as not wellsprings of value, then there are other aspects of love that he violates. Love to some degree is a success term. Love requires understanding. Plus, for a God to not recognize the members of the nightmare world as suffering, this God would have to be hopelessly confused.

If theists say there are relevant differences between the nightmare world and our world, they must answer 1) What those relevant differences are, and 2) At which point would our world feature those relevant differences were we to imagine our world to steadily get worse over time until it resembled the nightmare world. If the theist cannot do this, and in turns out that the basic analysis of love is correct, along with the analysis behind unbearable suffering, and if it turns out that its these analyses that allow us to see that the nightmare God is necessarily not loving, then we will be able to see that the God of the actual world is necessarily unloving as well.