… once again this came up:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
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I would say “who says that God is not willing to prevent evil? Maybe a perfect God sees the bigger picture and will do it in a different way that is more perfect then you can conceive.”
The reall problem is, an atheist hasn’t got a clue why God allows evil and suffering, much less the nature of his or her realty; so I am not sure what basis they use to Judge him, for atheists are not perfect and therefore do not know what a perfect, omnipotent, loving God would do and not do.
The world and the God that an atheist might envisage and think that they are worthy of, rarely takes into account that they our sinners, and such a world may not be beneficial to there souls, let alone there physical being. The problem here is that children often think they know what’s best for them and will parade there authority above the will of there parents. The world in which they intuitively want to live, they actually opposed.
Nobody knows the complete answer to the question of evil and suffering, but on top of the fact that there are other things in life that suggest the existence of a morally perfect creator (such as Love, and the fact that the universe began to exist), on that basis, they may in fact be a perfectly good reason why God chooses us to live in this particular reality where there is pain and suffering. To not explore this possibility, seems to me to be an arrogant dogmatic claim of moral-superiority and superior knowledge. But then we run in to more problems. If God is not Love, and God does not exist, morality becomes a meaningless delusional dictatorship rather then an objective truth about life. If God does not exist, then anything is permissible, and the atheist claim that God is imperfect or immoral becomes illogical and meaningless; there’s no authority. Why should a man be called wrong or evil for raping somebody? What does one base his authority on to judge such a person, if such a person is determined by evolution? Does freewill really exist in such a world?
It seems to me, that a perfect God, that is Love, is the only reasonable measure upon which to judge another human being in terms of right or wrong. If God doesn’t exist, then to say that the Christian perception of God is evil is a complete fallacy. And if God exists, as Christian see him, then such a claim, that God is evil or does not exist on that basis, is simply a miss-understanding of God. The question is, is the militant atheist so hardened against God that they will not except that such a thing could be entirely possible? Even though there is much evil in the world, I see God acting in our lives; every time somebody puts his life on the line, thats the love of God: anybody that feeds the poor; that’s the love of God in the world. God even said himself that no man knows him that doesn’t live by the law of Love.
Conclusion: Even though I sympathize with people who struggle with the lose of loved ones, struggling with the concept of a loving God existing in there lives, I think that to call people to reject God purely upon the premises of suffering, pain and assumptions about what God can and can’t do, is not an Intellectual position, but an emotional one. Emotions can sometimes blur the truth, if one doesn’t look at the bigger picture of life, but instead looks at one facet of existence because it seems to support ones position.
Life makes sense, in respect of morality and human dignity, if there is a perfectly moral God; life does not make sense if there isn’t one. That is a strong suggestion to me that there is a God, if one wants to make logical sense out of life. Also, when I was an atheist (and enjoying it) I looked for every little excuse to not seek God; that is not to say everybody that is an atheist is like that, but that is just something to ponder.
