Can you produce a blueprint of a world without suffering? If not your objection is worthless…
What are you asking? If i could think of a world without natural suffering?
Why should i think that it is not possible for the world to be anything other than red in tooth and claw?
Firstly, is it logically impossible for God to create a world with less natural suffering than what we have in this world? If it is not self evidently clear that it is impossible, then i can claim the possibility. A blue print is not necessary since it is you who has the burden of proof to show that the suffering we experience could not have been otherwise.
Secondly a better world doesn’t have to be a world where we experience no pain whatsoever. I Can certainly imagine a world where
Gratuitous Suffering does not exist. It can be a world where organisms don’t eat each-other to survive; a world were a lion does not eat a human child; a world where people are not born with no arms or legs. Why couldn’t God create such a world? Some suffering is meaningful, but others kinds of suffering, especially the psychological kind, seem very excessive and unnecessary.
The reason why God would permit these things is very hard to grasp if not impossible; and certainly no one is obligated to believe in a being who permits great natural suffering and yet gives no real comprehensible reason for why it’s happening. Why am i left to guess why a God would create a hostile environment in which to put human beings? And why should the burden of proof be on the atheist to disprove the idea that God knows something that is beyond our comprehension. If something seems careless and indifferent, then why should i think that God or reality is anything but that? Sure i can have faith that God has a good moral reason for doing what seems evidently wrong, but such a faith does not command rational accent any-more than the belief that we must sacrifice virgins to keep the God’s happy. I mean, why create a hostile evolving world, when he can create a world that is not evolving and mutating into lethal viruses?
Neither of these things seem necessary unless you can argue that evolution is necessary in the sense that evolution was the only way that God could have created our world.
To say i made the world hostile to teach human beings a lesson, is like me throwing a child into a pit full of broken glass, letting him get cut up, and then saving the child from the pit and saying,
“
it’s to teach you how good i am for saving you and how helplessly dependent you are on my power! Look how much i love you”
Any normal person who hasn’t got something to lose would say that i am a malicious lunatic megalomaniac drunk on power, not to mention a
child abuser; and that is certainly what it looks like, even if it is not.
I just can’t accept the idea that God will do absolutely “anything” to produce Good. Surely God would not rape a women to bring about a greater good. No, so there are limits to what God can do for the greater good. I don’t believe that God would harm creatures to create Good; that does not seem to me like a loving God. I don’t believe that God would rob a human being of his or her dignity in order to compel people to do good. Why is that any different from tyranny? We assume that because their might be a greater good that therefore any action to produce that good is justifiable.
We have something to lose if we don’t justify God (we lose the promise of heaven) and so the motive is there to cover up injustices. But we would quickly see abuse for what it is if we were judging ordinary people that don’t have the power to create heaven for us.
