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Okay let's go back to first principles. What is your purpose? Why do you exist?
Christianity teaches that your purpose is not physical well-being, it is not hedonistic pleasure, it is not propagating your genetic material. It's not any of these worldly goals.
You are arguing strenuously that the Christian God doesn't make sense because He doesn't provide the very things He has clearly said are not important. The contradiction you are describing is between reality and this made-up version of God in your head. Again, "If I were God this is how I would see things..." It's quite literally the most basic error you can make in theology.
Christians do pray for many such things, and those prayers are often answered. I've personally witnessed God's provision, even to the point of the miraculous, and I know plenty of others who have seen similar things. Plus, there is a massive body of literature on miracles and the evidence for them. I recommend Dr Craig Keener if you're interested to learn more, he has a book "Miracles Today" that covers a lot of this. There's also a lot on Youtube you can check out. However, honestly I doubt you'll do any such thing, it sounds like you've already made up your mind without bothering to look at the evidence.
Christian theology is forced to take up this incredible burden of justifying how the structure of the universe necessitates all these problems from cancer to bad equilibriums, so they bring in original sin or free will or other constructs. But there is no need for them in the first place.
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The simpler solution is better. It doesn't need to invent dogmatic justifications for what's going on. How are we to know that God's plans require his followers to be immolated in Lisbon? Blind faith. And the good things that happen? These miracles are actually good? They aren't some counterintuitive damnation to bring about more evil in the long run (since we're taking on this twisty reasoning process)? Again blind faith. It's not even consistent.
Theology is cope, it's a way to find some justification for the unjustifiable, baffling people with jargon when the case is very simple. Take Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds' - that's real theology done by real theologians. It's obviously wrong. Any idiot could easily make a better world just by subtracting mosquitoes or cluster migraines, or some similar unpleasant aspect of the world.
But theologians erect these huge bulwarks of defence against thinking clearly, they maintain that you can't judge God's action or inaction since you don't know what he's planning. Yet they seem to be very sure about omnibenevolence and love... How do they know what he's like? Because they appeal to the legitimacy of one holy book amongst many about events that happened in the distant past, when supernatural events happened constantly.
It's galactic-scale motivated reasoning, like anthropology or social sciences but without even pretending to be falsifiable, since they deny the very idea of testing their work.
One thing I’ll give the secular crowd is their arguments make a lot of sense at least prima facie in contrast with my own camp’s. One thought I remember having as a child was an expression very similar to what I much later came across when someone said, “The Christians have to do all these huge, tremendous intellectual backflips, whereas everything the atheists were so simple and straightforward by comparison…”
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This is simply false. A Christian should obviously test their beliefs. Scripture says, for instance: "Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil." [1 Thes 5:21-22] More importantly, the Christian faith is not a random philosophy untethered to the world, it is specifically tied to the resurrection: "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." [1 Cor 15:14]
You seem to by relying on this idea of 'blind faith' which, though a common refrain in pop atheism, is contrary to what Christians believe. The Christian faith is confirmed not just by the resurrection, which, being historically distant, you can certainly have skepticism about - but it is also confirmed by the miraculous work of God in the lives of believers, which you can still see today (I think I predicted correctly that you didn't even bother to Google the case for miracles).
I will repeat this as many times as I need to: you are tilting at windmills. You are arguing against your own made-up idea of God and of Christianity.
I did go have a look at the man you linked, I find it unsurprising that a Christian scholar believes in miracles. I could find a bunch of imams who believe and write about djinn. Let's see them use djinn in warfare. Let's see them act like they're truly real.
You should never even need to claim miracles. If God doesn't want something to happen, it would not be possible. Why introduce fornication to the world and then forbit it? Why have sodomy be a thing at all? Why have greed at all? There is no grand cosmic reason for men to derive sexual pleasure from buggery, nor for the human back to be weak compared to the weight of our heads and so get back pain.
By the way, you can use the Bible to argue for anything, there's so much contradictory or unclear writing in there that it can be interpreted in any direction:
This is similar to people who go around asking, “Why does God need prayer at all?” “If God is perfect and not lacking sufficiency in anything, why would He bother to even create humans; was He bored?”, etc. God has no need of anything from humans. Our relationship to prayer (or indeed our own existence) is for our benefit, not His. As a Catholic, Aquinas put forth a fairly straightforward theodicy that explains much of what you’ve alleged. God didn’t “introduce” these things, in the way you’re suggesting. “Sin” is a function of disordered desire that turns human beings away from God, and thus is a privation of the good. In its basic form. You could argue (as you’ve already pointed to), that that still doesn’t account for natural evils, but insofar as the physical world is corrupted, it demands God’s grace and faithful obedience from his adherents to the faith. It doesn’t preclude of accidental consequences.
Omnipotence disappears the moment it's called upon. Why can desire be disordered? Why can humans turn away from God? Why is the physical world corrupted at all? Why was there a tree of knowledge in the garden? Why make things and then forbid them?
Efforts to answer these questions presume the precepts of the faith and build up these huge abstract epicycles. Humans have to be able to turn away from God since that's obvious and we see it happening and so God, being omnipotent has to have allowed that to happen and it's somehow part of the plan or needed for free choice... But the other ways that our choices are limited by the structure of the universe are somehow not this grave restriction on free will. God is a lot more opposed to negentropy than sin, the former seems actually forbidden. The latter could be too but isn't. Maybe that's part of the mysterious plan we cannot understand, the catch-all defence.
The scripture, Aquinas and theodicy is written around this gulf between the grand claims of omnipotence and omnibenevolence and the meagre realities. It doesn't explain anything, Epicurean argument alone obliterates all of it. And so you say 'oh this is very basic stuff, we've dealt with the Epicurean argument' but you haven't and cannot without coming up with these question-begging excuses like disordered desire.
Whereas the blind watchmaker needs no excuses. Take away the omnibenevolence and everything falls into place.
Unless you’re asking this rhetorically, everyone knows the classic apologetic to this question, regardless if you agree with it or not: free will. To your point about forbidding things, anything available to you always has the opportunity to be misused. The fire that warms you can also burn you, the water that sustains you can also drown you. Your objection or dissatisfaction with the answer is predicated upon the assumption that an idealized world if such a God existed, would more or less be one populated with mindless automatons who are mechanically repetitious machines of virtue, devoid of the other divine qualities that make human action meaningful, and not just lifelessly giving the Almighty his due. But that’s not some kind of argument against His existence per se, that has to do with your theology:
“To call something irrational isn’t an argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.” - Nietzsche
The existence of contradictions (whether real or imagined, known or unknown) still persists even in secular philosophy. It’s why in the Maoist dialectic of Marxism, they think “contradiction” inheres in the existence of physical matter itself, because it’s the only way to explain how organic living systems can hold incompatible stances and propositions in their mind. Because if all contiguous physical reality is consistent and without contradiction at all times, how can contradictory impulses manifest themselves, since it should be logically impossible? If I accepted your framework of understanding, I’d buy the same conclusions you’re brought to. The question is, why bother accepting that framework to begin with? I see no logical argument that demands I accept that framework of understanding. I too can point to things I believe God does that leave me feeling wanting and dissatisfied, but aren’t logically incoherent necessarily. You may think it’s a cop out and catch-all defense (no doubt people also use it that way), but I can’t understand what I can’t understand, and can only try and inform you of what I do understand.
I don’t know what kind of heavy lifting you’re expecting Aquinas to do for you here, and specifically to Epicurus’ argument; there’s nothing logically incoherent about God having morally sufficient reasons for permitting the existence of evil in the world. That’s an argument that even Protestant theologians have dispatched to my satisfaction a long time ago. That’s why the modern defense of this argument was best captured by Wesley Morriston when he said, “If God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil in the world, then it’s whatever these reasons are that are the ultimate grounding of morality and not the fact that He has commanded them. Either way, the divine command theory is false…” (e.g. Euthrypho’s dilemma still remains and so does the Problem of Evil.) That is an argument that’s harder to refute. This is why the Logical form of the Problem of Evil is rarely defended anymore, and philosophers have pivoted to developing the Evidential Problem of Evil. I think it ultimately comes down to a definitional move you make over semantics at bottom and there really is no explicit logical contradiction (which gets down to logical epicycles if you want to call it that, but even so, that isn’t a logical argument against the proposition. All mathematics is ultimately tautological as well, this is what Bertrand Russell struggled with in trying to “prove”, but it still doesn’t mean 2+2 doesn’t equal 4.)
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The purpose of miracles isn't to occasionally fix God's mistake of creating diseases and disasters in the first place. The purpose of miracles is to point humans to God.
Here's a thought experiment, I'm curious to hear your reaction. Let's assume that God wants to instill virtue in people. Should he: a) create a world with challenges and suffering or b) create a world with no challenge and no suffering?
An omnipotent God can directly create virtuous people and/or seed virtue into the universe at a base level. The universe could literally work on vibes-based storybook logic where the virtuous always prevail regardless of whatever challenges or suffering they may face. That is no more or less reasonable than having the universe run on atoms or gravity. Virtue is independent of challenge or suffering.
If he wanted no virtue, he could make the physics and incentives revolve around pure self-interest, maybe one has to eat the souls of others to survive. We don't live in that world.
If he wanted maximum virtue, he could have virtue directly translate into success and power and prestige, directly performing miracles in public. The medievals thought that could happen, they thought that kings could cure scrofula with the royal touch. We don't live in that world either.
God would certainly not resort to such indirect and ineffectual methods as getting people to write and constantly reinterpret holy books if he wanted virtue. There are much more direct levers to push.
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Is Heaven not a place without challenge and suffering? It’s a ‘possible world’, as the philosophers would define it; which is to say a maximally consistent set of propositions. It only creates problems if you adhere to the axiom that God is omnibenevolent.
To your first point, you’re absolutely right. If your love of God is only conditional on the premise that He delivers you your hearts desires, this is no different than a parent who loves his children only if they do what it is he wants. But that’s the love of the sinners and tax collectors, it isn’t divine love. This is also an argument for why Christian philosophers dismiss Allah as a false God and why they don’t worship the same deity Christians do, because Islam has a morally deficient concept of God. Numerous times throughout the Quran, it details who it is God hates and who He loves.
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