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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 2, 2026

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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.

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.

“Sin” is a function of disordered desire

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.)