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Notes -
Which religion or culture do you think has the most satisfying solution to the Problem of Evil? Not just, “why does pain exist” but “why do diseases and catastrophes kill innocents”.
I don’t think Christianity nails it. A person is left either believing everything is God’s Will, or believing that a Perfect Being created Satan / disasters when he did not have to. It seems to me a much better alternative would be to state that there is a sovereign evil force, which does not originate from God, who is the cause of not just natural ills like disease and disaster but also ignorance, temptations, etc. This is more satisfying because we keep God purely good and wise, although we do this at the expense of his omnipotence. Ultimately any good explanation should be understood by a child, have a layer of complexity that an adult can appreciate, and allows a person to handle the existence of evil in an optimal way (either aversion or acceptance depending on scenario) while still loving God as before.
I think the idea of a benevolent God is an oversimplified one. Creating perfect souls is boring and they would all be boring and bland, tiny little perfect things. He already has a perfect thing of a completely different magnitude, himself. So he makes imperfect things, gives them agency, now they can do anything, help each other, hurt each other. Why does he tolerate all this suffering these imperfect creatures cause each other? Because he's the utility monster. He's such an enormous and ideal being that utility calculus has to switch to dual numbers: a > bε for any positive a and b, so the sum total of suffering happening in the universe is nothing compared to God quietly snorting when he reads something funny on 4chan.
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