Priests and monks back in the day might have know more than one would think
View attachment 161708
The "pointless suffering disproves God" argument does not make sense.
One problem with imagining God as one of us, but with super powers, is that he can affect every moral situation. Yes, you or I or a regular police officer would stop a rape from happening, because in our limited understanding we simply follow our moral obligation to stop evil as best we can. But when God acts, it is very different, because he could stop all evil if he chose.
If God were obligated to stop a woman’s rape, then wouldn’t he be obligated to stop all rape? And murder? And robbery? Hell, adultery, fraud, and even building code violations cause people harm. Suddenly we are faced with a genuine question: Would our world be better if God stopped every act of evil, both moral and natural? Even if we had free will, it would be useless if God made our choices trivial and sentenced us to life in a “toyworld.”
Moreover, there is the problem of the sliding scale. Yes, the amount of evil in our world can be awful at times. But if God were to reduce it, would that make atheists happy and resolve the problem of evil? Imagine we lived in a world without malaria and rape but with every other evil we currently have. Would the problem of evil be gone? I suspect atheists would still complain that there was too much evil. But what if the greatest evil in the world were stubbed toes?
We don’t think stubbed toes are bad when we compare them to evils like rape and malaria. But without those great evils to compare it to, maybe a stubbed toe would be considered too much evil for God to allow. “Please GOD!!, Just remove only chipped toenails!”).
Furthermore, there could certainly be a world in which the amount of evil was even greater than in our world; atheists in that world might say that if God existed he would at least remove these gratuitous evils. Atheists in such a hypothetical world might say they would believe in God if he just reduced evil to the level we currently observe in the actual world. If that happened, would these hypothetical atheists cease to mention the problem of evil?
Of course not, because then they would just become the atheists of this world who make the same complaint. The bottom line is that God may have good reasons to allow evil in the world, and the burden of proof is on the atheist to show that he doesn’t have any good reasons to allow such evil. One of those reasons may be that if he were obligated to remove some evils, then he would be obligated to remove all evils. But if he removed all evils, then God would deprive us of goods that often accompany evil, like free will or the opportunity to be our heroic best.
Also, how would an atheist even define evil or suffering? He might say evil is something that is bad or unpleasant. Well, then what is “bad” or “unpleasant”? It’s when things aren’t “good.” Well, what is “good”?
Is "good" the "way things are meant to be?" That would mean evil is "not the way things are meant to be."
But if everything is supposed to “be a certain way,” then it follows there is a creator and designer of the world who has a plan for his creation—in a word, God. In any case, all the other evidence for God’s existence (like the universe being designed to be a certain way) outweighs the evidence for atheism, and we can still be confident that God exists.
Atheists don’t have an easy solution to the problem of evil because their conclusion—God does not exist collides with the equally mysterious problem of good. Why, if there is no God, is there so much love, goodness, and beauty in the world? Why do humans seem so valuable, even those who suffer greatly, when under atheism humans are just a collection of molecules and electrical impulses?
TL;DR: If God performed a miracle every time someone was in danger or suffering, then we could never be compassionate and help others, which is one reason I think God made us. And if you want him to end just one or a couple of evils or suffering, do you think, in all honesty, that you still wouldn’t be bothered by the other kinds of evils, even if things like cancer or murder didn’t exist? How much evil or suffering is too much for God to allow?