Overcomer wrote:
William wrote:
He must either be cruel, or else had nothing to do with it.
I think there are other options, one being that God is loving and created humankind to be in a loving relationship with him, but human beings rejected that relationship and went their own way, thereby bringing sin into the world, making it the way it is -- damaged and full of woes.
To begin with there is an extreme problem with this ancient claim. Today we know that all the so-called "evils" of the world existed long before humans ever showed up on planet earth. So there's no way that humans having supposedly fallen from grace could be responsible for the evils of the world.
Overcomer wrote:
Does the atheist deny the existence of evil in this world? If he doesn't, what explanation does he have for it?
But this is exactly what we would expect from a natural happenstance world. Why would a naturalist think that the world should be perfect? Only if we lived in a perfect world would it make sense to think that it might have been created by some supreme creator.
Overcomer wrote:
Even more importantly, what solution does the atheist have for evil if he admits that it exists?
There is no solution for it. We can't change reality. The atheists doesn't need to offer solutions for things that cannot be changed. Even if all humans were removed from planet earth death, disease, natural disasters, and animals eating each other would continue on. We can certainly try to work toward educating humans to behave as best we can, but apparently even that cannot be done with 100% success because humans aren't perfect either.
Overcomer wrote:
Christianity not only offers an explanation for the existence of evil, it offers a viable way of dealing with it in the person of Jesus Christ. No other worldview does the same.
But that explanation is clearly false. We know now that humans are not responsible for the ills of the world the we call "evil". Death, disease, animals eating animals, and natural disasters have been occurring on this planet long before humans every appeared. So the explanation that humans brought this on the world is clearly a false man-made myth. So that's not a credible explanation. It's just a myth.
Also even the most devout Christian have been known to do bad things, even committing murder. And certainly committing lesser crimes (or sins). So apparently giving themselves over to an imaginary Jesus that can't be shown to currently exist doesn't work.
So this solution clearly doesn't work. Just look at the child molestation associated with the Catholic Church which claims to be the "Body of Christ".
Face it, the claims this religion makes have never been shown to have any merit at all. How can you call that a "solution" to the problem of evil?
In fact, Christianity doesn't even make any sense anyway, because the idea is that even an evil person can be forgiven by simply accepting Christ as their Lord and Savior. So it doesn't cure evil people, all it does is offer them undeserved amnesty anyway.
This religion doesn't solve any problems. It even has extreme theological problems in its claims. After all, if Jesus is offering sinners free undeserved amnesty and taking them into his heaven, then wouldn't heaven be filled with sinners who never did anything to deserve their place in heaven?
The religion doesn't even make any sense.
Also, you'd need to believe that a decent atheists who never did anything seriously wrong must necessarily be cast into hell simply because he didn't believe the claims that Jesus was the Son of Yahweh.
Christianity makes absolutely no sense at all. It's not even about morality. It's about offering free amnesty to immoral people if they are simply willing to believe that Jesus was the Son of God.
How does that solve the problem of evil?
By the way, there is no such thing as a "
Problem of Evil" for secular naturalists. Evil is an expected property of a happenstance world. So it's not a "problem" in this philosophy. To the contrary it's exactly what should be expected.
The so-called "
Problem of Evil" only exists for religions that claim that the world was created by a perfect benevolent God. Then it becomes a "
problem" to explain how evil came to be if it didn't come from the creator. The solution to that
problem is to try to pin the blame onto humans for creating sin and evil. But that is indeed an extremely huge PROBLEM.
If humans were created by a perfect creator, then how could they be anything less than perfect themselves? So Christianity hardly solves the "
Problem of Evil".
You're looking at it wrong. You said that Jesus solves the "
Problem of Evil" by offering humans undeserved amnesty for being evil. But that doesn't solve the theological "
Problem of Evil" which is the problem of how evil ever got started in the first place if humans were supposedly created by a perfect God.
Offering evil humans undeserved amnesty through Christ does not solve the theological "
Problem of Evil".
