AKG wrote:

"Under classical theism God is not a moral agent. This is because under classical theism He is is pure actuality or in other words He has no potentials that need to be realized. If God were a moral agent that would imply that God only has the potential to be good, and this can only be realized with good actions, like how you and I cannot be coherently judged as good until we perform a good action, which shows we have a potential to be good that needs to be realized. But under classical theism this makes no sense as God has no potentials to be realized, and since being a moral agent involves the potentials that need to be realized, then God in this sense cannot be seen as a moral agent, and trying to use the problem of evil in this way against him is incoherent.

This is true. If pressed you'll have to specific this as ‘no passive potencies to be realised’ since God’s being pure actuality does not preclude Him from having powers i.e. active potencies – God could still realise a good (say the existence of unicorns) which hasn’t been realised yet in this world.

AKG wrote:

Another reason for this is that under classical theism God does not participate in goodness like you and I do, but He is Goodness itself. In other words He is the highest standard of goodness and moral standards. If this is the case than God can not be a moral agent as being a moral agent would imply that God can be judged and is subordinate to a moral standard that is higher than Himself. But if God is goodness itself and thus the highest moral standard of goodness than this means that there is no higher standard to judge Him by as He is that highest standard. This also means that He is not subordinate to any moral standard including His own as He is that standard, which consequently means there is no moral standard or law for Him to follow, and this makes him by default not a moral agent.

Again absolutely true. One should be careful here though as what the atheist is really getting at is if God is good by nature – God = the Good – then why is not God constrained by His nature to realise all goods? Here the Poe is recast in the form:
 
1. God is of His Nature Goodness and possess maximal power
 
2. It is better to realise all goods rather than just some
 
3. Therefore of His nature God must realise all goods.
 
4. There are goods in this world which have not been realised
 
Conclusion: As 3 and 4 are incompatible there can be no being as described in prop. 1
 
It’s pretty obvious the atheist’s reasoning relies on the implicit assumption that God is determined by His nature to create the best of all possible worlds. This is a harder philosophical nut to crack but I doubt anyone of Fry’s ilk will bring it up (or if they do it’ll be lifted straight from somewhere else ).
 

AKG wrote:

But just in case how could a classical theist respond to the best of possible world claim? 

The simplest is to argue that there just is no "best possible world." As Aquinas himself argued, you can start with any conceivable world and think of another one just like it except with a smidgen more goodness in it. You'll find a related (and somewhat broader) argument here.

Mysterious Brony wrote:

Speaking of the POE, J.L Mackie formulates his "logical POE" but he also denies that there is such thing as objective morality or values.  How does he reconcile this? Does he address this seeming contradiction somewhere?

This always fascinated me as well - J.H. Sobel too apparently denied the existence of objective moral values yet gave a version of the Logical Problem of Evil. I suppose the paradox goes back to Hume who managed very successfully to attack the notion of objective morality with his Is/Ought Distinction yet appealed the existence of ‘Evil’ on a number of occasions as an objection against Divine Omnipotence.  

 This articleby J.W. Wartick is worth referencing at this point.

Last edited by DanielCC (8/15/2015 6:46 pm)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

 
But doesn't the atheist have to show that there is some problem with the classical theist conception of God or the good or both? Once the classical theist has given a proper argument for identifying God with absolute goodness, the burden surely goes back to the atheist to show why God is not supposedly good enough.

Well the problem ceases to be about suffering per say (a good thing too given the utter saccharinity it inspires in many atheists – see Quentin Smith’s famous ‘Bambi deer’ remark in his debate with WLC or Darwin’s frankly pathetic whinging about parasitic wasps) and becomes a question of why don’t all beings perfectly instantiate their essences. In other words it asks why there are any instances of privation when it’s possible for there not to have been.
 
The time honoured response to this has been to point out that as there are contingent beings in the first place and thus beings doomed to corruption at some point the world is ordered such that the inevitable corruption of beings contributes to the flourishing of others.  This neutralises a great deal of the problem as far as I’m concerned and reminds us to avoid anthropomorphism – however it’s a small step from admitting this to the claim that God orders the world so that corruption is at its’s bare minimum/its use is maximised which saddles one with the problematic best of all possible world claim.
 
I’ll start a thread for possible world claims I think – they lead to interesting antimonies.

(For what it's worth I have a suspicion that the Scholastic account of the transcendentals coupled with the admission that God need not create the best possible world leads to the interesting conclusion that there is no world too evil for God to create - any being/goodness is gratuitous)