I don't think miracles woud be a particular problem. I don't think it would be especially problematic to suggest God can take some action to alleviate particular incidences of suffering. After all, he does try to work on a macroscale to bring the maximum good out of the corporeal world. There are details to be filled in, but there seems a clear distinction between overturning the very nature of corporeality and the use of occasional miracles. 

As for paradise, I don't think that it is corporeal per se. I would say paradises are either subtle or ideal realms, to use the Platonic terminology. Of course, many traditional Christians might have misgivings about such a position, but that is a different matter.

 Also, could it not be arg​ued that the level of privation in our current experience of the world is a possibility or, perhaps better, tendency of corporeality, and this would allow one to argue for better conditions existing at some periods in the corporeal world without falling into the so called POE? In Platonism and in many other traditional religions and philosophies, the corporeal world is seen as being subject to cosmic cycles which tend to start out as most paradisial and closest to the levels of being above it (indeed, the interprenetration of the subtle and corporeal is a significant aspect of these cycles), and progressively declining from this state until some cataclysmic event takes place. In Platonism these cycles, drawing from general Greek belief, were called the Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron Ages. If this sort of unwinding is an aspect of the corporeal world, or in some other way it is in the nature of the corporeality to have at some times the conditions we find today, then it would seem that it would be possible to argue that God cannot change this on a macroscale.

 Of cou​rse there is much to be fleshed out here. For many atheists though, the so called POE is some sort of problem with a capital P. It is a problem with flashing neon light attached. I think there is a distinction between diffusing this notion and the usual work of fleshing out. I think the diffusing can be done quite easily, but that doesn't mean some of the other issues touched upon cannot be of great interest.

AKG wrote:

Did Hume really criticise Aquinas's version or a strawman that looks like Payley's?

Payley's. Here's a thorough analysis of what Hume criticised and how https://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/PSEUDOSC/Hume.htm

Hume wrote literary dialogues and he added remarks that make it unclear what his own position was. The analysis concludes, "Philo wins because Hume writes it that way. We might just as well say that Moby Dick proves whales are evil... Hume makes Demea (the defender of the design argument) a simpleton instead of having a foil on a par with, say, Thomas Aquinas or Augustine." 

AKG wrote:

1. People in my class seemed really troubled by the amount of evil in the world. We watched Fry's video and I gave the reason for why it doesn't work under classical theism due to God not being a moral agent. But still I have to ask since Goodness is part of God's nature could'nt He have created a world with less evil than the one it has as even though only His Goodness is perfect, could He have made the world almost perfectly good with little evil in it?

Are you really troubled by these questions or are you troubled by the fact that the class is troubled by the amount of evil in the world?

The dilemma is this: Either God creates a world with free will and people are free to do evil, naturally ending up complaining about the evil in the world, or God creates a world with necessarily shiny happy people without any chance for evil to enter the picture, which means no chance to exit the paradise, no chance for open-mindedness, no reflection over cause and consequence, and no free will.

It is honestly very hard to get people see that there is no gratuitous evil. I would not try to convince too much. I'd insist that evil in the world is in direct proportion to the opportunities that evil people are able to grab by their own will. There's nothing wanton or random. The evil is in balance, but people disagree about this for various reasons, just like people in general have disparate ideas about everything.

If God intervened to block evil acts, it would disrupt the order of cause and consequence in the world, it would obstruct free will, and it would remove responsibility from people - specifically from evil people. In such case one might ask, if God interferes to amend evil acts, why not amend good acts too, to make the world ever better. Why be partial? But this would remove responsibility from everybody. People would become zombies. Perhaps God would still know what each person is deep down, but people would not know each other and themselves, because they cannot see each other's behaviour and are unable to act according to their own nature.

Another point, if God intervened to block evil acts, He would intervene according to his own definition of evil, not according to the popular definition. Therefore divine intervention would actually do nothing to remove the charge of evil.

Moreover, calls for a better world presuppose that God has obligation to do as we please, not as He pleases. Is it really appropriate to presuppose this way? Such calls stem from a profound misunderstanding of the relationship of Creator and creation. Such misunderstanding is itself a form of evil, because obviously it should be the other way round - we should do as pleases Him, not vice versa. When one becomes appropriately humble, trying to see the whole matter from God's point of view, one will eventually accept how this world operates. Instead of zombies, God created people with free will and responsibility in a world where consequences of human action cause repercussions as per the natural law of cause and effect. God created an intelligible and just world instead of a nebulous stoned happy world. Of course, people disagree about justice too, but from above it should be somewhat clear that a non-intervention policy makes perfect sense, whereas occasional intervention would not make sense, not to mention constant intervention.

In summary, the short answer is yes, God could have created a different world, but knowing everything we know now, we would not be much happier in any different kind of world. To account for the ultimate balance of justice and complete measure of happiness, religions have doctrines about afterlife, but this is another topic.

I'm very surprised that the consensus seems to be that the problem of evil is no problem at all.  Usually I hear Christian thinkers saying that the problem of evil is a mystery,that we have partial explanations that apply to some evil, but not to all.  C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography*: 

Several years before I read Lucretius I felt the force of his argument (and it is surely the strongest of all) for atheism:
Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam
Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa

 I don't think he's wrong.  Yes, the problem of evil per se is the because of free will, but one questions why there need be such suffering in our universe.  (Usually, when I've seen the POE discussed, it's not just "evil" in the sense of moral failings, which exists because free will exists, but suffering.)

Perhaps this is sentimental and bad philosophy, but take smallpox. We currently live in a world without smallpox**, why did humans have to suffer with smallpox for all of history until 40 years ago?  We don't seem to be any less free than we were before.  You could say the same about almost any other naturally occurring source of suffering.  Yes, if we're free, we're going to be able to harm each other and ourselves, but do we have to have diseases and natural disasters?  Did we need to have mental illness that makes us less free and causes us to do more evil?

Then there's the problem that apparently the way God went about creating man was through natural selection, a process that seems determined to create concupiscence.  Every deadly sin including pride seems like a manifestation of behaviors that are (often) evolutionarily useful.

My own non-philosophical guess is that either 1.  God values the non-determinedness of all his creation. The Newtonian clock-like universe is not our universe.  Everything from the electron to your dog to human beings is undetermined.  In humans this is manifested in freedom; in lower creation it is only analogous to freedom.  But that leaves very little room for providence and I don't know if it's compatible with Thomism.  or 2.  The angels were entrusted with a role in creation.  They were allowed to keep that role despite their fall, and the fallen angels have messed up the physical world.

Then there's the fact that we're promised that after the resurrection, we won't have any more suffering but we will have something like physical bodies.  This leads to the question of why weren't we made that way to begin with.

I don't think I'm expressing any of this well, but at the very least, emotionally, I side with AKG's class. The big temptation of atheism for me, as it was for Lewis, is the problem of evil.
*In my e-book of Surprised by Joy, it's page 65.
**Yes, I know, the CDC and the Russians have stocks of the virus, but it is extinct in the wild.

Last edited by ArmandoAlvarez (8/20/2015 6:48 pm)

I think it is quite important to try and remove emotive appeals from the analysis, at least until we have a good hold on the more strictly logical and analytical issues involved. Many of the contemporary atheist arguments about the POE seem to me to involve far too much in the way of emotional appeals based on the very existence of suffering or a particular example. It is not too much of a caricature to say they tend to point out some example of suffering - usually invoving babies or small animals - attach the word gratuitous to it, and then try to evoke an emotional revulsion at it. That is their argument for the POE.

Perhaps, after we have ex​amined the basic logical issues involved to discover if there is an answer to this problem then we can try to examine the basis of the emotional problems people have with the level of suffering in the world, but I wouldn't blur these issues.

 And, of course, it must be said that death does not necessarily equal either an evil or even an example of suffering, at least directly.