Monday, November 7, 2011

Why does God allow evil?

Think about the various 'defenses' of God put forward by the prisoners at Auschwitz:

1. If the Jewish people are suffering, they must have broken their contract with God.
2. The Holocaust is a purification of the Jewish people, effected through the suffering of good Jews.
3. God has given us free will.

Try to apply these explanations in a broader context, not specific to the Holocaust. Do you find plausible that suffering in the world is punishment for human sin, that it purifies us, or that it is the result of free will? What do you think of the responses to these defenses? Can the amount and degree of evil in this world ever be justified?

16 comments:

  1. I believe that free will is the key reason for why there is evil and suffering in this world. Also at the same time I believe that punishment and suffering as a result of human sin,purifies us. Since we have the opportunity to make a choice, we may make a wrong, choice, and we must get punished for our sins. If we try to visualize a world without evil and suffering, then it would pretty much turn out to be like heaven. I believe that the choices that we make in this world will help us realize our faults, and make us better. it will increase faith and make us better as human beings.These are my opinions.

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  2. I feel that human sin is the reason for suffering in this world. This would mean that only bad people sin, but other people can be lumped in with that. One example of a bad peson doing something is Hitler killing the Jews for no reason so even the good Jews had to suffer. Every person has to have sinned once in there life, or they would just be called angels. I do not think that the Jews broke any contract with God, because God was not to blame for the suffering of the Jews during the Halocaust that suffering was from the Nazis. The pruifaction of Jews sounds like something Hitler would have said, but he did not care if they were good or bad Jews he just did not like them at all. God giving people to choose is free will, but they chooses that you get to make are not always good chooses. The evil in this world can not be justified, because there is too much evil in this world.

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  3. I find it more plausible that evil is the result of free will in the world. At first, it might seem that evil is the result of either humans being punished for their sins, or God being unjust. However, evil being the result of freewill shows that evil is the doing of humans, not God. It also shows that God is very just, since only a just God would give people free will. A response for the first and second points could be that neither God nor the Jews broke the covenant, they are suffering because the Nazis are using their free will to restrict the free will of others. Likewise, their is no purification happening to the Jews, it is once again the Nazis almost "abusing" free will. The last defense agrees with my argument, but I think a response to it could be that there is no free will in the world and everything is God's doing.

    I don't think that any amount of evil in the world is justified in the sense that it should exist and that there are valid reasons to be evil to others. I do, however think it is justified in the sense that it is a byproduct of free will. In other words, evil does exist and there is no denying that. The fact that it exists though doesn't mean that there is a right time to be evil.

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  4. God treats each and everyone of us like a parent does a child. God doesn't punish us for some ramdom reason or just because it is fun, but because he loves us and wants us to learn from our mistakes. The only reason why there is suffering in the world is because with out evil and suffering God would not be able to should his mercy and love towards us. God loves us more than anyone can imagine.
    God gives us freewill to choose Good or Evil. God expects us to choose good, but obviously not everyone does. He gave Adam and Eve the choice to sin, he gave them guidelines to follow but we broke them. If God is so Good why does he allow evil, the bible answers that. If he didn't allow Evil and there was sin in the world then everyone would go to hell. That is why he sent his son Jesus to die for our sins.

    So if I put on God on trial I would say he is just in what he is doing, and it all has a purpose in his divine plan.

    Frank Punzi

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  5. I believe that evil in the world is the result of freewill. If there is a God, he created people and gave them freewill. Whatever humans decide to do with this freewill is out of God's control. Freewill is unlimited to humans, even the ability to take away (or try to) others' freewill is a possibility. The Jewish people are suffering not because they have broken a contract with God, but the freewill and choice of the Nazi's are making them suffer. The Nazi's are to blame for the Jewish people suffering, not God. God has given freewill to everyone to do as they please, and the Nazi's chose to punish Jewish people. If I though the Holocaust was a purification of Jews, that would mean I support that God is "punishing" them. I don't believe God is punishing them; the Nazi's have taken freewill to a new extreme. God has given us freewill. If God had planned everything from the beginning, why would he choose to have humans go through life with pain and suffering. Even though he would allow a tremendous amount of good in the world, he would have also let an equal amount of evil in that would just cancel out the good. That is why I think God has given us freewill, and we do what we please with this freedom. Evil can never be justified. Even if for every evil action done, a good one takes its place, it doesn't cancel out or neutralize the situation. "Like a mirror, you can fix it, but you still can still see the crack in the reflection."

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  6. It seems to me that the best of these tree explanations of the presence of evil in a world where God exists and is good is that of free will. Only in a world where each of us has the ability to choose to change the world around us, whether in a small way or big, whether for good or for evil, and the choices we make have observable consequences, can we truly live a fulfilled life, and God would not want otherwise. Therefore, when we use our free will to do evil, that evil must occur, or we would not be truly free. I find it implausible that evil is a punishment, because almost all the time, the ones who should be punished are the perpetrators of the evil. Evil is done by the guilty, not to the guilty. I also find it hard to believe that evil is necessary for some greater good, because although in many cases good comes from evil, evil is never the only way to accomplish that good. The best explanation for evil is its most immediate cause, the evildoer, misusing God-given free will.

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  7. I think that suffering in the world is a result of free will. If you think about it, a lot of the suffering and pain that is caused can be traced back to the decisions made by poeple. Even things like the destruction caused by natural disasters can go back to human decisions. Take New Orleans for example. Yes, what happened was horrible. But why would people build a settlement in a basin that is in an area frequented by hurricanes and tropical storms? I believe that the amount and degree of evil in the world can be justified because everything (aside from God, that is) has a cause. If people look back to find the causes of all this evil, I think that they will find that, more often than not, the choices of humans are the root of suffering and evil.

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  8. Honestly, none of these explanations are the least bit satisfactory. Where free will is concerned, a loving, omnipotent, and omniscient god could find a logical way to prevent it, meaning that that argument bears no weight. As for the Jews being responsible for their own suffering, this too bears many unfortunate implications. What it implies is that either every single suffering Jew has done something to warrant the unspeakable cruelty they are being subjected to, which is unlikely and deeply unsettling if true. If the Jewish people as a whole have broken their contract with God, then surely there must be a way to reinforce the contract aside from wholesale slaughter of the Jewish people. Finally, the argument of "purification", makes absolutely no sense, as a loving and omnipotent God, assuming they would even need to kill most of the Jews to bring about this purification, could do so in a far more merciful way than the suffering brought by the Holocaust.

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  9. I feel like that God did not allow evil, I feel like we just kept giving and giving evil where it got out of hand and He could not have taken anymore control of the evil because it has gotten out of hand for him.In today's society there are evil people. We as people sometime just get fought up in today's society. Evil is not a good thing but it is satin the devil makes us do the evil thing, and unfortunately satin the devil, I believes live in all of us. And how society place apart in God and the devil sometimes makes us react. I believe that punishing each and everyone of us purifies us, as an individual. The choices we make that are either good or bad do show our fault, we have made and in the future we do not have to make them again and we understand why after that.

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  10. I believe that suffering is the result from both free will and that it is plausible that it could be a purification of the world. I do not necessarily believe that it is a purification but i do believe that it is in the realm of possibilities. God gave us free will to make life not dull and boring. In the movie clips we watched its almost like the Nazis took free will from the Jews and are abusing that power. The amount and degree of evil cannot be justified especially with the Jews and the Nazis because there is to much, its way past the point of turning back and purifying.

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  11. We are punished for our sins because of what we desire. Happiness,friendship and lust. Happiness forces us to want or need to do something. Like if life isn't making them happy like drugs. Some people have felt loneliness to join s group of misfits. Friendship causes people to crazy things just to fit in. Like to people tell things kid to do something like go jump off a cliff and survive. Lust makes you want to do anything for women even if it is crazy. God punishes us this and he wants us to learn that we must learn to resist or just choose smarter.

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  12. I believe that people will reap what they sew (karma). If people are bold enough to do evil things, then God will punish them. The punishing helps teach the person a lesson. If the punishment is bad enough and the person knows what they are being punished for, the person should not do it again. So, I agree with the statement that punishing purifies us. It scares us straight and helps us learn.
    No, I do not think all the evil in the world will ever be justified. There is too much evil and that is the issue. If people acted better and had better morals, then the world would be a better place. We wouldn't have to worry about as many punishments and we wouldn't be afraid, like we are.

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  13. In my perspective of why God lets evil exist, the only logical explanation is the planting of free will into the microchip of human nature. Because of free will, it allows people the power to choose what action they wish to take. Whether it is the moral action or the sinister path is up to the human. God weeds out the evil souls by free will and learns who is willing to lead the holy life in return for eternity in heaven. Evil is always vital for soceity to advance because life cannot make progress if no one makes a gain over someone else. People are hurt constantly, but it is the only way for life to go on. Evil is a neccessary being.

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  14. My thoughts about free will are that it is the reason for all the evil and suffering in the world. I also believe that punishment and suffering is a way of purification. Since we have the opportunity to make choices. If we make the wrong choice, they say we should be punished for our sins. If we had such thing as a world with no evil or suffering, it might be like a heaven. I think the choices that we make in this world will make us learn from our wrongdoings and make us better people. These mistakes that we do could increase faith and learning and would make us better people.

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  15. Evil always has existed. it is always the but it is up to the individual to use it or not. no matter how many people it effects the evil can always be traced to the decision someone made. I think God saw this coming but he realized he had to give us free will for the world to work. if everyone worked to their full potential everything could be wonderful but since that is not the common idea free will has done bad to us.

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  16. This problem has been one of my greatest struggles with maintaining belief in God, and I know that's the case with many many many people. Some of the suffering in this world is to an end, and quite a bit we inflict on ourselves by our human nature and our own choices. We need to be able to tell the difference between the two. The work of Hitler, while incredibly symbolic to the Jews, is not the hand of God in action in my opinion. He did not only kill Jews or any one race of people. I think that there are also travails and sorrows which we must pass through in order to learn from, and become more mature, or better people, such as the eventual death of our parents and close family members as we grow older. Justified? No, the level of evil in the world is not justified, but its also not all God's fault, and there are things we have to handle for ourselves.

    --Gareth Haynes

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