Kick wrote on Oct 14
th, 2020 at 2:01pm:
I had already had whatever tiny germs of faith in an all-loving God extinguished by this point, but seeing that person, still alive, but so utterly physically destroyed (I would guess in some sort of fire or explosion), has cemented my view that there is no-one looking down on us from above. At least not with loving eyes.
That is the classic debate over the problem of evil. Rather than rehash it, I'll just drop this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#St._Thomas_AquinasThe whole wikipedia article is fairly well written and lays out many different perspectives and conclusions about the problem of evil, but I personally like the Aquinas view. I like the definition of "evil" as the deprivation of some good. For evil to be incompatible with good (as is implied in the logical arguments at the top of the article), the person or creature who is deprived of that good must necessarily be OWED or somehow deserving of it. If you say that God is not good (or that a good God cannot exist) because we can clearly observe the deprivation of good things, then it implies that the person deprived of that good was entitled to have it. That just makes people sound, well... entitled. The same Bible that says God is all-knowing and all-good also says "you will have trouble in this world". Is that necessarily a contradiction?
It would be like my 2yo saying to me: "You're a bad parent because you won't give me all of the candy I deserve."
Despite my child's strong feelings to the contrary, my child is not entitled to all the candy they want, and I am not an evil parent for depriving them of it, but I also understand that they are too immature to grasp this concept.