this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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It's not a philosophical argument around or about suffering in general. The problem of Theodicy is directly in relation to having an omnipotent and entirely good god while also having incredibly amounts of suffering in the world, which are pretty much mutually exclusive. If god is all good and all powerful, how can suffering be a thing, basically.
That's the theological question around suffering.
The free will argument enters into it somewhat, but doesn't resolve or answer suffering caused by things entirely unrelated to actions freely chosen by people, hence the "deformed child dying" example.
Could you elaborate on how an entirely good god is mutually exclusive?
Omnipotence still have its limitations. For example, can a god create an immovable object? Which doesn't make sense because the question itself is contradictory. So that begs the question, is it even possible to be entirely good while still being totally authoritarian and eugenics?
On a side note, I'm not even sure what you're implying as the good option here. The child dying, the child growing up and having to suffer their entire life with deformity, or being eugenics? All of them sounds awful if I had to choose
Theodicy issue assumes that omnipotence is absolute, as it is attributed to god. But it's simply the same. If you have any limitation to the power, i. e. not being able to prevent deformed babies that are unfit for survival due to no fault of anyone's actions, then god isn't omnipotent and thus isn't god. Just another way of approaching the same goal of having an unmovable object created.
If god were both omnipotent and all good, as ascribed by scripture, they wouldn't allow a child with birthdefects to come into existence in the first place. The child would simply be healthy and any negatives in their lives would be consequences of their actions, rather than genetic problems or environmental factors beyond their or humanity's control.
Otherwise god is not all good or not omnipotent. And if they aren't one of those things, how are they god at all? That's the basic premise.
Theodicy doesn't necessarily assume that omnipotence is absolute in the sense that a god can do anything including a logically impossible task, but merely the ability to do anything logically possible.
Should omnipotentence include the ability to create a square circle? A married bachelor? Triangle with four sides? A number that is both even and odd?
It seems that you're taking it in what Thomasson calls a neutral sense as opposed to a sortal sense, which is meaningless for asking questions. For example, if I asked if there was anything in the fridge and you said it was empty. It'd be weird if I looked over and said "umm, excuse me? you said the fridge was empty but it's actually full of air!", because it was implied that I was asking about anything to eat instead of literally anything.
And if we just ignore the fact that you support eugenics, where would you draw the line between healthy and "deformed"? Is deformity not driven in part by genetic mutation and therefore natural part of evolution? Aren't we all result of a series of advantageous deformity? What if two deformed parents decides to have a baby even though doctors have warned them that the baby is definitely going to be deformed as well?