I want to live in a world where my loves ones don't die.

Wouldn't we all? But what would that mean? A static world populated by immortal beings who don't reproduce? Because if no one could die, yet people multiplied anyway, what would happen?

We might deplete the world of resources, pack it shore to shore so tightly that the lucky ones get to climb around on top of the massive continental dogpile. But since we can't die, we would just be stuck like that.

It would be a failure of entropy. And we might view entropy as a bad thing, but if we take an honest look at it we'll see that it's necessary for life. It's not merely some cliché to say that without death there can be no life. It's part of the natural harmony, balance, and equilibrium of the universe itself.

After all, what is cancer but a failure of entropy? Sure, it might start as a mutation of a cell. But that cell begins to reproduce, and the tissue begins to grow. If the body doesn't succeed in breaking it down and removing it faster than it grows, then it only gets bigger, until it starts to kill everything around it, eventually compromising the whole system, leading to death.

If there were no entropy, there could be no life. Your body is constantly breaking itself down and renewing itself. The only way to eliminate death would be to eliminate entropy, but by eliminating entropy you would also eliminate life.

Of course it's cruel and unfair that innocent children get sick and die. There's no way around that and I'm not going to try to explain it away with some callous religious tautologies. So maybe that's the difference between me and a theist.

It's not "the mysterious work of a god whom we can't understand." It's just nature in its brutal, unfeeling aspect: red in tooth and claw. It's Murphy's Law applied to the uncompromising mechanisms which make life possible to begin with. The cold, unnegotiable cost of living in a world where the grass is green and the birds sing, where flowers bloom and the wind carries puffy clouds across the sky after a heavy rain. You didn't choose to pay it; neither did they, yet there it is. Life never came with a guarantee.

And I'll reiterate once more that my intention here is not to make a theistic claim, but to pick apart the underlying assumptions we make when we say things like "Wouldn't it be better to live in a world without pain, illness, or death?" And it just so happens that "the problem of evil" was the perfect container for this analysis.

So if you found it thought-provoking, I'm glad. That is the sum of all I could ask to get out of writing this.

I'm confused. You began your comment by saying my points are commonly made in Christianity, and then you spent the rest of your comment explaining why those same points are incompatible with Christianity?

It's like you're trying to squeeze my words into a box they don't fit in, and then pointing out how they don't fit in that box.

I'm not arguing from a Christian perspective. I took "the problem of evil" from the philosophy of religion as a launching point, because that was the topic of this thread. But I made it pretty clear I wasn't making a theistic argument; the closest it could have been to that would simply be in the role of devil's advocate.

But if you look at the substance of my analysis, it's not "Some all-powerful deity can snap his fingers and change anything/everything instantaneously." It's "there are certain immutable laws of the universe which make life and existence possible, but because of those same laws, suffering and death are a package deal when you enter this world."

The bargain isn't between "God and the Universe." It's between "You and Life." And it's this: to live within the universe is to be subject to those immutable laws. And one of those laws is entropy.

There's no need for an omnipotent god to hold the universe together so that it doesn't explode. The laws of gravity, inertia, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, etc., they take care of that already.