A Civil Religious Debate

Yes but the point is that our free will is at fault for evil (according to you), and God is at fault for creating us, therefore god still created a being capable of choosing evil and was therefore creating the possibility for evil. According to you, God is the creator of the universe, nature, which encompasses everything in existence including evil which is an idea used to describe when an action is negative in nature of against a moral code. If God created everything, he is not exempt from being accredited with evil which is the by product of free will. You can't exclude God by placing the blame on his creation, he still created it. If God is responsible for everything in existence, the entire universe, why do you only credit him with the good? If God created everything then he is still the author of evil.

If you were a parent and give a child an AK-47 and tell him to run free and do whatever he wants, and he shoots another child without realizing the implications who do you blame? Exactly, you would blame the parent who handed the kid a fully loaded AK and told him to run free. Was that event tragic, yes. Was it preventable, yes. But what do you have to say for the poor little bugger that got shot. You can call free will whatever you want, call it a curse, call it a gift, but whatever it is, according to you, god gave it to us. God still gave this child the ability to kill and allowed the actions of one person, to destroy the innocent life of another. My question is how can you reconcile the consequences of death for the innocent child with an all loving god. How could he allow that child to die in a situation that in no way reflected a free choice of his own. How does this child learn or grow from his experience with evil?

Okay so you are saying evil is necessary for us to learn and grow, and that is all fine and good in moderation, I will give you that, evil is necessary for us to distinguish good. But what do you have to say to little Timmy who got cancer and will die at 5 years of age, or 4 year old Juan who was killed in an earthquake. What did they learn from their experience, how did they grow? No other person did this to them, it just happened, and why them? you could say bad luck or coincidence but you religious folk aren't too fond of coincidences now are you. So why would an all powerful and loving god allow this 5 year old, innocent child to die? And these circumstances are by no means isolated incidents, this type of tragic death happens on a daily basis around the world. Now it seems like you are just making excuses for this god of yours. It sounds like a battered wife trying to defend her abusive husband. "Oh he didn't mean to hit me offica, it was ma fault, I just din't have dinner on the table at 6:30 like he likes it, he's warned me several times offica." Either own up and admit your husband is a dick or the much more realistic situation, your husband doesn't exist and terrible things happen in the world because "evil" as we perceive it to be, is natural in the world.

And please stop with the "oh well god is out of our understanding and knows and created everything so his reasoning is exempt from our scorn" crap. If i made the claim to you that I was my own father, and you pointed out that it was biologically and physically impossible for that to happen, I could just say that "us self fathering people are outside of physics and genetics as YOU understand it, but we live by a different set of rules." I would mocked into obscurity and i would deserve it, you cannot exclude god from these arguments simply by retreating to the substance less backup of a lack of "well he is god so he MUST have logic we cannot comprehend."

Then god still created humans capable of free will and choosing evil. If our biology is at fault for our flaws, and god is at fault for our biology, then god would be responsible for our actions since he gave us the ability to choose evil.

So malevolence discredits the claim that god is loving and kind. Most Christians would hold to the idea that god is loving and kind, and if your god allows evil to happen and does nothing to stop it he is as bad as the evil he is supposed to oppose. Therefore a kind and loving god would not exist based on this malevolence. It's like if I claimed that I had psychic powers and could predict the lottery, yet i never won the lottery when I tried. The results contradict my claim, so you can conclude my claim was false.

This is known as the riddle of Epicurus and it addresses the problem of evil (natural disasters) for the existence of god. God has the character trait of being loving and caring for his creation, by refuting this trait of his character we refute his credibility of existence.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?