Countering the 'Greater Goods Necessitate Evil' Theodicy

It seems one of the most reliable ways to get me to make atheism and philosophy of religion videos lately is to show me something so stupid I feel the need to respond.

Well congratulations to Capturing Christianity, because he's done it with this attempted theodicy and pathetic attempt at a reversal on the problem of evil.

[Venaloid]

God is omnipotent, until he has to actually do something, then there's all this red tape. God can't just make people courageous from the start, he has to physically beat it into people apparently.

[MoovySoundtrax]

Lol I remember Cameron attempted this same theodicy in a debate with Justin Schieber years ago. I'll just say what I said then: Cameron is arguing, in effect, that curing cancer is good, therefore God has created a world filled with cancer. Like, yeah, we can't have forgiveness if there's no sin. But we also wouldn't need it, so who cares.

If the argument is that it's good because it "manifests love, " then how about we stick to manifesting love in ways that don't require lots of evil and suffering. There's nothing necessary about the existence of evil to the existence of love.

[Venaloid]

Cameron believes that all the evil is worth it, not because he's honestly weighed the virtues of, for example, Martin Luther King Jr against all of the abuse, beatings, lynchings, and rapes that created his movement, but because it *must* be worth it, otherwise Christianity is false, and Cameron will get the big sad.

[_Omega_Weapon]

A "perfect" (maximized in every conceivable way) being should logically have no needs or desires. Including a need or desire to create anything at all. Much less require "glorification" from it's creations. Less it be not maximized in that area.

[renegadesofanarchy]

Every time I hear the phrase “greater good” I just think of the film Hot Fuzz

[wimsweden]

"the greatest goods entail suffering" Why? An omnipotent designer has no limits. The ironic thing is that the god they believe in has an infinite possibility space but theists have to narrow his possibility space to make him fit the reality we find ourselves in.

[richardjb]

I think the philosopher Graham Oppy nailed it. Atheism, he says, is not a world view but it may be part of your world view -- hence, an atheistic world view. This is a perennial issue when the topic is theism versus atheism. Theists import much more into their basic premise than is warranted. In the Anglosphere, many apologists are actually arguing from a conservative, evangelical protestant set of premises to which they are strongly committed. That is why I believe it is more productive to argue for and against more concrete world views such as various forms of naturalism or religion.

[thomasfplm]

My favourite answer to the theodicies is "The Great Demon" in witch all of the theodicies are reverted using an omnipotent omniscient perfectly evil being in the place of god and answering whay would be "the problem of good" in that case.

[ShouVertica]

Personally, my approach for the problem of evil for Christians is three steps.
1. Ask if god intervened in the world for good. (Reference Bible).
2. Ask if god still intervenes or if he just stopped after Jesus.
3. Point to any tragedy with relevance to bible. Starvation, healing, etc.

The point isn't to just say "there is evil, god isn't consistent" the point is also to get the Christian to realize God doesn't actually care about people in those Bible stories either, he just cares that they acknowledge him. Now most Christians already know this subconsciously, the concept of "the burning bush"(worship the mighty) but what they don't do is think about this in a way that has God isn't the lovey-dovey Jesus that Christians make him out to be. That Yaweh is cruel and brutal in the bible.

[Just_an_onion]

Courage, forgiveness etc. are just as real when manifested in a hyper-realistic simulation (in which all people, except the"self"/"experiencing subject" are mindless NPC's) - as long as the experiencer BELIEVES that the simulation is real. So, even if courage, forgiveness etc. are the greatest possible goods, the best possible world is NOT one where real people suffer. An even better world would be one where everyone is living in their own simulated reality (where none of the characters one interacts with is a real conscious person). In such a world, there can be courage and forgiveness without suffering.

So, christians that accept this theodicy are rationally committed to accepting a kind of solipsism.

Also, it won't do to simply (re-) define e.g. "courage" as something that requires there to be a real external world with real dangers and real risks of other people suffering. Because that just begs the question of why "courage", so defined, is better and more virtuous than say "mind internal quasi-courage".

[invisiblegorilla]

Why would a maximally good being create in the first place? Creating something other than a maximally great being would be less than maximally great, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't the greatest good that a maximally being create be a world in which people didn't have to suffer at all, either in Hell or just in their earthly life?

I always found this apologetic so lacking....

[benleitner]

"Atheism doesn't narrow the possibility space" and yet "[one possibility] is extremely surprising given atheism." I have no words for how idiotic that is.

[vinnygiggidy]

OK, I need help with this syllogism. I've tried to punch holes in it, but I can defend each premise. But if anybody can find problems with it or can give me a better way of wording it, I would appreciate it. Especially the conclusion.
Premise 1) God, by definition, can not be contingent upon anything outside of him.

Premise 2) it is impossible to say "God exists" without making God contingent upon something outside of him.

Premise 3) If something is contingent upon anything outside itself, it can not be God by definition.

Conclusion)The sentence "God exists" is incoherent by definition.

[nickolashessler]

It's been disappointing to see that after all the years he has spent with philosophically sophisticated defenders of Christianity on his show, Cameron now fills his channel with movie reviews, exorcism stories, and pale imitations of Frank Turek with some winking and nodding to YEC proponents on the side.

[CesarClouds]

If the Christian deity exists then everything is permitted because you repent and all is OK. That's not morality, that's a dictatorship. True morality can only exist without a deity.

[samo]

I think it is easier to argue that because God is evil, good must exist so that the evil of God can be fully manifested and understood. 😁

[daniellassander]

As a cultural christian meaning only that i consider my own morals and values as christian in nature, i dont go to church, dont pray, dont say thanks and dont read the bible.

In order to do a greater good you first must also be allowed to do evil if you are free. We can all agree that murdering another person in cold blood is always wrong outside of war right? Let me introduce to you Gary Plauche, whos child (Jody Plauche) got sexually molested for some time, by a man that Gary Plauche tried to help. So after his son got kidnapped by this man and he was arrested and his son was returned back to him it was discovered that he had been sexually assaulted. So he got a gun or already had one, disguised himself and waited at the airport and when the pedo walked by him he turned around and shot him.

In order to do a greater good sometimes evil must be allowed to exist, because sometimes a greater good can also be seen as evil.

Imagine that you had the option to travel back in time where you could kill, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler and Mao and where their atrocities would never happen, they would have better leaders who wouldnt have done any of those things, almost 100 million innocent non military lives saved, by you killing a person at the first sign of them starting to murder people.

The bible does indeed say in the ten commandments that killing is wrong. You have just broken gods commandment "thou shalt not kill" but you would also have made the world we live in a lot better.

You ignore all of this, and i do find it sad.