BeCaUsE hE's MyStErIoUs!
this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to "You can't adjudicate the morality of the Divine." And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words 'God works in mysterious ways'. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won't be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
"He gave us free will" aka he doesn't want to.
Yeah I'm not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is "more good" than the bad things it leads to are bad.
The problem for Christianity is that it doesn't fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn't like what people were doing with free will.
You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you're implicitly saying there's no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
For that matter, the free will explanation isn't even universal among Christians.
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Amazing how much death and destruction have come out of arguing over who has the best Invisible Friend.
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A: then he isn't god.
B: then he isn't good.
C: then he is evil.
D: the truth.
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The god the Abrahamists have chosen to worship is a weather and war god. So he is a vengeful dick.
When the Israelites were still polytheistic they worshipped, besides this war god, a sun god and a god of fertility in the Pantheon. Yet they’ve chosen to solely worship the war god. Says a lot about them.
Please let me remake this:
A. He can't, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
B. He doesn't want, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
C. He causes them, so... uhm, actually maybe? Depends, is He doing terrible things to me and my friends, or my enemies?
D. He doesn't exist, so he is not worthy being worshiped.
Side comment - C is obviously excuse to let us do terrible things to them. If You like being evil, surem that do work.
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Growing up as an agnostic atheist, I loved the Epicurean argument. Now as an adult, I feel compelled to ask the definitions of the words Good, Evil, and God before talking about things.
I think most of the arguments surrounding these topics involves complex use of metaphors and abstract concepts that people can spend lifetimes defining, but are happy to argue about in a short form without a mutually agreed definition.
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I don’t know. At this point I’m leaning toward C.
Me too, but only because I very strongly lean toward "god was created by man" rather than the other way around.
Really if you believe that God created the universe, then C logically follows.
But if we were created in the image of God, then B is very likely, too. Just look at what we do to characters that we create in The Sims.
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there is a fucked up fifth answer that works for theists, E. terrible things don't exist
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God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth!
He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you're cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.
Religious people be like:
he won't, because he doesn't interfere
He causes them, because it's the circle of life
He can't, because doing so would cause chaos
He doesn't exist, because you don't believe
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It's all a test. If you can't put up with horrible shit while being alive, how you gonna become an angelic slave and sing happy songs for eternity?
Isn't there that philosophical argument about how God can't be both all-good and all-powerful? If he's all-good, he would have to stop bad things.
It's been well over a decade since philosophy class, but this reminded me of that argument.
Forgot who made it though.
Epicurus.
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?
It's the Epicurean Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
In summary:
If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good. If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?
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In Buddhism, the concept of God as a powerful creator is not central. The question of "why terrible things happen" is addressed through the teachings of karma and interdependence. Terrible things occur due to the collective actions aka karma of beings, influenced by ignorance, attachment, and aversion, rather than a deliberate act of a deity. Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, the most aligned answer would be that terrible things happen because of the causes and conditions created by sentient beings themselves, rather than any of the options listed.
For most catholic priests.... The D is always the answer.
Their logic would be
C
If something bad happens to someone it’s because they deserved it
“But they were a good person”
They were going to do something terrible
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