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[–] NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm much more familiar with the Christian version which presents god as perfect in an absolute sense.

Islam does too, but with less emphasis on the idea of benevolence. Most relevantly, Islam states that life is a test by God and therefore suffering is an inherent part of it, which is kind of my framework here (though I don't assume that in my argument below).

Step on a Lego > hurts > not evil. Stick a knife in someone or like commit genocide > very clearly evil.

My point is that that's logically inconsistent. A genocide killing thousands of people and an earthquake or famine killing thousands of people both leave thousands of people dead. Hell, even letting people die at all is suffering. Back to our postulates, pillar 2 states "his will is our reality." When you get down to it, the only kind of world that would not run afoul of the Epicurean paradox would be a no-scarcity paradise with only 100% happy thoughts, and at that point we'd be looking at robots (or I suppose angels, if there's a material difference), not humans. Worse, when you get down to it in such a world people would either lose the ability to even conceive of evil, or be prevented from committing it by an external force. Imagine if at the mall you always had an angel making you return your shopping cart, now multiply that by ten thousand times. Essentially we're looking at a world of lobotomized robots, which to me doesn't sound all that appealing.

is god not capable of creating free will without evil?

It might be possible in some outlandish alternate universe, but restricting the discussion to things we can conceive of, evil is baked into the concept of free will. As I argued above, take away the capacity to commit evil and you remove almost the whole breadth of human emotion and activity, by definition running afoul of free will. Perhaps most importantly, though

a god that's aware of evil and has the power to stop it, but chooses not to, is himself some degree of evil.

at the core of this is the assumption that suffering is ontologically evil. This is very egotistical, but it also betrays a fundamental instability in the whole thing: Without objective morality (which immediately follows from the lack of belief in a creator), how can there be good and evil? This application of the Epicurean paradox assumes that evil can exist independent of a higher authority able to determine good and evil, so it's a case of circular reasoning more than anything else. The Epicurean paradox can only be used to reject complete benevolence (which, well yes), not complete goodness.