"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message
news:4aee2616$1@news.povray.org...

>
http://directionlessbones.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/challenge-suggest-a-more-evil-principle-than-this-one/

It's longwinded and does not seem to bring anything new to the argument from
evil.

In fact, even as an atheist, I don't think the argument from evil is a
particularly strong one. For evil is a sliding scale. Imagine for a moment
that there were no death and suffering, at all, in another universe
populated with other beings. Would we then, those beings (forget religious
books for a moment), conclude that there were no evil? Of course not. The
most distasteful thing that's present then, however benign by our standards,
would be considered evil by those beings in that universe. Foul smells, say,
would become the very definition of evil, and those beings would ask and
conclude "why oh why does Beelzebub allow foul smells to be emitted? Since
such an evil exists, there can be no god".

And let's say their "god" or "laws of universe" prevented all foul smells
from being emitted, by sentinent and non-sentinent beings alike. Would that
be end of evil? No. It would then be elevator music, and the ability of
their fellow beings to compose such horrorful melodies would be construed as
evil. The bottomline is, then, if you want to eliminate evil, all
possibilities for objectionable outcomes or behaviours need to be pruned.
This will eventually eliminate *everything*, from bright lights to sharp
corners to hard to open blister packages to slow booting computers, since a
thinking being can find anything objectionable. This is close to, but not
the same thing as the free will argument.

So the premise, "there is evil in the universe", is, to quote Pauli, not
even wrong. I would counter that what we perceive as evil are simply foul
smells. For now we can go on the other direction and imagine a universe
where much worse things happen much more frequently. Does the fact that we
don't live in an Event Horizon (the movie) universe could mean there is no
evil? Hence, I think, the premise is meaningless.

One can, always, of course, focus on "evil as described in the Bible". But
if one's to take all of Bible as literally true (a point which even
christians don't take), then there are much stronger and less metaphysical
arguments for concuding that it's nonsense and inconsistent.

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