List pages on the Problem of Evil on this site by Vexen
"If God is all-powerful and all-good, it would have created a universe with no suffering and no evil. But, evil and suffering exist. Therefore God does not exist, is not all-powerful or is not benevolent. Attempts to justify the existence of evil are called theodicies. There have been no fully working theodicies created to date, even popular ones such as the free will theodicy were rejected thousands of years ago for reasons that still stand today. It seems that if there is a god, it is not the all-good moral being that classical religions would have us believe.""Introduction to Theodicy" by Vexen, 2000 Jan
An attempt to justify the existence of evil is to say that God is testing us in some way. Perhaps that if we pass the test(s), God will put us in heaven. Otherwise we remain on Earth or go to Hell. Most religions have similar mythologies. The authors of the Christian Bible included examples of people being tested by God. In Buddhism such tests eventually lead us to Nirvana, in Islam the test is one of obedience to God, success takes you to Paradise.
God is all-knowing. It knows everything, future and past. That's the God that I'm talking about here, the omniscient monotheistic God. Such a God exists outside of time, and can see all future and past events as if they've all already happened. This chain of events has all been created by God, from beginning to end. God is immovable, immutable, beyond time. As a result of all this, God clearly knows what tests we will pass and fail. God knows if we are largely moral or largely immoral. It knows why we transgress, and it knows in detail every reason and factor that ultimately causes us to go wrong.
God therefore never needs to test anyone. God knows, even without doing a test, what the results of the test will be. Let's say God wants to test someone by allowing them to stumble across a wallet in the street with money in it. Let's assume that God considers it best if the subject hands the wallet in to the police, and worse if the subject steals the money and throws away the wallet. God knows if the person will pass such a test. God knows it because it created the person and their personality in the first place, so can work out what they will do. It also knows what the person will do because it is all-knowing, and knows all possible future events. God never needs to actually test the person, God already knows if they'll pass. To say that God needs or wants to "test" us is to say that God is not all-knowing.
The existence of suffering and evil, therefore, is clearly not excused by saying that God wants to test us. God knows, if it creates evil, who will pass its tests and who will fail. God doesn't need to actually create evil, suffering or unhappiness to know who will fail. Likewise, God does not need us to make moral choices in order to know if we're moral or not. God knows what we would choose if moral options are presented to us. The actual testing is not required, God already knows.
God could have created a world with no evil, no suffering, and no moral confusions. That way, everyone would be happy all the time, and we would rightly know that a loving God existed. God would still know, if it allowed transgression and evil, who would succumb to temptation. But the actual creation of potential evil is not necessary. As it is clear that suffering exist and moral dilemmas abound, we know that either God is evil or doesn't exist. We certainly know that evil, confusion, suffering and anything else is not a "test" from God.
God knows who will enter Heaven - so why does it keep them on Earth?
Given that God knows who will pass and who will fail, and therefore who will get into Heaven, what's the point of Earthly existence at all? God knows who will, in the future, deserve to enter Heaven. So why doesn't God, with its knowledge, simply put those people into Heaven NOW? It could do so, if it wanted. Nothing would be lost. Suffering would be reduced.
God knows who will not enter Heaven
God knows who will fail its tests. God knows, from even before the time when a person is born, whether or not they will pass its tests and enter heaven. Why then does God bother to create people who are to fail these tests? What's the point of the testing when it already knows the answers? Why not simply put those who will fail into hell, those who will pass into heaven, and not have to bother with all the confusion inbetween? But more importantly, why does God create people who it knows are going to fail tests and suffer torment in Hell? Either God is an immoral monster, or in reality there is no hell and everyone ultimately goes to heaven. We simply cannot say that evil is necessary; yet it still exists. God is either evil itself, or does not exist.
By Vexen Crabtree 2005 Apr 10