For future reference, the god of the Christian Bible is not omnibenevolent. This is very obvious, especially when he killed the first born child of every egyptian. Any Christian who says that the God they worship is omnibenevolent is a dunce.

My question is rather simple, though. Why worship something that can stomp out evil/pain/whatever? 

LosingStreak06 said. "The problem with the riddle is that it fails to properly define evil."

Maybe after you can coherently define "god" we can discuss evil. 

The old "problem of evil" question is certainly as old as mankind itself. It's been pondered by man for all of recorded history, and I'm sure the last man will still be scratching his head over it asking "why?". I'd like to share the best explanation I've run across, which is a distillation of the thoughts of Rabbi Harold Kushner as written in his book "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" (with a few thoghts of my own tossed in here and there).

In the case of nature, the universe is guided by wonderfully precise and reliable laws. Because of this, we can be certain that certain actions will yield the same result each and every time. The law of gravity assures the builder that he can build a house without having his materials float away every time he turns his back. Because of the laws of chemistry, when we mix certain chemicals together in the correct proportions, under the right conditions, we know that a certain substance will reulst, thus doctors can prescribe medications, and know what effect they will have on his patient.

The flip side of these immutable laws is that evil can happen through them as well. Thus, when a mass of snow becomes too heavy to resist the attraction of gravity, it begins to move downhill resulting in an avalanche which destroys a village. The same chemicals, applied in a different dosage, or mixed in different proportions yield dangerous toxins polluting our evironment, rather than medicines helping to cure disease. That is when the same laws of nature come back to bite us in the ass.

These laws effect everyone equally. The apply their good and bad effects across the board without passion of prejudice.

God has, occassionally, interfered in natural processes to impose, or to display his will, but were he to do so every time he was invoked, the laws of nature would be reduced to the "suggestions" or "recommendations" of nature. The very things which make it possible for us to manipulate our environment to achieve our goals and desires would become impossible at worst, unpredictable at best.

The evils caused by mankind, on the other hand, are driven by our rational nature. Our ability to reason and to choose courses of action determines the amount of evil we cause.

Let's say for example, that I'm in some sort of business with a partner. If we make good business decisions, all should be well, and hopefully, our business is successful. But if things should go awry, and the business starts to go down the tubes, I may be faced with some choices, all of which are "evil". I can let the business defualt and just walk away, with dire economic consequences for all involved, I can delare bankruptcy and limit that fiscal impact somewhat, or I can kill my partner and use the insurance money to shore up the business. My choice affects the amount of evil introduced into the world.

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You stupid atheists know nothing The Flying Spaghetti Monster (God) likes his beer and is often completely pissed and incapable of helping.

You think its easy being the supreme creator of the universe, do this do that sometimes deities want to chill, have a beer see a stripper show, but all you mortals do is whine moan and pray

Get a life

Ramen

If God is not all powerful, why is that so bad? What if God is just a guiding force of love in people's lives, nothing more.

I really don't see how the problem of evil debunks Christianity, although I am not a Christian. The religion began after a brutal execution.

Finally, stop using the word "impotent." That always makes it sound like God has a low sperm count.

Probably not to your satisfaction.

I'm willing to accept the defintion of evil as that which is harmful or injurious.

That is a very thought provoking but a very old argument. It was answered in the 1850's or so by a man named Charles Finney in his systmeatic theology. His book is about three inches thick, and is full for terms that you may need a dictionary to understand. Terms like benevolence (disposition to love)and, malevolence (disposition to hate) and desert ( what someone deserves). He is however exceedingly thorough in his answers, and I have never heard anyone come close to being as convincing as he was. Dont you think that good questions deserve good answers? And this is a well formed question. I will do the best I can to answer it, from a Christians perspective, with no malevolence or undercurrent involved.

In order to even begin to answer this question, I hope that you will let me take a couple of things for granted ( that is, what God would be like if he existed).

The God of Christianity is Benevolent, ( all Love) Omnicient ( all Knowing) and Omnipotent ( all Powerfull). The way that your argument is stated was stated a little different in the 1800's , but basicly it follows that if in order to expalin the exisitance of evil, one must deny any one of these three of God's attributes, then they have also in effect denied the God of the Bible.

Finney goes so far as to prove that none of these attributes need to be denied to prove the existance of the God of the Bible.

First of all, let us go to the beginning. In Genisis it says that we are created in the "Image" of God. One of the definitions of the word image is "stick figure", like what a little child would draw of his family. So, in a nutshell, if you want to get just a glimpse of God, that is a "stick figure" glimpse, we are that "image".

We all know that we have a free will, so does God. We have emotions, knowledge etc, so does God. This is taken for granted in the Bible.

One of the attributes of God is Love. Love always wants the best for the individual that is loved, even when they dont want it for themselves. It is said that God is not willing that anyone should perish. You ask then, Why do they perish. I answer, it is not because he does not Love them. In any court of law, one of the rules of evidence that we must follow is that of "innocent until proven guilty". That is that we take it for granted that the defendant has good will unless the evidence proves otherwise. For now, putting God as the defendant, we can take it for granted that he loves us. He says that he does. Now for the other two attributes.

If God is Love, then whe does he let evil exist? Well, witch evil? There are many kinds, there are the evils of our own making, and he evils that others do to us, and there are evil circumstances, ( wrong place wrong time) It really is a big question it could be a paragraph long, just his part of it. Well, lets break it down. First of all, he lets evil exist in mankind, because they are created in his image. He has free will and so do we. Therefore this answer to this part of the question gets two attributes with one answer. God cannot do what it is not wise for him to do. Because he loves us, he wants us to respond in love. To force us to serve him is in effect to destroy our freedom. The only thing that an all powerfull and all wise God who loves us cannot do, is that witch is not wise for him to do. This in effect is a simple answer to that age old question, though both the question and the answer may be expanded on. I am  sorry that I do not have more time. This answer adresses all moral agents (people with free will and an intellect to know right and wrong) and pardon the simple answer, but other evils that dont involve moral agents can also be answerd with the same agrument basically. It is not wise for God to do, or to allow to be done other than he has allowed, and to disagree with this is in effect to take for granted that one has the knowledge on how a universe as complex as ours could be run better than it is run under his government without destroying the enviornment, morality, and life in the universe as we know it. 

I will let Finney Comment a little on this, on the moral aspects of evil and I will post more later if you are interested. ( this at least generally answers the whole question without going into the "whys" of Gods wisdom. If one does takes into account the law of evidence before mentioned "innocent until proven guilty" this will make some sence for a general answer. If we need to be more specific about what we mean by evil, that can be answered as well. Here is part of the answer for the moral aspect of evil that God allows to exist in the world. That is, when people hurt people.

"God must have purposed to secure, so far as he wisely could, obedience to the laws of the universe, both physical and moral. These laws were established for the sake of the end to which they tended, and obedience to them must have been regarded by God as of real, though not ultimate value, equal to that of the end, for the accomplishment of which they were ordained. He must have delighted in obedience to these laws for the sake of the end, and must have purposed to secure this obedience so far as he could in the nature of things; that is, in so far forth as he wisely could. Since moral law is a rule for the government of free moral agents, it is conceivable that in some cases this law might be violated by the subjects of it unless God resorted to means to prevent it, that might introduce an evil of greater magnitude than the violation of the law in the instances under consideration would be. It is conceivable that in some cases God might be able so to overrule a violation of his laws, physical and moral, as upon the whole to secure a greater good than could be secured by introducing such a change into the policy and measures of his administration, or so framing his administration as to prevent altogether the violation of any law. God might, and no doubt does prefer that every creature should, in the precise circumstances in which he is placed, obey all the laws of his being. But if under these circumstances, voluntary agents will in any case disobey, their disobedience, though a real, may be a less evil than such a change in the administration of his government as would prevent the violation, would be. In this case he might regard the violation as the less of two evils, and suffer it rather than change the arrangements of his government. He might sincerely deplore and abhor these violations of law, and yet might see it not wise to prevent them, because the measures necessary to prevent them might result in an evil of still greater magnitude. He might purpose to suffer these violations, and take the trouble to overrule them so far as was possible for the promotion of the end he had in view, rather than interpose for their prevention. These violations he might not have purposed in any other sense than that he foresaw them and purposed not to prevent them, but on the contrary to suffer them to occur and to overrule them for good, so far as this was practicable. These events, or violations of law, have no natural tendency to promote the highest well-being of God and of the universe, but have in themselves a directly opposite tendency. Nevertheless God could so overrule them as that these occurrences would be a less evil than that change would be that could have prevented them.

Violations of law, then, he might have purposed only to suffer( or allow), while obedience to law he might have designed to produce or secure"

So Finney basicly says here that God will not make everyone obey his law in every circumstance, even though we might be talking about the person who is doing us wrong, because to do so will create a change in the way that he governs the affairs of men, and may result in more harm to the human race than good towards it in the end. So in short, he loves us. More later.

Actually Magilum,

The Bible teaches that the earth is round in Isaiah. Some people debate the point, argue of the tense of words though, and then when it is proven resort to saying that other cultures knew that the world was round so its not a big deal. All I can say is that, it would be hard to believe in a God who didnt know the earth was round, and the Bible does teach that it is.

 But the alternative is to believe that we are all just an accident, with no reason to live, with no good reason to be here. I know of a guy named Ravi Zacharias, when he was a kid in school, alost succeeded  in killing himself in India thinking about the fact that , because there is so much pain in the world, if it has no purpose, nothingness would be better than a painfull somethingness. I think that many of you could agree, if you know pain.

 I cannot help but to think that God has a purpose for all of us....and if we dont find it, what is there to find at all? Oh spiritual vacume stinks....somethingk will try to fill it....just hope that it is the truth.

Oh, and LOL about the bible "getting it right" about the earth being a sphere. That's been debunked so many times, along with hundreds of other biblical claims, it's not even funny. Go read... anything. NO, EXCEPT THAT! Haha.

It was a good answer. God cannot do what it is not wise for him to do was the final point. Do you really want an answer, or to just mess up people who are sincere, but havent taken any classes on logic?

God has set limits and rules to the world. For example, it is impossible for a person to fly. This does not impede on any person's free will.

God could have set limits on the world which would make it impossible for evil to be done. This would also not impede on a person's free will.

Why didn't he?

(if you would argue that the inability to fly IS an imposition on free will, but god decided in his "wisdom" that it was necessary and worth the loss of freedom, you will have to address why it isn't wise to also limit free will enough to inable people from committing evil, which seems much more important)

The basis for the concept of a God is that everything needs a creator, everything needs an engineer. Then comes the idea that this creator is a superior entity, perfect, lovable, smart, etc, etc.

But eventually someone will ask the question: why is the world so imperfect? Scientists would say we evolved from lower apes, but that doesn't mean we are perfect and rational most of the time, nor is the planet perfect because it is a cooling planet, meaning tectonic plates are as stable as Robin Williams, and the weather can be as cute as Ann Coulter on PMS. But these answers won't please most Christians because they want to feel sure there's an imaginary friend looking over them. 

So why is mankind imperfect, and why is the planet so aggressive toward us?

The answer is "evil". According to them we are in a fallen creation. We are being punished because Eve and Adam ate an apple because a talking snake asked them to. We can't blame Adam and Eve for this mishap. Keep in mind God paraded all the species of animals before Adam and he named them all, so we are talking about Adam naming 1,000,000 classes of animals. Poor guy must've been suffering from mental exhaustion. He could've been tricked into eating dog shit for all we know. And Eve was younger than Adam by two or three days, so she hadn't been around that much. The apple made them evil by altering their brain chemistry, and this made their children evil as well, for an apple can alter human DNA. And now, because of them, we are living in a fallen creation, where earthquakes and hurricanes, torturers, suiciders are everywhere. Whenever someone uses an electrical jumper on some guy's nuts, it is because Adam and Eve ate an apple.

Has God tried to stop this? Yes. He flooded the Earth, killing everyone, but he selected Noah and his children to keep mankind alive. Unfortunately God didn't realize Noah was a drunk who would curse Ham for finding his skirt, or something dumb like it. Then there was Sodomah and Gomorrah. He destroyed that place, but the survivors engaged in an orgy later on, meaning the sodomy continued (I just don't know about that gomorra part). Then he sent Jesus, his son, but also God, his father, to save us all, and Jesus died for our sins, so now we can sin as much as we want to because Jesus died for our sins. Keep in mind Jesus is also God, and he is also the son of God, so this is pretty much like having one personality dying to please the other personality. Happens in mental hospitals. I guess. Jesus said stuff like "love thy neighbor," and somehow his teachings would save us all.

They didn't.  

So yes, God has tried to stop evil. He just keeps on failing.