You forgot the actual Epicurean belief. God(s) exist but they don’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck.
Epicurus was the first deist.
You can’t have free will without the option to choose anything. If you can’t choose evil you don’t have free will it’s just a semblance of free will. If you’d prefer a semblance of free will that’s valid
Is there actually “free will” without evil?
why not? you can choose to eat a banana or an apple, both perfectly non evil
I will die on a hill that says a banana is more good than an apple.
Making the apple relatively more evil on the scale from good to evil.
Others may prefer an apple. But I guess that is their free will to choose so 😉
I mean there was that whole ‘garden of eden’ thing with the apples…
This guide lacks the branch where people’s sense of good and evil differs from the God’s one.
So wait the argument is that yes, by human definition, God is evil, but that he thinks all the atrocities in the world are totally awesome? That doesn’t make him less evil
More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.
As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.
Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.
We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.
Ants are a bad example though as ants lack the physical capabilities to feel emotions, they don’t have self awareness and may not even be able to feel pain. Also we didn’t create ants and their properties.
Have you considered that maybe God, who is love according to the Bible, designed this universe to be a complete demonstration of love? How can you fully demonstrate love if you don’t show what it means to love someone who’s evil and considers you an enemy, or someone who doesn’t even believe you exist, or someone who once thought they knew you but were being deceived by people with evil motives?
I have considered that. There is a lot of evil (or suffering) that nobody directly causes and especially not because they’re evil. Why is there depression for example? Or cancer?
As for where it came from, it was all brought about with Adam and Eve’s first sin, which infected all of creation with decay. You could write a creepypasta about that. Depression’s a bit more complicated because it’s a thing in the mind, and there’s a case to be made that it’s often more directly a symptom of a separation from God, knowing on some level that something’s missing - but I don’t think that can be said of all depression. Either way, it still ultimately stems from the first sin.
As for why it should exist for a time, it’s again necessary to be able to demonstrate love in those circumstances. It’s easy to love someone who’s always having a good time, but it’s divine to see your love and support help to pull someone out of depression, or to comfort someone who knows they don’t have long to live. (This isn’t just about the love God pours out, but also the love He inspires in His people.)
